Episode 87

This week, we continue the How Were Your Barriers Removed series in an interview with recurring guest MD. Traditionally in this series, we focus on the barriers people have regarding salvation, but there are also barriers after salvation that can keep us from seeing the cross clearly in all areas of our lives. MD was born into a Christian household to parents involved in ministry and gives testimony of having been saved very early on in life. In this episode, he shares some of the barriers he encountered after salvation, and how the Lord proved Himself to be the Author and Finisher of his faith, just as He promises to be the same for all who will trust Him.

I will never leave thee nor forsake thee. Never. That’s a big word. I mean, we say never. We don’t really mean never. God says never and he means literally, absolutely, 100% of your life. I will never leave you, nor forsake you. Wow.

Thank you for tuning in to the Removing Barriers podcast. I’m Jay and I’m NCG and we’re attempting to remove barriers so we can all have a clear view of the cross.

This is episode 87 of the Removing Barriers podcast. And this is the 25th in the series of how were your barriers Removed? And in this episode, we’ll find out how MD’s barriers were removed when he came to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Hi, this is Jay MCG and I would like for you to help us remove barriers by going to removingbarriers net and subscribing to receive all things removing barriers. If you’d like to take your efforts a bit further and help us keep the mics on, consider donating at removingbarriers.net/donate. Removing barriers, A clear view of the cross.

Md welcome back to the Removing Barriers podcast. Thank you very much. You’re expert at this. Now, I don’t know about that, but as Jay said, I am seasoned. We’ll leave it as that.

So let’s get in the testimony. What state or country were you born in? I was born in the United States, in the state of Oregon. Oregon? I thought it was California. No, actually I moved to California when I was about nine years old. But I was born in a little logging town that I don’t even know if it still exists in Oregon. Lived in a lot of little towns as a kid up there. Where would you say you grew up from? The area about the middle of the Oregon rainforest, over into what’s called the high desert, which is much farther east, part of the country, over near Idaho. So that whole area, we were never more than two or three years in one place the whole time we lived there. Wow. Is that because you were in a military family or something? No. My dad was a Baptist preacher. He was raised a Mennonite. And the Church that he was in taught you could not know you were saved. And if you were saved, you lost your Salvation the instant you sinned against God, no matter when it was. And you could only get saved again in Church, which in his Church was only on Sunday morning. So you went through an awful lot of a week if you weren’t an extremely devout person who thought you never sinned in deathly, fear that you were going to die before you get back to Church again. And by the time he was probably 1516 years old, he’d read his Bible enough. He understood that that is not what the Bible had to say. So as I was growing up, he told me the reason he became a Baptist preacher was because at the time, the only people he could find who were unabashedly preaching the whole Bible, without question were the Baptist. So he became a Baptist, and that’s what he was when I was born. He was pastoring in Silverton, Oregon at the time, and he was also, I think, part time deputy Sheriff. And at one point he was even the Sheriff for about 12 hours.

Long story. A lot of political things going on right then, and the Sheriff just quit in the middle of the night. My dad was the only officer he had, so he was sworn in as a Sheriff until they could get someone else 12 hours later. He never planned on being a Sheriff because he always wanted to be a preacher. But since he was still a preacher, I guess it didn’t change anything. But where he preached was always in small and very impoverished churches in areas that were very impoverished. The place that I first remember best, there were, I think, 800 people in the entire county. And the county encompassed nearly 2700 sq. Mi. Of the high desert of Oregon. And with 800 people in the county, there aren’t very many churches. And people don’t get to Church very often. And so the Church because apparently the pastor, I think the pastor had moved on, maybe died. I don’t know. I was a little kid at the time, but there’s a result of that. My dad had his work cut out for him, going out and finding people who’d been at the Church and getting them to come back about three years later when the Church was big enough and could afford to hire a pastor because he worked free the whole time. He helped him form a pulpit committee, find a new pastor. And by the time I knew that that’s what he was doing, he’d already been and visited a number of different churches and preached there. And as a kid, I always went with him. The whole family went with him. So we were for about the last three months, I guess, that we were in Selma, Oregon. We were traveling all over Oregon, visiting different places and going to different churches. And ultimately we moved from Selma, Oregon. That was when we first went to California, and we moved to Sacramento for about six months. He didn’t have a Church. Then we moved to San Jose, and that’s where I actually no, I’m sorry. From there, we moved up to the Sierra Nevada mountains again, small Church, but he grew that Church helped that Church to grow. And there are a lot of people there wanted to have a Church. They just didn’t have one. So he helped that Church grow until they got to the point where they could hire a pastor. And the last I heard, my niece and her husband live in that town still. In fact, they live in the house I grew up in up there. They moved the house, but they live in that house. There are members of that Church, and last I heard, they have 4500 members in Church in an area that’s mostly tourists in summertime and really doesn’t have many people during winter at all. So Church is doing great. They just needed a pastor who was willing to come and do it at a time when I think I told Jay a little while ago, I think I told you, too. God doesn’t need really smart people or really trained people. He just wants people to dumb to duck. I think my dad would have, with all honesty, said I was too dumb to duck. But lest anyone think that is putting him down at all, he had two earned doctorates in theology and in psychology and an honorary doctorate before he passed away. And he was teaching in College the day he died. And it started a College in Nigeria that to this day is still preaching.

Candidates, describe your mum and your siblings, because I imagine if your father was moving around as much as you describe, she really had to be the one behind the scenes, holding everybody together and getting everything prepared and helping. Could you describe the rest of your family, what type of family you were born into? Well, I was really the odd duck being the youngest member of the family and the only member of the family who had any interest in technical things. So I was an engineer for 41 years. I think I’ve said that before. My oldest brother is in the Ministry now in Washington state. But I’ve kind of lost track because we’ve not seen each other since dad died 1214 years ago. We’re just too far apart. We still see each other. My oldest sister is in a retirement home up in Fort Collins, Colorado, where her son and grandsons live. My younger sister, who is 13 months older than I am, lives in Louisville, Kentucky, and I do see her pretty regularly, and I talk to her on the phone nearly daily. She was a weather reporter, I’m sorry, traffic reporter in Louisville, Kentucky, for nearly 20 years before and after her husband died of cancer. Now she works in a high end grocery store with an even higher end cheese table, and they call her the Cheese Lady Company, whose cheeses they sell requires that you go to a scripted seven month training program at a College to get a certificate. Her store put her through that training. I guess she’s really earned the quality of Cheese Lady. So we’re spread all over and doing all kinds of different things. And I’m the only one in the family who was in the military when my father was in the army during Second World War. But he was a conscientious objector. He was in did. His time was out, but he was drafted. I joined the Navy when I was 18 years old, nine weeks before my wife and I got married. By plan. We had discussed it. We knew exactly what tracks were following. And so when I joined the Navy, she expected it. We traveled all over the country together while I was in school. I went to Guam, was there for three months before she came over, and we’ve spent the entire nine years everywhere I went, we were together. So kids born while we were traveling. But the whole family really adapted to that travel and that moving really well, I think. And like I said, my younger sister and I, we were always closer together anyway as kids. So we are still very close. But I talked to the others whenever we happen to get together, when we happen to talk, we just don’t spend a lot of time going out of our way to talk to each other. I don’t know of any hard feelings that caused that. We’re not real close. But since I have five of my own kids, and last count, three people who’ve adopted me, and that means I have 27, got 17 of my own grandkids, got ten more from the adopted folks, folks that adopted me. One lady asked me two months ago in a store, Will you be my dad? And I knew her, and I said, sure. It turns out she’s a grandma, so I guess that makes me a great grandpa. But every time we see her in the store, she calls our eldest daughter Rebecca. She says, Hi, SIS. She calls me dad, runs over to hug me. And we love each other. It doesn’t take any more than just God bringing people together. I guess how my family turned out. I think they’ve had their ups and downs, brothers and sisters, but they’re all serving the Lord where they are. My sister doesn’t get out because of her health. She doesn’t get to go to Church very often, so she plays the piano and they have a hymn service in the retirement home she lives in. So she plays a piano for them every Sunday for their him service, something she’s always wanted to do, never quit. And my younger of my two sisters is helping to raise her grandson and his adoptive father. Neither of them are saved, and so she’s got her hands full witnessing to them and teaching them. I think we’re all serving the Lord where we are. It’s just God spread us all over the country, right? You spread my kids all up and down the East Coast. So I guess that’s just kind of a thing, right?

I know you got saved at an early age, but how much of your life do you remember before you got saved? I remember little snippets as a child of just childhood fun and play. I don’t remember a lot about what led up to me getting saved, other than I had to have come to the knowledge that I wasn’t going to heaven without getting saved, without accepting Christ as my Savior. Without acknowledging my sin. Do you remember the first time you actually heard the gospel, though? There isn’t any way I’d remember it because I probably wasn’t two minutes old. I mean, I literally back then, I doubt women didn’t stay in a hospital after having a baby. And I doubt very seriously that. Actually, I probably I think my mom was in the hospital for about a week because of complications. So I probably was a week and a half old first time I heard the gospel. But obviously that doesn’t sink in for an infant, right? So I don’t really have any idea when I really began to understand it. I have known Bible stories. I have memories of teachers from the time I was a year and a half, two years old. Do you remember that far back little snippets? It’s not really clear memory. And in fact, I had a long conversation with my sister just the other day about things we remember as teenagers. And it turns out that even though we lived in the same house and talked daily, we have vastly different memories of an awful lot of that. So no way to really say you talked about the fact that you must have known about the need to turn from your sin and turn to Christ. So around that time when you were very young and you got saved, would that be the same time that you came to a full realization of your sin, or is that something that came along later as you grew and as you became obviously older? I’m absolutely certain it grew over time, but I don’t think there was ever I honestly cannot say there was ever any one individual turning point in my life. I did for a short period. I say short. It wasn’t short when it was happening, but I went through a period where I really, seriously doubted my Salvation, prayed about it, prayed about it and prayed about it. And the day I found myself saying to God, God, if I’m really not saved. And I thought, that is the stupidest thing I have ever said to anybody in my life. And God’s got to be laughing at me because I would an unsaved person ask God if I’m really not saved, save me, because under generate heart, doesn’t even know to speak to God. And that was when I realized idiot Satan just loved twisting you all around. How old were you then? Oh, I would have been 21, 22 years old. It was when I was stationed in Guam already and Rachel had come over my wife. I would have had to have been 21 or 22 years old by then. We got married, we were 18, and we left the United States literally for the last time for seven years in 1974, last time for five years because we were in two years in Guam, three years in Japan, didn’t get back to the States at all during that time period, and it would have been within six months of my arriving in Guam. Yeah, I’m best I can say I would have been 21, 22 years old somewhere around there. Okay.

Do you actually remember your Salvation experience? Did you go to your dad and tell him you want to be saved? I really have no idea who in my family really led me to the Lord, although I would expect it was probably my mom because one of the sad truths and my dad acknowledged it, he understood it of being a preacher’s kid, especially small town churches, is that the preacher can’t spend near as much time with his family as he wants to. And so, Jay, you asked me earlier about describing my mom’s role. I have always maintained that a mom at home and my mom was at home most of the time. A mom at home really sets the entire tone of the house. She’s in control of the emotions of the house. And my mom was one of the most patient people I’ve ever known in my life. Calm, quiet. I remember a day that my sister got between two Siamese cats who were fighting. And my sister was about six years old. And my mom never did in her entire life drive a car. And the nearest doctor was blocks away. And I remember, even though I was only five years old, my mom running down the Hill on the mountain we lived on with my sister in her arms and her scalp was totally lacerated, bleeding everywhere. And my mom running down the Hill with her to take her to the doctor. And not crying, not screaming, not yelling, just getting about the business of taking care of her kids. That was just mom. So when we had problems at home, mom wasn’t putting up with it, but she never raised her voice. She never got angry. But we knew when we were wrong. We knew. So loving, patient, firm, and the most godly woman I have ever known in my life, bar none. Really wonderful lady. And an interesting and funny thing. And I didn’t know this about my brothers and sisters, but when I told my mom that I was going to marry my at the time girlfriend, my mom said, I knew that the day you met her. That had been five months before. And two months later, I came home from the Navy boot camp and we got married. My mom knew, but it turns out she told my brother and my two sisters the same thing about their spouses. Oh, wow. She knew. Don’t ask me how, but I suppose that’s part of being at home and knowing your kids. And there’s one thing I’d say about my mom. She knew her kids. So while nobody else in the family really understood my love of science and engineering and building and breaking things, and I probably broke a lot more than I built as a kid. I would come into the kitchen, I would explain to my mom what I was doing. I would talk to her about science. I would tell her about physics. I do non right triangle, three dimensional trigger in my head. And I did back then some. I wasn’t near as careful or capable of it as I am now. But I’d go into the kitchen and I would explain it to my mom. And mom would just look at me and say, and I didn’t realize till years later she didn’t understand a word I was saying. She’s just encouraging me. Yes. But I walked in one day from an experiment that went wrong, and I literally had sunburned my face, blistered all the skin on my face and burned all the hair off of everything forward of an inch from my forehead. So no chin hair, no facial hair, no eyebrows, no bangs, no nothing. And my face looked like a beef steak tomato. And I remember my mother looking at me and saying, what did you do? Dinners in five minutes. Go wash up. That was it. Oh, wow. It’s safe to say that she was pretty much the rock in the family. Pretty much. My dad was a rock, too, but she was the one who was always there. And if you wanted to break yourself on a rock, you could do that, too.

So being saved at five years old is pretty young. Do you remember if there were any barriers that would prevent you from being saved even earlier? Or you would say maybe that the barrier was that five years old is when you understood the gospel. I think that’s probably when it ceased to be just a lot of really wonderful stories. And they were I mean, even for a little child, they’re wonderful stories out of the Bible. When they’re told by people who have a real passion for God’s word, they sink in. But you still don’t realize God’s not just telling me stories about people. God is talking to me about me. And I don’t remember ever really coming to God’s talking to me. This is me. I don’t remember coming to that. But very clearly there was that point when I was five years old, when those stories ceased to be just beautiful, wonderful stories. And it became truth. It had truth because the Bible is the unerring word of God. And Interestingly enough, I’m reading my way through if you all were at the service. When the pastor mentioned the Reese Historical interleave historical Bible in the King James Version, we had one in our Church bookstore. He had bought it and I asked him about it, and I didn’t want his copy and he wanted his copy. In fact, I think he’d given his copy away, as a matter of fact. But we went online, both of us, and looked it up to see if I could buy a copy. For some weird reason, the hard bound version was $678 via Amazon. The paperback version was $470. Something leaf made of gold. I wondered. But I’ll tell you, I mentioned it to one of my daughters in law. And it turns out that Professor Reese was her professor when she was in school. And so she went online and she found him and she got me a copy of it and gave it to me less than three days later. Oh, I wasn’t even going to consider buying it. In fact, the pastor loan be his. And when I found out what it cost, I said, Pastor, I cannot have this in my house because I can’t replace it. And I gave it back to him. So I’ve been reading the one she got me. But even more, I’ve been reading it online because with an electronic version, when you want to read a note, you just touch on it and it takes you right to the note. I am amazed in reading what these Bible scholars found both historically, geologically, archaeologically, and in terms of the original language. In the original Scrolls, there’s not a single error and our understanding of it because the King James Version was not the original language. King James Version is incredibly accurate. And so I’m just having a ball reading it. Yes, I knew that story when I was a kid. Yes. It hasn’t changed any. It’s still true. I learned new things from them all the time because the Bible is ever true and God is ever able to teach us something new. But so, again, I’m going back to your original question. I really don’t know, other than it had to become personal.

When you described at that time when you were about 20 something and you were in Guam and you were wrestling with God, figuring out whether or not you were saved, could you describe that experience a little bit? Because I would imagine that there are many people who go through that same struggle wondering, am I really saved? Am I on my way to heaven? Am I right with God? Am I reconciled? Could you describe the circumstances of that struggle? Were there barriers that popped up that made you question who God was and what he said, or was it more of a you know, I’m reading this in Scripture and I don’t understand it type of thing, or was it more like a wrestling because you were saved so young that you don’t have that? Oh, I was saved on such and such a date that a lot of people tend to say is their Salvation. That last has always been somewhat of a problem for me only I agree. People have a date. Right. And I don’t have a date. People have a circumstance. I don’t have a circumstance. People have a description of a place and a time. And I’m sorry, I was five years old. Right. I don’t have any of that. But actually, none of that really applied in the situation in Guam. I grew up a very angry young man. I do not know to this day what contributed to that anger, but I was horrendously angry all the time and I just managed to get along with people anyway. And my dear, lovely wife had already put up with it for four years. So obviously she was more of a Saint than I was. And I just came to a point where I was just so angry that I think Satan was able to use that against me. So I don’t remember an exact circumstance, but just one day I woke up and realized it might have been because I was so angry, it might have been realizing that this isn’t what God wants from me. So maybe I’m not what God wants. Maybe I’m not. The anger you mean is not what I got you. Okay? Yeah. So maybe I’m not really God’s. Well, it wasn’t until later, after I had settled that with the Lord. It’s interesting that God didn’t need to use a human being to settle it. He just needed to actually use my intellect. He actually just slapped me upside the head and said, you’re an idiot. Stop that. Isn’t it awesome how God talks to us in ways that we understand? Like I said, he doesn’t need to fight smart people and when he gets a dumb one, he knows he’s got a dumb one. But later on, I was sitting with a missionary who was on the staff of the Church we helped start in Guam with Harvest Baptist Church. And that’s a really interesting story on its own.

Rachel and I were at their house and we were just sitting there talking to them and he knew how angry I was and we talked and we talked and the ladies left the room and he and I probably talked for 5 hours. And what he told me, what he convinced me of was that I really needed to take all of my sin. Just spend the night, the whole night until God said, okay, we peeled the onion and there’s no more onion and just go talk to God. And every time he showed me something that was not right in my life, ask him to forgive me. And I did. And boy, Howdy was it a life changer? Because I’ve never been that angry since ever. I don’t think anything has ever made me that angry since. So that was just years and years and years of pent up anger. I used to before I met my wife, I used to go to an airport nearby and just by myself because I was so mad. I didn’t want to be around anybody who knew me. And I would go sit in a teeming airport and just watch people and listen to their conversations for hours. Literally for hours. I don’t want anyone around me that knew me. I don’t want to talk to anybody and nobody ever did. But when God got a hold of me. No, God talks to us whether we want people talking to us or not. And he did. And through this missionary friend of ours, and we’ve been really close friends, we’ve kind of lost track of each other because he and his wife have been on the field, traveling around the world different fields over and over. I think my wife probably knows where they are now. And I think actually they came off the field due to health. They would be well, he and his wife would be pushing 90 now. So they’re probably not healthy enough to be on the field anymore. But if I had the opportunity to tell him how much I appreciate what he did, I am almost certain he wouldn’t even remember it. But I’d love to be able to tell him because it changed my life tremendously.

And I said, there’s a real story about that Church we started over there when I got to Guam. Part of what was going on was that I was trying to find a Church like the one my dad passed through it. And the only churches in the island were Southern Baptist churches. And I will say to this day, having been to every one of the three Southern Baptist churches that were on the island at the time that the pastors preached the Bible. But there was a fundamental problem in the way the Church was run. I mean, not just because I was raised by a Baptist preacher’s kid, but things that God just showed me. This ain’t home for you because this is wrong. An example would be a men’s meeting where they went to a restaurant that had one large room that did not have a bar in it and one large room that centered on the bar. And they decided to have the meeting in the room with the bar and the pastor and all the Deacons went up to get mixed drinks before we sat down for a prayer meeting. Oh, my. I’ve been going to that Church for about a month and a half, and I can tell you I didn’t stay. Now, mixed drinks. We’re not talking beer. We’re talking tarred liquor stuff. Yeah. Wow. And I’m not trying to be judgmental about it, but you think about the testimony it gives to the people who run the restaurant, who run the bar. Try going back and tell them about how great God is after that. The Bible doesn’t say, don’t ever drink alcohol, but it does say you’re foolish if you abuse it, right? I would say that was abuse. So that was the kind of thing I was seeing in these churches. And each one of them God said, not that one, not that one, not that one. And the whole time, a friend who was my military sponsor on the island had been calling me, saying, there are no good churches on this island. He was an independent fundamental Baptist and I wasn’t then. And he kept saying, Come meet with us. Bring your wife, bring your daughter, my wife and my son and I will just have our own Bible study Sunday morning. Well, I didn’t like the guy. I didn’t want to be in a meeting with him. And I finally gave up. And I said, Is that option still open? He said, yes, it is. And we went over and six months later, we had 85 people meeting in his housing on base. And the chaplain kicked us off base because we’re generating too much traffic on a Sunday morning, meaning they weren’t going to the Navy Chapel. So we went downtown.

They rented an apartment downtown. And so we used their apartment. And I guess less than a year after we started meeting, we had a chartering service, Harvest Baptist Church, which, if you know the name, is a huge Church in Guam now and serving God and doing a wonderful job. And I know the historian for the Church. I’m related to her. So when they had their 46th or 45th anniversary, whatever it was, I called her and I said, I don’t know if you know the early history. And she said, I don’t. And I told her all about it. And she called me back a month later and she said, I have searched every bit of history, including the geographical and the government history, and there’s no reference to any of that ever occurring. God, for his own reasons, did not want that charter to have our name on it. I don’t know why. I don’t care why. I’m just glad the Church is there and it’s doing God’s work. But that was another example of too dumb to duck. It’s what God has done. But that was very much as a result of my finally getting my heart right with Lord clay in the Potter’s hand. And however God chooses to fashion us and make us into whatever tool or whatever he needs to do, whatever he wants to do in whatever situation, that’s what yeah, because the interesting thing is when we left Guam, we went to Japan, and the only English speaking Church in the area within two hour drive of us was a Southern Baptist Church. And we became anchors in that Southern Baptist Church. And there were a number of hostile factions tried to take the Church over in the three years we were there. And each time we were able to stand up with the pastor and say, Nope, right. Too dumb to duck. God just puts you where he wants you. That’s the whole point. If you’re just willing to do what God wants you to do. So I’m furniture, and I love being furniture, because if God wants somebody to sit on me as a piece of furniture, that’s my job. And ultimately he gets the glory. Which is the whole point. Yes, absolutely.

Let’s dive a little bit into how you raise your kids because you are a father, a grandfather, a husband of almost 50 years going on. It’s 49 in June. Yes. So being saved that early in life, how did you help shepherd your kids hat back to the Lord? Because I imagine that you got saved at an early age. You never really went out in the world and have all these crazy things like some other folks. How did you shepherd your kids heart to the Lord as they were growing up? I can’t claim, and I don’t think my wife would either any special wisdom or knowledge that led us to what we did. But one of the first things we did because we grew up reading books a lot was we decided we would not have a television in our house until our kids were at least ten or twelve years old. I didn’t see the first television I ever saw until I was ten years old. And it was a little box about four inches square and black and white and grainy. So I didn’t grow up with a lot of TV. I grew up reading a lot. And the Bible was part of what I read, but it was never rammed down my throat. Nobody ever said it’s Sunday, we’re reading the Bible. We’re not reading anything else, but we always had Bible stories available. We always had things about the Bible. We always had God’s word available. And if we had questions, we had parents we could ask and they would tell us the truth. And Rachel’s folks were probably even more convinced of those things than I was. So we never had, I don’t think, a moment of disagreement about raising our kids the same way we’d been raised because it worked. So we raised our kids that way. And what’s really fascinating is we look at our kids, our grandkids now, and we don’t direct our kids about how they raise their kids. We believe God gave us a job. Raise them, shepherd them, let them go do the job. If you taught them right, they’ll do it right. Our kids are serving God everywhere that they are. All five of them are in churches serving the Lord in those churches, doing jobs God never called me to do. Our middle son is down in Florida, and he’s been the choir director in his Church. He preaches when the pastor has to be away. He’s been the Sunday school director in the Church. He’s been a mission outreach to the homeless director and a member of it. And his kids were really unhappy when I was down there to visit, and they had to give up their seats in the vehicle going out on Sunday to distribute goods so that I could go out. They were willing, but they sure weren’t giving them up two Sundays in a row because they just absolutely love going out and doing that. It’s just kind of the way my kids are. Our oldest son, he’s up in Pennsylvania. He’s a Deacon. He’s been the Secretary Treasurer for the Church. He’s been the youth director. I mean, basically filling in everywhere God wants him to fill in. So I think what my parents did in raising us the way they did and we didn’t have a TV because we couldn’t afford one, probably paid off in us not having a TV even though we could afford one, because our kids grew up reading Bible books, reading Bible stories, reading books that we were careful about to make sure that even if they were not directly stories about the Bible, they were still books that would not lead them astray it makes a huge difference.

But parents have to be active in teaching their kids something that really hit me when I think before I think before our oldest daughter was even five years old. The Bible talks about teaching your kids, and it kind of delineates when and if you read that passage. I can’t remember exactly where it is. But if you read that passage, it’s when I’m sitting down, when we’re walking in the way, when we’re eating. The only time that he’s not teaching his children is when they’re asleep. That’s the only time. That doesn’t mean that you have to pound it into their heads all the time. But I was talking to my granddaughter today. She went to the store with me in my truck, and she really has been itching to ride in my truck. And we got in the truck and we started talking. And she’s very attentive to anything someone older than her says. I mean, she really pays attention and she can read it back to you later on and she can tell you what it means to her. So she thinks about it. And the whole time we were traveling, she was asking questions about really how to live as an adult, as a Christian. Well, if you’re willing to teach them, they’ll ask. She knows I like to teach, so she asks. I’m sure sometimes she regrets it by the end of the day, but she pays a lot of attention. So that’s really the way we raise our kids. And you can ask my kids and they will tell you, yes, dad loves to teach and dad loves to talk, and he talked a lot. But you look at their lives and I’m satisfied looking at their lives. It paid off.

What would you say to your critics, though, because you got saved at a very early age, and some would say, man, there’s no way you truly understand what you need to understand to be saved at such a young age. How would you answer that question? Jesus Christ, when he was talking to his disciples, said, because some of them didn’t want little children to come talk to him. He said, unless you understand the word like these little children, understand it, there’s no way you can get saved. What I would tell people is, yes, a five year old can understand it. The Bible talks about the age at which you can understand. We call it the age of accountability, because when you can understand, you become accountable to God. I never know who’s hit the age of accountability. I can’t tell God knows, because God knows all. But what I would say about a five year old kid coming to that conclusion is that it’s so simple. Here’s the important part. The first thing in the Bible and I know you two will agree with this all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, even a little child, and anybody can understand that. And Jesus Christ died on the cross, rose again, shed his blood to pay for my sins because my blood wouldn’t do the job. So he did it. And a little child can understand that. And it doesn’t have to be gruesome and it doesn’t have to be horrendous and it doesn’t have to scare them or anything else. But a little child can understand, I’m a sinner and I’m going to hell, and he made it so I don’t have to and I don’t want to go to hell. The little kid doesn’t have a whole lot of options. So when he understands that the option is I’m either going to hell or I’m going to ask you this into my heart and I’m going to confess my sins pretty stark, pretty simple, pretty easy. Five year old can understand it. I did. I’ve known many five year olds who did. I have some grandkids who got saved at five years old. And the fruit is obvious when they get excited at nine years old about leading a little Jewish kid down the street to the Lord. That’s pretty obvious. Fruit. God has done the work. Yeah, definitely.

What’s going to my mind at this point is I remember the preacher I grew up under. He would say that many times that folks want to have what we call a testimony. So they want to go out into the world. And when they return to the Lord, they can say, oh, I don’t want to use cold, but give a testimony of God saving them from some her end of sin that they have committed or some errand of lifestyle that they were in and that showed a powerful Grace of God to bring them back in. And he will contend and say that the most powerful testimony you can have is if you get saved at a young age and you have never lived in the world of sin, you got saved at five. I got saved when I was twelve. You’ve never really been into the world or experience many of the heartaches of the world. Would you say that you have a powerful testimony or would you say that your testimony is not as powerful or not as relevant as someone who have been in the world for 1015 years and then the Lord saved them out of that. I don’t think there’s an issue of relevance. I don’t think there’s a difference in the relevance. You have children. Have your boys ever thrown a temper tantrum? Yes. Little children can be pretty sinful. Oh, yeah. And Jesus Christ himself said, if you offended one part of the law, he was offended in all of the law. And children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. So they may not understand that last part, but it is true nonetheless that God did say it. We all sin. Nobody has to teach a one year old or a two year old how to lie. When confronted with, did you break that? Did you yank the dog’s tail, whatever. Nobody has to teach a little child how to lie. Nobody ever taught me how to lie. Nobody ever taught my grandkids how to nobody ever taught my kids how to lie. And I guarantee you, every single one of us has done it. So what God saves you from may be bad choices you’ve made and the consequences of them. So maybe you have a very stark testimony. Maybe you have a very bad background, a very tough background, or maybe you’re a little child who never knew anything more than, I’m a sinner and I’m on my way to hell and I don’t want to be there.

I have a very good friend, a young man who is one of those who’s one of my adopted kids. He’s a long ways away. He calls me dad. He was addicted to drugs. He was addicted to alcohol when he was twelve years old. He and three other boys started their own set of Ms 13, and it’s operating today. And these guys are now adults. He’s in his 20s. He’s not been in that group for a long time. And he went through a lot of beatings and hospitalizations because he left. He got saved when he was 19 years old. He was in jail in an adult jail for the first time in his life. That’s where he enjoyed. If you want to put that in quotes, his 18th birthday. He’d been in out of juvenile hall all his life. He had never had anyone love him and we didn’t know anything else. But when he had a problem, we took him in and he lived in our house for a little while, and he had a girlfriend living with him, and we would not let her be put out on the street. So we told him, we can’t take you both in. We don’t have a place we can put you to sleep. And we’re not going to let you sleep in the same room because that’s what they’ve been doing. He understood. So for a while he even lived so rough that in the middle of the winter he was living in Culverts. Then he got saved. He got into a program up in Illinois. I’m still in touch with him. And he is absolutely almost violent about not going back to his old ways. He got saved out of a horrible background. His father was an illegal and was a convicted murderer here, both in the United States and in his original home country, crossed the border back into the United States three times. He has no idea where his father is now. He really doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t know where his mother is because she abandoned him and his brother and his sister when he was 13 years old. They were on their own. So this guy has really been through a rough time. And he has I think I’ve seen as many as 20 signatures on his Facebook page from kids and young adults up there where he is now saying, Jay, are we going to Church this Sunday, Jay, or where are we going? I mean, these are kids that he has been dealing with, whether he’s led them to the Lord or not. We were talking one time and I said, Jay, I’ve read some of what these kids are saying. They are not kids who would have ever talked to me for 10 seconds. I said, most kids you hung out with when you were down here with us, if I came to find you and I went to help them out quite a few times, I said, I’d get there and there’d be these kids hanging around with you. And they would scatter like roaches when the light hit them because I’m not somebody they want to be around or talk to or see. I look all wrong and I’m dressed nice. And I said, these kids are listening to you. So you tell me. And I told him, I said, you tell me when you’re feeling like you come from a bad background and people don’t respect you. Did God choose a vessel who can do a job and reach a group of people who won’t be reached any other way when he chose you? Or did they make a mistake? And he said, you’re right, dad. And he went back to work.

You know, when somebody tells me their story and they say, no, I’ve had people tell me God could never save me because I was so horrible. I take him to the thief on the cross. He was about as bad as they could get. He was a murderer. He was a convicted seditionist. He was being hung for his crime. And when the other guy railed on Jesus, he said, you can’t talk to him that way. You realize you and I are here because we deserve this. He doesn’t deserve this. And then he asked Jesus to save him. And Jesus said, this day shall dubbed me in paradise. Now, how long did it take him to get saved? Well, however long it took between the time of that conversation and Jesus Christ dying, it was done. Didn’t take any time, didn’t take conversion, didn’t take baptism didn’t take and he was about as bad as anybody can get. So my answer to people who say God can’t save me is, why can’t he, if he could forgive that, if he could forgive the people who hung him on the cross and killed him, if he could forgive the Roman soldiers who beat him the way they did and bloodied him, if he could forgive me, if he could forgive so many other people whose stories are a lot worse than anybody I’ve ever talked to. I think if you give my friend up in Illinois, what have you possibly done that an allknowing and Almighty and allpowerful God can’t forgive? And when people say, well, but my testimony is so horrible and there’s somebody who needs to hear it, that’s the whole point I’ve been saying all evening, God doesn’t need trained or intelligent or wise or well spoken or he just needs somebody to dumb to duck. Well, I think God will slap anybody upside the head who belongs to him and say, there’s a job for you. And all we got to do is say, yes, sir, we’ll go do the job. And as Paul said at one point in the New Testament, if they kill me for God’s glory, it’s God’s glory. There we go. That’s pretty much a period of the whole story. I think.

You’re listening to the Removing Barriers podcast. We assisted with MD and we are finding out how well his barrier is removed. We’ll be right back.

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Two Corinthians 517 says, Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. Old things are passed away. Behold, all things are become new after Salvation. Md, what changes were evident in your life that you can recall five years old? It’s really hard to remember, but I think probably the thing that made the most difference was the sudden ability to sleep without nightmares. I mean, I don’t remember a lot of nightmares as a kid, but I remember some horrible screaming memes, and I don’t remember any of those after that. Five years old, I probably was another two years before I really became fascinated by science. And it’s always been by applied science, what’s going on in the world around me, what’s really happening. And I know kids that are terrified of things like lightning or spiders. I think I could directly attribute it to the fact that I knew God was taking care of me. That the first time it was when I was in second grade, so I would have been six years old. I started school a year early, standing on the porch of my parents’house and watching a lightning Bolt hit the ground during a horrendous storm. And it hit the ground right across the country road from us. It hit a power station, and the Ark was incredible. And the power station literally turned into a pool of glass in the sand across from us in the desert. It didn’t scare me. I was fascinated, but I honestly believe that from the time I was a little kid, I’ve been fascinated by things like that and not afraid of them because I have always known. And if I ever was scared, my parents reminded me what God said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee. Never. That’s a big word. We say never. We don’t really mean never. God says never, and he means literally, absolutely, 100% of your life. I will never leave you, nor forsake you. Wow. And I think even as a little kid, I began to understand that very early because my parents kept teaching me that. But they didn’t say that ever to me before I got saved. I can’t say that I remember them not doing it. I’m just going to say they were not foolish enough to ever say to an unsaved child, God’s with you and he’ll never leave you and he’ll never forsake you because I wasn’t God’s child. But when I became God’s child, I had that promise. And that is a promise that has never, ever left me. My granddaughter asked me today. She said, happy. I don’t think you were ever scared of anything. I said, anybody who says he’s never scared of anything is a fool and he’s going to die, probably real early. I said, I’m not foolish, but there isn’t anything I can’t do because God gives me a job to do. I go do it. So it’s not a matter of not being scared. It’s a matter of taking my fears and hand them to God and saying, God, if you want me to do this job, here, hold this for me for a little while, wouldn’t you? And then I go to the job and I can because he enables me. He enables every Christian to go do the job. And that’s probably the most important thing. So I know that wasn’t what you asked me, but as far as the changes in my life, other than just having peace, just having peace, even a five year old can know the peace that I belong to God. I’m going to heaven now. As far as changes I’ve seen in other people’s lives that have gotten saved, they’re profound. That just takes me back to the realization that whether I knew it or not, when I was five years old, God did change my heart. There were changes. I didn’t know about them. My parents aren’t alive anymore, so I can’t ask them. And I doubt they’d remember the fundamentals of what really changed about me when I was five years old. I doubt they’d remember that if they were alive today. But God promised it would. So it had to. That’s pretty simple, but it never goes away.

So tell me, what are you doing personally in the area of evangelism to help others remove barriers in their lives? I just recently became aware because of a missionary we had visiting. It was talking about how we talk to people about the Lord that I’ve been going about. It all wrong with my next door neighbors. My neighbors are not saved. His wife, the ones who live right next door to us and the ones up on the Ridge behind us. And so we’ve been praying for them for a long time and we’ve witnessed to them when we get the opportunity. And I’ve realized that one of the wives has a concept of God and a soft heart. Her husband is very bitter because he thinks God did something to him through other people and he just won’t even allow me to talk about God. The other wife apparently has absolutely no spiritual background. And the other husband, when I’ve spoken to him about it, he’s indicated that he doesn’t even know who Jesus is. It never dawned on me that here in America, we have people who are my age or a little younger than me who maybe never did hear it. We’ve driven God out of the public venues so much that there are probably a lot of people who’ve never heard it. So in my trying to talk to them, I’ve been kind of using the whole get saved and get forgiven for my sins. And it never dawned on me they don’t even know who might be the instrument of that Salvation. They don’t have any idea that there was a creator because they’ve been so inundated with the whole evolution. It all happened by chance. So I’ve been praying a whole lot about it. Rachel and I both have. And we’ve been asking God to save them. But at the same time, every opportunity we get, we try to talk to them at a level that not talking down to them. And that’s one of the problems. You don’t want to treat somebody like an idiot, but same token, you’ve got to talk to them in a language they understand. And all this I’m going to say, Christian gobbledygook that we like to spout because it’s the way we been raised is what we’ve always heard is like skid marks right over their heads. They don’t get it because they’ve never heard it. They don’t understand the first words we say. It’s like we’re T spacing another language and ignore us. So in terms of what we are doing, let’s see, we have a neighbor across the street who she’s blonde and she’s beautiful, but she’s easily led astray and she’s saved. I’ve talked to her and her husband. And I know their testimony, they are saved, but they’re just really confused about a lot of other things. So we witness to them. We teach them. We try to teach them. He listens. And she’s a little flighty large to talk to her neighbors right next door to us. Every chance we get, we talk to them about what God’s done. They understand that if nothing else, they know we have a relationship with a God we love who really loves them too. And now we need to be able to talk to him about Salvation, starting at the very, very basics.

Got a neighbor up on the Ridge behind us that we witnessed to when we talked to his wife, his fiance. She’s not his wife, but when he talked to his fiancee, a real breakthrough occurred. About a month and a half ago, he was working on getting his son back. He’d been living with his former wife, but his former wife died and his son was left with step grandparents. They were doing him completely wrong. So he was trying to get his son back. And he called me and he asked me to pray for him. This is a man who wouldn’t even let me talk about God. That’s a real breakthrough. So I said, yes, sir, we will be praying for you. And I’ve called him and asked him about it. Talk to him about it. And he knows we’re praying for them, praying daily that God will show us what’s next. What do we do next? Because there’s a lot and then in our daily life, as we’re traveling around, we glorify the Lord every chance we get. And then we ask people, sometimes when we get the opportunity, sometimes it’s not the proper venue, because if you’re in a store and it’s the manager of the store you’re talking to and have time to really sit and discuss God. But when it’s in a proper venue, if someone has indicated that, yeah, I know God, I ask them about it, and then I take them to what the Bible has to say, if they’re willing to go there and we discuss what the Bible has to say. I had that opportunity with a young man. This happened years ago, but it was really kind of a watershed thing because my evangelism opportunities have been very personal. This is a young man I worked with who was not raised in Church, but he just married a Catholic Lady who was a lifelong Catholic. And so he’d taken a catechism because he thought in respect for his wife, he should become a Catholic. And a friend of mine who was raised Catholic had taught me how to talk to Catholics about the Lord. And so I went to the Bible with him and I said, Mark, do you believe the Bible to be God’s Holy word? Well, if you’re a Catholic, you have to. He said, yes, I do. And I said, would you like to look at what the Bible has to say about how to get to heaven? Because he had indicated an interest. And so I took him to Romans and he went and got his due, a Bible, which is the Catholic Bible. And the interesting thing to me, and I’d never seen anybody do this before, but he read every verse I gave him out of the Dua Bible and then gave me word for word, the way we interpret it out of the King James. I mean, it wasn’t the way it was worded in the due way Bible, but his understanding of it was exactly our understanding. I could not fault his understanding. At one point, I did what my friend had said. I said, okay, now you know what the Bible says about how to get to heaven, what stops you from getting saved? And he had a very small barrier, which was the fact that his wife didn’t know the Lord. And I said, how would you tell her about getting saved if you haven’t accepted Christ your Savior? So he got saved at you on a spot. Two weeks later, he called us up and he said, can you come over and have dinner with Suzanne and I and can you tell her what you told me? So we went over and had dinner with him and I told her and she got saved. And two weeks later they called us and they said, can you come over and have dinner with us and my parents and tell my parents what you told us? There was a roadblock because her mom, when we got to that question, and in every case, the question was they asked me why didn’t the Church tell me this? And I said, I don’t know. All I know is God’s word says and you’ve read it. So you have to make a choice. Mark and Suzanne both made the choice to get saved. And her mother told her father and me and everybody else in the room very vehemently. We’re following the priest. That was it. Barrier not removed. James made the comment earlier, God smacks people upside the head when they need it. Well, I got smacked upside to head by that missionary we were listening to, and he didn’t even know he did. And it was a wonderful smack. I needed it because all of a sudden I realized I’m making no headway. I’m probably building more barriers than I’m even trying to remove because I’m not talking a language my neighbors even understand. So I’m learning a new language. You ask that question, I’m learning a new language.

MCG talks about that all the time. How Christians in the Church need to realize that the culture in the United States is no longer an act to culture where people have a general knowledge of who God is and basic Bible knowledge. As we would say, the culture in the United States is now more of an act 17 culture where they have no clue what you described. They don’t know who Jesus is. And if they do and if they say they know who Jesus is, it’s a caricature of him, something they see on TV or in a movie or something or curse word. They don’t really know him. Well, we talked earlier about some of the misunderstandings people have of what the Bible says or doesn’t say about people who’ve been in combat can’t get to heaven because you were under a bomb and God can’t find the parts. Right. That’s not really what they said, but that’s kind of the implication of it. That’s the same situation. So many people that they have this, as you said, caricature. Right. It’s kind of a mishmash of a million different people’s views of what Jesus is and whatever feels good or whatever your experiences might be. All these things kind of become this conglomerate idol, if you would. It’s not who Christ is, but you are following and worshiping him as though he were, which is definitely a problem. Yeah.

All right. Well, let’s go into a little bit of fun section and find out some of your favorite MD. What is your favorite scripture verse? I can do all things through Christ, which strengthens me. Awesome. It meets every need. You can’t miss it. Right.

What’s your favorite biblical historical account in the Scriptures? Some folks will call it a Bible story, but I’m memorizing the entire book of Genesis right now, and I’m right in the middle of Joseph’s remeating with his brothers before his father came to join him. So it’s the whole clash encounter when they thought he was. Well, what I’m even says, Thou art even as Pharaoh. They thought he was an Egyptian. They thought he was a really powerful man. Well, he was a very powerful man, but he happened to be their brother also. But what I loved about the entirety of Joseph’s life was never did he one time complain when he was derailed at 17 years old into slavery and then lied about and thrown into prison. And then, I mean, you read the story. How many times was he wronged? And Pharaoh himself said, Only in the throne will I be greater than thou. In all of Egypt, God had a plan. And when Joseph’s brothers come to him later on, when their father dies and they say, you know, dad didn’t want you to, and he said, don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it. You sold me into slavery. Yes. You meant it to me for bad. Yes. But God meant it to me for good, that I might save all of you and all of the Israelites. What a viewpoint. I’ve been beat up. I’ve been spit on. I’ve been called every kind of name under the sun. I’ve been lied about. I’ve been, I’ve been, I’ve been. And God made it for good. And that’s okay. It’s fine. And I’m happy. I’m happy. After all that, I love that story because it’s such a testimony to character. It’s what God wants of us. It’s how God wants us to behave. And the really fascinating thing is, this is not the only story. I like it in the whole Bible. I mean, there’s stories about people like that all over the Bible. I love it. Talk about a character lesson.

What would you say is the most convicted scripture to him that knoweth to do good and do not to him at his sin? A long time ago, I was probably 19 years old. I was in a military school, and on our breaks, we all had this little place we could go stand where we could. It was army base. And no, army bases are not conducive to being comfortable. I carried a deck of playing cards in my back pocket, and I would deal out of hand in Solitaire, whatever. There was nothing, because we weren’t allowed to carry a book with us. Nobody cared if I had a deck of cards. And a guy that I had barely been able to witness to at all popped up out of clear blue, and he said, you’re a Christian and you play cards. And I have said this many times. We’ll say it. It was not of me, because if it was of me, I would have bristled right up and I would have told him to just pack it in his ear and get at it. But I took the deck of cards. The only thing I had to relax me in the middle of a really tough class. And I stacked them up and I tossed them in a trash can. And I said, well, then I guess I won’t. Oh, wow. And it actually took me nearly six more years before I would pick up a deck of playing cards, because I didn’t want to run the risk of someone else feeling that same way. Wow. So him to know what to do good. He didn’t know. And I don’t know that he ever really meant it, but I don’t care, because it wasn’t what God wanted of me. He had to have noticed that I threw him away. He didn’t cost much. I was bored a lot.

What would you say is the most comforting scripture verse to you? I think we talked about it earlier. I will never leave the Norfolk. How well encompassing is that? Day and night sleep, awake, swimming in the Mariana strench. I’ve done that. I got to tell you, that’s frightening because it was at night. It’s tough enough doing it during the daytime, but he was with me everywhere. Even when I was foolish, he was with me everywhere. Everywhere. Wow.

What about your favorite hymn of the Faith? There are so many. I really don’t have a favorite. And I’m not bragging when I say that, but having been raised in pretty much all my life, going to Church. There are very few hymns, even in a modern hymnal that I don’t know already, some of them are a little bit cerebral and hard to listen to or hard to sing, but most of them, they just move my heart. So I really don’t have a favorite. I can’t claim a favorite. I wish I could be nice to be able to answer your question better than that. But there’s just so many. Yeah.

Who’s your favorite giant of the face? I mean, King David. You think about the mistakes he made. You think about how wrong he was. You think he committed murder. He committed adultery and tried to cover it up and tried. Yes. That’s why he committed the murder. No, he committed adultery. And then he killed the woman’s husband in order to cover it up. And then he took her as his wife. And then God said, he’s a man after my own heart. Well, you have to go back and look at why. But when confronted by the Prophet, he said, Psalm 51, I acknowledge my sin and my sin is ever before me. And then he turned immediately to God, and he just poured out his heart. A man with a huge amount of faith trusted God knew that even though he’d sinned, even though God took his son away from him. And you remember what he did when his son was dying? Morning and morning and morning. And when his son died, everybody was afraid to tell him his son had died. But as soon as he heard about it, he put on regular clothes and he said that’s it, it’s time to eat. And everybody said, we don’t get it. He said while he was still alive, God might have been merciful, but I earned it. He didn’t. It’s done. Let’s move forward. Yeah. I love him.

All right, MD, let’s wrap it up. Tell us, how can barriers be removed in the life of others? You’ve had your barriers removed at a very early age. How can others have their barriers be removed? I think the only way it can be done one is by the moving of the Holy Spirit in their hearts. And that’s not something you can know is happening or not happening. It is because God does. But God said God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. Well, there it is. God didn’t throw anybody away. God didn’t decide anybody is not worthy of Salvation. And so the way the barriers have to be removed is that people have to confront that. They have to look at their own barriers and say, what is it that’s stopping me? Or in our case, it’s when we’re talking to him, as with my friend Mark, what is that stopping you with his wife? What is stopping you? In his case, he was concerned his wife would he literally told me, he said, I would not want to get to heaven and not see Suzanne there. Well, I said to him after Suzanne got saved because her barrier was well, that isn’t what the Church taught me. Well, I was going to tell her Church was wrong because that’s one thing that you just don’t tell somebody raised in a Catholic Church, you don’t tell them the priest was wrong. But if you show them what the Bible says and they have to make a choice, then they have to make a choice. And she did. And I turned to Mark and I said, you have to worry about that anymore. And they both just broke out in the biggest grids because they’re both going to heaven and they knew that and she didn’t know he’d said that until I made that comment. She asked me about it and I told her actually, he told her it’s a matter of getting to the barrier. In the case of my neighbor who wouldn’t let me talk about God, we know what the story is. We know what happened. He told us before, but the removal of the barriers is something that God’s going to have to do and we can’t do it. But we can talk to him about bitterness. We can talk to him about God’s saving Grace. We can show him what God has done in our lives, but we have to be a part of his life to do that. So I think one of the most important things that we can do and I’m not going to shoot anybody, I’m not going to point fingers to anybody. It’s waste of time. But as Christians, one of the most important things we have to do is to say he doesn’t know the Lord. I understand that, but he’s my friend and show him, show her they’re your friend. And then when they ask, why are you so loving? Why are you so happy? Why are you so peaceful in the time of storm? Whatever it is that as a Christian, you are at the point when they need to see it and they ask, because God gives me peace and here’s how he gives me peace. That’s how you get the opportunity then to ask him what stops you from having peace?

Well, MD thank you for joining us on the removing barriers podcast. Welcome.

Thank you for inviting me. Thank you for listening. To get a hold of us to support this podcast or to learn more about removing barriers, go to removingbarriers.Net. This has been the removing barriers podcast. We attempted to remove barriers so that we all can have a clear view of the cross.