“Flame is the air which true Christian experience breathes. It feeds on fire; it can withstand anything rather than a feeble flame;” – E.M. Bounds

Read the beginning of the series HERE

God had abundantly answered my prayers to be back in the action of winning and discipling young people while attending Bible college by allowing me to be a part of Teens Unlimited Youth Ministry at Baptist Temple, Springfield, Missouri. Lisa and I were quickly assigned a bus for Sundays to pick up teens and we started hitting the streets on Saturdays visiting and witnessing to young people. God blessed our efforts and soon teens started getting saved and coming to Teens Unlimited on Sunday. We would go all over Springfield and just stop teens on the street and start telling them about Jesus. During the week our prayer groups would be praying for the teens and workers by name. We began to see God really move in hearts and change lives. It was so exciting. It wasn’t long before I was asked to preach to the teens on a Sunday morning. I was ecstatic. I had been studying and praying for power to preach and here was my chance. Lisa and I made a pact to fast and pray as much as we possibly could the week prior to the Sunday I was supposed to preach. By Sunday we were so weak and so tired that I was wondering what in the world I had been thinking. Lisa sat in the back and prayed and I gave my sermon but I felt like it was a total flop. I preached my heart out for 45 minutes and then went and sat down on the front row and put my face in my hands and started to weep. I was complaining to God that I had fasted and prayed and preached my heart out and I didn’t feel anything supernatural. Just about then I heard a great rustling and I peaked up to see dozens and dozens of young people at the front weeping and repenting and giving their lives to Christ. I couldn’t believe my eyes! I put my face back in my hands and started praising God with everything I had. The invitation lasted as long as the sermon and at the end of the 2 hour service almost all of the teens in that ministry had either been saved or rededicated their life to Christ that morning. Praise God! That night the baptism service was amazing as young person after young person was baptized. I’ll never forget it as long as I live.

We continued working the streets and winning souls and building Teens Unlimited and more and more invitations started coming for me to preach around Springfield and around the country. Our team of prayer warriors and I made a trip to Indianapolis Indiana and held a youth rally and souls were saved and lives changed. We got to go to Kansas City and hang out at Jerry Johnston’s ministry headquarters and other amazing things. I was preaching so much that I couldn’t work a job and most of my preaching engagements didn’t pay anything so we would “pray down” the money to go. I’ll never forget whining to God one night that I had prayed and prayed and believed Him for some money and nothing had come in. I got up off my knees and went to my mailbox on campus and there was a check inside for $500.00. Boy did I do some apologizing for my unbelief to the Lord that night.

Then we heard that Jerry Johnston was coming to hold a week long conference on evangelism at our school and he needed volunteers to hand out brochures and put up posters and promote the meetings. We jumped in and helped and then sat enthralled each night as different speakers from around the country preached about evangelism and winning the lost. It was exciting to get to spend some time with him and tell him about what I was doing at Teens Unlimited. One night a young pastor preached on Power From On High and he told about how Jesus, our example, was anointed of the Holy Spirit to do powerful ministry and so must we be. He preached from Is. 61:1 The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, Because the LORD has anointed me To bring good news to the afflicted; and Acts 10:38 “You know of Jesus of Nazareth, how God anointed Him with the Holy Spirit and with power, and how He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him. I was tore down. I remember going to the front during the invitation and praying so hard that I didn’t realize the meeting was over and I was the only one left at the front until one of my buddies came and got me and we left. God was continually reminding me of where the source of power was from to reach souls.

Lisa and I were steadily growing in our love and admiration of each other though we were still not considering ourselves romantically attached. We were just “working in ministry together” but we were inseparable and had been for 6 months. March 1, 1985 would change all of that. This night was supposed to be a youth ministry night but for some reason that I can’t remember it got cancelled and we ended up going to the mall with a young evangelist and his wife to hang out. This young man had worked for Jerry Johnston Ministries and now had his own ministry and he was also helping out at Teens Unlimited. We hit it off that night and had a wonderful time. I’ll never forget at one point he turned to me and said, “what is the deal with you and Lisa?” I said, “well we really like each other but we aren’t dating or anything.” He said, “Why not?” I said, “well frankly she is so perfect that I’m afraid if I date her I will want to marry her.” He said, “And what is wrong with that?” and I said, “I don’t know if she is God’s will, or how to even know how to know if she is the right one and I don’t want to make a mistake.” He laughed and said incredulously, “So you are telling me that you love her, she loves you, she’s perfect, she thinks you are perfect, but you are not sure if she is God’s will for you???” Then he held up his arms like Elijah and said in his best Jerry Johnston imitation “Matt Bullen, how long halt ye between two opinions?” “Marry this girl!” It was the mentor approval that I needed. I asked her out that night and she looked at me like, “I was wondering when you were ever going to ask?” and we had our first date the next Saturday night, March 7, 1985.

Shortly after I received an invitation from Lisa’s pastor in Michigan to come and preach at his church. I was excited to meet him and Lisa’s family and friends. I had been asking the Lord what He wanted me to preach and one day as I was walking around a high school campus praying for the teens there it struck me that the reason most Christians weren’t reaching people for Christ was that they didn’t fully grasp the gravity of three things. I felt that if people had a clear vision of the horrors of hell, a clear vision of the glories of a transformed life in Christ, and a clear vision of standing before the judgement seat of Christ and giving an account of how they had used that transformed life, their lives would be different than most of the Christianity I saw around me. I was excited about preaching this message for the first time at Lisa’s church. I was also excited because most of Lisa’s family didn’t know Christ and she and I were praying that they would come to hear Lisa’s “beau” preach and God might do something mighty on their behalf. We caught a ride with some other college students and headed for the Detroit area. We had a wonderful time with Lisa’s church and got to meet her family. I preached my heart out that night. The sermon was entitled Get A Vision (the audio is below) and God blessed it and many came to Christ that night, some in Lisa’s family. It was glorious. I’ll never forget what Lisa’s pastor said to me after the invitation ended and all of the people went back to their seats. He looked at me in amazement and said, “son, just never get to where you think it was you that did this.” I said, “yes sir”, and I have kept that promise. Glory to God alone for His mighty works. The original audio of that message is below.

God continued to bless our ministry at Teens Unlimited. Many days and nights I would walk to the different high schools in our part of town and walk around the campuses asking God to give me the souls on those campuses. One day to my utter amazement the Sr. youth pastor told me that God had burdened his heart for all of the high school kids in Springfield and he asked me if I would hold a city-wide youth evangelism meeting for Teens Unlimited. He said that he would get the pizza and everything just like Jerry Johnston was doing around the country and we could invite all of the teens in the city to come and I could preach to them. He said that we could have an all night prayer meeting the night before and just see what God would do. I was delirious with excitement. I ran back to our little group of prayer warriors and told them about the plans. We began to plan, promote, and pray. We prayed all night the night before and then worked all day the next day to get ready. The night finally came and there in the stands were all kinds of kids from all over Springfield. I was so weak and tired I was really worried but I stood up and preached my heart out all the time begging God in my spirit to do something amazing for these young people and to lift up the name of Jesus. To my great delight, when I gave the invitation teens started streaming to the front to be saved. I remember praying with one young man from the local football team and when we finished praying he jumped up and beat his chest and said, “I got it! I got it! I’m going to heaven now!” It was a miracle night. Cheerleaders, and jocks, and druggies, and just kids of all kinds got saved that night. Our faith was growing and we knew that God’s word was true. The original audio of the message is below.

Shortly after the Pizza Blast as we called it, the Sr. youth pastor announced that we were going to be taking a mission trip to the inner city of New York in the next few months. We sent off to all of the gospel tract societies in America I think and asked for free tracts. In the end we collected just at 1,000,000 tracts to take on this trip. We did car washes and fundraisers to raise the money to go.

Before we left in July however, I wanted to take Lisa home and meet my folks and friends in New Mexico. We had borrowed a car and gathered up all the money that we had for gas. We did the calculations and knew that it wasn’t enough to get us the 850 miles to my house but we really felt that God was in this trip so we set out by faith, trusting that He would provide along the way or stretch our gas mileage. We headed out and made it all the way to eastern New Mexico before we ran out of money and gas. We pulled into a little gas station in Tucumcari and decided to go into the Denny’s and use the restroom before we decided what to do. We bowed our heads and asked the Lord to provide. I went into the men’s room and when I came out there were four men talking to Lisa and she looked a little pale. I walked over and introduced myself and realized that they were asking about the Teens Unlimited logo on our shirts. Lisa and I explained about our ministry and that we were going home to see my folks and then returning to go on the mission trip to New York City. I’ll never forget the feeling in my stomach when one of the men reached in his pocket pulled out his wallet and said, “here, I want to give you a little something to help out with your ministry” and handed me a $20.00 bill (just enough to get us home). My head was swimming and I wanted to run out the door and put gas in that car right then before that $20.00 disappeared or something. Then the man said, “hey can I buy you something to eat?” Lisa and I hadn’t eaten for a couple of days because we were saving all of our money for gas to get home but I was so excited about getting out there and putting gas in that car and getting on down the road that I told him no thank you. Lisa kicked me under the table and gave me a look like, “what are you saying? I’m starving” 🙂 but I was ready to go. She never has let me live that down. We said thank you and slipped out of the Denny’s and headed home praising God! The most amazing thing about this story is that some years later I would be interim pastor for a time at the Temple Baptist Church in Tucumcari, New Mexico and the man who gave us the $20.00 was a member of that church and he sat under my preaching for a time and I got to tell him what a miracle that money was for us.

We enjoyed 2 weeks at home and then back to Springfield and then off to New York City. It was a marvelous trip. We got to sing and preach on the streets and we handed out all of our 1,000,000 tracts in just a few days. It was astonishing. I remember a busy intersection in the Bronx. We would have 4 people on each corner with an armful of tracts handing them out to people as fast as they could for hours and hours. Sometimes a line would build up as the people were waiting to get whatever the young person was handing out. Many times they would stop and read it right there and we were able to engage them in discussion and lead some of them to Christ. There was a little church plant in the Bronx called Lighthouse Baptist Church and I got to sing there one Sunday night. I also got to preach at a church in Saddlebrook, New Jersey just outside of the city. It was a blessed time. We also did some sightseeing and Lisa and I stood on top of the World Trade Center and dreamed of the day we would hold city wide evangelistic campaigns in major cities all over the country. Our minds, hearts, and dreams were expanded.

We came home to Springfield, and with the approval of our Sr. pastor, Dr. W.E. Powell, who was also chancellor of our college we decided that we should get married before the next semester started. We set the date as August 3, 1985 (Lisa’s step dad’s birthday) which was just a few weeks away. The teenagers from Teens Unlimited and our Bible college friends rallied around us and we had a wonderful wedding. Many of the people who stood up with us, sang for us, decorated, and more were teens that we had won to Christ that year. The young evangelist who had asked me at the mall “How long halt ye between two opinions?” and his wife were our best man and matron of honor and the Sr. youth pastor walked Lisa down the aisle. The teenagers had taken up a collection and rented us the honeymoon suite at the nicest hotel in town. No two kids were ever more happy to be wed. She was 18 and I was 19 and we were ready to win the world for Christ… together! Aflame For God 9 – A Man Obsessed