I D.i.e.d & Jesus Revealed The Secret The Devil Has Been Hiding From Black People For Centuries

My name is Robert Jones. I’m 65 years old. And 3 weeks ago, I died in a hospital bed in Dallas, Texas for 12 minutes and 19 seconds.

I’m not telling you that to scare you. I’m telling you that because what I saw on the other side of those 12 minutes, what Jesus himself showed me with his own hands, it broke something inside of me that had been rotten for 65 years.

And if I don’t tell you what he said, if I don’t open my mouth and say the words out loud to whoever is listening right now, then I deserve to go back into that grave and stay there.

Because Jesus didn’t send me back for nothing. He sent me back with a message.

A message about black people in America. A secret the devil has been hiding from them, from us for centuries.

A secret so big that when Jesus showed it to me, I I fell on my face and cried like a child.

A 65year-old army veteran. Two tours, Silver Star. I cried like I was 6 years old.

And I need you to stay with me. I really do. Because if you are black and you’re watching this right now, I have something to say to you that I don’t think a white man from Dallas, Texas has ever said to you out loud.

And if you’re white like me, I need you to hear it, too. Because the lie I believed my whole life, the same lie my daddy believed and his daddy before him.

That lie is going to send a whole lot of good churchgoing people straight to a place they don’t want to go.

I know how that sounds. I know. 3 months ago, I would have laughed in the face of any man telling me this story.

I would have called him a fool. I would have muted the video and moved on with my coffee.

So, I’m not asking you to believe me yet. I’m just asking you to stay.

Give an old man 12 minutes. One minute for every minute I was dead. And I promise you, by the time I’m done, you’re going to understand why I can’t sleep at night anymore.

Why my hands shake when I try to read my Bible. Why I drove to a black church last Sunday morning for the first time in my entire life and sat in the back pew and wept until the ushers had to walk me out.

Because Jesus showed me something. And I have to tell you what it was. Let me start at the beginning.

Let me tell you who Robert Jones was before he died. So, you understand why it took Jesus himself to fix me.

I was born in 1961 in a little house off Lemon Avenue in Dallas. My daddy was a mechanic, worked on cars 6 days a week, and drank beer on the 7th.

My mama cleaned houses for rich folks over in Highland Park. We weren’t poor exactly, but we weren’t far from it.

Had everything we needed, nothing we wanted. That’s how my daddy used to put it.

Now, my daddy was a good man in a lot of ways. He worked hard.

He never raised a hand to my mother. He took me fishing on Saturday mornings out at Lake Ray Hubard.

He taught me how to change a tire, how to fire a rifle, how to shake a man’s hand, and look him in the eye when you do it.

But my daddy hated black people. I’m going to say that plain because Jesus told me there’s no more time for soft words.

My daddy hated them. He used words I won’t repeat on this video. He taught me those words before I could even tie my own shoes.

And he taught me something worse than the words. He taught me that hating them was righteous.

It’s that it was what God wanted, that the Bible said so. That the races were meant to be separate, and any man who mixed them was going against the natural order the good Lord himself laid down in the book of Genesis.

I was 4 years old the first time I heard my daddy say it. We were at a gas station out in Msket.

A black family pulled up in a station wagon. Father, mother, two little girls in the back seat.

The daddy got out to fill up his tank. And my daddy turned to me in the front seat and said something I’m not proud to repeat.

And then he said, “Bobby, you remember this? God made them to serve. He made us to lead.

You mix it up. You’re calling the Lord a liar.” 4 years old. That’s how early the poison got in me.

And the thing is, nobody ever corrected it. Not my mama, not my granddaddy, uh, not my Sunday school teacher at the little Baptist church we went to every week on Live Oak Street.

Nobody. They all either agreed with my daddy or they were too scared of him to say different.

So I grew up believing it. Believing it the way you believe the sun comes up in the morning.

It just was. It was the shape of the world. I went to school, got decent grades, played football in the fall, baseball in the spring.

My high school was integrated by then. It was the ‘ 70s. But me and my friends, we kept to our side.

They kept to theirs. We didn’t fight them. We didn’t bully them. We just didn’t see them.

I need you to understand the difference because this is the part most white folks like me don’t want to admit.

I wasn’t the kind of racist that burns crosses on people’s lawns. I was the other kind.

The quiet kind. E. The kind that smiles polite at the black cashier at the grocery store and then goes home and tells his wife a joke about her behind closed doors.

The kind that votes a certain way and then says, “Well, I have nothing against them personally.”

That kind of racism is almost worse because you can’t see it coming. It hides in church pews.

It hides behind handshakes. It hides behind words like tradition and heritage and the way things used to be.

It hid in me for 65 years. I joined the army right out of high school, 1979.

Needed the money. Needed to get out of my daddy’s house. Needed to be a man.

Spent 22 years in uniform, two tours in the Gulf. Got a silver star. I don’t talk about much because the story behind it involves a young corporal from Louisiana who didn’t make it home and I can’t say his name without my chest getting tight.

Here’s something I want you to hear. That corporal, he was a black kid, 19 years old from a little town called Opaloosas.

And he saved my life in a way I’ve never told anybody, not even my own children, until right now.

We were in a convoy. Something went bad. I’ll leave it at that. He pulled me out of a vehicle that should have been my tomb and he took the hit that was meant for me.

He died in the sand holding my hand, whispering a prayer I couldn’t understand because I didn’t know the words.

I didn’t know any prayers. My Bible was for show. And you know what I did after that?

I went home. I got my medal. I shook the general’s hand. And I went right back to hating his people.

Let that sit for a second. A black boy died for me. Laid down his own life the way Jesus laid down his life on the cross.

And I took the gift of my own breathing body back to Texas and I used it to keep hating the same people he came from.

I didn’t even go to his funeral. His mama sent me a letter once. I never wrote her back.

That’s the kind of man I was. That’s the man Jesus had to come and find.

I married my Kathy in 1985. Best day of my life. She was a nurse at Parkland Hospital.

Had hair the color of Texas wheat in July and a laugh that could fill up a whole room.

We had three boys, Michael, James, and Samuel. Samuel was the baby, 10 years younger than the others.

A surprise blessing Kathy used to call him. Our last little miracle. Kathy was a Christian, a real one, not the Sunday morning kind like me.

The kind that prayed over her food, prayed over her patience, and prayed over her boys every night before they went to sleep.

She loved Jesus the way some women love their own children. Just fierce and patient and never giving up on him for one minute.

And here’s the hard thing I have to tell you. Kathy didn’t share my hate.

She never did. We used to fight about it late at night, whispering so the boys wouldn’t hear.

She’d say, “Robert, you can’t raise these boys to be like your daddy. You can’t put that in them.

It’s going to ruin them. It’s going to ruin you.” And I’d tell her to mind her own business.

I’d tell her it wasn’t hate. It was common sense. I’d use every dressed up word I could think of to make it sound like something other than what it was.

She’d just look at me and then she’d go into the boys’ bedrooms one by one and pray over each of them.

That was her way. She didn’t argue with the devil. She prayed. Michael and James, my two oldest, they grew up to be a lot like me.

I’m sorry to say that. They kept their distance from black folks. Told the same kind of jokes I used to tell.

Voted the same way, lived the same small life. They were their father’s sons. But Samuel, Samuel was different from the day he was born.

I need to tell you about my son Samuel. Because if there is a hero in this story, and there is, it’s not me.

It’s not Jesus. I mean, it is Jesus, but the human hero, the one who held the door open so Jesus could walk through it into my hospital room.

That hero is a little boy who is now 21 years old and who loves the Lord more than any grown man I have ever met in my whole life.

From the time Samuel could talk, that boy loved everybody. I mean, everybody. Black kids, all brown kids, the little Vietnamese girl across the street, the old homeless man who lived under the bridge on Harry Hines Boulevard.

Samuel didn’t see color. And I don’t mean that in the cheap way people say it on television.

I mean, he genuinely didn’t. He’d bring home friends from school and it’d be a rainbow walking through my front door, and I’d grip my teeth and be polite because Kathy had made me promise not to run any child out of our house with ugly words.

Samuel loved Jesus the way his mama did. He’d read his Bible at the kitchen table while I was reading the newspaper.

He’d ask me questions I couldn’t answer. Daddy, why did Jesus say, “Love your enemies?”

Daddy, why does it say God made us all from one man? Daddy, if heaven has every tribe and every tongue like it says in Revelation, why is our church only white people?

I didn’t have answers. I’d grunt and turn the page and tell him to ask his mama.

And his mama would smile at me over the top of her coffee cup like she knew something I didn’t.

She did know something I didn’t. Kathy died in the spring of 2022. Pancreatic cancer.

By the time they found it, there was nothing anybody could do. 6 weeks from the diagnosis to the funeral.

6 weeks. I watched the love of my life turn into a ghost in a hospital bed and I held her hand the whole way down.

The last thing she said to me, and I’m going to say this the way she said it because I can still hear her voice.

She said, “Robert, promise me you’ll let Jesus find you. Promise me. He’s been chasing you your whole life, honey.

Let him catch you for Samuel. For me, let him catch you. I said I would.

I lied. I buried my Kathy on a Tuesday in April and I went home and drank a whole bottle of Jim Beam and I cursed God out loud in my own kitchen.

I cursed him for taking her. I cursed him for leaving me. I cursed him for everything I could think of to curse him for.

My two older boys went back to their own lives. And Samuel. Samuel was 15 years old and he moved into the guest room downstairs so I wouldn’t be alone at night.

15 years old. And that boy became my parent instead of the other way around.

He’d cook me breakfast. He’d pray over me while I slept. I caught him doing it once, standing in my doorway at 2:00 in the morning, hands lifted, whispering.

He’d read his Bible out loud at the kitchen table, hoping I’d hear a verse or two.

He never pushed. He never preached. He just loved me the way his mama had loved me, patient and fierce, and never giving up.

And and I was so full of grief and hate and bourbon, I couldn’t even tell him thank you.

I was the worst father in Texas. And I had the best son in Texas.

And those two things lived under the same roof for three more years. And I never, not one time, told him I loved him.

Not one time until after I died. Now, I want to pause right here because I know what some of you are thinking.

You’re thinking, “Okay, old man. Get to the part where you died. Get to Jesus.

Get to heaven. I hear you. I’m going to get there. I promise. But you have to understand who I was.

Because if you don’t understand how dark that hole was, you’re not going to understand why what Jesus did for me down there in the dark was the biggest miracle since he walked out of his own tomb on Easter morning.

Stay with me. Now, we’re getting close to the part of the story that I’m scared to tell.

The part where I have to tell you what he looked like, what he said, what he showed me about black people that made me fall on my face and cry.

Stay with me. It was a Thursday morning, November 6th, about 8 weeks ago now.

I remember because I just paid the cable bill and I was sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee that had gone cold and Samuel had already left for his morning class at the community college.

He was studying to be a youth pastor. Did I mention that? 21 years old and already answering the call.

Kathy would have been so proud. I was proud, too, even though I never told him.

I was sitting there thinking about nothing in particular, just staring at the back of a cereal box on the counter.

And then my chest hit me. That’s the only way I can say it. It didn’t start hurting.

It hit me like a man took a baseball bat and swung it right into the middle of my ribs from the inside.

The air went out of me. My coffee cup slipped out of my fingers and shattered on the kitchen floor.

And I remember thinking, Kathy is going to be upset about that. Which is a strange thing to think when your wife has been dead for 3 years.

But grief does funny things to a mind. I tried to stand up. My legs wouldn’t hold me.

I slid down the side of my chair and ended up on my knees on the lenolium, clutching at my own shirt like I could reach in and grab whatever was squeezing my heart and my left arm went numb.

And the edges of the kitchen started turning gray, like somebody was dimming the lights.

I want to tell you something that I’m not proud of because it is the honest truth of what happened in that moment.

The first thing I thought about right there on my kitchen floor was not my wife.

It was not my sons. It was not Jesus. The first thing I thought about was a black family that had moved in two houses down the street about 6 months earlier.

A young couple with a little boy about 4 years old. And the way my mind worked even then, even with a heart attack squeezing my chest, the first thing my brain did was be glad I was going to die in a neighborhood that still had good folks in it before those people ruined the block.

That’s what I thought. A man dying on his kitchen floor. And that was the thought my 65 years of hating had trained my brain to think first.

I’m telling you this because I want you to understand exactly how lost I was, how rotten, yet the how much work Jesus had to do when he got a hold of me.

If you’re listening to this right now and you think you’re too far gone for God to save, I want you to remember old Robert Jones on his kitchen floor with a racist thought in his head and a hole in his chest.

If Jesus could come for me, he can come for anybody. Anybody. I reached for my phone, managed to hit Samuel’s name.

I don’t remember what I said. I don’t even remember if I said anything at all.

I think I just made a noise. And then the kitchen went all the way dark and I felt myself falling sideways.

And the last thing I heard before everything went black was my own son’s voice coming out of the speaker of that phone shouting, “Daddy, daddy, I’m coming.

Jesus, I’m coming. Hold on. I’m coming.” And then nothing. I’m going to tell you something that happened in that nothing.

E before the ambulance, before the hospital, before the 12 minutes. Something I haven’t told anybody, not even Samuel.

In the nothing, I heard him pray. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t feel my body.

I couldn’t feel anything. But I could hear my boy’s voice, and he was driving his pickup truck the way only a scared 21-year-old can drive, running red lights, and he was shouting at God.

He was shouting, “You are not taking him. Do you hear me, Lord? You are not taking him.

I am not burying my father next to my mother. Not today. You sent me to be in that house for a reason.

You gave me this daddy for a reason. You are not taking him before he knows you.

Jesus, please. Jesus, I’m begging you. Give me my daddy. I don’t care what it costs.

Give me my daddy. 21 years old. Praying for a man who had never once told him he loved him.

Praying for a man who still deep in his heart didn’t even fully see the black neighbors his own son called friends.

Praying like Moses on the mountain. And you know what? Jesus heard him. I don’t remember the ambulance.

I don’t remember getting to Baylor Scott in white. I don’t remember them cutting my shirt open or putting the paddles on my chest.

I don’t remember any of that. Samuel told me later. The doctors told him later.

They told him his father was flatlined for 12 minutes and 19 seconds. They told him they were about to stop.

They told him to prepare himself. And Samuel told me, and this is the part I want you to hold on to.

Samuel told me he walked out of that waiting room into the hallway and he got down on his knees on the hospital floor right there in front of the nurses and the orderlys and the other families and he opened up his Bible to the book of Mark chapter 9 and he read out loud the part where the father says to Jesus, “Lord, I believe.

Help my unbelief.” And he prayed the prayer for his daddy. And in that moment, in the exact moment my 21-year-old son was kneeling on a hospital floor begging Jesus to save a man who didn’t deserve saving, I was standing face to face with the Lord himself.

Now, I have to tell you what it was like. And I want to be honest with you.

I’ve been trying to tell this story for 3 weeks, and every time I try, the words run out before I get to the good part.

Because human words weren’t made to describe what I saw. It’s like trying to describe the color blue to a man who was born blind.

I can use the words, but the words don’t carry it. They can’t. You’re going to have to meet me halfway and use your imagination.

And even then, you’re only going to get about 1% of it. But I’ll try.

The first thing I remember is that I wasn’t in my body anymore. There was no pain, no pressure in my chest, no ache in my knees from all those years the army put on them.

I felt light, lighter than I had ever felt in my whole life. I looked down and I could see myself, my actual physical body on a hospital table with doctors working on me.

I saw Samuel out in the hallway on his knees with his Bible open. I could see through walls.

I saw Michael and James racing to the hospital in two different cars from two different parts of Dallas.

I saw my own empty kitchen with the broken coffee cup still on the floor.

And then I started to move, not walking and not flying, just moving. Being drawn somewhere, pulled towards something like a river was carrying me.

Only the river was made of light and the light wasn’t cold and it wasn’t hot.

It was alive. I know that sounds crazy. It sounds crazy to me, too. And I was there.

But the light was alive. It had a personality. It loved me. Before I ever saw his face, I could feel his love in that light.

I started weeping before I even got to him. Because for the first time in 65 years, I felt what it was like to be completely loved.

Not loved with conditions. Not loved because I was useful or handsome or brave or tough.

Just loved. Loved for being Robert. Loved in a way my daddy never loved me.

Loved in a way I had never even known to ask for. And then the light opened up in front of me and I saw him.

He was standing there waiting for me. And the first thing I want to tell you, and this is going to be hard for some of my white friends watching this, so I’m just going to say it plain.

Jesus was not a white man. I had a picture of Jesus on my wall growing up.

Blue eyes, blonde hair, skin like a country music star. That’s the Jesus I had been told was Jesus my entire life.

That’s the Jesus on the pamphlets at our little Baptist church on Live Oak Street.

That’s the Jesus in the Sunday school books I read as a kid. That is not the Jesus I saw.

The Jesus I saw had brown skin, not light brown, not tan, brown, olive and bronze, like a man who had walked under a Middle Eastern sun his whole life because that’s exactly what he did.

He was a Jewish carpenter from Nazareth. Nobody ever taught me that. I mean, I knew it in my head, but I had never seen it until I saw him.

They His hair was dark and curly and long enough to touch his shoulders. His eyes were the deepest brown I’ve ever seen, like coffee with no cream in it.

And they were ancient. You could look into those eyes and see time bending around them.

And the way he looked at me. Oh, friend. The way he looked at me.

He looked at me like a father looks at a son who has been lost in the wilderness for 65 years and finally finally came stumbling out of the trees.

There was no anger in it. There was no disappointment. There was just pure oce love.

And the love of it knocked my knees out from under me. I went down on my face.

I couldn’t stand up. I couldn’t speak. I just started crying these big ugly crying jags that came from somewhere way down deep in me, somewhere I didn’t even know was there.

I cried for Kathy. They I cried for the corporal from Opaloosis whose hand I held in the sand.

I cried for Samuel. I cried for my daddy who I’d spent 65 years trying to please.

I cried for every ugly word I’d ever said, every joke I’d ever laughed at, every black man I’d ever walked past at the gas station without so much as nodding hello.

I cried and I cried and I cried. And the Lord Jesus Christ just stood there and let me cry.

He didn’t rush me. He didn’t tell me to get up. He didn’t say they’re there.

He just stood there in that light and let me empty out 65 years of poison all over the floor of heaven because he knew I couldn’t carry that weight any further.

He knew it had to come out. When I finally looked up, I don’t know how long it had been.

Time doesn’t work right there. He was still smiling. That’s And he reached down and put his hand on my shoulder and he spoke.

And his voice was the sound I had been waiting my whole life to hear without even knowing I was waiting for it.

He said, “Robert, I’ve been looking for you for a very long time. I want to stop right here for a minute because I know how some of you are feeling right now.

I know because [clears throat] I felt it, too, lying there on that floor in front of him.

You’re feeling too broken, too old, too far gone. You’re remembering every rotten thing you’ve ever done.

And you’re thinking, “There’s no way Jesus is looking for somebody like me.” I want to tell you right now on the authority of a man who was a racist army veteran from Dallas, Texas, who cursed God in his kitchen and never went to his own wife’s savior and never said I love you to his youngest son.

I want to tell you on that authority that Jesus is looking for you. He’s looking for you right now.

He sent me back from the dead to tell you that. Don’t you turn this video off.

Not yet. The best part is still coming. Robert, he said, I’ve been looking for you for a very long time.

I tried to speak. I couldn’t. My mouth wouldn’t work. He said, “You don’t have to say anything yet.

I need to show you something first. I brought you here because there is a lie living inside of you that has been eating you from the inside out for 65 years.

And I need to take it out of you. But first, you need to see where it came from.

You need to see who put it there. And most of all, Robert, I am, you need to see what it costs my children.

He held out his hand. He helped me to my feet and his hand, his actual physical hand.

I could see the scar right there in the middle of his palm. Not a little scar either.

A wound, a hole, like somebody had driven an iron spike straight through it. And he let me look at it.

He let me stare at it. He said, “This is for you, too, Robert. Every drop of it, this is for you.”

And then he waved his other hand and the light around us changed. I want to warn you before I tell you the next part.

Because what Jesus showed me next is the part the devil does not want you to hear.

It’s the part he has been hiding for centuries. It’s the secret I came back from the dead to tell you.

If you’re black and you’re watching this right now, I want you to get somebody you love and bring them to the screen.

All because what I am about to say is for you. It is for you.

It is a gift from the Lord himself to his black children in America. And the devil has been working overtime for 400 years to keep it from reaching your ears.

If you’re white and you’re watching this right now, I want you to stay, too.

Because this is for you to hear in a different way. You need to hear it the same way I had to hear it on my knees with a Middle Eastern carpenter with scars in his hands standing next to me.

Here we go. The first thing Jesus showed me was Africa. Not the Africa I’d seen on the evening news growing up.

Not the starving children with flies in their eyes in the commercials they used to play during Jeopardy.

Not the war zones. Not the poverty. Those images were in my head. That’s the only Africa I’d ever been shown.

And Jesus knew it. Yes. He showed me a different Africa. He showed me ancient cities.

Cities with towers and libraries and schools and gardens. He showed me the great kingdom of Mali and a king named Mansam Musa who was so rich his gold broke the economies of entire countries just by passing through them.

He showed me Timbuktu, a city of scholars and books and wise men. He showed me the stone walls of great Zimbabwe, older than most of Europe.

He showed me Ethiopian monks copying scripture by candle light in monasteries that were praising Jesus’s name back when my English ancestors were still painting themselves blue and worshiping trees.

He showed me black hands writing down the words of God in languages my people had never even heard of.

Robert, he said, my people in Africa were mine before any white missionary ever set foot on that continent.

Oh, they knew me. They walked with me. They called me by different names in different places.

But they knew I was the God of heaven. I was in their songs. I was in their prayers.

I was with them long before your people arrived. I couldn’t speak. Everything I had been taught, everything my daddy had told me, everything the TV had shown me, it was a lie.

A carefully constructed lie. And Jesus was pulling it apart piece by piece right in front of my eyes.

Then the vision changed. And what I saw next, I wish I could unsee. I wish to God I could unsee it.

He showed me the ships. He showed me the slave ships. I saw white men, men who looked like my great great granddaddy, men who looked like me, coming onto beaches with chains and whips and Bibles.

They had Bibles with them, friend. They had Bibles. And they used those Bibles to say what they were doing was God’s will.

I saw mothers being torn from their babies. I saw fathers being chained and dragged onto boats while their wives and children screamed on the shore.

I saw entire villages burned to the ground for sport. I saw the belly of those ships and I want to tell you I was in desert storm.

I have seen things that would make most men sick and I could not look at the belly of those ships.

Bodies packed on top of bodies like cordwood. People lying in their own filth for weeks and months at a time.

Sharks following the ships because so many bodies were thrown overboard that the sharks learned to expect a meal.

A whole species of shark learned to follow slave ships because of how many black people were dumped into the sea.

Jesus was holding my hand while I watched. And I could feel him trembling. The Lord himself was trembling.

Robert, he said, and his voice was so quiet. These were my children. Every single one of them.

I knew their names before they were born. I knit them together in their mother’s wombs.

And they were brought to a country that would call itself Christian while doing this to them.

I fell on my knees again. I was begging him to stop. I was saying, “Lord, I can’t.

I can’t. Please, I can’t watch this.” And he said, “You have to watch, Robert, because your people did this, and your people covered it up, and your people are still covering it up, and I am sending you back to uncover it.”

He showed me more. He showed me a slave auction in Charleston, South Carolina, 1847.

I watched a little girl about 7 years old get sold away from her mother.

And so I watched that mother fall on the ground screaming while a white man in a three-piece suit counted out his money.

That white man went home that night and read his Bible and prayed over his supper and thanked the Lord for his blessings.

He showed me a man named Samuel. Another Samuel, Jesus said his name quiet like the name meant something.

A black man who was a preacher in Georgia in 1859. That man could recite the whole New Testament from memory.

Couldn’t read because they didn’t let him learn to read, but he had memorized the whole thing by listening to it.

He was caught baptizing other slaves in a creek at midnight. And his master beat him to death with a buggy whip while his wife watched.

His last words were, “Jesus, receive my spirit.” Just like Steven in the book of Acts.

Just exactly like Steven. He showed me the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. He showed me a thriving neighborhood they called Black Wall Street.

Black doctors, black lawyers, black business owners, black churches, black families sending their kids to black schools.

And he showed me a white mob burning it all down in one night. Dropping bombs out of airplanes on American citizens in an American city in 1921.

And not one white newspaper in the whole country called it what it was. He showed me EMTT Till.

He showed me the Birmingham church bombing where four little girls died in their Sunday dresses.

He showed me the hoses and the dogs. He showed me Martin Luther King on a hotel balcony in Memphis.

He showed me every name I had ignored my whole life. And then he showed me something I will never forget as long as I live.

He showed me the spiritual realm underneath the physical realm. I don’t know how to describe this part, but I’m going to try.

Jesus showed me that underneath every one of those physical evils, there was a spiritual war going on.

There were demons. Actual demons whispering into the ears of slave traders, plantation owners, clansmen, politicians, pastors, whispering lies, whispering, “They’re not fully human.

They don’t have souls the way you do. God wants this. Your comfort is more important than their suffering.

You’re not doing anything wrong.” And he showed me why. Oh friend, he showed me why.

Robert Jesus said, “The enemy of my kingdom has been attacking my black children harder than almost any people on this earth.

And I’m going to tell you why. Listen carefully. Because this is the secret he has been hiding.

I’m crying again now. Just recording this. I’m crying.” He said, “My black children carry something inside of them that the enemy is terrified of.

They carry a measure of spiritual resilience, a capacity for worship, a gift of faith under fire that no other people on this earth carry in the same way.

The enemy saw that gift in them before they were ever born. He saw it in the womb of their ancestors and he has spent 400 years trying to beat it out of them, crush it out of them, lie it out of them, chain it out of them, and kill it out of them.

Because he knew that if they ever stepped fully into who I created them to be, if they ever lifted their hands and worshiped with the full weight of that gift behind them, that the gates of hell themselves would not be able to stand.

I’m going to say that again because I need you to hear it. The enemy knew.

The enemy saw a gift inside black people that was so dangerous to his kingdom of darkness that he spent 400 years trying to destroy it.

Slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, redlinining, mass incarceration, crack in the 80s. Every single one of those things, Jesus said, was a demonic attack on a calling.

Not just on a people, on a calling, on an anointing the Lord himself had placed on black people before the foundation of the world.

And the devil has almost convinced them it’s not there. That’s the secret. That is the secret.

Robert Jesus said to me, “The reason my black children have been able to survive everything they’ve been put through is because the anointing I put on them is bigger than anything the devil could throw at them.

You cannot kill what I have blessed. Every time the enemy tried to kill them, they came back singing.

Every time he tried to silence them, they started a new church. Every time he tried to separate them from me, they ran deeper into my arms.”

The black church in America is the most persecuted, most beautiful, most faithfilled branch of my bride the world has ever seen.

And most white Christians have never set one foot inside one. I want to tell you that last sentence hit me like a freight train because he was talking about me.

I had lived in Dallas my whole life. Dallas, Texas. Do you know how many black churches there are in Dallas?

Hundreds. Like hundreds of houses of worship full of people singing my Jesus name with more fire and more faith and more joy than I had ever shown him in all my 65 years of pew sitting and I had never set one foot inside a single one of them not one Robert he said when my black children worship me I lean forward on my throne do you understand what I’m saying to you when they sing to me out of the prisons out of the plantations out of the projects out of the suffering I lean forward because I know what it cost them to keep their faith.

I know every tear. I know every chain. I know every mother who buried a son who should have come home.

And their worship is the most precious sound in my kingdom. I was on my knees.

I couldn’t have stood up if he had commanded me to. The devil, Jesus said, nay has been trying for four centuries to make my black children forget who they are.

He has whispered to them through white pastors that their skin is a curse. He has whispered to them through movies and music that they are less than.

He has whispered to them through their own broken fathers that they are nothing. He has done everything he can to make them hate themselves.

Do you know why, Robert? I shook my head. Because he knows that if they ever remember who I made them to be, if they ever step fully into their identity as my beloved children, as my chosen priests, as the ones who carry a double portion of my spirit because of everything they have suffered.

If that ever happens, Robert, the next great move of my spirit on the earth is going to come out of them.

The next great awakening is going to be led by black worshippers. Yes. And the enemy is doing everything he can to stop it.

But he will not stop it because I am God. And what I have ordained, no demon can undo.

I need to take a breath. I really do. If you’re still with me right now, if you’re still watching, I want you to know that what I just told you is the truth.

I did not make this up. I am not a creative man. I am a 65-year-old former mechanic’s son from Dallas.

I am not clever enough to invent what I just said. That was shown to me.

That was spoken to me by the Lord Jesus Christ himself. And he sent me back from the dead to say it out loud to whoever is listening right now.

If you’re a black brother or black sister watching this, I want you to hear me.

I want you to hear a white man from Dallas, Texas. It is with a Confederate flag in his daddy’s garage.

I want you to hear me say this to you. You are not a curse.

You were never a curse. You are a gift. The devil told you otherwise for 400 years.

He used my people to tell you. He used churches to tell you. He used movies and textbooks and politicians and police officers and so-called Christians to tell you.

I am one of the men who told you with my silence and I am standing in front of you right now on this video as a man who has been to the throne of God and back saying they lied.

You are the people God has been protecting for a special purpose. You are carrying a calling so heavy that the enemy has spent generations trying to kill you to stop you from standing in it.

And the reason, the only reason you are still here then is because the Lord of hosts himself has been holding you up.

He has been with you in every single thing you have suffered. He was on that slave ship.

He was in that cotton field. He was at that lynching tree. He was in that church on that Sunday morning in Birmingham.

He was on that Memphis balcony. He was in that precinct. He has never left you.

Not for one minute. Not for one breath. And his favor on you is only getting stronger.

I am telling you what Jesus Christ told me. Now, I need to finish the story because there’s one more part you need to hear.

And this is the part I am most scared to tell you. After Jesus showed me all of that, after I had cried myself dry on the floor of heaven, he helped me up one more time and he said, “Robert, I am going to send you back.

But before I send you back, that I want you to see one more thing.”

And he showed me Samuel, my son, kneeling in a hallway at Baylor Scott and White Medical Center in Dallas, Texas on a Thursday morning in November, with his Bible open on the hospital floor, tears running down his face.

Praying to Jesus for the daddy who had never once said, “I love you.” Robert, Jesus said, “I am sending you back because of him.

Not because of you, because of him. Your son has been praying for you every single night since his mother died.

Did you know that?” I shook my head. I didn’t. Every night on his knees next to his bed for 3 years, he asked me to save his father.

He tells me about every good thing he ever saw in you. He reminds me of every time you made him laugh when he was a little boy.

He pleads your case, Robert. Your son has been your priest. Oh, and you have not even known it.

His faith is the reason you are here right now. His faith is the reason I am sending you back.

I am answering a prayer that a 21-year-old boy has been praying since he was 18.

I was weeping. And here is what I want you to do when you go back, Jesus said.

I want you to tell him you love him. I want you to tell him I met you here.

I want you to tell him his prayers were heard. Every one of them. And then I want you to do two more things.

Are you listening? I nodded. I want you to find a black church in Dallas.

Anyone. It doesn’t matter which one. And I want you to walk in that front door and sit down in the back pew.

And I want you to worship with your brothers and sisters. Don’t say anything. Don’t try to lead anything.

Just sit down and be a student of what I am doing in that room.

Let my spirit wash over you. Let your brothers and sisters love you. Let them teach you how to worship me the way my black children worship me.

And then he said, I want you to tell your story. The story of the 65-year-old racist from Dallas, Texas, whose life was saved because his black brothers and sisters prayers and his son’s faith reached my throne.

Tell it out loud. Tell it on video. Tell it to whoever will listen because the time is short, Robert.

The enemy’s time is almost up. And I am calling my white children and my black children to come together before the end.

And your story is going to be a seed. He looked at me, those ancient brown eyes, and he said, “Will you do it?”

And I said, “Yes, Lord. I’ll do it. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything.” And he smiled at me.

And then he put both of his hands on my face. And he kissed me on the forehead like a father kisses a little boy who has finally come home after a long, long time away.

And the light got brighter and brighter and brighter. And then I heard Samuel screaming, “He’s back.

Oh, Jesus, he’s back. Thank you, Jesus, he’s back. I opened my eyes. I was in a hospital bed.

There was a tube down my throat and wires all over my chest. My son was standing over me with his Bible still in his hand and tears running down his face.

The doctors and nurses were all staring at the monitors like they had seen a ghost.

One of them, a young black woman in green scrubs, was whispering, “12 minutes. 12 minutes.

There’s no way.” But there was a way. His name is Jesus. I spent four more days in that hospital.

They couldn’t explain what had happened to me. My heart had been stopped for 12 minutes and 19 seconds, and I should have had brain damage at minimum.

I had none. The doctor said it was one of those medical mysteries we occasionally encounter.

Medical mystery, my foot. It was the Lord. The first thing I did when they took the breathing tube out was grab Samuel’s hand.

I grabbed that boy’s hand and I looked him in the eyes. And I said the words I should have said a thousand times already.

I said, “Samuel, son, I love you. I have always loved you.” And Jesus told me to tell you that he heard every one of your prayers.

That boy collapsed onto my chest. He cried into my hospital gown for 20 minutes.

I don’t think he had ever really cried in front of me before. He had always been so strong, even when his mama died.

Hey, but that day, he cried like a little boy. And I held him. And for the first time since he was in diapers, I was actually his daddy.

Michael and James came too. I told them what happened. All of it. The hate, the kitchen floor, the tunnel, Jesus, Africa, the ships, the anointing, the secret the devil has been hiding.

Michael didn’t believe me at first. James told me I must have been hallucinating. I didn’t argue with them.

I just told them I love them. And I asked them to pray about it.

And I told them their mama was waiting for all three of us in heaven.

And I wasn’t going to be the one who kept us out. I don’t know yet where they’ll land.

That’s between them and the Lord. But I’m still praying for them every night the way Samuel prayed for me.

The Sunday after I got out of the hospital. Then I drove myself to a black church on the east side of Dallas.

I’m not going to say the name of it. You can find your own. The pastor’s name I’m not going to say either.

I walked in the front door at about 10:00 in the morning. An usher in a suit and a kind face walked up to me.

He looked at me. This old white man with shaky hands and wet eyes. And he didn’t ask me a single question.

He just said, “Welcome home, brother. We’ve been waiting for you.” I swear on my Bible, he said exactly that.

We’ve been waiting for you. I don’t even remember the sermon. I remember the singing.

I remember a woman about my age with a voice like an angel standing up and leading a song I had never heard before.

About how the Lord is a fortress. About how he will never forsake his people.

About how every tear is counted and every cry is heard. That’s and the whole congregation sang it with her.

Hands lifted, swaying, some of them crying, some of them laughing. And I sat in that back pew and I sobbed into my own hands like a baby.

And a woman I had never met in my life put her hand on my back and whispered, “Let it out, brother.

Let it all out. Jesus has got you.” A black woman, a total stranger, comforting a 65-year-old white racist she didn’t know from Adam because she had the anointing of the Lord on her and she could see he was working on me.

She didn’t need a backstory. She just knew. Those people love me at that church like I was one of their own from the second I walked in.

And I realized something sitting there in that back pew with that woman’s hand on my back.

My people have been missing out for 400 years. My people, my white Christian people, in the ones who look like me, the ones who built the churches and wrote the hymns and ran the denominations.

We have been missing the fire. We’ve been missing the oil. We’ve been missing the anointing.

It’s been right across town from us the whole time, right there in the black church.

And we have been too proud, too scared, too deep in our own generational sin to walk across the street and sit down at the family table with our own brothers and sisters.

Jesus told me up in heaven that the next move of his spirit is going to come through his black children.

I believe him. I saw it. I was shown. And if you are a white Christian and you want to be part of what God is doing on the earth in these last days, I am telling you right now from the mouth of a dead man, come back to life.

Go find a black church and go sit down in it. Don’t go to teach.

Don’t go to perform. Don’t go to make yourself feel better. Go to learn. Go to repent.

Go to worship. Go to be a student. Your brothers and sisters have been carrying something for 400 years that you need in order to stand in what’s coming.

And they will share it with you. They will. That’s the kind of people they are.

I want to say something to my black brothers and sisters one more time before I finish this video.

I’m going to look right into the camera now. I’m looking at you. I’m looking at you and I’m saying I am sorry.

I am sorry for my daddy and I am sorry for my granddaddy and I am sorry for me.

I am sorry for every word and every silence and every joke and every vote and every cheap smile at a grocery store that was supposed to cover up what was underneath.

I am sorry for the corporal from Opaloosas whose funeral I did not attend. I am sorry for his mother whose letter I did not answer.

I am sorry I did not see you the way my Jesus saw you. I am sorry it took me dying to learn what my own son knew when he was 3 years old.

I do not expect forgiveness. That is not what I am asking for. Forgiveness is between you and the Lord.

And he is big enough to handle it. Either way, what I am doing is telling you the truth.

The truth that the Lord himself told me to carry back from the grave. You are not a curse.

You are a gift. You are carrying an anointing the devil has spent four centuries trying to steal from you.

And you still have it. You still have it. Every time you have lifted your hands in a praise break, every time you have clapped on the two and four, a every time you have cried out, I won’t complain.

In a church basement somewhere in America. You have been pulling that anointing up out of the ground and waving it in the devil’s face.

And he is terrified of you. He is absolutely terrified of you. Step into it.

Step into all of it. The Lord is about to do something on this earth through his black children that is going to make the book of Acts look like a warm-up.

I saw it. I was shown. Don’t let any devil, any devil outside of you or inside of you convince you that you are small.

You are not small. You are seated with Christ in the heavenly places. And the anointing on your life is a double portion.

And the Lord Jesus Christ is leaning forward on his throne to hear you sing his name.

I love you. I mean that. A racist old man from Dallas, Texas is telling you on a YouTube video that he loves you.

And if that’s not proof that Jesus is real and Jesus is moving, I don’t know what is.

To everybody watching this black and white, I want to end with this. We don’t have much time.

I don’t mean the world is ending tomorrow. I mean I don’t have much time.

My heart is weak. The doctor told me my ejection fraction is low and I need to take it easy.

I’m 65 years old and I came back from 12 minutes on the other side.

Every day I wake up, I say, “Thank you, Jesus.” Before my feet hit the floor because every day is borrowed.

Every day is a gift. I could go back to see him tonight and I would not be mad about it except that I want to finish the work he sent me to do.

Part of the work was telling Samuel I love him. Part of the work was walking into that black church.

Yet part of the work is this video right here. If you are white and you are watching this and something in your chest is pulling at you right now, that’s him.

That’s Jesus. He’s trying to catch you, too. Let him catch you. Don’t do what I did and wait 65 years.

Don’t wait until you’re on a kitchen floor with a hole in your chest. Let him catch you today.

Say his name out loud right now in whatever room you’re in. Just say, “Jesus, I believe.

Help my unbelief.” Those are the words my son read out of his Bible when I was flatlined.

Those are the words that opened the gates of heaven for a man who did not deserve it.

They will work for you, too. They will. If you are black and you are watching this and something has been whispering lies into your ear your whole life, something telling you that you are less than, that you are a curse, that you are not worthy, that God has forgotten you.

I am telling you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, that voice is a liar.

That voice has been lying to you since your ancestors were put on those ships.

That voice is the same voice that whispered to my daddy and my granddaddy and made them into the men they became.

It is a devil. It does not speak for God. God’s voice about you is the voice I heard on the other side.

And that voice said beloved. That voice said chosen. That voice said anointed. That voice said leaning forward on the throne to hear you sing, “Please hear me.

Please.” Nothing the enemy has thrown at you has been able to kill the calling on your life.

And he has thrown everything. Everything. And you are still here. You are still here.

Your great-grandmother’s prayers are the reason you are still here. Hey, your grandmother’s hands are the reason you are still here.

The Lord Jesus Christ is the reason you are still here. And he is not done with you.

Not even a little bit. The best chapter of the story of black faith in America has not been written yet.

I saw the next chapter. I was shown and I am telling you it is glorious.

It is absolutely glorious. We belong to each other. That is the whole message. That’s the whole thing.

The devil has spent 400 years trying to convince white Christians and black Christians that we are two different families.

And Jesus told me himself, “We are one family. We were made to worship together, to weep together, to fight the enemy together, to raise our kids together, to bury our old people together.

Oh, to look across the aisle on a Sunday morning and see our own brother and our own sister and say, “I love you and mean it.”

Heaven is not segregated. I saw it. Heaven is every color, every language, every tribe, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in front of a brown-skinned Jewish carpenter with scars in his hands.

And the church on earth is supposed to look like the church in heaven. That is what we were made for.

That is what he died for. That is what he rose for. That is what he sent me back from the grave to say.

So here is what I am asking you to do before you close this video.

If you have never given your life to Jesus, not the performance kind, not the Sunday morning kind, the real kind.

I want you to stop the video right now, wherever you are, and I want you to talk to him out loud.

Just say, “Jesus, I I believe you are who you say you are. I believe you died for me.

I believe you rose for me. I am sorry for my sins. Come into my heart and change me.

I give you my life. Take it.” That is a prayer that works. I know it works because I prayed a version of it on the floor of heaven.

And I am here today because of what he did with it. If you are already a believer, I want you to pray for the person sitting next to you in your life who needs this message.

The racist daddy, the broken son, the grandma who doesn’t know yet. Pray for them the way my Samuel prayed for me.

Don’t give up on them. If Jesus could reach Robert Jones in 12 minutes on a hospital table, he can reach anybody in your life.

Anybody. Don’t stop praying. Your prayers matter more than you will ever know until you get to the other side and see the files on what they did.

And if you are just watching this because you were curious, I am glad you stayed.

I am grateful you stayed. I am an old man and I don’t have many days left.

And I spent most of my life being the exact kind of man I am now asking you not to be.

So take this story, whatever you’re going to do with it, and just hold it somewhere in your heart.

Jesus knows where to find it when he needs it. My name is Robert Jones.

I am 65 years old. I was a racist for 65 years and I was dead for 12 minutes.

And I met Jesus Christ face to face. And he sent me back to tell you that he loves his black children with a love the devil has been trying to hide for 400 years and couldn’t.

He loves his white children too. He loves every child he ever made. And he wants us home.

All of us together around one table in one family e under one name. I don’t know when he is going to call me back.

It could be tonight. It could be next year. But when he does, I am going to run into his arms and I’m going to thank him for sending me back one more time so I could tell this story.

And I am going to ask him to let me sit next to that corporal from Apaloosas and tell him thank you for what he did for me in that desert.

And I am going to ask him to let me sit next to my Cathy and tell her she was right about everything.

And I’m going to ask him if I can meet Ruth and EMTT and all the ones whose names I need to know.

I have a lot of apologies to make when I get there. But until then, until he calls me back, I’m going to keep telling this story.

Every day I have breath in my lungs. I’m going to keep telling it because I promised him I would.

And I am not about to break a promise to the man who brought me back from the dead.

Thank you for listening to an old man’s confession. If this story touched you, share it with somebody who needs it.

Share it with the black brother or black sister in your life who has been carrying a weight too heavy to carry alone.

Share it with the white brother or white sister who still doesn’t see. Share it with the son or the daughter who is praying for a parent who won’t listen.

Let it be a seed. That’s all Jesus asked me to do. Just plant the seed.

He’ll do the growing. May the Lord Jesus Christ bless you and keep you. May his face shine upon you.

May he be gracious to you. May he give you peace. And may he open the eyes of every one of us, black and white, young and old, rich and poor, to see each other the way he sees us, one family at one table, one name.

In Jesus name.