This Sunday was special at New Hope. We saw a glimpse of what God is doing through us as we baptized five new believers into the fellowship. Some we've known for a long time, and some for less, but they all are beginners on the long journey of following Jesus.
On the same Sunday 35 years ago, I made a profession of faith in Jesus when the invitation was given at the close of the Sunday night worship service at Bethesda Baptist Church. So as I looked into the eyes of those I baptized "in obedience to His command", I heard echoes of Brother James Herndon doing the same for me.
I don't think anyone who has seriously tried to follow Jesus' call to "come, follow Me" would fail to identify with me when I confess that my fidelity to His commands has been filled with ups and downs. Especially in the earlier years, I operated mostly out of a cultural relationship with Jesus - I went to church and hung around with people who went to church. Life was pretty darn good - even easy most of the time, and so there were very few instances where I realized the import of my decision to become a follower of Jesus. Since I was a pretty moral person, living with other moral people, it was no big deal to stay the course.
Then years later, at the height of what success I had in the corporate world, after getting the boys into good schools, the family into a good house, and seeing only an upside to life, two things happened in succession. The first was that through no fault of my own, (or significant gifts) I was singled out by God for special service as a pastor. I can confidently tell you with no worries of being contradicted that I had never considered that career field once in my entire life. But there I was, and there He was. How would that work? Hadn't the foggiest notion.
Six months later the plan unfolded. The company I worked for was shrinking itself and I was low man on the totem pole. If I didn't take the buy-out, I would be transferred far away. So I made plans. Then God unveiled part two. My Mother was stricken with terminal cancer. My plans got ditched. When the dust settled, we had laid her to rest, and I was back into the workforce. It left me grieving and relying more on God than I ever had before.
This time I wasn't around moral people. On one job, the first day of training ended with my boss showing me how to cheat on expense reports. On another, I was shown how to make numbers that meant one thing seem to mean another. Through that experience, I understood what lots of other people had faced outside the Christian bubble. I finally found a job in sales where I could live out my faith again alongside other believers.
I was first called as a youth pastor in a semi-dysfunctional church, then as a pastor in what I thought was a great place to live out my calling and help people come to know Jesus and grow in their faith. The baptistery was used to store Christmas decorations and the pipes that filled it required a blowtorch to unseize, but at the beginning God was alive there and we grew. Chick Swindoll nailed it when he said that small rural churches were possibly the most difficult and had ended many a pastor's ministry prematurely. I was nearly such a victim. There is no doubt that a portion of the blame has to fall on my inexperienced shoulders. But as I later found out, the church ate preachers for breakfast and lunch.
Lurching from there into a church splant, I delayed the agony of leaving behind the people who had given the church life. But our attempts to plant a church in that area suffered from a lack of a place to meet and a total "shunning" by the power brokers in the old church. So it eventually ended, leaving me in sales management but not much closer to service in God's church.
Then a little church, reeling from pastoral failure, spotted a resume I had posted a year before, and called. New Hope Baptist in some unknown town called Valparaiso Florida was trying to hold on and reach the future God had promised.
I've been here nine years now. We've seen God work miracles, and we've been hard pressed at times. There's no doubt that some of the bruises were self-inflicted. My friend Arnold and I were comparing notes a few weeks back about what has happened over the last few years. He even remembered things that I had mercifully forgotten. I really can laugh at some of them. However, at the time they really hurt.
But there's never been a doubt that God sent us here.
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