Cailin: Welcome everyone to Faith and Purpose podcast.
Each episode of this podcast contains the personal testimony of an ordinary person
transformed by an extraordinary God.
My name is Caitlin and I'm here to introduce this podcast
for my friend Jesse Duke.
Jesse is a husband, father, author, life recovery guide, lay counselor,
and small group leader, but his most important role is disciple.
As a disciple of Jesus.
Jesse created this podcast to help other believers tell their faith stories.
We'll be hearing the personal testimonies of all sorts of people
who have one thing in common, Jesus has transformed their lives.
Jesus used parables because he created us to learn best through story.
And as we listen to how God has worked in others lives, we find encouragement
and inspiration for our own faith walk.
Whether you are already a believer, or just a curious seeker, we believe that
as you listen to these stories, you will be encouraged on your own faith journey.
We are sure that God can speak to you through one of these episodes, and that
you will see that our Heavenly Father truly works all things together for
our good, When we simply love and trust him if you are currently going through
a trial We believe that you will come to see that your troubles Heartbreaks
and failures are not gravestones, but stepping stones into new life in Christ.
Here's Jesse with today's guest
Welcome everybody to the Faith and Purpose podcast.
Today we have my friend Keith Darnell from Woodruff, South Carolina.
Welcome Keith.
How are you doing today?
I'm doing great.
It's good to be here.
Well, tell us your story.
What, what is your, what's your life been about?
My life has been a, I would say a fairground, lots of different rides, lots
of different activities, experiences.
Uh, grew up in Marietta, South Carolina.
My dad was the, in a family where we had loggers, we cut putt wood.
They did all kinds of different work and they also were bootleggers, moonshiners.
And my dad was a runner in the moonshiners for a long while,
which later on led him into racing.
So grew up in this family.
It was a great family in Marietta, South Carolina.
It's up in the upper part of South Carolina, above Travels Rest
in the Greenville County area.
That was.
I guess five years old, uh, my dad had been to jail for bootlegging
and, and, and assault and battery and all kinds of crazy stuff.
And when he got out of jail, they, uh, put him on probation.
So he went to driving a truck.
And so he was gone for long periods of time.
Then he landed a job at engineer products.
I'm just telling you this to get us to the beginning of my story where
Christ begins to impact my life.
So my dad.
Gets a job with a company in Greenville, putting up storage racks
and installing conveyor systems.
And so now he's gone for two weeks, three weeks at a time out of state.
And so we get to see him every now and then on the weekends and during racing
season, he would come in and fix the car on Friday, race on Saturday and
Sunday would be the family day and back out Sunday night or Monday morning.
So during these periods of time, he was gone.
My uncle began to invite us.
To go to church, there was a church up in Marietta called Marietta First
Baptist and they began to, uh, he began to attend that church and he
wanted us boys to go with him because he knew we needed to be in church.
He began to realize the need for us to be in church and so he started
taking us to church with him.
So one weekend, my dad comes home, I don't know the dates or times, I just
know my dad came in on the weekend.
And my uncle said, Hey, I'm coming to pick those boys up Sunday
morning, take them to church and he and my dad, like best friends.
So it's not like this was a truce.
It was like doing what?
And my dad said, no, Sunday's my only day with the boys.
So we, we spend that day together.
He said, okay.
I just wanted to offer the opportunity.
Well, we boys, according to my dad, we just bugged the hound out of him.
Cause we enjoy going to church.
Children's church at Mary the first.
It was a blast and it still is to the day if I understand correctly.
So anyway, that church put a priority on kids ministry and
that got us wanting to be there.
So we started begging and finally my dad called and said, all
right, come on and get them.
And then he said he waited around a few minutes, he said, wait a minute, I need to
go find out what is going on up there that makes my kids want to go to that church.
So my dad called him back and said, Hey, if they go into church,
then I'll go to church with them.
So they took us to church.
And that was the beginning step that the Lord used to get my dad
where he could hear the gospel.
So the lead pastor at that point was absent.
And there was a pastor called Bill Cashin, who is a missionary, retired, I
believe today, but he's always on mission.
He's a great guy, great servant of the Lord.
He was a student at college.
Uh, ministerial student came to Marietta first and the preacher said,
Billy, you got your guns loaded?
He said, yes, sir.
Let me ready to preach.
And so Billy just went up, you know, no ready, no prep, just went up to
preach, got up and preach the gospel.
And my dad said something happened to him during that service.
He ran down the aisle.
He was in the balcony, came all the way down and went to the front and accepted
Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.
And so I'm probably six years old at this point.
In my life, but I can remember thinking, this is amazing.
We get to go to church all the time, but Eddie just got saved.
And my mom got involved in church and the church built a new building, a new
worship center, new center school, new area, this old rock church that we've been
going to, they tore it down eventually.
And so anyway, we, I spent my entire life from that point on in church.
My dad became a deacon, Sunday school teacher, student department leader.
My mom became church secretary.
She led in the WMU.
So my parents got invested in church and my dad's testimony was amazing because
throughout his life, he began to live his life on mission trips and always finding
ways to do labor renewals and go out.
He loved to go out and canvass communities.
So his role model for me growing up through high school was pretty impressive.
But in high school, I had, the thing is when I was about seven or eight.
I got to a place where everybody in my church, all my family was
going down and being baptized.
So I was just curious, ignorant of the word of God, ignorant of
the truth of what was going on.
I want to be baptized.
Everybody else is getting baptized.
I want everybody to get baptized.
Well, the pastor sent me back to talk to my parents.
And I guess they didn't understand what they needed to say.
But from that day till I was 18, no one ever, ever just sit down with me
and talk through my experience and share the gospel with me, knowing the
pastor never shared up at the front, never prayed with me, never, never
shared with me what the steps I needed to take to make sure that I understood
that I was accepting Christ as my Lord.
Not just getting a salvation security, you know, he was going to be my Lord.
No one ever said that now.
And he probably thought that my parents did, but no one understood
what to do at that point in my life.
And, and so as I grew up, I was real rebellious because I was
having to go to church all the time.
And so church was like.
It was like coming in, you know, you had to be in 11 o'clock every night.
So church was not being in 11 o'clock, not something you had to do.
So I grew up in church and it was probably good.
Cause I got the influence of church.
I have a Bible.
I wish I had it with me this morning.
My family has used it in their weddings.
I have a Bible that I got when I was, uh, six years old in Crusaders,
which is a program of the Southern Baptist Convention, of the RAs.
And I was in Sunday school one morning and realized that all the other guys
in my Crusader class had their Bibles in church and we would have to open and
read, find verses and find scripture and I couldn't find none of that.
But I noticed all their Bibles looked worn and wrinkled and, and, and
was, was flared out at the edges.
Mine was still gold, still up crisp.
I was embarrassed.
I went home that day and took my little Bible and I wrinkled every page.
I spent an hour.
If I'd have spent that much time every day reading the Bible, well, I would
have understood why I needed to read it.
But I wrinkled it because see, I was a poser and I learned
to pose as a Christian.
People say, Hey.
Are you a Christian?
I'm a Christian.
I was baptized when I was eight years old or seven years old, you know, and I
would always tell people that so I learned to pretend to be a Christian all those
years and so I graduated high school.
Now in high school, I was in a lot of trouble.
I was, I was drinking, using profanity all the time and had become
sexually active when I was like 14.
And so a lot of that stuff in my life had dominated my life.
And had had, I would say it's like I had indulged my body.
So my body craves those things and food was a big craving.
So all those things that I loved in my life, I made them into cravings.
And so when I graduated high school, I basically was just gonna go to work.
So for two years, I went to work at my dad's business and I went all over
the country working and I had the best of life for a young guy my age.
I was making a lot of money and didn't know what to do.
I was blowing it as I was making it on anything I can blow it
on party and play and whatever.
So one thing I had to stay connected, even though I had moved out of my home,
my mom and I got, I moved out of my home when I was 18, because I was rebellious.
And I moved in with my youth pastor, the youth pastor at our church, crazy,
but, and he stayed on me all the time about things, trying to get me to
realize the reality of what was, but what had happened up until I was 18 or
when I was 18 years, my senior year.
A youth trip, and I kind of had that, but I'm going back to it, my senior year, we
did a church camp, and instead of doing the traditional kind of stuff, this new
guy we hired from South Carolina, he's passed on now, he came, and he took us
to Sumter, to this little state, South Carolina park camp, and didn't have
hot water in the boys dorm area, and so, in the boys bath house, so we had
to run water hoses to take showers, that's how bad it was, So anyway, it
was way out there and from being up in the upstate, I'd never seen the
horse flies and experienced mosquitoes and stuff like they had in Sumter and
the air force base is not fair from there, so when they would drop bombs
on the practice fields, you can feel the vibration coming through the water
when you're like, wow, this is weird.
You know, it's like, whoa, whoa, what in the world?
And so we experienced a lot of things we never experienced.
And so I had took my girlfriend, the only reason I really went, my
dad was cooking, my grandmother was cooking, and my girlfriend was gone.
So at the time I wanted to go because my girlfriend was going to be there.
And my intentions, they were not holy or spiritual at all.
My intentions was physical and because it was a have to situation.
My dad didn't leave me a lot of options.
It was like my last chance.
I guess his last chance to help me see the light.
So I'm at this camp.
And all week I did what I wanted to do.
My Aunt Rachel was there.
She's passed on before 10.
She was a Sunday school teacher in the youth, her whole life.
That I remember when she accepted Christ, she began to teach girls
in Sunday school for years.
But she was always the one to call us up.
She never got married.
She was about four foot six.
She'd call us up.
She'd find out how we were doing.
She'd see you doing something wrong, she'd get on you about it.
So that week she was at camp too.
All she did, I believe, was follow me around and call me out when I was
somewhere I wasn't supposed to be.
Whenever I'd get somewhere, that little girl, get out of my back there.
You ain't supposed to be down there.
It was on and on that way the whole week.
I mean, she would nag me until I just, oh, about to just scream at her.
But I knew I had to respect her because that was my dad's sister.
I disrespected her, I'd be in trouble.
So I had a lot of respect and fear for my dad because he was
a godly man, but he knew how to bring down the wrath if he had to.
Anyway, on Thursday night of that week, they did a passion play.
Some college students from North Greenwood came down and they did a
passion type play where where Jesus was tried and crucified and I saw that.
And I'd really never seen it in that likeness, nor have I ever heard the
gospel told in a narrated story, the way they told it that night, and
it, it, it's just way into my heart.
I had to get up and kind of move away from everybody.
And I saw other people that night before I went to bed, kind of.
Crying and praying and doing things emotionally.
And I wasn't emotional.
I was like, you know, why are these guys crying?
I know that was impressive, but that wasn't, nobody got hurt.
Well, no pain for us.
Why don't we cry?
So I didn't understand that.
It sounds silly, but I'm just giving it to you the way it was.
Then the next morning I go to our group meeting.
My youth pastor, Mike, gets up and he starts to share his testimony and he talks
about how his life was before Christ.
And the crazy thing was his life before Christ sounded like my life right then.
All the desires and things he was seeking in his life, I was seeking in my life.
And none of it was good.
And he said, that was before Christ.
He said, and then he had written a song about it, but he talked about how.
In the song, how his life was at a desperate end, he didn't
want to live any longer.
And then he met, then somebody had shared the gospel with him and he,
and he repented and received Christ in his heart and how God had turned
his life around and how his life had a new purpose, a new meaning.
And I heard all that.
And I was like, wait a minute.
Man, maybe, maybe, maybe I'm not saved.
Nothing about me is saved.
Nothing about me is, I've never even thought about a relationship with Christ.
What he's talking about is like, he's like talking to his dad.
And I've never even thought about Jesus as my dad.
My dad is my dad.
But all of a sudden, you know, this year I'm going out for the football team.
I'm going to be a senior, I'm going to be a football player.
And I'm going to be a defensive lineman.
And I'm thinking in my mind.
I'm about to cry.
Emotions are overcoming me, and I don't want nobody to see me crying.
So I walked away from the crowd slowly and eased down the hill, and
my Aunt Rachel didn't follow me.
I don't know why, but she didn't.
Maybe she did, and just didn't come down there.
Because when I got down there, there was a bench by the lake where you
could sit and fish, and I went down and sat on that bench, and that's
where I had my Come to Jesus meeting.
And I told the Lord, I said, Lord, I don't know what I did when I was baptized.
But I know for a fact that I wasn't saved.
I know for a fact if I died today, I would not be with you in eternity.
I would be separate for eternity.
And the wisdom to know how to say that had to come from the Holy
Spirit because nothing in me was smart enough to think like that.
But I remember those words and I remember out verbally articulating those words
out loud, emotionally broken, knowing that I was lost and needed Jesus.
And I remember just saying, God, I want to receive you.
I want you to be my Lord and Savior.
I want you to be the Lord of my life this day forward.
I receive you as my Lord and Savior.
I want to be saved.
And that is the day that I will tell anybody that I was saved.
Now, all of that up, that was a great experience.
I didn't tell nobody I got home.
Now my cousin had done the same thing and I overheard a conversation
of two adults that were in church.
Uh, one, uh, had just gotten saved and, uh, was being baptized.
I had been baptized, but that next Sunday when we got home, my cousin
went up forward and presented herself.
As a candidate for Christianity and Baptism.
Now she was baptized back when we all were, but I overheard two adults on the
phone, and one of the conversations, one of the statements was made that
it just seems silly that she would go up and be presented to be re baptized
because she'd already been baptized.
Why do we need to baptize her again?
And so at that point, I thought, well, it's going to be embarrassing if I
go tell people that I just got saved.
And so I put it, I filed that next conversation of going to be baptized.
I filed away two years later, now I'm working for my dad.
I am going to camp as a helper, set up recreation guys.
I had to set up recreation for them and all that kind of stuff.
My senior year in high school was the best year academically and
I was living it as a believer.
Okay.
Somewhere towards the end of my senior high school, I got caught up with
some guys and, and doing a little bit of partying, but it wasn't the same.
There was like, there was no longer a concern that my parents are going
to catch me doing what I shouldn't be doing because I was aware of the
fact that God had already caught me.
I was under conviction that I never had before, which further confirms that
my salvation was at 18, not later on.
So as I went on, I still struggled.
I was given into peer pressure and those indulgences were calling my name.
Okay.
Eating was out of control.
The eating disorder was out of control.
A little bit of drinking, not a lot of drinking.
The sexual misconduct, the, the, the, the, the looking and participating
in things I probably shouldn't have been, was always a pressure, a draw.
And so that was trying to rule me, but the conviction was overpowering me.
I didn't go to church anymore because I had to.
I went to church because I wanted to, I wanted to learn.
I was way behind.
I was way behind where I thought I should have been as 18, living that
many years, over almost 20 years in church, excuse me, 10 years in church.
And I should have known better than doing some of the things I was doing.
So I was struggling with that in my life.
And so finally, uh, my second year out of high school, helping at
the camp, we were doing the drama.
I was in the drama then, helping with it.
And man, something about it just struck me and I just knew
something special was going on.
And I felt like a draw into ministry and I felt like man, cause the pastor
said something near the invitation that maybe some of you sitting here,
you just feel like there's something's going on in your life right now.
Maybe God's trying to get your attention.
He wants you to serve him for the rest of your life.
And now that hit me like, that's exactly what I'm trying to figure out.
That's what I'm trying to say.
And so I went home.
I tried to tell my dad, my mom and dad and my parents were like,
look, we spent 12 years fighting.
It's in your education and you've bowed through it away.
And I'm like, look, I need to go back to college.
They're like, you go to college, you go on your own.
You know, we're not going to be part of that.
Which was justifiable.
As I played in school, I was, I could have been as smart as anybody wanted
to be, but I threw it away because I was lazy and rebellious and just
wanted to do what I had to do to make a passing grade to get through it.
And that was evident when I had to go to summer school, take history in English
and pass it with a B or not get credit for it my senior year before my senior year.
And I went in and got A's and B's in both.
And my mom was like, Oh, are you kidding me?
So anyway, so they didn't want to invest.
So my dad gave me some advice.
I went in his office at his business and I said, Dad, I feel
like God's calling me in ministry.
The youth pastor and everybody's saying I need to go to school that
they can get me in at North Greenville.
And I think I probably need to do that.
My dad was like, well, that's great.
And so those.
Somebody from North Greenville, I know his, his name was Mason Easterling.
Great serve at North Greenville all them years.
I think he serves at Anderson now.
Mason came to my dad's work and tried to share with my dad, the
importance of getting me in school and how they could help me And my
dad called me back in his office.
He said, all right, son, this is what we're going to do is if you're going to
work for me one more year, at the end of that year, if you feel, if you still feel
called to go to school, then we'll support you to do, I'll help you do whatever
we need to do to get you in school.
So one more year, I went to work traveling on the road, selling
equipment, whatever we need to do.
And so nothing changed.
My commitment, my, my, my draw, my conviction was
stronger that year than ever.
My walk with the Lord increased daily.
My youth pastor gave me a Bible that I still have today.
It's duct taped together, but it was a Bible I read all the time.
And so God, the Lord got my attention, got me on the right path.
And I began to head towards that call into ministry.
At the end of the year, the end of that year, I'm registering at North Greenville.
Trying to get my finances together.
And look, how am I going to get finances to go to a school?
Of course, then it was only like 5, 500 a year.
You know what I'm saying?
Which was nothing, but to me, it was a lot making 300 a week.
You know what I'm saying?
So to me, it was a lot.
My tech, my paycheck, I think was like 275 a week, normal
hours, 40 hour week working.
I got my confirmation letter.
And my financial package letter from North Greenville one day, and when I
opened it up, it was, I owed exactly 275.
They somehow have fixed this thing just so that I can get in school.
And so I never have, I never had to ask my parents to pay for my schooling.
Now, once I left North Greenwood, went to Charleston Southern, and when
I graduated college, I had an 1, 800 student loan that occurred over the time
at North Greenville, and my mom picked that loan up and paid it off for me.
So, basically, I had one little loan I paid off at Charleston Southern,
but it was kind of paying itself off, because by the time I was a senior,
I was getting all kinds of money.
So, I graduated Charleston Southern University under the name
of Babbage College, Charleston.
So, I have two diplomas.
So, I tell everybody, that's both my diplomas, all I need.
Anyway, it was.
Me taking those steps.
So I left during the summers.
Between, between one year in the Nakeson College, I took a job working
at a place called Camp Pine Hill in Bennettsville, South Carolina.
And I worked for a guy there, his name was Marion Lee, he passed on.
His name, his real name that we called him was Bull Lee, B U L L.
He was a football coach, graduated from Newberry College, football coach, big
old rascal looking, had big old forearms.
We called him Popeye Arms, you know, but he was just a great guy, loved the Lord.
Share the gospel anywhere and anytime he could.
What a great role model.
And I remember my first year working with him, he would, he and I would go
sit down and, uh, he would share a story about walking with Christ and, and he
and I had a great relationship and he would pray for him and pray together.
And so I worked the summers at a summer camp called Camp Pine Hill
as my first year as a counselor, slash assistant director.
And the rest of my years there was assistant director.
I also met my wife there.
At this camp and my first year, you know, I fall heads over
heels for cause I'm just crazy.
But I don't know how to respect God's gift because again, my indulgences are bad.
And she's not going to put up with that kind of pressure
or indulgence or whatever.
And so I knew that from the get go.
Plus, she's the perfect person for me to, to maybe get some of that out of
my system and get my focus back on just having a relationship with the Lord.
And so we kind of get together at the first summer, we were
to camp, which was in 85.
During that year.
Things didn't, you know, because I was gone, she was gone, absence,
you know, allowed us to kind of drift in different directions.
She had kind of got back with an old guy, old boyfriend, which
they eventually got engaged.
So the next summer I'm out and, but, but in my mind, I know there's nobody else
I would ever want to be with, but her.
And so it's a tough situation.
So another series of events, the Lord works things in mysterious ways.
And mom got through all those events because.
It could, it could lead people to ask crazy questions.
But anyway, a series of events took place.
Um, where my wife had to make some decisions that summer, cause her
plan was to get married later on.
So I ended up, she called the wedding off and she and I got
together at the end of that summer.
We began to work through things that next year and we had a great relationship.
But it's just been one of those things at the camp the last Thursday night
of the week, coach Bully told me.
And Claire to stay down and put the fire out, which he never, we never did that.
We never promoted relationships.
That was tough to do when you're working together.
We worked at Camp Pioneer for almost five years and we were dating the whole
time and nobody ever knew we were dating.
So he knew, Coach Lee knew that I was going to ask her to marry me that night.
And I already laid the whole plan out.
So he asked her to stay back, help me put the fire out and make sure everything
was straightened up when we come back.
Cause like the end of the summer, he wanted to make sure
everything was done down there.
So we walk up to the road, we're talking.
And that summer we had did the master life study and that was our orientation.
I led our counselors through master life and you know, the part of that
master life deals with man, the cross.
Talks about man being a man.
The other part is talking about man's relationship with God, man's
relationship with each other, man's relationship with God.
So we built a prayer garden.
Down by a well, and in the middle of that prayer garden, between the benches,
we put a heart shaped bed of rocks, and in the rocks, we embedded a cross
tie cross, built out of cross ties.
It was on the ground.
When you walk down there, you see the cross, see the heart shape,
and the cross, Jesus in your heart.
And so, that end of the summer, I walked her down to that cross.
And I said, we sit down on the cross and I said, let's, let's go down here and pray.
And thank the Lord for this great summer because this is where it all began.
Me and her prayed, sat on that cross.
So we went down there and we sat on the cross and, and I told her how God had
put her in my life and that I needed her.
And so it was all part of my spiritual journey, major part.
And so that was on that cross that sat on those two, on that cross
member that I asked her to be my wife.
And she said, yes, thank goodness.
And so we got engaged at Camp Pine Hill.
And so I tell you that because we got married my last year
at Charleston Southern.
As a student, I was married, living in an apartment with her.
I graduated Charleston Southern and we took the full time job at Camp Pine Hill.
My wife is a school teacher.
She, she, she got a job in Bennettsville and I was the camp director at
Camp Pine Hill, living at camp.
And that was in 89.
We stayed there until 94.
In 94.
I felt a call to pastor a church or more toward the pastoral because the thing
about camp is it's great in the summer.
You can't top it in the summer.
There's no spiritual mountains you can ever get to that is
high as watching children come to Christ through the summer.
But when the kids go home at last week and all the counselors leave and it's
just me and Claire, it's a lonely place.
And it's like, it'd be like sitting in a sanctuary of a
church and nobody ever comes.
Just sitting there waiting for the next group.
And the groups would come, they just wanted you, at that
point you became a facility, a facility caretaker at the camp.
And so, I didn't understand, I was too young to understand what I needed
to do spiritually to make it work.
And so I was doing work because the camp couldn't pay us a lot.
So I was all sitting in my paid camp with other work and doing some work with my
dad still on the road that was anywhere close I could drive to get home in a day.
And so camp was fun.
We'd start hiring our counselors in January, but by the time summer
came, we were ready to go and boom.
And then you had that letdown at the end of August.
And it was like, Oh, and so you had a whole three, four months of just.
Trying to figure things out, and I'm not built for that.
I'm built for a continuous, something's going to be happening in my life.
I don't want this sitting back waiting or being idle.
We were very active in our churches.
Matter of fact, I was a deacon at the church we attended in Bennettsville, but
I also took the job as the interim pastor of a church, Bruton Fort Baptist Church
in Bennettsville, which was the first church, the chairman of deacons there
was on the board of trustees at the camp.
And so in 1994, Or during that summer, we were talking, and he
knew how summers were for me.
And he asked me, he said, is camp what you say you're doing
for the rest of your life?
I said, I don't know.
I love it.
But I don't know that that's what I really need to be doing.
And he said, well, would you consider being the full time pastor of the church?
And I'm like, I've never really thought about that.
Let me pray about it.
Let me put that to the Lord and see.
In the back of my mind, I knew that I already, in my heart,
knew that's where I needed to be.
And so I think it was 1994.
I resigned from camp and took Bruton Fork as full time pastor.
And I was there until 2000, to the year 2000.
We celebrated Y2K!
I remember the little 2000 confetti we were throwing around
and the world didn't shut down.
It was so much fun, you know, so I was pastored there.
It was a great experience being a pastor.
I still felt called toward young people, but, and we, and that was
Intel cause we went to a church and had about the first time I went there.
We had seven people, we had like 12, 13 people, then at night
we came back and we had seven.
So that's where we started.
And then we left there and we're averaging around 78 to 80 people.
But, uh, a lot of those were young people.
My wife started driving the van, picking up kids, bringing them.
And it was just a great experience.
And we're, but I began to deal with some things in church in my life.
Personally that I wasn't ready for it was church politics didn't, didn't like it.
Didn't understand it.
I began to go to the convention meetings and I was watching
things happen on a global scale that I really didn't understand.
And it was just, y'all ain't what in the world's happening, you know?
And when I was at Bruton Fork, one of the big challenges we had there.
One of the big ones was I got to a place where I began to realize that we're
out here in the country, a bunch of farmers, I can sit on the front porch.
When I'm doing my Bible study and wave at my neighbor, going down the road on
his tractor, you know what I'm saying?
So it's like, we're in a farm land.
And on Sunday morning, I'm looking out and nobody in church has got a
town, but me, I'm looking at my suit and tie, my double breasted suit, my
tie that I'm having to spend three, 400 on, but I'm weighing 350 pounds.
You don't say I'm a big old boy and I got to go to a special place to buy suits.
And I'm like, this is what am I doing?
I'm up here like a dad gone.
I felt like I was a million dollar portrait just sit in the country.
And it was doing them a sit and nobody understood it.
It didn't mean nothing to anybody, it was just sitting there, going to waste,
cause the people who really appreciated it, wouldn't even, you know, wasn't there.
And so I'd heard a story, or I went to a conference where this guy was
talking about, in his church, they were very casual, and uh, they just quit.
They just threw the dress code out, and started inviting people.
And I remember as a kid growing up, with my granddaddy, who was my hero
as a boy, He died when I, right in the year I graduated college,
high school, but my granddaddy got saved when he was 62 years old.
And I remember our pastor making the comment that he'd go to my granddaddy
and try to invite him to church.
And my granddaddy said, I ain't got nothing but overalls.
And the pastor said, if you wear overalls, I'll wear overalls to preach you.
That's what the pastor told him.
But anyway, my granddaddy ended up getting saved when he was like 61 or 62.
He died like the next year or so.
But I remember I used to go over on Wednesday nights after church, and he'd
play the banjo and sing him old bluegrass songs, just before he was even saved.
But after he got saved, was the only one not talking to him, and my granddaddy
said, son, said, said, said, I've searched for happiness for many, many years.
He said, I never had true happiness until I found Jesus.
He said, whatever y'all boys do, don't waste your life.
I remember him saying that.
It stuck in my mind.
How old were you when he told you that?
That was probably when I was, that was 17.
That was leading up to the conviction coming.
The Lord was preparing my heart for all that.
Because I was beginning to see things.
At a realer standpoint.
And so that was the, the kicker when I accepted the call to ministry.
Let me take you back there.
When I come home that year, I guess it was 1992, 93, 93.
I came home from summer camp that year.
And my dad was like, son, I think you really called.
And I got that letter.
I've skipped this open.
I apologize for that.
I got that letter from North Greenwood acceptance letter.
And all I owed was as much money as I had in my pocket.
Right.
Then I just cashed my check.
I owed that much money, and I just humbucked it up
and sent it to North Green.
So I went to my granddaddy's grave up on Holiness Hill, and I sat down by his
grave, not because I thought he was there.
I knew he was in heaven.
I sat down by his grave and I said this to the Lord, I said, Lord, my
granddaddy taught me a powerful lesson.
Probably one of the few lessons that he taught me that were real and good.
He taught me that he wasted his life and he asked me not to do that.
I don't want to do that.
I don't want to waste my life.
So from this day forward, whatever I can do to serve you, I want to do that.
When I said to call the ministry, I said it at my granddaddy's grave and that's
where I made that prayer of commitment.
So anyway, I'm going to jump you back forward now to where we're, we're at
this church, Pastor in this church, and some cool things have happened.
We've started having some revivals, people getting saved, our
little, our small little church.
Led our association and baptism was like a couple of years in a row
because people were getting saved.
And we were sharing the gospel.
Listen, I overshare the gospel.
I make sure they understand that it's not just about a prayer.
You say it's about something you feel in your heart.
It's got to be an experience that you know, because nobody gets saved
without Christ, without Jesus drawn, Holy spirit, drawing them to Jesus.
Nobody comes to the father without Christ drawing them in.
So I know that there's a spiritual movement happening where Christ
is out there drawing people.
But I also believe in the heart of that we've got a
responsibility to share that gospel.
So I've always shared the gospel because I don't ever want people to go through
what I went through as a kid and be opposed to their life in their lifetime
and not know who Christ is genuinely and have a relationship with him.
So while I was at Bruton Fort, I got a situation where a lady came to
my office after a revival meeting.
Reverend Paul Noe preached revival in our church.
And one night after the revival meeting, a lady came in my office and she
said, Pastor, I mean, I got to pray.
I got to do it.
She said, when I was eight years old, I got baptized at my church as a kid, and
I thought I meant it, but I'm not sure.
She said, but I do know for certain tonight that I received
Jesus as my Lord and Savior.
And I said, first of all, just know that I don't believe you can lose your salvation.
So you need to know right now, if you believe tonight was the night that you
got saved, the night you got saved.
She said, well, my question is not about that.
But I know tonight I got saved, but do I need to be re baptized?
So I called my mentor pastor, Maurice Ensign, who asked me numerous times
before he ordained me in the ministry to share if I was sure that when I was
a kid, and I passed up numerous times to confess, I got saved when I was 18.
I had many opportunities that I kept passing up, kept passing up.
So here I am now, pastor of a church.
I said, well, here's my problem, Maurice.
I need to tell you something.
I told him, I said, I should have told you.
As I guess I was just embarrassed or my pride.
I said, here I am.
I'm still posing.
I've been posing as a pastor.
I'm trying to be Charles Stanley or Agent Rogers.
I'm still trying to be somebody that I'm not.
And he told me, he said, you need to read Wild at Heart.
And I said, okay, I'll read it.
Let me, when I get a chance, I'll read it.
So anyway, he said, yes, you do need to be baptized.
So I called the Cherry Creek Dickens Eye Church, which was Allen Evans.
And I said, Alan, I said, I'm doing baptism service Sunday.
He always, he would always come and fill the water up and put the
heat in it and get it all ready.
I said, Alan, we're doing baptism Sunday.
He said, I know, I got your water ready.
I said, well, you need to bring a change of clothes.
He said, why?
I said, because you got to baptize me first.
And so, so
that's Sunday morning.
I got up and told my story to the congregation that I was pastoring,
and they gave me an ovation.
And I went in to baptize, baptize the martyrs, I was baptized.
And then I baptized five more people.
So the Lord is doing work, and that lady was, and those people are still in church.
Still committed to the Lord.
God done some great work in my life during that period.
I knew some growing up.
Let me ask you a question about the baptism.
So what you were up against was the traditional belief that if you
were baptized as a child or any time previously, that you weren't
supposed to get baptized again.
Is that what you're talking about?
What I was up against was the belief that baptism is for believers.
Right.
A person who had believed, had received Christ in their heart,
because it's a following up of baptism.
It's a representation of, I have died to myself.
I'm burying my old life in the grave, and I'm being resurrected,
that I will be in the future.
I'll be resurrected a new person in Christ Jesus.
That's what baptism represents.
That's what the Bible teaches about baptism.
And so that's why I believe.
That I had to be rebaptized because I had never been baptized as a believer Being
baptized as a kid is just getting wet.
I know that's a hard say for some people But it's we don't live about what we
feel nor about what some theologian came up with We live about what the bible
teaches And I know this that there's one right interpretation of the bible
and that's god's interpretation through the holy spirit And man, there's a
lot of people out there today that do infant baptisms even, that they still
will do submersion baptism as an adult.
If you come back later on and say, Hey, I need to be baptized.
I won't mention any names, but I know some great pastors that
practice submersion baptism.
Cause later on people come back who are in their denomination.
They say, Hey, I've got to be baptized.
The Bible is true.
We live in by the Bible and God's word.
And when the Bible says baptizing them and the word baptism means to take under.
You know what I'm saying?
Okay, now I know what you mean, because my parents had me sprinkled as a baby
in the Methodist church, thinking that would kick me out of hell.
But it wasn't my free will decision, you know, I was just a baby.
So, many years later, after I was actually born again, I asked my Presbyterian
pastor about getting baptized, and he said something like, It would be
an act of unbelief to get baptized again, but the opposite was true.
I needed to get baptized as a true believer because that fire insurance my
parents had gotten for me wasn't, wasn't biblical because I was just a baby.
I didn't make that decision.
So, later on, I did get submerged.
About 20 years ago, I got submerged, uh, by a non denominational pastor
at a, at a YMCA swimming pool.
Uh, To testify to my belief and it was the right thing to do because
then I was a believing believer.
So I, I think that's something like what you were doing.
When Jesus was baptized, John the Baptist baptized him.
It was a representation of, hey, I'm going to die.
I'm going to be buried.
I'm going to be resurrected.
John the Baptist knew what baptism meant.
He knew who Christ was.
He knew he was going to be killed.
He knew he was going to be buried.
He knew he was going to resurrect because the scriptures in the Old
Testament tell us he's coming back.
He's going to read three days in the grave.
Jesus kept prophesying that whole time.
I'm going to be dead, buried, resurrected in three days.
I'll come back.
Turn this temple down.
He wasn't talking about the big temple.
He was talking about this temple.
The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.
Carried down three days, I'm coming back.
The Bible teaches me that when I am absent, when I'm dead in the
flesh, when I'm absent from the body, I am present with the Lord.
Just like that, I'll be with God.
So anyway, that's why we went through the baptism.
That was why that experience is impactful for me today.
I have not lost my fire and my zeal to do exactly what I did that day.
and to share Jesus.
Man, I get a chance to share Jesus.
I'm gonna do it.
Give me an opportunity.
Give me a person.
I've learned some of the things I've learned growing up.
I went through a thing called experiencing God through Henry Blackaby.
Great study.
And people liked it and they disliked it.
I don't care.
For me, the Lord uses all kinds of tools to train us and equip us and
prepare us for the work of the ministry.
But in there is where I began to realize that there was some things
in my life that wasn't right.
The book Wild at Heart by John Eldredge.
Great book.
I read it.
All of a sudden I began to realize that I was a poser.
There was a lot of things I was doing in my life that wasn't adding up to
what God had called me to do still.
I was trying to be somebody else's ministry instead of being who I am.
I didn't call this polished, clean cut, finished guy.
He called old redneck hillbilly out of the mountains to come and preach
the gospel to people who would look at him and say, man, you ain't
there, but a simple minded hillbilly.
That's okay.
Who were the disciples?
You know what I'm saying?
Why do I need, why does God need me to be somebody he's already got
when he don't have anybody like me?
So I didn't be me.
So I began to try to be me and I brought all that up.
That long story.
I know to bring you to this point.
One of the issues we had at the church was, I stopped wearing a suit and tie.
I just wore a casual shirt, maybe a t shirt.
Now, it was clean.
I didn't look like a bum.
I didn't go up there dressed like a junkie, you know.
I went in there like a regular guy.
Sometimes I wear blue jeans, you know what I'm saying?
And so I knew I didn't want to take it too far, but I tried to, I just tried
to be casual and I led the church to understand that people can come to do
not, I had church members saying to people, well, if you need a suit, I'll
go buy you one, which is probably nice.
They couldn't go buy them a suit, but they didn't need a suit.
They didn't need to go buy them a suit to come to church.
And so that was one of the, the, the rough areas of that ministry, that
church, uh, they couldn't, they didn't like the fact that I was not willing
to, that I didn't want to wear a tie.
I could, I was willing.
Anytime we did a wedding or a funeral, I'd work tiny time, but I just
wanted to share the gospel as it was.
Right.
I wanted to preach the word and teach the word as I was.
It wasn't a distraction.
And I understood that on the mission field that all missionaries have to understand
as Paul says, there's some times you got to become all things to all people.
And Jesus said, I ain't come to heal the ones that are
well, I come to heal the sick.
The sick aren't going out to buy a suit to come to church.
The sick, sick are far from God.
They're not gonna, they don't, they don't care if I got a tile or not.
Matter of fact, they're gonna feel bad if I don't.
So that was my point of, the message I was trying to get across
was that I'm here for the loss.
And a lot of us don't care about the things of God.
A lot of us don't care about our steeples, don't care about the new
paint on the walls, the walkways, the crosses sitting all around our buildings,
they don't care about none of that.
What they want to know is, what is it about your life
that's different than my life?
And so that was where I began to grow as a Christian for the first time, really grow.
I began to realize that I had to start taking some real steps toward maturity.
I ended up going from there, from Root Fort, going back into student
ministry, student education, because I wanted to, I wanted to try to get
Sunday schools and, and different Sunday schools in the Baptist church.
Most of the traditional churches have a Sunday school department.
And so I was an education pastor.
I wanted to try to guide Sunday schools into a place where we begin to, to
have Bible studies other than what was bringing through Sunday school quarterly,
into small group type stuff, finding ways to mentor people and, and making
sure our curriculum was Bible based, not some kind of curriculum that tells
a story and adds a Bible verse to it.
I wanted it to be a curriculum that taught the Bible.
Bible says faith comes by hearing, hearing by the Word of God.
And so I want them to hear the Word of God.
I had a situation once at a church I was at where a lady that went to church,
who worked at the church, when you had a conversation with her, you could tell
her spiritual depth was kind of shallow.
She was very committed, very dedicated to attending church every week.
If you have a spiritual conversation, it wasn't very deep.
It was very shallow and very worldly.
Kind of a worldly, well, you know, I watched such and such
on TV and this is what they say.
And I kind of agree with that.
And I'm like, that's totally wrong.
That's totally wrong.
So either way, we had a program called Awana that we started and Awana has this
thing called a listening room and every kid memorizes Bible verses every week.
And they would come, you had me adults sitting at these tables in the listening
room and these kids one on one come to that listening room and quote that
Bible verse, scripture and verse.
That's totally wrong.
One after the other, over and over again, year after year, that
lady sit in my listening room and heard kids quote the Bible.
And years later, when that church went through a big traumatic
experience, that lady was one of the spiritual leaders in that church.
Cause she didn't let them deviate from God's word.
She didn't let them, you can go to her right now, throw out some false ideology.
It sounds good.
And she'd laugh at you cause she knows God's word.
Cause she got a hunger for God's word.
And I'm telling you, faith comes back here and the only way to
please God, it takes faith.
You want to obey God.
You want to do what God wants you to do.
You got to have faith.
You got to be willing to move forward.
And the only way you're gonna move forward is faith.
And the only way you're gonna have faith is to trust God's word and to realize
that God's word's already covered this.
That's right.
That nothing we're facing, it's caught God off guard, you know what I'm saying?
Everything that we face in life, no matter how modern we think we are,
no matter how great technology is, and no matter how, what was the word
they used on the news the other night?
Progressive.
No matter how progressive we think we're getting, God's word, as old as
time, is still relevant and alive.
And it still changes lives today.
And so that's an awesome point.
Yeah.
So we follow that story.
I leave, I go from there to Calvary Baptist church in Augusta and I
stayed there for a couple of years.
It was kind of a stopover because my next journey was Jackson first
Baptist church in Jackson, Georgia.
And we left Calvary to go to Jackson and at Jackson, we, we
encountered a great experience.
They're just a great pastor.
And we got there.
Who was all about discipleship, and he, he actually does a thing called,
he had a ministry called Renewing the Right Spirit, and which is based on, he
was part of the Henry Blackabee videos.
Him and his wife were sitting in the videos, if you ever buy
the video series of that series.
And so he was big into that, part of that link up.
So that was kind of a help to begin to realize that God's at work around us
at all times, and to see God at work.
Learn those markers.
God called me to ministry.
There's specific things that God used in my life.
First of all, when God got my attention, he got my attention by
showing me when I was lost, that I was lost, that I needed a savior.
And I'll never forget how he did that through testimony, through realizing in my
own spirit where I was and understanding that what God's trying to do.
And that's why I got saved.
Then when he called me to ministry, realizing In ministry, what was going on
around me and my circumstances, but also realizing that what I was experiencing in
my own life through God's word was guiding me to go preach and teach the word of God.
And so step for step, I began to realize how God was speaking to my
heart, how God speaks in my life.
It's not an audible word that I hear, it's not a dog talking or donkey talking.
It's a spiritual movement inside of me.
It's a reckoning from, here I am, and here's where I need to be, and I got
to do this and this to get there, and this is, but why do I need to get there?
And that's where I begin to realize, it's like, I know I'm not saved, I know
I need to be saved, and this is where I need to be over here, but here I am, and
so what do I need to do to get there?
And so, God leading me through that journey.
And that next few minutes to accept Him as my Lord and Savior.
God leading me through that journey.
Here I am not in ministry.
Here I need to be in ministry.
Boy, I need to get there.
Understanding the surrender, the total surrender of my life, my everything,
my trust that God financially would have handled me, take care
of me, that I don't have to worry about money anymore in my life.
You know what I'm saying?
Never do I have to worry about money again.
And I'm not rich, but I've never had, anytime we're at, we're at the bottom.
There may be a need.
I know you want me to share a story too, from experience of struggles.
Let me give you this one.
When my daughter Hannah was born, my wife decided to take a year off from teaching.
This I'm pastor at Bruton Fort church, Baptist church, and they're
paying me about 18, 19, 000 a year.
All right.
Hannah makes our fourth child.
Okay.
So we've got three kids already.
We've got another one coming.
And my wife who is making a lot more money than I'm making is teaching
school is taking a year off.
And we trust that God's gonna take care of us.
I remember going through that year, and I got up one Sunday, I said, what
do you want to do for lunch today?
And she said, I don't know.
And I said, well, let's see what we got in the cabinet.
Opened up the cabinet, we had a couple cans of soup.
Opened up the freezer, there was no meat.
Refrigerator had a couple little things.
Had some milk for breakfast, you know, a little bit.
But we were, we were strapped.
Financially, at that moment, right there, we had nothing really to eat, substantial,
but a few little things, which was no big deal to us, and we had no income, so we
just paid all our bills to go get moving.
And I said, well, after church, we'll just make do with what
we got, the Lord will provide.
After church, a lady in our church, her and her husband owned
a grocery store in Bennettsville.
Her dad worked with her at that grocery store.
They rotated crops, they rotated.
Stock that morning on Sunday morning, they had to do it once a year.
They had to rotate once every so often they had to rotate stock.
They backed up to my front door and reloaded crate after crate after
crate, fresh milk, orange juice, cereal foods, all these meats.
We, my wife and I literally went up and down the road,
giving people food that morning.
Afternoon that they had brought to our house, delivered milk.
We knew we couldn't make all that milk, but that day we had enough food to
sustain us for probably two, three months.
Great story.
So that was, that's the story.
How God has taken care of that and all my life, God has taken care of
that we need to come back to another.
What we need to do is come back to another podcast where I just
share some highlights of ministry.
Yeah, I'd like and I'll just come back and share some stories because I got
some funny funny stories and some great highlights how God's where to be very
emotional, but it'd be a good story.
So let me move on to Jackson cause faith was getting out there
that faith that my wife had.
She's always had great faith and I have I have learned her faith.
Over the years and, and her faith is a push for me to keep moving on and
keep working hard and keep finding ways to, to do what God wants me to do.
So go to Jackson.
We started in Jackson four years, the same children and education there.
We saw God do some great work.
We read, we revamped their committee structure and made it
teams, more of a team structure.
And then everybody's like, well, we've got to call them teams.
Well, we don't have to.
But the thing about a committee is you've got a set committee, but a team is anybody
who wants to be a part of the team.
I said, so if you're on a Benevolence team, and your job is to take care
of people when there's bereavement, Benevolence, take care of anything
the church does food wise to take care of ministry need, then you need more
than three or four people on the team.
So y'all need a big team.
You need about, I think, 16 or 17 people at one time.
I believe that's true.
So anyway, so all these people on the team, and we fixed all
the teams so they could increase their numbers if they needed to.
Try to use the teams instead of doing so much of the capital
improvement campaign stuff.
Just use your team already built in and then use that same concept and go forward.
You already got people doing the work.
Why go out and get a whole new group and get them involved instead of utilize your
teams and let your teams grow if they need to grow, let them grow to fit the need.
And so anyway, we're able to do that.
And that's a lot of people except Christ there.
We left that to go to Myrtle beach.
Took a job there at Beach Church, was confronted with probably
one of the biggest dilemmas.
I was actually told by a pastor there at the church.
That I didn't fit at the beach, that, that I was a redneck country boy,
and I didn't really belong there.
The pastor told me that.
And the truth is I think he wanted my salary back because
I was hired before he came.
And I was getting a real pretty substantial salary for my
position, for what he needed.
And he ended up putting my part time people in the position I had
and then using that money to hire.
Uh, somebody to come in and do the small groups, lead small groups,
probably smart on that point.
He didn't have to break me down.
The breakdown was humbling for me though, I needed it.
It was hurtful.
Brought out a lot of emotions and some of that redneck carnal
pride was, he, he called it out.
I'm about to show it.
It was like crazy.
But he and I, we ended up, it was one of those things where the Holy
Spirit through his conviction wouldn't just let you walk away from it.
He continued to bring us, me and him, back together to, to forgive each other
and to, although I was getting angry too, I was saying things about him.
I shouldn't have said, I would never say that about a, a
leading pastor of a church.
Here I am now.
I'm angry now.
I'm letting my flesh win and because I'm angry and I didn't
feel like I was being disciple.
So anyway, I just resigned.
Didn't have a job.
I just resigned.
And out of frustration, out of feeling unwanted, Just resigned.
It was a church that had over 80 some volunteers in my department,
uh, 200 some kids every week.
Um, my pride is probably why I went there.
I probably should have never left Jackson.
I'm second guessing some of that because I didn't really have that marker to go,
but I saw the opportunity to go and went.
And, uh, instead of cleaning up some mess that I had in Jackson, I just walked,
I just kind of said, well, it's not my place to fix that and walked away from it.
I'm a peacemaker.
My job is to make peace.
And when I try to make peace and don't make, I need to find
another way, find a way to do it.
And there's one situation when I left Jackson that I had opportunity
to make peace between some people and I didn't finish it.
When the pastor said, I'm not doing that, I said, fine.
And I took the job and left, ended up in the pastor, ended up having to leave
the church and within the next year or so, big split in the church, all
the work we'd done so It's all good.
Was just all up in arms.
They recovered because like I said, that lady, people like that lady, there
was a lot of other people in that.
There were leaders in that church.
People didn't know who they were.
Leaders were in them listening rooms.
And a lot of those people have led that church and still
leading that church today.
Wow.
But they recovered and they did well, and that pastor has recovered
and gone on and I think he finally retired, but, but it was just.
When you know what you need to do, when you, the Bible says,
when you know what's right to do and you don't do it, it's a sin.
You see what I'm saying?
So anytime we know what's the right thing to do, the right thing to say, the
right way to respond, we need to do it.
And that was a situation where I didn't complete that.
I just, I felt like, well, this guy, he, he knows what's going to need to be done.
And so I left and it kind of left the church in a lurch because even
today, right now, right now, if that church called me and said,
Hey, Would you be willing to come?
If I knew the Lord, if I saw no blocks in my way, I knew it was an open door
for me to go back down and serve.
I would be there in a heartbeat.
And, uh, probably when I, when Claire retires teaching, there's
a chance we may end up moving.
The only problem would be our grandkids.
They right here with us, but we may end up moving to Jackson just
to finish our life out, you know?
But a lot of our friends are still in Jackson.
I mean, a lot of, a lot of my wife's been, I know we're in Jackson.
She's doing a women's retreat this weekend.
She's there right now with the women from that church.
Wow.
And a lady from that church helps her do all those ministry weekends.
And that's a whole different story, but so we're going to, we're going to have
to start wrapping it up because I want to try to keep it, keep it down to the
podcast itself down to about an hour or so, but I would like to, well, unless you
got something else you want to add on.
Let me close with this.
Yeah.
Good.
We are in Myrtle Beach.
Is where I kind of semi retired.
I decided we went to Palmetto shores there.
Then we went, we planted a church called the hub.
We tried a church plant and I'm not, I'm not a church planter.
That wasn't my call.
I don't know why I did that either, but a couple of things I've done.
I probably shouldn't have, but, but it was a fun experience.
And, and listen, my kids and my wife would tell you that we, that they loved it.
We had a great time there.
So what I saw was a failure because I guess, again, that, I guess I had
this thing about me, about posing.
I wanted to be like everybody else to plant a church.
So maybe God wanted us to there for those four years to do what
we did and accomplish what we did.
Because those people are still in church, still, I still watch them on Facebook.
They're still serving the Lord and different churches.
So maybe they needed a little bit what we had.
We came, we came to Woodruff from the beach and we moved here.
I took a job as a facility manager at a plant and now I'm in my own
business, but we joined a church called the meal and a church of the meal.
And we served there.
My wife's a counselor.
We have served a small group.
We've taught Sunday school for the youth there.
And right now I do one of my other loves is cooking.
I cook Zach's chicken fingers on Wednesday nights, 12 to 1400 chicken fingers every
Wednesday night during the year program.
Wow.
And any opportunity we get to share the Lord, we do it.
You've had a long, uh, career doing various ministries and
you've learned a lot along the way.
I know this is going to be a tough question and it's going to
be hard to narrow things down.
But I'm wondering if there was just one bit of advice that you could pass
along to people out there in the.
And never, never, and podcast land, you know, maybe somebody might be listening
to this a hundred years from now, who knows, but what, what one eternal
truth would you pass along to, to somebody that might be listening today?
Galatians 2 20.
I am crucified with Christ.
It's no longer how I live, but Christ lives in me.
The life I live now in the flesh.
I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.
That's my life verse.
And what I'm saying by that verse, Bo Lee gave me that verse when I
went to work at Camp Pine Hill.
But what that, what I've learned, I learned from that verse every, every day,
but that's my verse to not be opposing.
The life I live is the life God called me to.
My life that I wanted to live is dead and gone.
I need to live the life that God called me to.
And he called me.
I need to be original.
I need to be me.
I need to be myself.
I need to be the Christian that God called me to be.
Don't try to be somebody else's Christian.
Follow their example, live through their mistakes, learn from their
mistakes and not make the same ones, but be you, be you, Christ
has called you into the ministry.
Your personality is distinct.
Your fingerprint is your own fingerprint.
Your spiritual fingerprint is just the same.
It's going to mean the same thing.
Nobody else's story is going to be like mine.
And I shouldn't try to make mine like somebody else's.
That's what I've learned.
So that's what I would say to anybody, be yourself, be who Christ makes you to be.
Let Christ develop you.
Don't try to look at, well, I want to be like these people over here.
I want to be like that up there.
Preachers, when I went to this church, Bruton Forge, they said, well, Bruton
Forge is a stepping stone church.
I said, that's got to stop.
God don't need no stepping stone churches.
God needs so many gospel preaching churches that do the work.
Every little church, I learned this in Cyprus, every little church.
We need every church in every community and we're going to
win the people for Christ.
We're losing the world.
There's more lost people in the world than there is saved people.
There's more lost people in this town Woodruff than there is saved people.
And there's 10, 000 more coming in the next two years.
So we're losing the battle for the lost souls and they're ours.
They don't belong to Satan.
They belong to God.
We just got to go out and live Christ.
Be real.
If you make a mistake, I'll make the mistakes.
I'm the mistake maker.
I said, I'm a rebel hillbilly redneck from Marietta, South Carolina.
And I am that rebel, but I am who I am.
When I made those mistakes, I go fix them.
I go repent, ask forgiveness, step forward, move to the next level.
Cause I'm going to make, I'm not perfect.
And I had to hone it when the Holy spirit said, Hey, you should have said it.
As soon as you were since the Holy spirit said, you shouldn't have done that.
Go fix it right there.
Don't wait.
Don't try to correct it right there.
Right.
Well, wow, this has been great.
We do need to do another one in the, in the future.
I will, I'd love doing some of my funny stories and some of
our, some of our faith moments.
Well, would you pray for, pray for our listeners right now?
I will, buddy.
I'll pray up.
Let's do it.
Lord Jesus, we love you.
We praise you, God, for all that you do in our lives.
Lord, I, us thank you that you know us and you know us before we even think things.
You already know we're gonna think 'em.
It's how awesome you are.
So Lord, we ask you, first of all, just to forgive us for our sins.
Lord, I want you to, to convict the hearts of all people who are listening to this,
that they know that they can receive forgiveness for anything they've done.
All they gotta do is ask, because you already know in
advance they're going to do it.
And so you, you, you love us enough that you died on the cross to give us a
chance to be washed clean by your blood of all the sins that's in our life before
Christ, before we became Christians.
And even after we become Christians, your blood cleanses us of all
sin, and we thank you for that.
And God, I pray for the listener right now, that they will
hear this, God, in some way.
Lord, don't, don't, don't hear this old boy, let them hear your word in me.
Let them hear your spirit and your spirit.
Take my words and translate them into their hearts that their
life can be made different.
They will be made stronger and God, I pray that they'll have, they'll
desire walk with you that's really personal and their life will be turned
upside down from this day forward.
And they'll find so much joy and peace in serving you, but they'll never
understand and be able to explain it.
And we love you, God.
We praise you for what you're going to do.
And I thank you for this opportunity to share this word.
It can last now until you come again.
In Jesus name we pray.
Amen.
Thank you, Jesse.
Thank you, Keith.
I appreciate your taking the time to do this.
It means, it means a lot, not just to me, but I'm sure to a lot of
people that are going to hear it.
Well, I appreciate you guys, man.
I appreciate y'all praying for me when I was going through all
my stuff with my knee and all the stuff that you did for me.
I appreciate y'all.
Cailin: We hope you've been blessed by today's story.
In case you haven't noticed, there are no advertisements on this podcast
and we hope to keep it that way.
So if you've heard something that you think could help someone you know, please
share it using the link in the show notes.
Also, if you will give Faith and Purpose a positive review on your podcast platform,
you could help more people find it.
You will probably never know how that small effort can make a big
difference in someone's life.
But our Heavenly Father knows.
Speaking of sharing, if you know a Jesus follower with a story to tell, please send
them a link to Faith and Purpose Podcast.
It may encourage them to tell their story.
That person may even be you.
Our only criteria is that Jesus be glorified.
Most Christians don't share their faith because they mistakenly think
their story is not interesting enough.
Or that it's self centered to talk about themselves.
Or that they are not competent to explain the gospel correctly.
But none of that is relevant.
If Jesus has changed your life, you have a story to tell.
All of our stories are completely unique.
No one has a story like yours, and you may be the only one who can reach someone
else through telling your experience.
All of our stories are completely unique.
No one has a story like yours, and you may be the only one who can reach someone
else through telling your experience.
So don't be intimidated.
A story is just that, a true account of your own experience.
And no one can disagree with your experience.
When we tell what Jesus has done in our lives, we are being obedient to his
command to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.
It's not about theology, and it's not about how interesting or special you are.
It's all about Jesus.
So when you're ready to tell how Jesus has impacted your life, you can let Jesse
know at his ministry website, jesseduke.
net.
There you can download guidelines that will make it easy to
prepare to tell your story.
Thank you for listening today and Shalom.