Bittersweet Farm

It was 47 years ago last Tuesday on August 11,1976 that I was called to pastor my first Church. I was seventeen. I had been preaching since I was 14 in rest homes and jails and prayer meetings and such. I preached wherever I could. I even preached at a large Boy Scout Jamboree once in the Greenville City Park. That summer and in the summer of 1977 I worked through the week at the Union City Body Company building GM delivery trucks.

My first church was a small church in the countryside. Before I left for Moody in late August of 1977 we had a baptism service. I baptized my little brother Nathan and almost all the young people in the church. I think there were over a dozen baptized that day. The little white church was near the Ohio-Indiana border in beautiful Ohio farm country. It was named Pleasant Ridge.

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There was a little rise in the road east of the church. Embedded in my memory is the sight of that old church—light shining out from large stained class windows as I drove down the little knoll toward the church.

I tried to study and stay ahead of the people I pastored. I studied when I could. During the school year I would rush home every Wednesday afternoon and sit at a little typewriter stand at the foot of my bed and write my message for Wednesday night. On Saturday I got up early and wrote my messages for Sunday morning and Sunday night. I leaned heavily on people my dad told me were good to read so I wouldn’t tell the people at Pleasant Ridge anything wrong.

For the first summer my job at the UCBC was to get truck chassis from the lot and drive them into the factory to the assembly line. I would go the truck and wait until they were ready for it. Much of my job was waiting. That gave me time to read in the cab of the truck. That summer one of the books I read was by John R. Rice. The book was called Prayer: Asking and Receiving. It was rich with scripture, simple, clear, strait-forward and helpful. I was growing my own faith and my own walk with God and discovering the God loves to hear and answer prayer.

I loved to read about God answering the prayers of others, but the question in the back of my mind was, will God hear and answer my prayers. I was conscious of my own sinfulness and weakness.

Years have passed but the memory returned to me this week because I was preaching on prayer. I’ve lived long enough to have a journal full of personal evidence that God does indeed answer prayer, even for those who don’t deserve it.

Bittersweet Farm | August 13, 2023