Discipleship Ministry International, Inc.

Addiction and Grace!

April 8, 2013 Uncategorized Comments Off on Addiction and Grace!

“No!  God please, no!”  I can only imagine the breathless words of the eldest son as he knelt in the dirt beside the dusty road, holding a lifeless father he would never have an earthly conversation with again.  The car had slid into the ditch causing a rollover that would propel the father through the window and into an empty field releasing his life for eternity.  No man’s land for as far as the eye could contain.  This rugged land met by the mountains in the background had become the resting place for a man scarred by a life of addiction, yet recently named by God as “REDEEMED!”

Two years earlier God’s Grace, with arms wide open, swept up the father in the midst of his addiction and gave him new life.  His four children loved him to Jesus.  They unconditionally loved him to life.  The father’s verse in life became the symbol in his death.

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! ”  (2 Corinthians 5:17)

And new life this father enjoyed for two years; a renewed relationship with his children, new friends, new purpose, new future.  He lived each day as though it was his last.  He knew the value of life as never before.  This father began to share with many others how they too could know Jesus and His amazing forgiveness and love.  Not one time through many years did his children give up believing God could and would touch the heart of this father, searing his heart with the love of the Lord.

The message is really about love and forgiveness and the POWERful restoration God can and will do in the heart of a man.  “As long as there is life, there is hope” the children said.  They prayed, they sent birthday and father day cards, they called him, they loved him.  They wooed him and by so doing, got out of the way, so the Holy Spirit could speak to the father.  These children were God’s representative of how the Holy Spirit draws us to God.

Redeemed is the theme of his life and his death.  As a young man, he learned how to blot out life’s troubles and pain through heroin.  As an old man he learned he could live fully alive, REDEEMED by the blood of the cross.  A new man.  A new life.

A few years ago I read the book Addictions and Grace by Gerald May.  This father and his four children understood the depth of God’s Grace.

DMII is honored to establish a scholarship fund for teen boys in this fathers honor. To donate to the CG Haire REDEEMED Scholarship Fund please click on the DONATE tab or the REDEEMED Scholarship Tab on behalf of a teen boy who so desperately needs the opportunity to experience a redeemed life through DMII.  All donations are tax deductible.

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