Buddy Robinson
Friday, May 09, 2008
Buddy Robinson was born in the mountains of Tennessee on the 27th day of January, 1860. He was the youngest of 13 children who lived in an old, one-room cabin with a dirt floor and a clapboard roof. They were in the very lowest of poverty, often going without sufficient food to eat or clothes to wear. His father made and sold brandy and whiskey to the surrounding mountain people. They were among the roughest, vilest people in the country. He grew up in a home surrounded by drunken, cursing, vulgar men in a region without churches and without schools. He couldn’t even read or write until he was 20 years of age. His daddy died when he was 12 years old, and he and his remaining family moved to Texas, where his mother hoped for a better life for the children. In Texas, Buddy was hired on as a ranch hand. It was here on the frontiers of Texas that he followed in the vile footsteps of his mountain upbringing, and it was here that God saved the wretched life of Buddy Robinson and called him to preach the Gospel.
His mother had gotten saved some time before, and she dragged Buddy to a camp meeting some miles below where they lived. With a pistol in one pocket and a deck of cards in another, Buddy trembled up to the altar after being convicted in his heart to a choice between life and death. He chose life, and God called him into the life of an evangelist.
Buddy was 20 years old at this time, and attended his first Sunday school service a few months later, where he started learning how to read and write. It was now 1880. At this time, God was really burdening his heart to preach. But the devil kept telling him he couldn’t because he had no education, no money, no friends, and he had a bad stuttering problem. He went to other ministers, and they told him he should never try preaching in his condition; that he would bring a reproach upon the ministry. But the Lord was condemning Buddy to the point where he thought he was going to die. Then God sent a new circuit rider preacher through the land who encouraged Buddy and recommended him before the church to get his license. After a long debate and some reluctance, the church granted him his license to preach ("exhort," as he called it). They did so with the stipulation that he had to record every sermon he preached, the number of people saved, and the number of homes in which he had preached and prayed. At the end of three months' time, he was to appear again before the church board to be evaluated.
It wasn’t long before Buddy was out on the countryside preaching the saving power of Jesus Christ. His first set of preachers cloths, as he called them, cost him $2.75, including the shoes, and his mother sewed the material into a shirt, jacket, and pair of pants. For his first meeting, he rustled up a small crowd who showed up for entertainment. He had a rough way to go the first night. His stuttering caused the rough ranchers to laugh and scorn him, but by time the night was over he had led three souls to Christ. During this three day meeting, he led a total of nine people to the Lord. God had blessed Buddy and given him the strength to overcome and get through to the people. At each following service, he would return home and tell his mother the results of the meetings so she could record them. During the next three months, he preached 90 times, exactly 90 people were saved, and he had prayed in over 200 homes. When he appeared before the church for his quarterly conference, Buddy had to let the elder read the report, because he couldn’t even read it correctly. The elder told the brethren that Buddy had brought the best report he had ever known during one quarter. For three months he had preached once a day and led an average of one soul to Christ each day.
Buddy Robinson continued strong in ministering Christ in and around Texas for six years. His down to earth way of preaching and unique sense of humor had a way of winning souls to the Kingdom of God. He had a common prayer he prayed that helped him make it through each day. It is one Brother Branham often quoted from:
"Oh Lord, give me a backbone as big as a sawlog, ribs like the sleepers under the church floor, put iron shoes on me and galvanized breeches, give me a rhinoceros hide for a skin, and hang a wagonload of determination up in the gable-end of my soul, and help me to sign the contract to fight the devil as long as I've got a fist and bite him as long as I have a tooth, then gum him till I die. All this I ask for Christ's sake. Amen." Bud Robinson
After he was converted, he still had somewhat of a temper and lacked the Christ-like love he longed for. Then he heard a minister preach on sanctification and the filling of the Holy Ghost. They called it "holiness preaching." It struck another match in his heart, and as time progressed, Buddy became so eager to be sanctified and filled with that perfect love of Christ, until he vowed never to stop until God gave him that experience. In 1890, Buddy finally let everything else go in his life, and God sanctified him and filled him with the Holy Ghost. While crying out to God in a cornfield, God came and visited Buddy in an unforgettable way. He said, “As the waves of heaven rolled over my soul I finally got down on the ground and stretched out and as wave after wave of glory rolled over me, told the Lord that if He didn't hold up a bit there would be a dead man in the cornfield. From that day to this I have been convinced that God can kill a man with His glory just as quick as He could kill him with lightning."
Bud Robinson became a permanent fixture on the evangelizing field after his experience in the corn patch that day in 1890, and he never came off for another 37 years. He became a nationally recognized minister, traveling from one end of the country to the other. Some of his work made it overseas, where it was translated and spread abroad. Through his ministry, he led tens of thousands to Christ and wrote more than a dozen books that have blessed just as many.
This is what he wrote upon the closing of 47 years worth of work for the Lord:
“During this time I have traveled just about one million miles,
have preached 18,000 times. I have prayed with more than 80,000 people at the mourner's bench
and have traveled and worked the United States like it was a field, and have worked four
provinces of Canada. Up to the present I have written thirteen books. They have sold by the tens of thousands and the end is not yet. This date finds this old preacher blood-red, sky-blue,
snow-white, straight as a gun stick and red-hot.” Bud Robinson
He truly accomplished great things for the Kingdom of God during his lifetime. You must remember that a good portion of his life’s ministry took place before there were even cars or paved highways, let alone airplanes. Buddy Robinson was a real man of God, who sacrificed his life for the glory of God. He was a true witness.