Growing up, Jeff craved affirmation from his hardworking, athletic father — a man who rarely showed affection. After being cut from one junior high sports team, after another, he found his place when his dad brought home a guitar from Western Auto. Music quickly became Jeff’s world. Fronting Louisiana garage bands, his talent as a songwriter led to record deals and touring opportunities with major acts like Kansas, Chicago, Kenny Loggins, the Allman Brothers, ZZ Top, and many more you would recognize. But everything changed when he encountered the writings of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones and was personally discipled by Conrad Murrell. Confronted with the sovereign God of Scripture, Jeff was radically converted to Christ at age 30. A longtime pastor, he served as elder at Mount Zion Bible Church for 23 years and continues to edit The Free Grace Broadcaster in retirement. 

Well, welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we've got Jeff Pollard with us to tell his life story. He's going to be preaching at our national conference in May, and you're not going to want to miss him there or this story of Jeff Pollard. Hope you enjoy the time. Hope you enjoy the time.

Okay Jason, the life story of one of our favorite people. We were just in Pensacola a month ago celebrating Jeff being at Mount Zion and with Chapel Library for 24 years. I think That's right. Is that right, Jeff? I was actually in my 24th year.

If I wanted to sound like I was six years old, it was 23 and a half. We always round up, Jeff. That was a fun time. That really was a joy to... Well, we didn't really roast him, actually.

No. So can I give you my favorite moment from that? Okay. So my favorite moment was where a couple dozen people from Louisiana, which was part of your ministry, but even before your 23 and seven-eighths year at Chapel Library, And a bunch of people from your time in Pensacola came up front and sang scripture memory songs that you wrote. And I just thought you...

When they were kids. Right. I thought you and Myra were going to melt when that happened. It was fantastic. Yeah, that was my favorite.

It was the high point for me simply because I was seeing three generations, all of these, The people that got up to sing, most of them, a little younger than I, they were young people when I taught them those songs. Then they all got married, then they all had children, and now they have, some of them have grandchildren. Who sing those songs. Yeah. Yeah.

That's fantastic. I love it. And that's, you know, our multi-generational view was standing right in front of everybody. Yep. Singing scripture.

So that's not a terrible legacy, Jeff. Well done. Well, okay. So we've, we've really fast forwarded in his life story. Let's go back.

Time to rewind. Let's rewind. Let's go back to Jeff's birth and childhood. Tell us, Tell us about when you were born, where you were born, and all the surrounding situations. Well, I was born at 3.40 p.m.

On the Lord's Day, July 1st, 1951. Okay. Where? Southern Illinois. Southern Illinois.

It was Mount Vernon, Illinois. Okay. But I never lived there. My mom and dad were living there, but my father had taken a job down in the South working for an oil company. He was an attorney and he was working for an oil company.

So when I was born, he immediately went down there. Mom stayed there in Mount Vernon for about six weeks and then moved to be with him. So I never really lived up there where I was born. I've been on the Gulf Coast my entire life. Wow.

So tell us about your parents, your family. Well, my father was a very hard-working man. He was a good provider, as they would say, especially from his generation. He was a good provider, but he was a lost man. His views of God were pretty much like that of a deist, and he was an alcoholic.

And so his life, for the men who knew him in business, knew him to be a very hardworking man, a very bright man, he could read people in an almost supernatural way. And he was very good at what he did. But he did not know the Lord, and my mom did. My mother was an absolutely wonderful person. I loved her dearly.

I miss her dearly. She knew the Lord, at least considering the kind of churches she was in minimally, but she was always reading the scriptures. She taught me the Lord's Prayer. She taught me the 23rd Psalm. She would put me in a chair in front of her and say, repeat after me.

And we would do it until I finally got it. And what I learned about loving people came from my mother. So I loved both of them dearly. I spent a great deal of my early life doing what I could to secure my dad's love. I'm not saying that he didn't love me, but he came from a generation that almost never said, I love you.

And I didn't hear that actually until I was 18 when I complained about it. So I was spending a great deal of my life trying to prove to him that I could be something. My dad was a gifted athlete, And he was going to, as the family story goes, he was going to get a degree in athletics and become a coach. But he met my mom and she changed his mind to seeking a law degree. So he got his Juris doctorate in law, became an attorney.

So I was constantly trying to please him and I never seemed to succeed at that. That's ultimately why I ended up in music. When's the first time you picked up a guitar? Yeah, I would have to say it was probably I lived in Africa for a short while. I had the guitar when I went to Africa.

So it was probably around seventh or eighth grade that I got my first guitar. My dad bought it for me from Western Auto. That's where they were selling guitars that were closest to the house. So talk to us about the music here, years, your rise in the music industry, just what was happening during that period. Well, as I said, my dad was a great athlete.

And I wasn't. I got cut from all the best teams, football, baseball, basketball. And the only thing that I excelled in was swimming. And because of my allergies, I couldn't stay in the water. So I was a complete loss when it came to being an athlete.

And so I gave up trying to carry the family torch as far as athletics went. And I was sitting one night watching a show called Shindig and the Kinks came on. And by the time they were finished with that song, I said, that's what I'm going to do. I can do that. I know that I can do that.

So that's when I got the guitar and started learning it. And I gave myself to it every single day until I could play for people. And as soon as I found out that people liked hearing me play and sing, I just affirmed what I was on earth for in my younger and foolish thinking. So that's what I did. I did that.

I played in many garage bands until I started working with some fellows in Louisiana. I was writing my own songs by then. We went to Nashville and we went to Colorado. Several people came out to hear us. I ended up with a songwriting deal and that led to our album deal.

So that's the shortest I can make it. I played guitar. When I would wake up in the morning, I would be reaching sometimes for my guitar before I had both eyes open. I would play until I had to do something else, like my mother would want me to cut the yard, or I would have to work in my books. I learned at school how to sit and watch teachers and my eyes would track them, but my brain was not there.

And I would be sitting and arranging what the stage ought to look like, how I ought to hold my guitar, what kind of amps I should have, what kind of songs I should be playing. I mean, it's what I lived and breathed music. That's simple. So you, I've seen your guild guitar that you played, on stage a lot. Did you ever, Did you play the electric guitar as well?

Oh yeah. I moved, let's see, I moved to the electric guitar by the time I was in High school. Yeah, I was playing electric by then. So I guess the acoustic was about two to three years prior to that. But it wasn't long playing acoustic that I knew I wanted to play an electric guitar.

All the guys that I liked, all the musicians that I liked were playing guitar. So that's what I did. Jeff, how did the Lord break into that life? That's a long story. Of course, most of mine are.

But it's, I guess the easiest way to put it is this. I lived and I breathed music. At the same time when I was in the fifth grade, I ended up walking an aisle in a church with my mother and I didn't know what to do. All I know is that at the end of every service, there would be what they called an altar call. My mom turned to me and said, I'm going to join the church.

Do you want to join the church? And I said, yeah, I will. I had friends there, so why not? There was no conviction of sin. There was no understanding of the gospel whatsoever.

But I watched every Lord's Day. I would watch people occasionally leave their pews and walk down to the pastor who was at the front of the church while the choir just kept singing, just as I am. And we got down to the end and I thought, Because every time someone went down there, they would put their heads together and he said something to them and I thought, well, he's giving them the password. I didn't know what else they were talking. And So I walked down and I turned my ear up to him and he turned his ear down to me and we stood there while the choir kept singing.

And I finally realized he wanted me to say something to him. And I thought he was supposed to say something to me. At first, I thought he forgot the password. He said, why don't you have a seat over here? So he brought, after the service was over, he took us in the back into his office, and he took me down the Roman's road, told me about hell, which scared me to death.

And if I believed in Jesus, I wouldn't go there. And so as a fifth grader, it all made sense to me, I would believe on Jesus. A couple of weeks later, I was baptized, went into the youth choir, ended up singing a trio with a couple of girls and our three-part harmony was beautiful and That's where My thirst for the praise of men came from Everyone came up to us afterwards said you were doing great. So I walked the aisle, I become a church member, I was being involved in all of these things, and I believed myself to be a Christian because the pastor told me that I was. So I was professing to be a Christian.

I was sincere in trying to do the things that the church talked about, but I went well into my 20s, and it was when I hit 30 that the Lord actually invaded my life, right, in the heights of my career. So I had one foot in religion from the fifth grade all the way through my music career. But the Lord did not deal with me powerfully until I hit 30 years old. Were you already married at that time? Oh, I was.

Yes. Myra and I had been married for several years. Like I said, I played in garage bands, local bands, house bands. We moved from Thibodeau where I met her. And we moved up to Baton Rouge so I would have a bigger opportunity to play with bigger name people.

I ended up doing studio musician, being a studio musician for a while. And we were married. I promptly did the American thing. We got married. I put her to work so that I could work on playing my guitar.

And the two of us were able to support our marriage until such time as I started getting some notoriety. We were married. We had two children. And again, you have to bear in mind all this time I believed I was a Christian, and everybody around me thought I was a Christian, except for some fundamentalist pastors. They didn't buy that I was in the rock and roll business and could be a Christian at the same time.

So all of that to say, as we were doing our fourth album, I went into a very profound depression. The things in the band were not good. Everybody had discovered that songwriting was where the money really is in the music industry. So most of the guys in the band started to offer songs. And I had been the main songwriter for the first two albums.

That began to change. Not that I hold that against them in the slightest. They were all gifted musicians and they were writing good stuff. But things were just getting very tense in the band for a number of reasons. Now that being the case, I called a Christian friend of mine, a fellow that had been to, he'd been to seminary And I told him, I said, man, I'm miserable.

I'm as depressed as I can be. Please just, I don't know what's really going on with my career. Please give me some encouragement. And he told me to read three books. The one that hit me was a book called Birthright.

It was written by a man named David Needham. And the best part about that book was the fact that the footnotes were almost all from the writings and sermons of a man I had never heard of. His name was David Martin Lloyd-Jones. And I was so floored with those footnotes. I mean, I just never read anything like it.

There was a Christian bookstore in town, which after I left the music business, I ended up working in. But at that time, I would go and I would buy books to read while I was on the road while I started ordering books by Dr. Lloyd Jones. And as I read his Romans, chapter six, It was the most stunning thing I'd ever read in my entire life. By the time I got to the finish of that volume, I went back and started over and read it a second time.

I'd never read any book twice. Wow. But what was happening is by then the band was getting really big, at least in some areas, not worldwide, certainly. But We were becoming a known entity, at least in some places. We were playing with some of the biggest bands in the world.

I would be sitting either in my bunk. We had bought a Silver Eagle bus. We got tired of flying. So we've got a Silver Eagle bus and we had a lounge in the front, we had bunks in the middle and we had a lounge in the back. And you would either find me in my bunk or in the back lounge reading or listening to tapes.

So that back lounge, you know, Kerry Livgren from Kansas, he gives his testimony in meeting you, And he said that the back lounge was the Christian, the Christian section of the bus. That's what he said. Which was you. Which was you. And he would go back there and talk to you.

Well, that's an interesting story. I'll be glad to tell you if you want to hear it. Yeah, let's hear it. We were touring with Kansas. We really liked them and, you know, our bands began to hang out with one another.

And Carrie was very deeply into an occult book called the Urancha book. Elvis was into the same book, and other stars were into it. It was supposedly channeled by aliens. I won't get into the whole thing, but he knew that I professed to be a Christian. Now, the Lord was dealing with me at this time.

So, he got tired of flying. So, he would ride in the bus with us. Later on, some of the other guys would join us. But he came into the bus with us. And we got in the back one day and he started talking about the Urantia book, and I started talking about Christ.

Previous to this, I had been listening to a man by the name of Walter Martin, who was the Bible answer man, and I had gotten my first true look at theology from him. And I had done a lot of studies in the Trinity and in the deity of Christ and those things. And in the Lord's providence, everything that Kerry brought up from the Urantchi book, I had an answer for from the Word of God. And to make an even longer story short, in a fairly short time, he was converted to Christ in his motel room. And he was reading some of the books that I'd recommended to him, and he was reading the Bible, and he realized—I told him very plainly—that the point of the book, the Orantua book, was this so-called Christ that was going to come and deliver the world.

I said that the Christ that's described in that book is the Antichrist, is not Jesus Christ who saves the soul. And there was something about that that really, the Lord really used to move him. And shortly thereafter, he repented of his sins, believed on the Lord Jesus, and we fellowshiped with one another for a good while. So what made you make the transition, leave the band? You had a big shift.

That would be longer than this particular podcast. Well, Jeff, we can cut you out. We can cut this. It's not live. Cut you out.

I mean, you cut this, you know. It's not live. Well, the best way I can put it is this. What put me on the road to ultimately leaving the band was after we had done our last album, we had recorded some demos for the next record. Generally, most acts do a number of demos and then pick from those demos what they're going to refine when they go into the studio.

That's not 100%, but that's the general practice. And we were playing in a big nightclub down the road from Pensacola. It was in Destin. And the owner of it said, I can't pay you guys what you normally get in the concerts you play. He said, but if you'll just come and play One set a night for me, you know, I own the motel that's back in the back.

You can stay in the motel for free. You can come and rehearse in the building and it would just be helpful to me. So we agreed to do it. And as we were near finishing that particular series of nights, an attorney that I knew from Baton Rouge came backstage and he said, I've been listening to demos that you did for the next album, and I really like this particular song. The name of the song was giving the power to love.

And he said several times how much he liked it, and I was very thankful that he did. He knew us from Baton Rouge, and he loved the band. He'd been around when it was just the Jeff Pollard band. That was the name before it became La Rue. And he looked at me and he said, that song, he said, I work with people who use music to change the way people think.

And I knew I had just heard something. It hit me like a sledgehammer, but I didn't know what it meant. I knew that I had just heard something profound, but that was what he said. And he told me that he was going to go back to Pensacola, back to Baton Rouge, where we both lived at that time. And I said, man, could I go with you?

I don't want to stay another night here. And so we ended up on an eight-hour drive going back to Baton Rouge. And in that, he told me that his spirit guide had gotten him in touch with people in the United States government and the Chinese government. He ended up later going to China six months every year. And what he said was, your average Joe Sixpack doesn't know what life is.

He doesn't know what he needs to do. He said, That's why the gifted must rule. And I thought, what am I hearing? And he started telling me the world has all kinds of problems. My spirit guide got me together with people in our government and the Chinese government.

And we are all in agreement that there are things that need to be changed. He said, I'm running over this. But what he said was, we need a world economy, we need a world government. And I knew what the last one was going to be. He said, we need a world religion.

This is 1981. There was no internet. There was no talk about conspiracy around anybody that I knew. And I will jump ahead really quickly. But what came next is we were going to premiere our new album, our fourth album in Memphis.

And So the record company was going to fly me up to Memphis to sit down with a very well-known DJ, so that I could talk through the album, talk through the songs, how they came about, all of that stuff, and then play them. It was a great premiere. But I always went to the bookstore when I was at home, that Christian bookstore that I had mentioned. And because of my years in the rock music business, I had started reading books about the cults and the occult, because I ran into them all the time in the music business. Helves Witnesses, Mormons, Witches, Warlocks, all this stuff, New Agers.

And they weren't called New Agers back then. So the way this all came about was I would go into the bookstore and buy a handful about these various groups and then I'd read them so I'd have some idea of what I was dealing with and I would try to tell them about the Lord Jesus Christ. And it just so happened that when I went in this particular time before I went to the premiere of our album, the owner of the bookstore gave me a book, And he said, nobody's going to buy this book and nobody's going to read it except maybe for you, so I'll just give it to you. And the name of it was Fourth Reich of the Rich. And as I sat in the plane reading it, I was reading virtually the blueprint for every single thing that the attorney that I had driven back to Baton Rouge with had said to me.

And I was getting completely creeped out, because I was reading something that was messing with my world. It was messing with my understanding of life. And it was like, are there people that really think this way? So that led to one other aspect that I'll toss in. If this sounds disjointed, it's because I'm doing this in leaps and bounds.

But the way it ultimately comes down to is when I came back from the premiere, I was so disturbed by what I had read and the fact that it affirmed everything I had heard from this attorney. And he told me that a number of the people, big business people in Baton Rouge were all involved in this. And I was thinking what world did I just step into? I thought rock and roll was weird. This is astounding.

And So I called the publisher of the book, and I said, I want to talk to the author. And she said, well, a lot of people want to talk to him. But why do you want to talk to him? I described the drive back, my eight hour drive back from Pensacola to Baton Rouge in those days. It isn't that long anymore.

And she said, what do you know about spiritual warfare? I said, nothing. Nothing. And she said, you are dealing with Satan's doctrine, and you better understand something about spiritual warfare. Went back to the bookstore, bought everything I could find on spiritual warfare, read it, and among those was a book written by a man named Conrad Murl.

The name of it was Practical Demonology. That led me to meet with him. He wonderfully came and ministered to Myra and me at my house and some of the people from the church that I was in at the time. He told me about the biggest God I'd ever heard of. He talked about the sovereign God of heaven and earth, his mighty power, his glory.

Apart from Lloyd-Jones, I'd never heard anything like what Pastor Murl was saying to me. The long story short, he dealt with me. He cast devils out of me. And by the time all of that came down, I started reading the scriptures every day, all day. Everything that I could find out about Christ was all that mattered to me.

That was truly it. And within a year's time, I knew the Lord wanted me to lead the music business. Well, that really is the fastest way I can tell you about it. And I left. And you just wrote a Free Grace Broadcaster on spiritual warfare this month.

I did. I've waited years to do it. I did. And I really encourage everybody to read it. It's just the introduction.

I hope to do at least two more on the whole armor of God, and then one on how we deal, actually deal with our spiritual warfare as day-to-day Christians. And so, All I knew is that for the first time in my life, after Conrad had dealt with me, I knew a liberty, I knew a freedom, I knew a joy in Jesus Christ that I had never, never, never understood, never experienced. And all I could do was soak up as much scripture as I possibly could. And after that, it became apparent that the Lord was not only calling me out of the business. At first, what I was going to do was I was going to join a cults apologetic group that was in California.

I was going to try to open a branch in Louisiana. But because of my notoriety, having been in Leroux and local people wondering why I left the band and then I was being invited to speak in churches, As I was speaking in those churches, one night, my wife, it was in a well-known big church downtown in Lafayette, Louisiana. I got up and I preached. I sat down and Myra said, I could see you doing this. I said, doing what?

She said, preaching the Word of God. It was like, no, I was a first-rate Jonah. Nope, I'm not interested in that. I'm glad to tell people that the Lord set me free, but No, I'm not a preacher. I'm not gonna do that.

And then he called me into the ministry in a way that I could not say no to. You were 30, Exactly how old were you when this happened? I was 30 when all this began. I was 30. It was my 30th year.

And I was truly stunned, because the short statement of a long story is simply this. I grew up in a version of Christianity that isn't biblically Christian. I never heard the word repentance. That was for the Jews, that wasn't for us. I heard a truncated gospel at best, but I heard nothing of a transformed life.

I mean, I knew there were some things I wasn't supposed to do and things that I was supposed to do, but I did not understand anything about God's sovereign grace. I didn't understand anything about predestination, that God saves people and transforms them by His mighty power and makes them trophies of His glorious grace in a world that's dying in its filth and rebellion against God. I never heard of that Christianity. So you've been preaching about it for 44 years since. It took me two years after the Lord dealt with me, and that's a fairly long story in itself.

But it took two years for me to actually understand that what had happened was I wasn't having a great spirit revival, a revival in my heart. I wasn't having a renewal. I wasn't letting Jesus be my Lord. I wasn't speaking in tongues. I came to realize that what had happened to me was that extraordinary word regeneration.

The more I studied the scriptures, it was like, how did I look at the Bible for years and never understand not only God's purpose, but what He does in His purpose to those people that He saves. He uses them. He takes them, whether they're husbands and wives at their daily jobs, their childbearing, the things that they are, or whether it's somebody that he's calling into special ministry, every single Christian is a walking miracle because God in his mercy sent the spirit to find them in their rebellion and he gave them a new heart. He opened their hearts, he breathed life into them so that they would repent of their sins, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and follow him wherever he led them. I didn't know that Christianity.

And that's what I was reading in Lloyd-Jones. That's what I was hearing from Conrad Murrell. It was Dr. Lloyd Jones that got me reading the Puritans. So all of it's transformative.

I'm not saying everybody has to go through what I went through. And I certainly don't mean that everybody has to love the Puritans like I do, you know, to be a Christian. But what I am saying is that when the mighty power of God's Holy Spirit opens someone's heart, that person cannot remain the same. When the living God takes up residence in you, when you become God's address, when his spirit opens your eyes, opens your ears, you want new things. You want Christ.

You want his word. You want to know people that know him so that you can walk with them, fellowship with them and serve the Lord with them. I didn't know that Christianity till the Lord wrecked my career. Praise God, What a great story. Jeff, hey, we're so grateful, you know, that you would come on and tell your story.

We know you don't like really to tell the story except for this last part. You like to tell that part of the story. All the time. All the time. Hey, we appreciate you so much, Jeff, and thank you so much for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast.

You're most welcome. I'm thankful to be able to speak of the glory of Christ and his transforming power in the new birth. He's worthy that we should love, praise, and follow him wherever he leads. Well, that's such a treasure. It really is.

And thank you. Thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. I hope you can be with us next time, and I hope you can come to our conference and hear Jeff Hollard preach at our Manhood and Womanhood Conference in May. See you there. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of Scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches.

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