“THIS IS MY STORY – THIS IS MY SONG”
Part I: “Called To Be Free”
I Samuel 20:12-17;
Luke 1:39-45; Mark 1:6-11; Romans 5:6-10
Preached at Beckley Presbyterian
Church on April 10th 2005
There have been three questions that I have been asked on more than one occasion since beginning ministry
here. Firstly, “Adrian, how did you come to faith?” Secondly, “What
made you want to be a minister?” and thirdly, “What made you decide to come to America?”
Seeing as some of you have asked, I’m going to take three weeks to answer each of those questions.
My aim is not to put myself on a pedestal or make out that I’m something special. I’ve made so many mistakes in
my life, and when things have turned out well, I put it down to the Grace of God. My hope is that as I share some things about
my own spiritual journey, you will be encouraged that if God can work in the life of someone like me, He can also do awesome
things for you.
This morning in “This is my story - This is my Song,” I’d
like to share with you how I came to faith in Jesus Christ and some thoughts around Galatians 5:13: “You were called to be free, but do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature. Rather
serve one another in love.”
Freedom is one of the things I’d always searched for in my life. But when I look back to my school days, they were a fine example of the abuse of freedom. I started attending High School at a time when great changes were taking place within the Educational System
in Merseyside, England, where I grew up. They
introduced a system of “Fully Comprehensive Education,” which meant that the High School you went to didn’t
depend on any grades you achieved, but on parental choice.
I was sent to a school which until the year I attended had proudly been known as “Wallasey Technical Grammar
School,” a
school with a history of academic and sporting achievements. A school, which
until then had screened very carefully the kind of students they would admit. The
school had now been renamed “Mosslands Senior Comprehensive” and they had to take any child whose parents wished
them to go there.
On my first day, the principal (who was not far from retirement) did his usual welcome speech, about
how fortunate we all were to have been “chosen” and “allowed” to be part of his wonderful school. Most of us knew, well enough, there was no question of being chosen or fortunate. He had to take the whole lot of us including those who in previous years he’d
have wanted nothing to do with. So my first day at High School I’m sitting
there thinking, “This guy is an idiot. The government’s changed the
rules, but he hasn’t changed his speech. And he’s the Principal!”
So, like a typical teenager, I rebelled. I developed a
great distrust and dislike of authority. I found having to wear a school uniform,
have my hair cut in a certain way, being- told to work at things I really didn’t think were important by people in whom
I had little confidence, infringed on my idea of freedom. I wanted to learn about
life, not how many hours it took Mr. X to get from A to B if he was carrying a load of Y amount. Anyway, if ‘Y’ was so heavy, and it was going to take that long, why didn’t he
take a taxi? I wasted so much time in High School, because I thought freedom
meant doing whatever I wanted to do.
I should explain that I don’t come from a religious family. My
mum’s a good Methodist. But for the rest of the family church wasn’t
even on the agenda. Because most of my family never went to church, Sunday morning
was an excuse for staying in bed. Having to go to Sunday School was an abuse
of my freedom. - Why couldn’t I stay at home like my father, and my elder brother and sister? Why did I have to go and sit on those uncomfortable chairs, in that musty old room with the out-of-tune
piano and listen to those people going on and on?
So early on in life I dropped out of church. I don’t
think I had anything against God; I just objected to being told to go to this place that seemed to bear no relevance to the
rest of my life. I couldn’t say that I believed or not believed in God. I had other things on my mind.
The city that I grew up nearest to was Liverpool. One thing the city was famous for was soccer, or as
we called it football. The city, even today, is football crazy. One of Liverpool’s most famous managers was Bill Shankly. Someone once accused him
of making football more important than religion. He replied, “It’s
far more serious than that!”
The other thing Liverpool was famous for was “The Beatles.” They were,
for the people of Liverpool,
a glimmer of hope. It wasn’t just the music. It was the fact that here were these four working class lads, not particularly academically brilliant, living
in a city that was on the way down, yet through their music and characters they
could rise above it and change the world.
The first recording (and I’m not talking C.D.s—I mean vinyl 33 1/3 records) we had in our
house was “Peter and the Wolf.” The second was “Please, Please
Me” by the Beatles. I was about 7 years old. I grew up with the sounds of both the classics and the pops
in my ears. By the time I was in my late teens and going through a rebellious
stage at school, the Beatles were history.
Other groups had come along. Music had become for some
people not just something you listened to, but a reason for being, an end in itself. I
used to line up all day long to see concerts by bands like “Deep Purple” and “Black Sabbath”- dinosaurs
of rock that were then spring chickens. As a teenager disillusioned with school,
doubtful that if in the disintegrating economic climate of Liverpool there would even be a job for me at the end of the road
(there were some areas near where I lived that had an unemployment rate of 75%), and disinterested in the church, I found
that loud rebellious rock music was something I could identify with.
The image of glamour and success and instant achievement satisfied a deep down urge. I liked the message, “If it feels good, do it” and “Be free to be whatever you want,”
A lot of the songs spoke about the hypocrisy of the establishment. “How can they tell us how to live our lives when they are making such a mess of the world? The politicians are liars, the religious people are hypocrites, the men of war want to destroy us, the atom
bomb is hanging over us, who are they to tell us what to do?” Much of it
is a cry for freedom. It suggests that freedom can be found by hitting out at
the hierarchies and doing whatever takes your fancy.
It was through rock music I eventually returned to the church. I’d
grown up with the Beatles. Maybe if I could play the guitar… bang some drums... write a song, just maybe my life would
amount to something. I could be in one of those mega groups and tour the world
and party on for evermore. So I taught myself to play guitar and spent a lot
of time dreaming.
I had some friends, who not only played guitar far better than me, but also went to a youth club in
the Presbyterian Church at the top of the road where I lived. Occasionally they
would have a local band playing at the church hall. Other times you could just
go along and hang out. I started to be a hanger outer.
One of the youth leaders asked me if I would like to join. He
explained that as well as Friday nights, if I went along to the Youth Fellowship meetings on Sunday mornings I would qualify
for half-price entrance on the nights when they had a band playing. Sunday youth
meeting wasn’t actually going to church, but a discussion group talking about God stuff. “Well,” I thought, “It’s not actually going to church.” I didn’t think going to church would do much for my image as a cool up and coming rock star. But,
mind you, some of those girls at the church were really cute.
As I went along I discovered they talked about big problems like truth and honesty and peace, questions
I was asking myself. An invitation was given to take a weekend course at a Youth
college in a little Welsh town called Bala. I remember thinking, “A weekend
away. And the church is paying half. This
will be a laugh!”
When I arrived at the youth college the theme of the weekend was ‘Freedom’. Boy, I was going to tell all those narrow minded, hypocritical, bigoted, religious people what freedom was
all about. I was expecting, because it was a church college, some very strict
organization. I was surprised after arriving late that nobody was hassling us
to get to bed. I was getting tired when someone said, “Hey, let’s
go to Epilogue.” I didn’t even know what an epilogue was.
But what really got to me was the basement coffee bar. I
should explain that whilst I was heavily into rock music, I am grateful to God that I never got involved with drugs. I’d seen what they could do to people and I wasn’t impressed. Be young, be free, get a little crazy, but when people started taking pills or sticking needles in their
arms, that wasn’t clever.
Anyway, I had a secret craving – Mars Bars. Mars
Bars in Great Britain are a bit like Milky Ways here, but thicker and yummier. If I was at a party and
something illegal was being passed around I could always pull out my Mars Bar and say, “No thanks man, I’ve got
my M.B.”
But back to the basement coffee bar. When you went down
there, nobody served you. You just went and helped yourself to whatever you wanted,
and there was a box to put money in and help yourself to the change. Coming from
an area where the church has put barbed wire on the roof to stop the kids
stealing the lead from around the roofing tiles, I thought to myself, “Are these people crazy? What is to stop you coming down here and helping yourself to the goodies and taking all the money as well?”
I went down there all alone and there was a whole stack of glistening Mars Bars on the counter. It
sounds stupid now, but for the first time in my life I was conscious of having to make a decision to do right or wrong. “Do I just take a Mars Bar, or do I pay for it? No
one is going to know. It’s up to me... Surely these crazy people don’t
actually trust you?”
Getting back to that text from Galatians 5:13: “You were called to be free. But do not use
your freedom to indulge the sinful nature. Rather serve one another in love.”
It would have been so easy just to pig out on illicit Mars Bars, but so unfair
to those people who had given me the freedom to make a simple moral choice.
One thing we had to do at this weekend was prepare an item for a Sunday morning worship service. I’d decided I was going to keep my mouth shut and play guitar. But someone found out I’d written some songs and suggested that I could write something about freedom
to use in the service, the epilogue! This really bothered me, particularly after
the experience all alone in the coffee bar. I liked these people. I didn’t want to let them down.
On Saturday night a little group of us were talking. Two
of them were committed Christians. They spoke about God, not as a distant concept
but as somebody personal. We talked about freedom and how we often abused it.
I was so full of questions. God
must have been with us that night, because every question I threw at them, they seemed to find a bible passage that gave the
answer in a way that I could relate to. (They confessed later that this wasn’t something they were usually so good at!)
It slowly started to dawn on me that there was a whole realm of freedom that I had never explored;
the sort of freedom that was in the life and work and words of Jesus Christ. Here
was this one man, who died horribly, yet praying that the abuses and mistakes we make with our freedom (mistakes He was paying
the price for!) might be forgiven. After His death, His followers are saying
that He is alive and that His love could be a living force in our lives — through the Holy Spirit.
I was hearing all this from some people who had a dimension to their lives that was lacking in my own.
It was all a bit mind boggling. One
of them prayed a prayer that night asking Jesus to make Himself a personal reality in my life and for His love to set me free.
I was worn out. In a way very uncharacteristic
of a youth weekend, I slept.
Sunday morning I woke up and all I can tell you is that I knew life would not be the same again. It’s hard to put into words. It
felt a bit like when you are on a jet plane and you zoom down the runway, and the power pushes you back in your seat. It was like starting over again. Even
watching Eric Clapton burning out the blues hadn’t felt so good.
I knew the reality of Jesus Christ. I knew that God was
my Father. I knew that the Holy Spirit was doing something inside of me that
had not happened before. But I didn’t know where that journey was taking
me or how it would affect my life. I had come to faith. The freedom that had eluded me had now found me.
Such is my story, such is my song. But there’s more
to tell and time has gone. But for those who asked how I came to faith, hopefully that answers the question. Next week I’ll try and answer, “What made you want to be a minister?”
Adrian Pratt
