“THIS IS MY STORY – THIS IS MY SONG”
Part II:
“Go Forth”
Genesis 12:1-8; Exodus 3:1-6; Mark 1:16-20; Timothy 3:1-7
Preached at Beckley Presbyterian
Church on April 17th
2005
Last week I was explaining how there have been three questions that I have been asked. Firstly, “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?” Last Sunday I was sharing how through an unlikely combination of Rock Music, Youth Retreats, chocolate bars and the unmerited grace of God
I came to be embraced by the Christian Faith in my late teens. This week I will
respond to “What made you want to be a minister?” My hope is that
as I share how God called me, you’ll consider where God may be leading you.
Returning to where I left off last week… As a teenager
I went on a Christian youth retreat about freedom. Two friends had prayed for
me that the freedom of Jesus Christ would become a reality in my life, and it surely did! I
knew life could not be the same again. 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. I
was starting over. 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 where was
it leading?
The answer: Downhill – fast! I went back with my
new found Christian brothers and sisters to the reality of my non-Christian friends. I
tried to tell some of them of my new found faith. They laughed. I told them that I’d changed. They didn’t believe
me. I can’t say I’m surprised.
At that stage of my life my language was
not as choice as it should have been, my alcohol intake was more than was healthy, and I resembled the guy you really hoped
your daughter would never bring home for dinner. Inside I felt different, but
truly I had a lot to learn.
After being scorned by some of my friends, I started to behave inconsistently. I would act one way with the folk at church and another way when hanging out with the guys. It didn’t
feel right. I wanted all this freedom stuff, but I didn’t want it to cost me anything. I
liked the good feelings but wanted a good time. After a while it hit me. I wasn’t flying anymore. I didn’t know if the plane had landed, was still
hovering around, or had crashed out beyond repair.
What was going on? God was dealing with me patiently -
in God’s time - showing me new things I had yet to realize. Showing me
ways I could serve Him. Showing me how I was free to do anything, but that not
everything was good for me. Showing me that if I was serious about having the
sort of freedom Jesus expressed, then it demanded deep commitment.
I started to read of people like Deitrich Bonhoeffer and Corrie Ten Boom who found, in the face of
the evil of Nazism and behind prison bars, a freedom that nobody could take away. I
learnt of different Christian communities in the world who, though they faced oppression and displacement, still sang of victory
and freedom and love. I learnt about the apostle Paul who wrote letters which
have shaped 2000 years of Christianity, not from the cozy study of a theological college, but from captivity.
Last week I mentioned the text from Galatians 5: “You
were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature, rather serve one another in love.”
It was as though, through God’s Spirit, God was teaching me the deeper
implications of that text. It’s one that is hard to really live by, because
the nature of Christian freedom is so radically different to that which our culture tells us being free is all about. It is freedom that is found through obedience rather than through doing as we please.
I was asked, “What made you want to be a minister?” And the answer to that question has
its roots in my experience of coming to faith. For me the measure of my discipleship
was my willingness to act upon those things I felt God was calling me to do. Those
who heard the call of Jesus also heard the command to follow. This brings me
to another scripture which has shaped my life: Genesis 12:1, “Now the Lord said
to Abram, Go forth.” Hearing the call to Go forth and acting upon the command were not identical.
I’d like you to picture me as a 19 year old. I’ve
been struggling with how to be a Christian and keep true to my beliefs. I’ve
been spending less time with my non-Christian friends and more time with those who encouraged my faith. After wasting a lot of time in High School and landing in a dead end job stocking shelves in a supermarket,
I’ve been back to college to obtain some qualifications, and I am now working on a Government funded scheme.
The work involves helping elderly and disabled people with their gardening and working out in the countryside
maintaining footpaths. I’m working with a mixed bag of people, including
some young offenders whom I have become friends with, and I’m even sharing my beliefs with them. Better still the hours
are really flexible, so I’m able to give a lot of time to what was becoming my real passion, the band.
I spoke last time about how coming from Liverpool I cherished a dream that, like one of the Beatles whose music I grew up with, I could make it through
life writing songs and playing my guitar. Like Jake or Elwood from that film
‘The Blues Brothers’, I was “on a mission from God,” because this was no ordinary band I was playing in. It was a gospel Rock Band, and we
didn’t want to just be famous throughout the world - we wanted to save the world!
Never mind that some of the church folk said we were playing the Devil’s music whilst some of
the un-churched said, “We like your music, but why do you have to keep bringing Jesus into it?” God was opening
doors. There is talk of record contracts, festival appearances, slots on prime-time
T.V. Now this is back in the mid-1970’s, before the days when there was
even a category known as ‘Contemporary Christian Music.”
To top it all I am nineteen going on twenty, and I’ve fallen in love. As I shared last time, one of the reasons I was attracted to church was that some of the girls looked good.
Now I was engaged to one of them. I
have my wife’s permission to say that because it was her, and after over 25 years of marriage I still think she’s
lovely.
So for a near 20-year old lad things couldn’t
be much better. Great job, great band, great fiancé, great expectations. Yet throughout it all, when I stopped to listen for long enough, there was this little
voice somewhere deep inside that said, “You should go into the ministry.” Whenever
I became aware of it I would say “But Lord, I have my ministry, my work, my music, my relationships. I’m doing fine”
Genesis 12:1 “Now the
Lord said to Abram, Go forth....”
I wonder how many times the Lord told Abram to Go forth
before he went. Over the next two years my comfortable world fell apart. The band, that mission from God, broke up. Two
of them came and told me they had received a better offer. Ouch! That hurt my ego. Yvonne and I set our wedding date and obtained
a loan on this lovely corner house in a nice area of town near the sea front. The
week before we were due to be married the bank informed us the loan was no longer
available.
The day before we were due to be married the works manager called me into the office. “Got a problem,” he said. “According to the
governmental guidelines, we have to pay you a higher wage as a married person, and we don’t have that extra cash in
the budget. If you get married you are out of a job.”
Yvonne and I went ahead and were married. That scripture
about Abram and Sarai leaving their Father’s house and going out not knowing where they were heading took on a special
significance. I had lost my job, I’d lost my place to live, and my musical
dream was shattered. The frightening thing was that I’d been trying so hard to do the right thing, to do what I thought
God was calling me to do, except of course for that little voice about the ministry.
I learnt however that when God is on your case, things work out. Against
all the odds a place became available at a ludicrously cheap rent just a few doors down from where we’d first tried
to purchase a home. Yvonne still had her work, and after a while I managed to
land a position in the Civil Service. A few months after I was dismissed from
that Government scheme the whole project collapsed. If we’d have had a
loan to pay back on that corner house, we could have ended up in serious debt.
And the band? Well, sometimes there is a very thin dividing
line between “Doing the will of God” and “Doing what I’d like the will of God to be for me.”
Sure, we had a ministry and were breaking new ground. But God was saying, “Go forth.”
There were reasons why I didn’t want to be a minister. In
Great Britain most of the clergy I knew were a lot older than I, seemed to have a strange attraction to wearing
dark suits that smelt of mothballs, and didn’t seem at all interested in the things that excited me. They certainly were not cool, and neither seemed particularly relevant.
I wasn’t the only one who didn’t think I would be the ideal material for a man of the cloth.
Some of my friends had even given me the nickname ‘Notavicar’. Whilst it was one thing going to a church, becoming an official part of that authoritarian,
established, and frankly sometimes incredibly boring institution was a different matter. And
as Groucho Marx once said, “I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to be part of any club that would have me as a member.”
After we were married Yvonne and I started attending a church that had been the Welsh Presbyterian
Church, but had become an Elim Pentecostal Church. We became pretty active and they even allowed me be their volunteer youth
leader for a while. One night they had a youth mission rally. It was great. They let me play my guitar and sing a few songs.
During the prayer time, I was sitting in the pew, head down, eyes closed, not really seeking God for
anything in particular, and there started to come over me an overwhelming sense that I should offer myself as a candidate
for the ministry of the Welsh Presbyterian Church. There was no audible voice,
no blinding light or messages from the pulpit or sky, just an incredibly intense feeling that this was something that I had
to act upon, and until I did there would be no peace in my life.
After the service I went to see the preacher. I told him,
“I think I’ve had a call to the ministry...” “PRAISE THE LORD!” he said. I added “…of the Welsh Presbyterian Church.” Now
the Welsh Presbyterians and the Elim Pentecostals hadn’t exactly had a positive history of good relationships. The pastor said, “I think we better talk about this.”
After what seemed like an endless evening as he explained to me the errors of Welsh Presbyterianism,
I gained the impression that in his opinion the Presbyterians were only slightly to the left of the Devil. The strange thing was, the more he talked, the louder the voice inside of me became telling me to offer
myself as a candidate for the Welsh Presbyterian ministry.
I thought I better tell Yvonne. “Yvonne,” I said, using that voice husbands use when they
tell their wives something that they are not sure how they will react to, “Yvonne, I think I’ve had a call to
be a Presbyterian Minister.” Yvonne replied, “Well, God hasn’t
said anything to me about it!” She was about as enthusiastic at the prospect
of being a minister’s wife as I was about being a minister.
We arranged to see Rev Barrie Redmore, the Presbyterian minister who had married us. He listened carefully and then told us to and come back in a year’s time if I still felt a sense of
calling. A year later the feeling was stronger than ever. The process of becoming a candidate for the Presbyterian ministry was set in motion. At the age of 23, after taking nearly five years to come to terms with the notion that God may be calling
me to the ministry, I finally went forth to Aberystwyth, on the coast of Mid-Wales, where I attended theological college.
So in answer to the question, “What made you want to be a minister?” the fact is that I
never wanted to be a minister, but it became a question of obedience to what God was showing me. These days as I look back
over twenty years of ministry on two continents, I am forced to swallow my pride and admit that God knows best.
As I said at the start of this brief series about “This is my story, This is my song,”
my aim in sharing these things is not to put myself on a pedestal, but simply to share with you how God has worked in the
life of one of God’s reluctant disciples, with the prayer that you will discover in your own life the awesome possibilities
that open up to you through giving your life to be lived under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, trusting in God to lead you through
the work of the Holy Spirit and the guidance of God’s Word.
Next week: “What made
you decide to come to America?”
To God be the Glory.
AMEN.
Adrian Pratt
