Aflame for God 4 – 17-Year-Old Evangelist
“Set a fire down in my soul that I can’t contain and I can’t control… I want more of you God.” – Will Reagan and The United Pursuit Band
Read the beginning of the series HERE
Our Bible club was underway and within a couple of months we were filling up the youth ministry at our church with teens who were being saved daily in the halls, classrooms, and library of our high school. Our youth pastor eventually convinced the church to designate two 15-passenger vans with drivers and every Sunday morning we would make the rounds and pick up “our kids” from the Manzano Bible Club. The most we ever brought on one Sunday was 42. It was exhilarating being on God’s team and seeing Him respond in big ways as a result of the simple childlike obedience of a few teens to speak about Jesus to someone everyday… and pray like crazy ☺
It wasn’t long before we were getting invitations to go speak at other churches and ministries about what was happening at Manzano. The first one I remember was especially exciting because it meant traveling with our youth pastor to another city about 200 miles away. We were to share our story at a church called Tabernacle Baptist Church in Roswell, New Mexico. (The amazing providence is that less than 3 years later I would be the youth pastor of this very church and God would launch an amazing ministry there… but that is for another post) On the way there our youth pastor asked us if we knew how to prepare a sermon. I answered, “Sure! You just pick a subject; find every verse in the Bible that relates to that subject, and preach about it.” Brother Rick very patiently agreed that was one way to do it but would we like to learn about using an introduction, 3 point outline, illustrations, and conclusion. We said, “great!” so the rest of the trip he mentored us in sermon preparation and delivery. It was such a blessing! We poured our hearts out and came home rejoicing. We were now itinerant evangelists just like Jerry Johnston! ☺
Not long after this, Dr. Jack Hyles (now in heaven) was preaching a conference at our church and so we took off from school to go. On the way to the conference I stopped and bought my first necktie. (In the picture below) My youth pastor taught me how to tie a single Windsor knot and I was ready for the conference. It was a blast and I remember sitting there with tears running down my face amazed that I was having this much fun at a preaching conference. Wow! Things had sure changed in my heart. There was this longing that can’t be described by words to preach and be used by God to transform the hearts of people the way my heart had been transformed. Dr. Hyles from that moment on would have a dramatic impact on my life and thinking.
Another thing that happened at this conference was I noticed that my brother and I were the only ones at the conference who weren’t wearing suits. Consequently, the next week we had our mom take us to Western Warehouse (we were still cowboys after all) and we each purchased a three-piece western cut suit. We polished up our cowboy boots and we were ready to join the preaching circuit. ☺ I have rarely felt as exhilarated as I was the first Sunday I walked into church with that new suit on. I can still smell the wool.
Not long after, my pastor, Dr. Curtis Goldman (now in heaven) asked me to preach for him on New Years Eve 1982. I couldn’t believe it! Our church of 1000 people was huge to me and I was so excited and scared at the same time. I prayed and fasted and studied for days and felt the Lord leading me to challenge the congregation with the fact that Jesus had said, “If the world hated me it will hate you.” As I looked at the church and the Christians around me and as I read and studied the Bible, the largest dichotomy that I had observed was that the Christians I knew, for the most part, were not turning the world upside down and were not being persecuted for it. The Sunday came and I stepped into the pulpit and experienced something for the first time that I have enjoyed many times since and came later to understand as the anointing of the Holy Spirit. I preached my heart out on The Persecution of the Righteous (actually audio HERE) and explained to the people that a direct indicator of whether they were following Jesus or not was the amount of or lack of persecution taking place in there lives. I shared passages such as
[quote]Luke 6:22 – 26 22 “Blessed are you when men hate you, and ostracize you, and insult you, and scorn your name as evil, for the sake of the Son of Man. 23 “Be glad in that day and leap [for joy], for behold, your reward is great in heaven. For in the same way their fathers used to treat the prophets. 24 “But woe to you who are rich, for you are receiving your comfort in full. 25 “Woe to you who are well-fed now, for you shall be hungry. Woe [to you] who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. 26 “Woe [to you] when all men speak well of you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way.”[/quote]
I challenged them to look at their lives and ask themselves the question, “Does the world hate me?”
[quote]John 15:19 “If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you.”[/quote]
I was surprised at how many people came to me after the message and said that they were really challenged to look at their lives. Praise God! I was equally surprised at the number of people, whom I looked up to, who came to me and warned me to be careful of taking my newfound faith too seriously. I was satisfied in my spirit that I had spoken the truth in love and I trusted God to give the increase.
I spent the rest of that school year building the Manzano Bible Club, preaching where and when I could, and reading and studying and listening to sermons like a madman. Some of the books that touched me deeply early on were Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret, Why Revival Tarries, Sodom Had No Bible, both by Leonard Ravenhill, God’s Smuggler by Brother Andrew, Absolute Surrender by Andrew Murray, and biographies of George Mueller, Adoniram Judson, and William Carey. These books painted for me a radical Christianity that I didn’t see around me and I longed for it. As David said in Psalm 63 I thirsted for it as in a dry and thirsty land where no water is. As I tried to live what I read in the scripture and these books the persecution at home, school, and church was intense at times. I continually discovered though that the overwhelming joy of following what the Bible said over what man said and the joy of seeing God’s fingerprints all over our ministry as a result overcame all discouragement. The school year ended and I spent the summer working in construction with my dad.
That summer, July of 1983, I also returned to Singing Hills Youth Camp and once again Jerry Johnston was there but this time he was aware of our ministry and we were able to spend some awesome time with him and at the end of the camp he invited us to come on stage with him and share our testimony of what God had done the previous year! It was heady stuff getting to speak on stage with the man whom God had used to lead us to Him. He was also going to be speaking the next week at the camp and he invited us to come back and share our testimony then also. As it so happened, our uncle’s church from Dodge City Kansas was going to be there and our cousin was the youth pastor. Their hearing our testimony lit a fire in their teenagers to go back to Kansas and turn their world upside down for God. Little did I know that less than 4 years later I would be a youth evangelist and would be holding a week long revival in that Dodge City church. But that is a story for another post. We went back to Manzano that next year even more on fire than before and I will share about that in Aflame For God 5 – Youth on Fire.
Not long after, my pastor, Dr. Curtis Goldman (now in heaven) asked me to preach for him on New Years Eve 1982. I couldn’t believe it! Our church of 1000 people was huge to me and I was so excited and scared at the same time. I prayed and fasted and studied for days and felt the Lord leading me to challenge the congregation with the fact that Jesus had said, “If the world hated me it will hate you.” As I looked at the church and the Christians around me and as I read and studied the Bible, the largest dichotomy that I had observed was that the Christians I knew, for the most part, were not turning the world upside down and were not being persecuted for it. The Sunday came and I stepped into the pulpit and experienced something for the first time that I have enjoyed many times since and came later to understand as the anointing of the Holy Spirit. I preached my heart out on The Persecution of the Righteous (actually audio HERE) and explained to the people that a direct indicator of whether they were following Jesus or not was the amount of or lack of persecution taking place in there lives. I shared passages such as[quote]Luke 6:22 – 26 22 “Blessed are you when men hate you, and ostracize you, and insult you, and scorn your name as evil, for the sake of the Son of Man. 23 “Be glad in that day and leap [for joy], for behold, your reward is great in heaven. For in the same way their fathers used to treat the prophets. 24 “But woe to you who are rich, for you are receiving your comfort in full. 25 “Woe to you who are well-fed now, for you shall be hungry. Woe [to you] who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. 26 “Woe [to you] when all men speak well of you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way.”[/quote]
[quote]John 15:19 “If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you.”[/quote]
I was surprised at how many people came to me after the message and said that they were really challenged to look at their lives. Praise God! I was equally surprised at the number of people, whom I looked up to, who came to me and warned me to be careful of taking my newfound faith too seriously. I was satisfied in my spirit that I had spoken the truth in love and I trusted God to give the increase.
I spent the rest of that school year building the Manzano Bible Club, preaching where and when I could, and reading and studying and listening to sermons like a madman. Some of the books that touched me deeply early on were Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret, Why Revival Tarries, Sodom Had No Bible, both by Leonard Ravenhill, God’s Smuggler by Brother Andrew, Absolute Surrender by Andrew Murray, and biographies of George Mueller, Adoniram Judson, and William Carey. These books painted for me a radical Christianity that I didn’t see around me and I longed for it. As David said in Psalm 63 I thirsted for it as in a dry and thirsty land where no water is. As I tried to live what I read in the scripture and these books the persecution at home, school, and church was intense at times. I continually discovered though that the overwhelming joy of following what the Bible said over what man said and the joy of seeing God’s fingerprints all over our ministry as a result overcame all discouragement. The school year ended and I spent the summer working in construction with my dad.
That summer, July of 1983, I also returned to Singing Hills Youth Camp and once again Jerry Johnston was there but this time he was aware of our ministry and we were able to spend some awesome time with him and at the end of the camp he invited us to come on stage with him and share our testimony of what God had done the previous year! It was heady stuff getting to speak on stage with the man whom God had used to lead us to Him. He was also going to be speaking the next week at the camp and he invited us to come back and share our testimony then also. As it so happened, our uncle’s church from Dodge City Kansas was going to be there and our cousin was the youth pastor. Their hearing our testimony lit a fire in their teenagers to go back to Kansas and turn their world upside down for God. Little did I know that less than 4 years later I would be a youth evangelist and would be holding a week long revival in that Dodge City church. But that is a story for another post. We went back to Manzano that next year even more on fire than before and I will share about that in Aflame For God 5 – Youth on Fire.
