Monday, June 26, 2000
10:33 PM, on the computer

So much happened yesterday that I completely forgot to get on! Yeesh!

Jail ministry went GREAT! It started out like normal... sign in, security checks, five minutes of doors opening and closing behind you, and passing by guys in the shower and thinking "Lord, why the heck am I here again?" But one thing was different: Last week I just went in with Grant and watched him, but the night before the Lord led me to Ephesians 6:12 and said "go with that", so I swallowed my fear and stepped into a pod by myself and introduced myself, and the people started coming. There were about six guys that I talked to, I remembered two of them from last week, two were new inmates, one was a guy that was there last week that I didn't remember, and the last guy was the dude that I saw in the shower. Well we had a good time though, I preached on the scripture that I was shown and the words just flowed from me. I talked about Satan and the Armor of God, and about Jesus' temptation in the desert and how to rebuke the devil. About an hour and a half later I gave a crude altar call and praise the Lord, the two new guys were led to Christ! I tell you the truth... nothing... and mean NOTHING compares to the feeling I had... and I even put it above the feeling I got when I got saved (but not above my actual salvation, for you nitpicky people), and even better than when I received the baptism of the Holy Spirit afterwards... most preachers I talked to about it said they agreed, the feeling can't be explained! But scriptures say that the Heavens rejoice when someone gives their heart to Jesus, so the feeling I had is multiplied, so God must feel GREAT! Even today I'm still feeling it... I love doing jail ministry, and seeing the peace that only Jesus can give these guys working is just a blessing in itself!

But back to yesterday, those two guys had just gotten saved, and I could still see that everyone was hungry, and I felt led to continue (and wanted to as well) and I said "okay guys, two things are going on here... one, I'm not wanting to stop. Two, the Spirit's telling me "you'd better not stop" (I got some amens for that), so I'm not stopping, cool?" They all agreed, and I said that I couldn't think of anything to talk about, so I just offered to answer their questions about the Bible, because they have a daily Bible study and I knew they had questions. So they fired away and I knew that I wasn't using my knowledge to answer the question, that the Lord supplied me with the answers (PTL). They asked me some toughies, like "Why did Noah curse his grandson Canaan instead of his son?" (which I won't answer now because I gave a thirty minute thing on that one...) and "Can you love your dog like you love God?" The latter one was pretty funny to explain, and I had to tell them about the four types of love in greek (giving, brotherly, between a man and a woman, and Godly) and told them that you can have a giving love for your dog and Jesus, but you can't love your dog like Him because that's idolatry. We also got into conversations about wine in the Bible (again, I talked for about thirty minutes on that one), fasting, marjiuana being the "herb that makes the heart glad" (which it's not). They even gave me a topic that they wanted to hear for next week: The names of God (Jehovah-Jireh, Jehovah-Nissi, Jah, etc). After that they asked me personal questions about myself, and I gave them my testimony (which I seem to be giving a lot lately) and talked about hobbies and such. We had some old skool Pac Man players in there... these guys are my boys!

Well at noon I felt it was time to stop (in other words, I saw Grant walk by and thought "man, if I talked longer than he did, I must be going for a while!" Well I blessed them and told the two guys that I'd buy them Bibles (and ended up buying two more) and then left for Fred's and bought four large-print, red-lettered King James Bibles (I'd have bought New International Versions but they requested KJV) for next time. Aaaaaanyway, I headed home and felt really good about myself and gave thanks and praise to God in the car.

Well in other news we're having a youth revival led by Scott Carter, and lemme tell you... the brother is ANOINTED. He's a great speaker and he can motivate like none I've met before. Imagine a football player running around and crying while shouting about Jesus and you've got this guy, he's great. He gave a great message about compromising to sin and how it happened to Lot and what became of him because of his compromise. It was a great message, and I'm having four tapes made of it to send to some friends that I know that would know people that need them. He'll be speaking until Wednesday, and I'm looking forward to it! Afterwards we had a good potluck dinner (what is it about potluck dinners in the south?) and I talked with Scott about some things, and we had a good conversation.

Well, there's really not much else to say, so I'm closing this entry and posting it, so g'night all and God Bless!