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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Danny Kwon

Perfect in Weakness

Dear Heavenly Father, Lord, I want to thank you for this Sabbath day.

And Lord, as I share my testimony here this morning, Lord, may your Holy Spirit speak through me and anoint my lips, and may you be glorified in everything that is said, and what doesn't need to be said, please let it not be said.

Please turn your Bibles to 2 Corinthians 12, chapter 12.

2 Corinthians 12, And we will be reading verses 9 and 10.

But he said to me, my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.

Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me.

That is why, for Christ's sake, I delighted weaknesses in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties, For when I am weak, then I am strong." I really like these 2 verses.

I think they're extremely eloquent and they really summarize the character of God and his power and how he operates.

You know, going back to the beginning, I guess, of my life, if it's true that addictions are hereditary, I probably took after my grandfather.

While my father was the picture of perfect discipline and very industrious and hardworking, my grandfather was known in his town to be quite the womanizer and drunk.

And being an executive for the local tobacco company, he died at a fairly early age of lung cancer.

And I was just always very mischievous and curious and loved to take risks.

And if it meant that my life was in danger or there was like a thrill involved, I wanted to do it.

Now I was raised in an Adventist home by good Adventist parents.

My parents, They immigrated from Korea when I was 2 years old.

My mother was a nurse, my father was an accountant.

And they graduated from the Adventist College in Korea.

And my name is Danny because my favorite Bible character was Daniel.

And I needed an English name because my Korean name, Hyojoon, was too hard to say, they said.

So I've, you know, but growing up, you know, it just seemed like, especially in the academy that I was attending and in the church I was attending, it just seemed like there was just no way that I could be perfect.

There was no way that I could, by myself, become the ideal Adventist young man.

And so my approach was just to say, forget it.

You know, I don't really want this anymore.

And you know, I was the typical, prototypical lukewarm Christian.

I would go to church because I had to, but would just live my life any way I wanted to for the rest of the week and for the rest of the day on Sabbath after church.

And you know, The Lord was still alive and working in my life, and I never really paid attention.

And looking back, 1 of my first experiences that I should have really known that God was trying to get my attention was when I got into trouble in Michigan.

I was attending Cedar Lake Academy and I went for a home leave at Andrews University and I got involved with a group of friends and we stole like over $5, 000 worth of computer equipment And we got arrested.

We thought we'd be really smart and we would just take all the computer equipment back to our dorm rooms and use it and nobody would like suspect anything was so strange.

And so we got caught and I spent a month in a juvenile detention facility in Benton Harbor.

And if any of you guys have been to that area, it's a pretty scary, Benton Harbor's a pretty scary town.

And I was in the juvenile lockup facility there.

It was like a kid's jail, but there was cells where the doors opened, you step forward, cell closed behind you, cell open in front of you, you went into population and they only fed, you could only use a spoon because people would make shanks out of forks and knives and things like that.

So it was a pretty scary place and within the very first day, you know, guys were trying to figure me out because I was the only Asian guy there and I was really skinny and they couldn't figure out why I was in there.

I was surrounded by murderers, rapists, you know, thieves and So they were coming up to me and they were like, yo man, teach me some karate.

And because they figured he must know something.

And so I was sitting there 1 day reading a comic book.

And the alpha male of the whole group, this really large young man, he took the comic book out of my hands and started hitting me in the face with it and said, yo man, teach me some karate.

And so stupidly, I swore at him, you know.

And next thing I knew, a fist came flying and hit me.

I turned my head to try to, you know, my glasses flew off.

I flew to the ground, and I'm not a very good fighter.

I knew that I was gonna like just be like torn to bits.

But I was dazed, I could barely move, I was on the ground, and he was just sort of standing there, and then the guards jumped on me, jumped on him, and I spent the rest of the day locked up in my cell, and then I came for supper, they let me back out.

And I saw him in the cafeteria, and he had a cast on his hand.

And he came over to me, and he was like, yo, man, you got 1 hard head.

And I may be hard-headed, but I don't have a hard head.

And so, you know, an angel must have, you know, helped me out there.

And so he became my friend, and he, and I did all his homework, and I survived.

And so, but you know, my heart was still really stubborn.

And after I got out of there, I, you know, just continued to, like I said, whatever was exciting and interesting, I gravitated towards that.

I gravitated towards friends that were not good for me and I knew weren't good for me.

And I started smoking marijuana and cutting class.

I play the cello, so I had a scholarship to go to Southern College, Southern Adventist University as it's called now.

But I didn't go to class, I was smoking weed every single day and I got kicked out, not once, but twice from Southern College.

And I wanted to be in a rock band, and I wanted to just live my life.

And The church that I attended in Winnipeg had a large West Indian population, and these were friends that I grew up with.

They were partying by this time, stage in life, and I was hanging out with essentially what I guess the police would refer to as the Jamaican gangs.

And we were all into, they were into drugs and prostitution primarily.

And so it was just a great, if you're like looking for excitement, scene to be part of.

And you know, I started dealing drugs and I started dealing cocaine.

I figured I knew how to make money at it and be good at it.

But the way sin is, is that the more you dabble in it, the more you play with it, the more it will just destroy you.

And before you know it, I wasn't dealing it anymore, I was using it, and 1 thing led to another.

And, you know, when I finally realized I needed to check into rehab, and when I checked into drug rehab, I weighed 115 pounds.

I weigh 175 pounds now, so you can imagine how skinny and pathetic I looked.

You know, 30 days in rehab, I regained a lot of weight, a lot of strength.

But within 6 hours after I left, I was using again.

Without God, you know, your weaknesses become even more amplified.

And, you know, within a few months of that, I was really bad, you know.

I was using needles, it was really bad, and I owed money to everybody.

I even owed money to a loan shark who was trying to break my legs.

And so I realized I needed to get out of the city.

And I saw an ad in the newspaper that said, sell air purifiers, you know, and come for this meeting at this hotel.

So I went to the hotel, and it was out of town, so that was the key, that they would pay for your expenses and take you out of town.

So I went to this meeting, and it was just this really clever demonstration on air purifiers that also doubled as vacuum cleaners.

So I got involved in vacuum cleaner sales and moved to Alberta and went to a small town called Grand Prairie, Alberta and trained for 2 weeks and memorized the spiel and everything and there was about 40 of us, and we were having a great time.

But I was away from the hard drugs, but I was still drinking, and we were smoking weed, and it was a partying bunch.

But by the end of those 2 weeks, we started sales and we hit the town.

And you know, it was door-to-door sales and there was a competition for 30 days.

Whoever sold the most in that 1 month would win the prize.

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Perfect in Weakness

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