What God Has Done for Me: The Testimony of Larry Price
What God Has Done For Me: The Testimony of Larry Price I was not raised in a Christian home but I was sent to Sunday School when I was a young child. That did not last very long once I got old enough to do what I wanted to do. As a teenager I chose to go in a bad direction which led me down a very bad path. I got involved in a lot of bad things with other young people. I always seemed to identify with the more rebellious people that were part of any group, the ones always getting into trouble.
Around age thirteen, I started skipping school and hanging around with others doing the same things. There were certain things I said I would never do. Yet, there seemed to be a progression where when I would break one barrier, the next one became a little bit easier to break. I began to experiment with drugs. By the time that I was fifteen, there were no drugs I had not done.
It all seemed like a big party – a big game. My only reason to live at that point was to party, hang out with friends, and have no restrictions of any kind. This led to conflict in many areas. I grew to disdain all authority, including the home. My lifestyle created problems in school and I was there less and less. My problems were all drug related, either because I wanted to get money to have drugs, or wanted to get money to have a party, or because I just did not want to work. Many of the crimes we were involved in were drug-related in one form or another. I had many conflicts with the law and spent more and more time in juvenile detention centers. My life was filled with crime, drugs, and all of the things associated with them.
At times I really had a struggle within me. I would get in trouble, perhaps end up in jail, and I would say to myself. “I really wish I could break this lifestyle.” But then, once I got back on the street again, I found myself right back into the same crowd with the same lifestyle. As a young man, I served my first prison sentence in the Florida State Penitentiary. Then later I was arrested in Georgia and put in prison there. I was released in 1978 to live in a halfway house and to go to college. I was only out for 75 days before I was arrested and, on my way, to prison for the third time. It was then I really hit bottom. I was in jail in a little town in Georgia. I felt as if the rug was pulled out from under me. It seemed all the props were gone. I was in such a state of despair that I came to the brink of considering taking my own life. If life just consisted of going from one problem to the next, or from one high to the next, or one drunken episode to the next, or one jail cell to the next, then life just wasn’t worth living. I had always thought before that there had to be a way out.
Then the Lord intervened. I was arrested in a town I only heard of once before. One of my counselors in a drug rehab program was from there. I used my one phone call to call his house, but he wasn’t there. His parents who happened to be members of a Bible-believing church were home, and came out to visit me. They had never met me before but brought me a Bible and what they said to me seemed to hit home. Their sincerity spoke to me. They sent a preacher from their church to visit me and it seemed like everything he had to say was directly pointed at me.
I was alone in my cell and everything that had been said began to speak to me. I got hold of some gospel tracts that told how to be saved and I read them and this little New Testament they brought me. As a child in Sunday School I had also heard the gospel many times. The thought came to me that if I wanted to tell somebody else how to get saved, where could I find it in the Bible? I remembered when I had gone to prison in Florida as a young eighteen-year-old, a dear lady had written me a letter with Romans 10:13 at the bottom. Like a flash, all those years later, that verse came to me. I looked up that verse in the Bible, “Whosoever shall call upon the Name of the Lord shall be saved”. Not only did I believe that, but I also believed that I could use that to show someone else how they could be saved. It was there in that little jail cell I trusted Christ as my Savior and I noticed that He began to take away from me, even in that place where many things were still accessible, the desires for some of the things I had desired before.
Although for many years not a day would go by when I wouldn’t do drugs in one form or another, deliverance came almost immediately. God immediately delivered me from the desire for drugs. He took away my life of drugs, alcohol abuse, and all of the things that went along with it. I realized that though I was in prison, for the first time in my life I was really free. When I was released in September of 1979, I didn’t have much: just the clothes on my back, $75 and a bus ticket.
Oh, how great is God’s forgiveness, based on the sacrifice of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ for us. In 1992, I received a complete pardon from the State of Florida. I am thankful to God for what He has done in my life and pray as you have heard my story, God might impress upon you His claims on your life. He is no respecter of persons. What he has done for me he can do for you. Ask Him for help to make a clean break from your old lifestyle and habits. He is able and can deliver you also.
Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. (2 Cor. 5:17)