We sing these words, “I love to tell the story of unseen things above.” That’s why the Gospels are so powerful. We see people like us encounter the Son of God. Glory happens. The amazing thing about the gospel is that Jesus was constantly pressing believers to work together to do miraculous wonders. Think of the paralytic who would have never gotten healed, if four friends hadn’t grabbed the corners of his mat to climb on the roof and lower him with ropes to the feet of Jesus. That’s teamwork!
Phil Young, TBMB specialist has plenty of stories to share. Along with his efforts to lead our state to revitalize churches, he recently began working with Carson-Newman University to bring seminary classes into the prison system.
I asked him to tell me a prison story. Phil began, “One prisoner who had been convicted of a very serious crime received a long, extended sentence. After having served the first few years of that sentence, he got a call from his wife, and she shared with him that their 9-year-old son had gotten saved at church that past Sunday.”
God is using the local church!
Matt Tullos
Your church is the first point in the strategy to win Tennessee! If you have prayed and are sharing the gospel in the harvest field surrounding your church building, you are vital. This is why we love and serve churches. Before any mission board was created, Jesus founded the church as the last and greatest hope of the world.
Back to the prisoner’s story.
Most of us would think that would be a joyous experience, but for the inmate, it was not. In fact, it aroused anger within him. He shouted back to her, “What do you mean!? He got saved? You and I agreed that we would not raise our son in the faith. We would not take him to church! How did this happen?”
The wife said, “Maybe you should talk to him.”
She handed the phone over to the son and he explained “I went because my friends at school go to church. They’ve been talking to me about Christ. They invited me to go, and I wanted to go. When I got there, from the things that they had been sharing with me and what happened in the moment of church that day, I knew that God was calling me. The voice of God was calling me into a relationship with Him and so I went down and placed my faith in Christ.”
As the conversation went on, his son, shared the gospel with his incarcerated father and the dad placed his faith in Christ.”
God uses families
The prisoner had been gloriously saved, but that’s not the end of the story. He was not able to be baptized. In prison, that’s not an easy thing to do. Months went by. Eventually, East Tennessee had some flooding and heavy rains, so water gathered on the prison campus. He had an idea. He found a trash can lid and temporarily clogged a drain pipe to create a pool of muddy water. It was shallow, but it was enough. The dad saw a fellow inmate who was a believer and asked him to baptize him. They were a part of a prison Bible study together and the other prisoner gladly assisted.
God can use you to reach your friends
After they performed the baptism, the fellow prisoner confessed that he hadn’t been baptized either. So, he returned the favor.
But the story continues! Another prisoner walked past about that time. He looked baffled by what he was seeing and asked, “What are you all doing?” The two inmates shared the gospel with him. At that moment, he prayed to receive Christ. They baptized him in that same muddy pool. God is at work, even in places we will never get to see.
God guides and provides
That’s just one of the stories we can celebrate. When you give, you play a huge part in prison ministry, job corps, disaster relief, compassion ministry, BlueOval City initiatives, evangelism, and missions in your association.
Those are just a few of the things you’re up to when you give. This is just one of the thousands of untold stories that are being written in the lives of Tennesseans from Memphis to Mountain City.
Thank you, Tennessee Baptists, because you are a part of that story, too. Through your gifts through the Golden Offering for Tennessee Missions, you helped provide tools that are being used to train ministers who are in the prisons of Tennessee as inmates.
Last year we crossed the annual $3 million objective for GOTM that we set 10 years ago, but the work continues. Please consider giving throughout the year through GOTM. What will God do through our church, families, friends, and donors this year? We can’t wait to find out.
The story continues. …
