How God Saved Christian Comedian Jeff Allen’s Marriage, Life
By Movieguide® Contributor
Comedian Jeff Allen revealed how Christ saved his life, turning him from alcoholism and a failing marriage to a loving man filled with the Holy Spirit.
Allen’s life had been marred by anger, and he took his rage out on his wife and those around him by verbally berating them and making nasty jokes.
“I worked inside out,” Allen told CBN, explaining where his jokes came from. “I had female club owners who wouldn’t hire me…[because of] the way I talked about my wife. Tammy would come out occasionally to a show, and she’d leave in tears.”
“I was angry,” he continued. “My marriage was falling apart. Everything was…bankrupt. I felt the weight of the world but there was this apathy about it.”
Allen recently shared with GMA that after becoming sober, he searched for a “point” to life for eight years.
“In the end, it turned out to be a cliche,” he shared. “The meaning comes from your family, your friends…all the stuff that I kept looking at [as] meaningless and pointless. But until I connected to the source, the author of life, then this life made no sense to me at all.”
Things began to change when Allen met a believer at a golf course. This man had done well in business, and Allen began to ask him about ways to make money.
“So, I’m asking him, ‘How do you accumulate wealth?’ and he’s going, ‘You don’t want a lot of money.’ I go, ‘I don’t?’ he goes, ‘No, you can’t handle what little you have, it would be a burden to you,’” Allen recalled.
“In order to enjoy the creation, you have to have a relationship with the One who created it,” the man told Allen.
After talking more, the man signed Allen up to receive Bible tapes from a church in Texas. It would be a year and a half before he viewed the tapes.
At the time, he and his wife planned to divorce but decided against it while driving to the courthouse. Instead, his wife took their kids for the summer and told him to get a grip on life.
Feeling like his marriage was broken beyond repair, he turned on one of the Bible tapes. What he heard changed his life forever.
“It was Ecclesiastes. And when I heard meaningless, meaningless, all in life is meaningless, I knew that,” he said. “That was my conclusion—nothing mattered. I was a full-blown nihilist, nothing mattered.”
“What I really got out of that first sermon that I heard was life without God will have no meaning, and without meaning, there’s no purpose – and in a life without purpose, you might as well kill yourself,” he told Fox News. “And that summed up my eight-year search. I personally really couldn’t find anything that gave me any lasting peace or joy.
As his relationship with Christ deepened, one moment finally broke Allen’s tendency to anger.
One night, he was hitting his punching bag in his basement, screaming and yelling, “Why,” until his son told him he was scaring him.
“All of a sudden, this calm came over me, and I looked at Tammy and I said for the first time, ‘this will never happen again,’” he explained. “I said, ‘I’m okay’…I never said it to [Tammy]. I never tried to make promises I couldn’t keep, but something just came and I believe that was the night the Holy Spirit came.”
From that night forward, he had the power to control his anger.
“Jesus said, ‘Don’t worry about this life, I’ll give you a new counselor in the form of the Holy Spirit,’” Allen said. “That’s the new way of looking at things with a new view of the world. Now, it fights with my nature, believe me. Paul talks about it all the time, you know, killing off your nature. But everyday there is something in me.”