Thanksgiving Eve Service - Testimony - November 21, 2007

God Centered Theology

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Well, we are blessed tonight. We have a special testimony to kick things off our testimony time tonight.

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Brother Andy Cain and Gina is known to you already, but you may not know that when

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Andy was a little bit younger than he is now, he was a student at Campbell University.

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And I think a couple other fellows in you would come on Sunday and worship with us here.

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And it seems like Greg maybe was teaching the college and career class at that time.

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And they were very faithful, but then they graduated and moved on and really didn't know what happened to him.

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And a few years later, in walks Andy and Gina.

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He's married, settled down, got a job in the community. And he was telling me the other day, he said, he's not just, you know, around the corner as far as that goes.

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He lives up the road away. So they'd been looking for a church. And he said, you know, I got to thinking about the church that I went to when

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I was in college and enjoyed that and appreciate it. So they came back. The Lord's led them here.

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They found a home and we're so grateful for that. And then this past spring or summer,

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I'd been that long ago. Brother Andy came forward to one of our services and indicated that he felt the

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Lord's calling on his life to go into the ministry. So he's got a long road of preparation ahead of him, but I just asked him, he might come tonight and share with us a little bit of testimony, a little bit of what is on his heart.

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Just kind of maybe about how the Lord's led him, what the Lord's taught him. And I think we'd all be blessed from that.

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So that's brother Andy, if you'd come and share with us the next few minutes. First of all,

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I just want to kind of publicly thank the church here for welcoming me and my wife into the church.

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Like the pastor said, we're looking for a church and we found a good home here.

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And I consider it a true honor to be able to share with you tonight my testimony. I feel that our own personal testimonies, each one of us has one if you're a

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Christian, and I feel like there's something to be cherished, something to have great value in because it's one of the great tools that God can use to win souls for Christ.

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And tonight I just want to kind of share with you a little bit about the journey I've taken from one where I had a path of avoiding my true destiny to one where now

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I'm learning to embrace it. One of the songs we sang, and I think we sang it Sunday morning, goes like this.

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Our God is an awesome God. He reigns from heaven above with wisdom, power, and love.

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Our God is an awesome God. Now I've been on this earth now for almost 25 years and it's taken me a while now to truly understand what the words of that little short song means.

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Three things that I'm thankful for this year is God's wisdom, God's power, and God's love.

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And all three of these are so important to the Christian life. I want to start very shortly tonight here,

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I want to start with God's wisdom. And number one, I am very thankful that God's wisdom is far better than my own.

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See, I've always had this feeling deep inside my soul that God had something really big and important for me.

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And despite what God had intended for me, I did everything I could to try to avoid it.

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I want to kind of say things like, you know, Lord, let me do just this one thing first.

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Or Lord, let me get to this certain point in my career first, then I'll be ready. Or I even said things in my heart like,

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Lord, I just don't see how, you know, being in the ministry really fit into my life right now.

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How did that fit? I got so much going on. So you can kind of see from what I was thinking that, from what

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I was saying, what I was thinking that I thought I had better judgment and wisdom than what God had for me.

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So I just want to tell you a quick story, just kind of give you an idea of what I'm looking at here. In high school,

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I started a job with Food Line and carried it on through college. As I moved up the ladder and took new positions, raises, things of that nature, all of a sudden, instead of keeping the proper attitude towards the blessings in my life and realizing what was happening,

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I started to have these huge dreams and plans start to take place. I mean, I had all these ideas.

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I began in management and went as high as store manager. My head just ballooned up. Arrogance, whatever you want to call it,

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I had all these ideas. I wanted all these things. I felt like I deserved them. Basically, you could say

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I used to have it all planned out. I wanted to be a store manager by 22.

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I wanted to do this and this by this age. And I had no doubt that by the time these things happened,

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I would have everything I wanted. Nice house, wealth, you know, whatever. But shortly thereafter,

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I began to sort of reap what I had sown in my own wisdom. Certain things would happen at the job to kind of restrict where I was trying to get to.

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And it sort of just developed this bitterness in me where I said, you know what? I'm not going to let this happen.

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I deserve this. I'm going to make it happen. I'm not going to let anything stand in the way of my success. And what this did is it just created this huge cloud of frustration and just anger.

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And I couldn't really figure out what was going wrong because I felt like, hey, I'm just doing a good job. I'm trying to do the best.

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You know, I know I'm saved. I've been saved since I was five. What's going on here? Then finally, one day,

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I began to realize that I'd been miserable for a reason, even after I had even changed jobs to try to maybe escape what

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I was living in here. I thought, hey, I'll just escape and go get another job and that'll fix everything. Wrong.

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Made things worse. Not only did I go farther away from my wife and I was always gone, so I wasn't home, but things just got worse.

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But I kind of come to this verse here in Psalms 120, verse one, it says, in my distress,

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I cried unto the Lord and he heard me. And in sort of that, it got to a point where I just stopped and I said, you know what?

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I've created this distance between me and God. He was always there. I was saved, but I created this distance.

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You know, my relationship wasn't right. And after I realized this, it just sort of overwhelmed me.

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I just, I almost, it was, I didn't necessarily cry out, but my heart cried out and said, I said, Lord, I surrender to you.

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I know you've put this, this calling inside me for a reason. I'm not going to ignore it anymore.

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Show me what to do. I'm tired of being like this. Because one thing people don't realize when you're under that, you know, the world's stress of trying to make it on your own, it just, it brings you down so much and it tires you out.

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And it just, when I cried unto the Lord and I surrendered my life, just like that, the distance was gone.

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The load was gone. I just felt so much better. I mean, I just knew for the first time in life, things were going to be okay.

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Number two, I want to move on to God's power. Finally, I am living a life that is empowered by God.

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Since I've made this decision to answer his call and begin to live my life, seeking his wisdom, I have felt confidence like never before.

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And we don't even have to turn. We know the verse very well. Philippians 4 .13, I can do all things through Christ, which strengtheneth me.

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Since I've been focusing on developing a relationship with God and seeking after his will, I have taken a job that's put me back closer to home.

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Things are starting to improve. I'm beginning to really see what it truly means to get God's guidance and wisdom and making my decisions.

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And it's so amazing to me now when I think about it. Before, when I had everything planned out,

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I knew exactly what I wanted to do. We had our own plans of what we wanted to do. I had such crazy frustration, no peace.

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And now that I've accepted this calling, I don't really know what

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I'm going to do. I don't know what church I'll end up in. I don't know what school

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I might go to. I don't know where I'll be five years from now. But you know what? I have this peace.

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I have this confidence. It's a calm that I can't describe. It's just a completely,

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I've said to some of my friends about it. It's like God just freed my mind from everything the world was trying to tell me.

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But you know, I may not know where I'm going to be five years from now. I may not know where I'm going to be one year from now.

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But this one thing I do know that is wherever I am, wherever I go, whatever I do,

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God's going to be there. He's will never leave you nor forsake you.

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And whatever God leads us to, he will lead us through. And now I can say with bold confidence that I know no fear because I am on the winning side.

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And whatever I face, I can face it head on with God's power. And number three,

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I realize that no matter what I have done or what I will do, I can never be separated from the love of Christ.

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And I want to read for you in Romans 8 verses 38 through 39.

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For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our

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Lord. I know that God loves me so much that he sent his only son to die on a cross for me so that I can go to heaven one day to spend eternity with him.

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I know that his love is so great that there is nothing that I can ever do. Neither is there anything in this world that can ever separate me from his love.

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And I know that the greatest blessing I will ever receive on this earth is to know God's love and to love him as my heavenly father.

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So like I said, there's three things that I'm very thankful for, especially this Thanksgiving, because a lot of these things

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I just talked about have transpired very recently. And that's just like the song says,

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I'm thankful for God's wisdom, God's power, and God's love. And I truly believe that for the first time in my life,

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I'm finally living with all three. Father, how grateful I am tonight for all the things you've done for me in my past,

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Lord, what you're doing for me now. Lord, just continue to be there for me, be there with me as I go forward.

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Help me to not lose sight of what I've learned. Help me to never forget what you've done for me and how you've brought me out of a situation where I was seeking my own and when

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I should have been seeking what you wanted for me. Lord, just be with me and my wife as we journey forward.

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Help us to always seek your wisdom, Lord, and to never forget that you love us more than we could ever know any other kind of love,

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Lord. And just be with the others tonight as they share their testimonies and just be with us all as we go out from this place tonight and bring us back to the next point in time.

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In your name, amen. Amen. That was a blessing.

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And I tell you, it makes you think. Someone walks through that door on Sunday morning, first time you've seen them, or the second or the third, and they're new, or maybe they're some young person in the youth group.

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You don't know how the Lord is going to use them, direct them, or what part you might have in encouraging them or providing a church home where they're blessed.

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And we all have a part in everything that Andy will do for the Lord from here on out.

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We have the opportunity to support him, encourage him, and pray for him. And that was a great brother.