I find in life that there are many people who are hurting for various reasons. Some are having problems with their kids, marriage or love life, an addiction such as drugs, alcohol, pornography, gluttony, anger/violence, or perhaps their financial situation, their job, or lack of one, the death of a loved one, childhood abuse haunting them, bitterness and so forth.
As they clamor to find answers to their problems, too often they come up short, because the advice they receive usually comes from someone who is on the outside looking in and cannot relate to their pain, or from someone who has never experienced the same or similar pain that they are suffering and cannot relate to.
My brother once told me that no one can understand the agony of losing a child unless they’ve suffered through it themselves. I’ve said the same thing about living through Jim’s suicide and the guilt, depression, and sadness I felt when he killed himself and still feel even today.
Many people run away from God when faced with serious problems and instead turn to the world and its shrinks and “talking head” professional pain removers, prescription med’s, alcohol, drugs, and so forth.
What we are trying to do with our worldwide ministries is to provide solutions offered by real people who have lived through real problems and come up on the winning side of things by turning to Jesus Christ.
This Sunday my good friend Terry Warren is going to speak at Honey Lake Church. He’s one of those people who lived life and enjoyed many triumphs but also faced an equal amount of tragedies.
He’ll tell of his promising football career and becoming an All-American linebacker at FSU and then being drafted by the Dallas Cowboys only to suffer a career ending injury before he played his first game. He’ll tell of how Actor Burt Reynolds discovered his singing ability and how he took him to Hollywood and how he got caught up in its glamor and glitz and got a few parts in movies and singing gigs, but then it ended badly. He will relate his promising Broadway career that fizzled and how he moved to Nashville to pursue his music and how he got married, had two great kids and then ended up in a bitter divorce and became dangerously suicidal.
Most importantly he’ll relate how he turned to the Lord and how He changed his life forever. He will also sing some songs that will move you deeply.
Today I’m in San Antonio ministering to prisoners with the Bill Glass Ministries. I’m joined by a plethora of folks with powerful testimonies that will relate how God changed their lives forever. It is inspiring for inmates who have lost all hope to hear of someone who has been in prison themselves or suffered and then triumphed by finding God.
It’s the same outside of prisons and just in ordinary life from soccer mom’s to professional people. We all have problems. Mr. Businessman, who cannot seem to stop drinking, has a crappy marriage, with troublesome kids, may need to talk to someone who was in the same boat, but climbed out of it and got on track. It’s pretty difficult for someone to get, (or take) advice from some tee-totaling preacher that never had a drink or experienced the pressure cooker of building empires. Better to talk to someone who faced the exact same circumstances and solved all of those problems by turning to God.
If you or your daughter were raped, would you prefer to talk to some pastor who hasn’t been raped, or someone who lived through that nightmare themselves and dealt with it successfully? If you were a drug addict would you want to talk with someone who lived it and through God’s help beat it, or someone who doesn’t know squat about drug addiction and its highs and lows other than what they’ve read in books?
Soon we’ll have a website where you can hear powerful testimonies and Q&A’s with real people who faced real problems just exactly like yours. I hope you’ll visit the website and support this important ministry.
Have a great weekend and go to Honey Lake Church, (or somewhere)!
1Peter 1:6
In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials