By Karine Keyser—
After committing suicide and going to hell for eight hours, previous Buddhist Steve Kang came to Jesus and became an evangelist.
“(The devil) came to me and he’s talking to me like I’m talking to you,” Steve said. “He comes to me and says, ‘Steve, I know you’re having a hard time. If you offer your life as a sacrifice, kill yourself. I will give you 50,000 less years of Hell.’”
Today, Steve Kang is the leader of the global ministry Revive the Nations, which trains church ministers and plants churches around the world. He also is the founder of a marketing and consulting company called GoSteve Consulting, which he started in the early 2000s
Born in 1978 in South Korea as part of a dedicated Buddhist family, Steve grew up moving between Boston, Massachusetts, and South Korea. When he was 14, his dad enrolled him in an international high school in South Korea, where he was basically the only Buddhist in the school.
“I got deeper into Buddhism actually, because there were more temples,” he said. “But again something in my heart was not full until I met God.”
Steve described his experience at the temples as crazy.
“When I was there, there’s all these pictures of like different gods,” Steve said. “And I actually was in a sub-like, cultic-like division of Buddhism where the highest monk told us he’s the Messiah. He told us he’s God. So we gave him all our money.”
Then, when he was accepted to Pomona College in California and moved to Los Angeles, a lot of his Korean-American friends there tried getting him to go to church.
“I’m not gonna be a Christian because when I saw my Christian friends in high school, they lived a hypocritical life,” he said. “They were partying with me. I wasn’t even smoking and drinking that much in high school. But they were going to church and doing all that. I was like, you know what, Jesus is not real.”
“How could his disciples live worse than me, cheating on their girlfriends and cussing?” he asks. I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to stay a Buddhist.’”
Everything changed when the Asian Financial Crisis occurred in 1997 to ‘98. Steve’s wealthy father in South Korea lost everything and couldn’t pay for any of Steve’s expenses.
This forced Steve to live with a friend who, unbeknownst to Steve, was a drug dealer.
“So I go to his house in Huntington Beach, and every day we’re getting high. I don’t remember being sober for more than three hours,” he said. “I found out later it was a drug-dealing house. They were selling these drugs to the Mexican mafia, the KKK; it was part of the supply chain.”
The drugs he took ruined his ability to focus and do well in school. It even changed his attitude so much that his friends from school noticed his behavioral change.
Then he took a “death bowl” – marijuana laced with heroin, cocaine, PCP and meth.
“When I smoked it, I knew something was different because my anxiety level went 100-fold. I didn’t know where I was, what time it was. I think my brain got really damaged,” he said. “So for 10 straight days after smoking that at the end of the summer of 1998, I didn’t sleep for 240 straight hours.”
For 10 days he suffered neurosis.
Steve’s mother prayed and prayed to Buddha for her son.
Nothing seemed to work. Steve felt that death was drawing closer to him.
“Around the ninth day, I had my crazy encounter with the devil himself,” Steve said. The devil looked like an old Asian grandpa with a beard and told him to kill himself as a sacrifice so that he would get less time in Hell.
“I went to the kitchen. I grabbed the biggest knife I could find. And I got on my knees, and I put the knife on my stomach,” he said.
He copied the harakiri of the Samurai movies but failed. His mom called the police, who showed up with batons and mace.
“Put the knife down,” the cops said.
“It’s now or never.” the devil said.
“I went for it, and I cut my stomach open,” Steve remembers.
“They started jumping on me, hitting me with the bat and macing me,” he recalls. “It hurt so much.”
The devil kept egging him on: ”If you don’t get this done now, you’re going to miss your chance”
At that moment, everything was hectic. Steve thought that the cops were preventing him from going to heaven, so he tried to end it all.
After police held him, the EMTs took Steve to the UCI Medical Center, where he was losing consciousness. He couldn’t see the Asian grandpa anymore.
Suddenly, Steve was sinking, and he went on a rollercoaster ride down into Hell. It was striking because Buddhism never mentions Hell.
“When I landed there, I was shocked,” he said. “I was not alone. There was a sea of people in front of me, to my left, to my right. There was no light. It was the darkest place ever. There’s no plants. I looked for flowers. There’s no shrubs. It was all like rocky ground – purplish reddish rocky ground.”
Immediately, Steve knew he was not a good person. His confidence in Buddhism vanished.
“It’s something I pray nobody experiences — not even my worst enemies, not even the people you hate the most: serial killers, Hitler, Kim Jong-un or Stalin,” he said. “The pain is indescribable.”
Among the cast of people in Steve’s life, the mom of the drug dealer was Christian and brought prayer warriors into the hospital during his 8-hour surgery.
When he woke up, the doctor told him it was a miracle that he survived.
Steve heard Jesus in a still, small voice: “Steve, no more drugs and no more Buddhism. I love you.”
After Steve woke up, he chose to accept Jesus in his life. His mom got saved too.
After he grew in Jesus, he ministered in China in 2000, smuggling Bibles into Beijing. “I saw the persecuted church,” he said.
“I believe God’s calling everyone, not just me and my wife, to stand up, to speak for truth. My goal in life is to live and die for him because he lived and died for me,” Steve explains. “There’s no God like our God who would die for his people. What an honorable king. Who does that? What kind of a leader dies for his people? That’s a true leader. This is a true servant king. That’s why I worship him.”
