John Joseph tells his story of how God transformed his heart from a self-centred addict and then self-help deception to someone redeemed by God’s grace alone. Today he leads a church in Maryland, USA. The full story appeared in the January/ February 2020 issue of Christianity Today.
FOR GOD SO LOVED A DRUG ABUSER
“I was a typical American kid, until I wasn’t. In high school, life revolved around sports and popularity. After high school, I took a scholarship at a college. By the end I was not ready to take on the responsibilities of adulthood.
My life got further out of control with each passing year. From weekend parties to weeklong parties by my senior year, as casual drinking metastasized into alcoholism. With no direction and no aspirations, I took to the streets. And over the next five years, my life spiralled out of control. A college friend with whom I regularly smoked weed connected me with his dealer, and I began selling drugs and started working as a waiter and bartender, which enabled me to keep partying all week.
It also introduced me to cocaine. And cocaine stole my soul. As soon as I was introduced, I was hooked. Got fired multiple times and started selling cocaine. I became a monster-a liar and a thief. I used everyone and everything to serve myself. I didn’t care who I hurt.
By this time (2005), constant partying had become a way to avoid the gaping hole in my soul. I couldn’t keep a job. I had driven away everyone who cared about me. I was miserable. And, to make matters worse, I didn’t know how to stop.
TRYING TO CHANGE
I decided to make drastic changes, and in 2007 I enlisted in the US Coast Guard. The discipline helped but it couldn’t change my heart and so I regressed, also began struggling with depression and anxiety.
Then God put Art Thompson into my life. Art was a young skater-kid who had just joined the Coast Guard. Art loved Jesus, and he loved me. He faithfully shared the gospel with me, always making a point to say, “Jesus loves you, bro.” He invited me to join his family for meals…Art had a serious joy that I wanted in my own life. I just didn’t know how to get it.
In 2008, I was re-stationed but the same problems with drinking and drugs followed me. But this time, so did God. He put a couple more Christians in my life, one of whom gave me some books…It made me desire a relationship with God like never before.
I started attending church…and came away thinking that being a Christian meant doing good things. So I started coaching youngsters in sport and volunteered for community events. But I wasn’t actually changing…still partying, lying and using people.
Re-stationed again, I spent most of my time drinking, playing online poker, and watching movies. In early 2009, I rented Bill Maher’s documentary Religulous. His objections to Christianity caught my attention because they called into question some of the core doctrines that Art had explained to me the year before. After watching, I went online and Googled “Christian debate,” hoping to find someone who could respond to these objections. I found Ravi Zacharias. Over the next six months, I watched his every video and listened to his every talk. I memorized the arguments for God’s existence. I knew how to respond to objections to Christianity. Mentally, I believed all of it was true.
The problem, though, was that I still conceived of the gospel as a call to change myself through an exercise of willpower. And during the second half of 2009, I actually started becoming a better person. I stopped drinking and doing drugs and started exercising self-control. My life was in order for the first time since high school. I had saved myself.
MY CHAINS FELL OFF
And then the bottom fell out. While celebrating New Year’s Eve with some old friends, a round of casual drinking turned into an all-out binge. I was so drunk that I blacked out, which hadn’t happened in years and my friends expressed concern about my reckless behaviour.
I drove home in a state of despair, convinced I could never truly change…decided to listen to a sermon and the message on God, sin, justice, etc helped me understand for the first time that I was guilty of more than doing “bad things”-I had sinned against God and deserved his judgment.
Two nights later, I listened to another sermon on John 3:16. The preacher said, depending on how we respond to it determines our final destiny, with God forever or apart from him. I distinctly remembering time slowing to a crawl as he said those words. I was replaying the last 10 years of my life: the lying, the drunkenness, the drug use-all my terrible sins against a holy God. I felt the crushing weight of it, and I knew I was going to hell. And then, I knew I wasn’t.
The burden of my sin fell off in an instant, replaced with the knowledge that Jesus was Lord and God had saved me. That moment led to an immediate and radical change, as God removed my heart of stone and gave me a heart of flesh. He had set me free from my sin.”