Aflame For God 14 – Exporting The Blessing

“Preaching is theology coming through a man who is on fire… A man who can speak about these things dispassionately has no right whatsoever to be in a pulpit; and should never be allowed to enter one.” – Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Read the beginning of the series HERE

It was early 2000 and at the invitation of our nearest neighbor, we visited Forest Meadow Baptist Church and immediately fell in love with the church, the people, the pastor and his wife. Very soon after we invited the pastor and his wife over for lunch after church one Sunday. In our usual fashion we visited with them while the children cooked and served and then we sat around and the children shared stories and testimonies and the pastor and his wife were completely blown away. After a beautiful afternoon of fellowship they said goodbye and as they were leaving the pastor pulled me aside and said, “Matt, you have something very very special here in this family that you guys are raising. What God is doing here in your home needs to be exported to the world. You need to export this blessing that God has given you. Can I challenge you in the next year to have as many families from our church over to your home as possible so that they can experience what we experienced today and feel what we felt today and be inspired to raise up a generation of warriors for Christ?” I was stunned. I promised him that we would do exactly that and when I went back in and explained to the family what he had told me we pulled out the church directory and a calendar and began to formulate a plan to have every family in the church over for dinner in the next 12 months. In that one moment of encouragement from that pastor a flame was lit in our hearts to be a catalyst for Christian family renewal and inspiration.

Week after week, chicken dinner after chicken dinner, we began to build relationships with all of the families in the church and God began to do amazing things in us and through us. First, we built some of the greatest friendships of our lives that remain as bulwarks in our family to this day. Second, we began to study even harder than we had before about godly family and marriage so that we could grow ourselves and also counsel and disciple others. We did end up having nearly every family in the church over for dinner in the next two years and we and I would like to think the church were never the same again. We also began to loan out books and tapes from our significant family library and the results were so stunning that we began to buy two and three of everything in our library to give away or lend to our steady stream of hungry souls God was sending to our dinner table.

My health had been dramatically deteriorating for a couple of years and we couldn’t figure it out. I was only 35 years old but was functioning like a 70-year-old man. Finally the doctors told me I had Systemic Lupus and it was incurable. They put me on 11 different medications and within two years I was almost dead. I could barely walk and spent more time in bed than out and that blessed little church and group of friends loved and cared for us amazingly. God only allowed us to enjoy that heavenly mountain valley and church and friends for 3 years and then He moved us to Houston, Texas in a most miraculous way. Even though I was terribly sick, I was still rocketing up in the commercial construction world and eventually caught the attention of the largest construction company in America and through a series of providences that made it clear God was at work I was recruited to build a $220,000,000 Hilton hotel in Houston, Texas to be completed in time for the 2004 Superbowl. So we loaded up and moved to Houston. All the while we felt strongly that God was not primarily moving us here for construction but that it was only the carrot to get us here for some yet unforeseen kingdom plan. And we were not wrong.

Within a few weeks of settling down in Houston we “stumbled” onto a little church plant that was 3 weeks old and immediately fell in love with the people there. Within a week or two we had rolled up our sleeves and dove in. In no time at all the church had 30 families attending regularly and you guessed it, we put into action a plan to have each family over for dinner and love on them and minister to them in any way we could including exposing them to our now mammoth family lending library. We jumped at every chance to do any job in the church no matter how small and we had never been happier. One weekend in the spring of 2004 changed my life forever. As we now had risen to leadership in the church we were sent off to a Christian retreat called Tres Dias as part of our leadership training. I went with an open mind and heart to see what God had for me there but in my wildest dreams I could never have imagined the impact this one weekend would have on me for the rest of my life. I can’t explain exactly what or how but Jesus met me on that weekend so miraculously that I can only say that it was every bit as impactful as that youth camp in the summer of 1982 and I came home a man aflame once again. If you had asked me before that weekend if I was on fire for God I probably would have said yes but time and trouble and illness and the cares of this life had dampened my flame more than I realized but that weekend God blew through my soul with a fresh wind and fanned an inferno that burns brightly to this day. I came home from that weekend with a three part vision. 1. I knew God wanted me to pastor. 2. I knew God wanted me to write a book about godly family. 3. I knew God wanted me to begin speaking at homeschool conferences and challenging parents to raise warriors for Christ.

Shortly after, I became one of the pastors of this booming church of now 300 people, we began to write our book The Blessed Family (now available on Amazon HERE), and I became a regular speaker at the annual Southeast Texas Homeschool Association state conference. Later I would also write a monthly article called Dad’s Corner for The Teaching Pioneer Magazine. I loved preaching more than ever now and like days gone by I enjoyed the Holy Spirit’s power and help but in even stronger ways than when I was a youth. It was thrilling what God was doing all around us. I was still sick much of the time, still building high rise buildings all over Texas, and still ministering to people three and four nights a week in our home but by this time we had an army of precious warriors and best friends in our 5 teenagers who now did all of the work, including our two sons studying theology and working for me building high rises and then God called us to start a church in our living room because we weren’t busy enough! Within 8 weeks that church was running over 100 people and then 300 and then after 3 years we started over with another church in our living room. Through some miraculous circumstances our family was part of a think tank strategizing with the leaders of some of the largest churches in America about how to raise up the next generation of warriors for Christ. Lisa and I were also speaking at Tres Dias weekends twice a year and seeing God work miracle after miracle in the lives of hundreds of people. It was 2008 and we were working as hard for God as we knew how. There are too many crazy God-stories and fierce spiritual battles to tell all of it but suffice it to say we were exporting the blessing in every way we thought possible and swinging our swords at the agents of darkness with all of our might. We were living as radical for God as we could possibly imagine. BUT GOD!… was about to completely blow our minds…

Aflame For God 15 – An Orphan On Our Doorstep