SPRR RICHARD ROBERTS That’s what the world will say.
SPKM DON STANLEY I was witnessing — some called me crazy, some called me fanatic, but when Jesus calls me they can call me gone. I know I’m going to heaven. Glory to God. They took me out of that cell. They sent me to another prison…medical ward. A Christian psychologist — happened to be a Christian — the lady examined me, she walked back out to the ward and said, “Don Stanley hasn’t gone crazy, he’s just been filled with the unspeakable joy of the Lord. You can turn him loose on the compound now.” That night they gave me a bed among 1,000 inmates that were lost and on their way to hell without Jesus. And I said, “God, if you’ll send me a Bible I’ll be your witness, I’ll share Jesus with other people.” He had called me at 12 to be a missionary, and I wouldn’t go. I ran from him — 22 years — like Jonah did. I said, “I’m in love with Jesus and I want to win souls with Jesus Christ.” And I said, “Lord, give me a Bible and I will study it this time to show myself approved.” I woke up at 2:30 in the morning, the presence of Jesus all over me.
Poems were flowing out of my system, and I’ve written 33 poems, but I started back towards the bathroom and there was a 55 gallon trash can there, Richard, and we don’t where those Bible that you take into Africa and Ethiopia ever go, but we know that God is faithful and true, and when he plants his Word it’s the most powerful word under heaven and earth. And it will never pass away. But there in a 55 gallon trash can there was a little light shining out.
And I looked in, a prisoner walking in darkness that night without the help of God’s Word. And I tell people in America the light that was shining out was much brighter. This little Gideon New Testament Bible was laying in the top of that trash can, open to the third chapter of John. And I picked it up. And it said — thank you Jesus for your precious word, it is a lamp unto our feet, the light unto our path. It is the bread of life to he who believes. I went in and sat down in that bathroom that night and read John 3:16, — for God so loved the world — an old sinner like me who had a wicked heart, on cocaine, drugs and alcohol — that he gave his only begotten Son Jesus, that if I would believe in him I wouldn’t perish but have everlasting life.
I got down and reaffirmed that salvation that night and asked God to fill me with his Spirit — started going to a little Methodist chapel in the prison, 6 nights a week, and there had communion with the Lord. Jesus was a friend who would stick with me closer than a brother. (APPLAUSE) Seven months later they called me up to the warden’s office and said, “Don, you’re getting ready to go home, you’ve received a pardon.” I said, “Sir, I was pardoned on May 12, 1983, when the blood of Jesus washed me clean.” He said, “Yes, but you’re going home.” He said, “You take Jesus with you, he’ll never be back in a prison like this.” And I ask you in America today, come back to Jesus, come back to the Word of God. They took me that day and they were — I was singing, “I’ll Fly Away, Oh, Glory, I’ll Fly Away, like a prison bird from a cage, I’ll fly away.”