Martin Girard

It is good to serve the Lord! I am glad I heard a few people telling the Gospel story a number of years ago.

I was just starting out in life, trying to find a good time, as many young folks are doing these days too. I thought I would find pleasure in the things of the world, though my dad warned me from experience what it would do for me. He was a hard-drinking logger, and our home was anything but a Christian home.

We lived on a ranch in the northern part of the State of California, near a little town called Dorris. One night, at a Ku Klux Klan meeting, my dad heard about some special revival services that were to be held and someone suggested it wouldn’t hurt any of them to go.

The Apostolic Faith people are a busy people. Through the rain and the mud, Brother Frost, an old-time minister in the Gospel, came across the mountains from Medford, Oregon, with a group of church workers and they set up a big tent in that town, and began to hold services.

I shall never forget those meetings as long as I live. We got in a little car and drove from the ranch to the town where they were being held. I had never heard anything like the story those people told! More than sixty were saved in those meetings, among them my dad. So many members of the Ku Klux Klan were saved that they didn’t hold Klan meetings after that!

More than sixty were saved in those meetings, among them my dad.

I saw what the Gospel did in my dad’s life after he was saved. Mother was saved a short time after Dad, and they lived a Christian life before me. I knew the old-time religion was real. The bad habits that had bound my dad for so many years were gone: he no longer had any desire for those things. He didn’t want the liquor anymore. I watched my dad’s life and could see that he had something that was real. The men who worked for him knew there was a change in his life. They offered him tobacco and the drinks, but he could say no to those things.

It wasn’t long before I realized that I needed what he had. When I prayed and asked God to make a real Christian out of me and help me to live a victorious life, the Lord did.

It was a marvelous change! Those things I couldn’t get along without—I thought I couldn’t leave them alone—God took the very desire for them out of my heart. I can live a Christian life; God has been able to keep me. I have found the greatest thing in all the world. Down through the years I have enjoyed the old-time religion. I have never seen the time I wanted to go back to the old life of sin. It doesn’t attract me at all. I thank God the Gospel means everything to me. The more I put into it the more I get out of it. I can recommend the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Martin Girard was saved in 1926. He and his wife, Olive, lived and ministered in Port Angeles, Washington; Eureka, California; Honolulu, Hawaii; and Dallas, Portland, and Roseburg, Oregon.