“ Since 1986 he has been with me regu-
tO Dave —on the platform as part of the minis¬
try team and behind the scenes taking care of hundreds of details.
Dave strayed as far from God as any person I know, but the Holy Spirit would never let him go. The Holy Spirit loved Dave too much to let him remain under the bondage of drugs.
Delgado was raised on 47th Street in Brooklyn, New York, where his father was pastor of a large Spanish Pentecostal church. His parents were from Puerto Rico.
“Dad was very strict,” he told me. “As a boy we had no television. Comic books were a sin and I wasn’t even allowed to go to the beach. While Dave s friends were out sowing their wild oats, he was in church at least four or Five nights a week.
“I grew to resent it,” he recalls. “By the time I was in the seventh grade my life was like a pendulum, swinging from one extreme to the other. I would smoke pot with my friends and then come back to the church.”
In the ninth grade he was “getting high” almost every day and became physically hooked on heroin. “It broke my parents’ heart,” he told me. “I was sent to a counseling program, a psychiatrist, a methadone clinic, and even to a Teen Challenge center.”
Three different times Dave was able to break his drug addiction, but the satanic power of narcotics continued to pull him back. Says Dave, “In the mid-1970s I had a major habit and became a dealer so that I could get my own uncut drugs and prepare them for myself in higher concentrations.”
Strange as it may seem, Dave Delgado always had a love for the things of God, and in particular he was drawn to the miraculous manifestations of God’s healing and delivering power. Even though he was not living for the Lord, he made it a priority to attend Kathryn Kuhl- man’s meetings every time she was in New York City. “In the services I felt great conviction, and gave my heart to the Lord again and again, but I could never seem to get the victory over sin. The problem was that I wanted both God and the world. I wanted to serve Him, I really did, but I also enjoyed getting high. I couldn’t seem to lose the desire.”
Dave’s drug involvement grew to the point that he was involved in major narcotics trafficking in three states. “I had twenty guys working for me and was handling tons of cash,” he told me.
With federal agents about to close in, Dave hurriedly shut down his activities and started life again in Birmingham, Alabama. “I kicked the habit, and stayed clean for two years before the same demons of drugs pulled me back again,” he sadly recalls.
David says, “I was doing 1200 milligrams of Demerol every day and taking Dilaudid, a class-A narcotic we called “hospital heroin” back in New York.”
During this time Dave married, divorced and married again. “I began to embezzle from banks, steal money from night depositories, and was arrested for buying and selling stolen property.”
But back in New York City, his faithful mother never stopped praying for her prodigal son.
Delgado finally told his wife, “If we are ever going to have a chance for a new start we have to move to Florida.” His wife, who had so faithfully stuck by him and prayed for him, agreed to go. Anything for a fresh start.
Dave found work in Orlando installing drywall. But tragically he was also sinking deeper and deeper into drugs. “With increasing frequency I would shoot myself up with a quarter-ounce of coke and afterwards drink a glass of vodka and orange juice to take the edge off. This would cause me to fall into a coma-like stupor. It was not long until I was bleeding through my nose and looked as if I was in the last stages of cancer.”
Dave’s wife soon began attending our church, praying earnestly for her emaciated husband. She experienced God’s miraculous healing power during a service when God healed a deteriorating disc in her back.
On a Sunday morning in 1986, he joined her in church. Dave was immediately struck by how similar the ministry was to Kathryn’s. When I gave the altar
call, Dave rushed to the front of the sanctuary. He began to cry out, “Lord I want to serve You but I can’t. You know that I love to do drugs too, and the desire is too great for me to stop. I know Your Word says that You made me and that You know every cell in my body and every hair on my head. If You don’t change every cell in my body and take away this desire, I’ll never be able to serve You.”
In that moment of desperation, Dave raised his hands toward heaven and he fell under the power of God. Those around him picked him up and again he fell under the power of God. In that holy moment the Holy Spirit began to do a work in him that was nothing short of a miracle. When he stood to his feet Dave Delgado was a brand new man, he knew it, and his wife knew it.
Recalling that day, Dave smiles and says, “I was totally set free and have never had the slightest desire to touch drugs again.”
God’s precious Holy Spirit restored his health, his home, and has given him a ministry—and God isn’t finished with him yet. Like John Mark, “he is helpful to me in my ministry” (2 Tim. 4:11 Niv).
The Same Who is the Holy Spirit we welcome today?