TGC: Dave Mustaine

With Mustaine and Ellefson, God saw fit to save some of the most cynical, aggressive, hardest-partying public individuals he could find. In sports this would be akin to a Mike Tyson conversion. Ellefson and Mustaine reached a point in their lives when they could no longer explain away their choices. They could reckon with their sins no longer. Conversions like these bring a ton of glory to God and untold joy to my heart because they remind me that there are no unredeemable sinners. There’s no case too hopeless or difficult for God if the individual repents and comes to Christ in humility and faith. It means, of course, that I’m not hopeless either.

Mustaine was in another stint in rehab when he fell asleep in a chair with his arm draped over the back. The pressure exerted by the chair on the nerves in Mustaine’s arm—a one-in-a-million type thing—threatened to permanently injure him and end his music career. He reached a personal and professional rock bottom, and at that moment cried out in repentance.

“At some point you have to wonder,” Mustaine wrote in his book, “how many times does God have to say, ‘Dude, I love you,’ before I straighten up for good?”