Locked Up With God

The title of this book reflects that it is a book about being locked up with God. This happened to me during the Vietnam War. I was an American prisoner of war - P.O.W. I spent over five years in a prison, and there I was with God and only God besides a few cellmates. This is mainly a book of the speeches I have given over the last decade or so that reflect my experience as a war prisoner. I have integrated the stories and experience of this period of my life with the faith and experiences of my life since. The talks have been transcribed and placed together here. I have refined and polished them. Some are shorter than others because of the various time constraints. I have selected what I felt were my best. They have been sorted by category as the table of contents reflects. However, I placed the first in its own category and titled it My General Talk. This is the one I most commonly give. It gives a good general overview of my experiences in the Vietnam War and my total dependence on and trust in the Maker. The second category titled Faith all relate to deep spiritual truths that I have grown to love and respect because of my initial experiences as a POW. To get through five years in a prison camp under horrible conditions was a real journey of faith. I returned to this country an entirely different man. I had grown in my faith. I had learned how to trust God, to love Him and to forgive others. These talks reflect what being locked up with God for five years did to me. The third category titled Family and Manhood reflect what has occurred to me and what I hold out as ideal in regard to being a man and a father and husband of a family. I have been through much in my lifetime. I have had and raised a large family. I am now old and have had time to reflect what is important and what means the most. I have also made many mistakes in my life and only by the grace of God have made it to this point and still have a family. This category is given to help young men get off to a good start. The best way to learn is by experience. That is, the experience of others who have been through it and made all the mistakes one can possibly make. This is the case with me. I am offering these three speeches to all young men so that they can profit by my life of having to learn the hard way. If young men can read these, they won't have to fall and struggle as I have had to do. They can fly high and have a very productive life being a man and, if called, also a father and husband of a family. The final category of talks titled War and Patriotism include those that give more detailed stories of my combat and POW experiences in South and North Vietnam. This war is history and most don't even remember it, but reflecting on a war and hearing what a person has experienced who lived through one can help anyone to grow in love of country. The reader can also learn much in case they are ever called to be in a war. Being in the military is a vocation all by itself. It is a vocation of love because a soldier is ready to lay down his or her life for another wherever they are called to serve their country. A soldier must be ready to not only die for others but also suffer as I did and many others did in an enemy prisoner of war compound. This category also includes a talk about leadership. This will help any young man or woman know what it takes to be a great leader. There is also a speech about Lance Sijan and one that was given at an Air Force Base to honor two other Medal of Honor winners, Bud Day and Leo Thorsness. Reflecting about the life of real heroes always does a soldier good, for all soldiers are called to be heroes in their vocation of love. I hope and pray that this book helps our country be great and remain great for ages to come. I will soon die as all do, but words never die. My hope is that these words will go on helping my American brothers and sisters keep America great. May God bless you and our country forever. Amen.

MORE THAN 500,000 COPIES SOLD! Are your thoughts out of control--just like your life? Do you long to break free from the spiral of destructive thinking? Let God's truth become your battle plan to win the war in your mind! We've all tried to think our way out of bad habits and unhealthy thought patterns, only to find ourselves stuck with an out-of-control mind and off-track daily life. Pastor and New York Times bestselling author Craig Groeschel understands deeply this daily battle against self-doubt and negative thinking, and in this powerful new book he reveals the strategies he's discovered to change your mind and your life for the long-term. Drawing upon Scripture and the latest findings of brain science, Groeschel lays out practical strategies that will free you from the grip of harmful, destructive thinking and enable you to live the life of joy and peace that God intends you to live. Winning the War in Your Mind will help you: Learn how your brain works and see how to rewire it Identify the lies your enemy wants you to believe Recognize and short-circuit your mental triggers for destructive thinking See how prayer and praise will transform your mind Develop practices that allow God's thoughts to become your thoughts God has something better for your life than your old ways of thinking. It's time to change your mind so God can change your life.

True crime stories provide the foundation of this prison memoir. Bill Dyer was robbed and shot at an ATM. In Doing Time with God, you go into prison with him and other victims of violence to meet with convicted felons who will be facing their worst and greatest realizations, before they are released. Nothing is predictable when victims and offenders come together and share their stories of the true crimes that have devastated their lives...and reshaped them. Victim-survivors remember their losses and feel their pain; Offenders come face-to-face with the hurt they have caused, and open wounds from their own past. Walls of defensiveness and fear are knocked down by empathy and compassion, vulnerability and tears. Raw emotions flow. The way to peace is often intense, turbulent, and heartbreaking. Even when it's not pretty, the journey is beautiful in its honesty... miraculous in the way it unfolds...divine in how it transforms lives. This Amazing Process Opens the Heart, Touches the Soul, and Renews the Mind

When I Lay My Isaac Down offers readers a powerful and poignant sense of identification with their most profound challenges, equipping them with biblical principles to persevere in hope and joy and faith.

Never before had Daniel Bergner seen a spectacle as bizarre as the one he had come to watch that Sunday in October. Murderers, rapists, and armed robbers were competing in the annual rodeo at Angola, the grim maximum-security penitentiary in Louisiana. The convicts, sentenced to life without parole, were thrown, trampled, and gored by bucking bulls and broncos before thousands of cheering spectators. But amid the brutality of this gladiatorial spectacle Bergner caught surprising glimpses of exaltation, hints of triumphant skill. The incongruity of seeing hope where one would expect only hopelessness, self-control in men who were there because they'd had none, sparked an urgent quest in him. Having gained unlimited and unmonitored access, Bergner spent an unflinching year inside the harsh world of Angola. He forged relationships with seven prisoners who left an indelible impression on him. There's Johnny Brooks, seemingly a latter-day Stepin Fetchit, who, while washing the warden's car, longs to be a cowboy and to marry a woman he meets on the rodeo grounds. Then there's Danny Fabre, locked up for viciously beating a woman to death, now struggling to bring his reading skills up to a sixth-grade level. And Terry Hawkins, haunted nightly by the ghost of his victim, a ghost he tries in vain to exorcise in a prison church that echoes with the cries of convicts talking in tongues. Looming front and center is Warden Burl Cain, the larger-than-life ruler of Angola who quotes both Jesus and Attila the Hun, declares himself a prophet, and declaims that redemption is possible for even the most depraved criminal. Cain welcomes Bergner in, and so begins a journey that takes the author deep into a forgotten world and forces him to question his most closely held beliefs. The climax of his story is as unexpected as it is wrenching. Rendered in luminous prose, God of the Rodeo is an exploration of the human spirit, yielding in the process a searing portrait of a place that will be impossible to forget and a group of men, guilty of unimaginable crimes, desperately seeking a moment of grace.

The theme of freedom is ever-present for those who inhabit the modern western world. To be free, most people assume, means to be free over and against the state and one's neighbor. But Luther's conception of freedom is decidedly different from the usual story we tell about what it means to be a free human being. For Luther, to be free doesn't mean isolation from or opposition to one's neighbor, but freedom is the kind of liberty that empowers human beings to service of those around them. True freedom comes only from the promise of free grace in Jesus Christ delivered through the preaching of the gospel and the delivery of the sacraments. To be free in Christ involves a rediscovery of God's creation: that God has made us vessels of his goodness for those he has placed into our lives.

Explore this stunning quality of God’s grace: It never ends! In this revision of a foundational work, John Piper reveals how grace is not only God’s undeserved gift to us in the past, but also God’s power to make good happen for us today, tomorrow, and forever. True life for the follower of Jesus really is a moment-by-moment trust that God is dependable and fulfills his promises. This is living by faith in future grace, which provides God's mercy, provision, and wisdom—everything we need—to accomplish his good plans for us. In Future Grace, chapter by chapter—one for each day of the month—Piper reveals how cherishing the promises of God helps break the power of persistent sin issues like anxiety, despondency, greed, lust, bitterness, impatience, pride, misplaced shame, and more. Ultimate joy, peace, and hope in life and death are found in a confident, continual awareness of the reality of future grace.

If you have a father, mother, sister, brother, grandmother, auntie or any close relative or friend incarcerated in any form of secure lockdown, one of your first thoughts is probably, "when will I get to see them again free?" Now just imagine, if your loved one physically ends up imprisoned (or have even escaped the system) but they have been locked up spiritually their entire life? In this book, I will share my powerful testimony that will demonstrate the power of God that set me free both physically and spiritually.

It Was Supposed to be a Four-Day Visit It turned into a 445-day imprisonment. And if God had not intervened, he would have been there for the rest of his life. In December 2015, Petr Jasek traveled to Khartoum, Sudan, to evaluate how The Voice of the Martyrs—a ministry he had served with since 2002—could help and encourage persecuted Sudanese Christians. Pleased with his meetings with local pastors and other Christians, Petr checked in for his flight home to the Czech Republic. But before he could board the plane, he was summoned for questioning by Sudanese security agents. They wanted to know more about his activities in the country—activities that, if disclosed, could endanger the Christians with whom he had met. Petr soon realized he was facing much more than a routine security screening. The guards took his computer, phone, and camera before quickly discovering his second passport. Later, his interrogators showed him photos of each meeting he had arranged during his four days in Sudan; he had been under surveillance from the moment he arrived. Taken into custody, Petr knew he would not be returning to his family anytime soon. Charged with espionage, waging war against the state, and undermining the constitution, he was locked up with ISIS fighters, convicted after a lengthy trial, and sentenced to life in prison. Now Petr shares the harrowing but inspiring story of how God sustained his strength and courage while giving him a new purpose during his ordeal—and then opened the prison doors and set him free.