The finished work of Christ (the blood, the cross, and redemption) has been my life’s work as a minister of the gospel more than any other Biblical subject. This is only a guess, but I think it’s possible that I may have spent more time in this area of study than all other areas put together in more than 37 years as a Christian. I am still learning and growing, but I have learned a lot over the past nearly 32 years since I first began to study in this glorious truth.

Allow me to give you some back ground as to how I have gotten to where I am today. I was saved when I was 14 years old. I am now 50. Early on, in the beginning of my walk with the Lord, I was diagnosed as having schizophrenia. I was very fearful and tormented in my mind. The doctor who diagnosed me as schizophrenic told my parents I would never live a normal life. I was in very bad mental condition, too detailed to go into here. My mind was so tormented that it seemed as if I were hearing voices and that’s how I describes it.

These voices became very tormenting to me and not long after I was saved (about 4-5 months) I was admitted into the hospital and I went downhill from there. If you had walked into my room on one particular day (I remember vividly) you would have seen me lying on the bed with one leg in the air, while I clutched my arms together and gnawed my tongue, while straining making a grunting noise. It was bad.

I did everything “those voices” told me to do. It was total torment and bondage.

One day while I was walking in my hospital room, I heard another voice, but this one was different. It was a calming voice and a voice of hope. This voice came from the Lord, and whether or not I knew at the time that it was the Lord’s voice, I can’t say, but these words definitely got my attention. The Lord simply said to me “Don’t give up.”

After I was released from the hospital, the next 4-5 years were a constant struggle with fear, condemnation, torment, and it was during those years that I began to think I had committed the unpardonable sin. The darkness was overwhelming at times.

My senior year in high school, I begin attending a Bible Study just down the road from where I lived. It became a safe haven for me. The Bible study was held in a mobile home behind the house of the gentleman (Mr. Grimes) who led the Bible study. One day he told us that we could come to the building (the mobile home where the Bible study was held) to pray and seek God any time we wanted to. He said he would leave the building unlocked for that reason.

Not long after I graduated from high school, I had a life changing experience. I had gone to work one morning and was struggling terribly. I prayed a simple prayer and cried out to God, asking for Him to relieve me from work that day so I could go and pray. Not long thereafter, the manager came over where I and some other employees were standing. He asked, “Who wants to go home?” I gently raised my hand and he gave me the rest of the day off.

From there I went to a wooded area to pray. While I was there praying, I remembered that the place where I attended Bible study was unlocked and I could go there to pray, so I did. While I was there praying, I noticed a magazine from Kenneth Hagin’s ministry. I picked it up and began to read it. In this article, Brother Hagan addressed the lies of the devil concerning “the unpardonable sin” and how Satan uses this lie to bring people under condemnation. Towards the end of the article I remember reading a line that said something like this; “don’t let the devil bother you about this anymore”.

I knew God was speaking to me!

In this article Brother Hagan also shared truth about the blood of Jesus. That was the moment when a desire for a strong faith in the blood of Jesus was conceived in my heart and that is where my journey with regards to learning, and teaching about the blood of Christ, the cross of Christ and our redemption in Christ, actually began.

So the things I teach today about the cross are more than what I have studied. They are the result of my desperation for God. Early on Hebrews 10:19 became the lifeline that sustained me. Hebrews 10:19 says, having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus.

Through that verse I latched on to the hope, that if I had faith in the blood of Jesus, nothing could separate me from the presence of God. My desire and prayer was to have strong faith in the blood of Jesus

My journey of learning about the death and resurrection of Jesus began out of real desperation because I needed hope!