The Rebel To Your Will Interview

Why I Wrote Rebel to Your Will

Welcome back to another episode of the Room for Nuance podcast. I'm your host, Sean DeMars, and you can't see my face. Here's why. This week's episode is going to be about a book that I wrote called Rebel to Your Will.

This book came out earlier in 2024, and since it has come out, a number of fans and friends have said, oh, you should talk about it on the Room for Nuance podcast. But I felt a little weird about that.

That's not really what the show is about, promoting me and my stuff. It's really more about promoting other people, their ministries, their resources. Nevertheless, people kept asking about it, and I thought, OK, we should consider it.

A number of good friends even offered to interview me about my own book for the show. But at the end of the day, none of it worked out. While I was visiting a friend, Dave King, a future guest on the podcast, by the way, be on the lookout for that episode, interviewing him about his book, Your Old Testament Servant Needs to Get Saved.

But anyways, Dave King actually interviewed me about my own book for his local church. They have a podcast there for their local church, and he interviewed me. And when I listened back to that interview, I thought, wow, this is fantastic.

I don't think anyone can do a better job than Dave King. So Dave very kindly allowed us to just use that audio from his podcast on our podcast. So that's what you're going to be listening to today. I hope it's edifying and encouraging, and I hope by the end of it, you'll pick up a copy.

Maybe not just for yourself, but if you know anyone who struggles with father hunger or abuse or addiction, I pray that you'd give them a copy as well. May the Lord bless it to the glory of His name. Amen.

Childhood Abuse, Fear, and Survival

I want to read just one little section of your book, Rebel to Your Will. You say, my little ladybugs love going to church. Those are your daughters, right? Why do you call your daughters ladybugs?

You know how nicknames evolve. I called them my little ladies, and then they became my little ladybugs.

Okay. You say, my little ladybugs love going to church. They wake up on Sunday morning excited to spend the morning with the body of Christ. They color quietly in the pew during the very long sermon. You preach a long time, huh?

I do.

They play hide and seek in the dusty old squirrel infested building with their friends. They eat potato salad at the church potluck and learn the story of the gospel in Sunday school. This is the only life they've ever known.

They love their daddy. They love big hugs and back scratches and dessert night. They may not love their spankings, but one day they will see the rod as an instrument of love. This is the only Shawn they know.

They will never meet the drug dealing, gangbanging, womanizing, burglarizing, cheating, thieving, blasphemer I once was. Hurt people hurt people, but those who have been called by grace become new creations.

You are a new creation in Christ, and you chronicle that transformation that God brought about at your life in this book, Rebel to Your Will. And I was so moved by this book, Shawn. It's so well written.

It's easily accessible. I should say it's PG -13.

Yeah, that's right.

I mean, you don't get graphic, but you give us enough detail to really understand the life that you've lived and what God brought you out of.

Yeah.

And so I was eager just to sit down with you since you're here in town today.

Great.

And talk to you about your life a little bit because I think it's going to be an encouragement to our church.

Yeah.

Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to give labels for different parts of your life.

Okay.

And you can tell me if that's a good label or not.

Okay.

And then we'll talk about what fits under that label.

All right.

So like chapter one of your life.

Okay.

If I had a one-word description, I would say victim.

Okay. Okay?

Okay.

Is that fair?

Yeah.

I mean, I was victimized. I was abused from my earliest memories until I was old enough to stop it.

Yeah. Yeah.

One of the quotes in the book was, most of my young life was lived in fear. That's a gripping to me to think about. I had a different kind of upbringing than you did. You don't have to go into all the details now.

Sure.

But could you give just a quick sketch of what was it like growing up for you?

Yeah.

I understand it better now in light of my relationship with my own children. But the only real emotion I ever felt towards my mother—I never met my father—was fear. There was just like a constant sense of foreboding.

When is she going to fly off the handle? When is she going to try to molest me? When is she going to beat me? When is she going to cuss me out or be so drunk or high that she's going to embarrass me? It was pretty constant for most of my life.

This was a hard thing for me to read. I mean, you're kind of choking back tears as you read things that you endured.

Yeah.

I mean, there's so many little details that are calling to mind right now. Like having to eat hot dogs all the time. I mean, we laugh, but that was because of a real problem you were living in the midst of.

What was that all about, the hot dog thing?

So my mom, for several summers, she would just be basically drunk and high the whole summer. And she wasn't like a functional alcoholic. So she would be basically incapacitated for a week at a time. And then she would wake up and maybe go to the grocery store.

But when she would go to the grocery store, it would almost be like she would plan to be incapacitated again for another week. And so she would just buy a bunch of packs of hot dogs. And that's what I would live on for months at a time.

I remember I would be so excited. It would be such a big treat if she would ever come home with Hot Pockets. Because I would get Hot Pockets then. And so the pattern was kind of like she would be really inebriated.

She would wake up and beat me pretty severely and then use and then go back to sleep. And then I would just find little pockets where I thought she was deep enough in sleep that I could heat up hot dogs and eat them without waking her up.

Because I was just always afraid of waking her up.

So that was your breakfast, lunch, dinner?

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. A little bit later, she began to She was a prostitute at a certain point. And I would she had money then. So we were like government, like Section 8 housing, government cheese, WIC family kind of a thing.

But when she got a little money, I used to steal money from her purse when she would pass out. And I would go down to the little Mexican restaurant down the street. And so or I would go to we're getting way out of it.

But I would go to the convenience store and buy Hot Cheetos and Mountain Dew. So I think for about six months there, I lived every meal of the day off of Hot Cheetos and Mountain Dew.

Oh, wow.

Which explains my physique today.

Man, your Your physique. We're not on video, but You've got the guns, man.

Oh, man.

I'm overcompensating, dude.

Those Cheetos paid off.

Yeah.

From Victim to Victimizer

So the next dark chapter of your life, we move from victim to victimizer.

Yeah, that's good. I should have put that in the book.

No, tell me, like, one of the themes in your book is hurt people hurt people. I think you say that three or four times.

Yeah.

So you weren't just a victim. You became a victimizer. You weren't just abused. You became an abuser. I mean, tell us a little bit about that part of your life.

I mean, you learn how to relate to other human beings by the way you relate to your parents. And the way I related to my single parent was through hurt. So my conception of love was all wrapped up in pain.

I mean, even to this day, to be honest with you, as a 37-year-old man who's bought and redeemed by Christ, who's a pastor, a faithful husband, a father, the most normal way that I communicate love is by making fun of people.

Right?

Yeah.

And people who know me, they get it. Sarcasm.

It's a love language.

It's a love language. But, man, it has caused problems. You know, it's a relational thing that I'm still trying to slowly work out of me. So I've been walking with Jesus now going on 20 years. And so, praise God, that's kind of the worst of what I'm having to deal with in light of my childhood.

But you can imagine an unregenerate 16-year-old who suddenly discovered that he can have power over women and even other men with violence and manipulation. So, yeah, it was really bad. Once I figured out that I didn't have to be the one who was hurt all the time, but that I could actually hurt other people, that was the primary way I related to other human beings.

And I hurt a lot of people really bad. I mean, yeah.

That was your way of getting on top of the mountain.

Trying to.

Yeah.

Even, like, we lived in the projects, and what I wanted more than anything was a dad, but I didn't have one. And every older male in my life, I tried to kind of put in that place of a father. And they were all just really violent guys.

You know, when you're a drug dealer trying to climb the ladder, the older men, the wiser men, the stronger men, at least as you perceive them to be, that you look up to are who can be the most violent.

Who can hurt people the most.

You see, from a human perspective, this seems like, how in the world could somebody like this get saved? I mean, you hadn't really been to church. I mean, I think maybe you had been in a church once or something.

I went to a youth group that I got kicked out of for selling drugs. I went to youth group in all sincerity because that's where I knew girls that would put out.

Oh, wow.

That's terrible.

Terrible.

Yeah. Yeah.

So you get kicked out of the youth group. You're not really around church. You've probably not heard the gospel.

No, not really. I mean, in the Christian South, it's kind of in the ether a little bit, but I mean, I didn't comprehend it.

Conversion, the New Morning, and the First Steps of Faith

Yeah. Yeah.

So you're, I think, 17, 18 years old and you're dramatically saved. I mean, how did that happen?

Yeah.

So I was about to go to prison for a long time for committing some crimes and I got accepted. I was a pimp and a drug dealer and I got accepted. I started at 17. This happened when I was 18. I got accepted into this program for adults, which was a Christian ministry, by the way.

One of the nice things about being in the Christian South is that judges are more than happy for Christians to start halfway houses and drug rehab programs and last chance opportunities because it alleviates some of the burden that the state has to bear in relation to these criminals.

And so the judge where I committed this crime had a relationship with this Christian program where if I complete the program, I won't have to go to prison. That was the deal. And so I get there and I just pretend to be a Christian.

So we go to church. Every morning you wake up and you do Bible study. Every night you come home, there's a devotional. You go to church three times a week. I started going up and sharing my testimony.

Did you really?

Oh, yeah.

I mean, that's how they would raise funds. They had these love offerings. They would go to churches and the success stories would go up and share their testimony. So I'd be in the bathroom doing like bumps of coke.

And then I would go wipe my nose and go up on stage and be like, I want to tell you what God's done for my life. So I was just pretending to be a Christian because I didn't want to go to prison. So I was trying to like con my way through the program.

Exactly.

But nothing was changing. I was sleeping around. I was still cutting myself. And one night I tried to commit suicide, but I didn't really pull it off. And I was deeply depressed. And I went to the guy who ran the place and I said, this is not in the book.

I'm giving you the good stuff. I went to the guy who ran the place and I said, I think I need to go to a mental hospital. I have suicidal ideations, all that stuff. And he said, no, you need to go to church.

And I was like, oh man, what kind of world am I in? And the church we went to wasn't a good church. It was probably Pentecostal and prosperity gospel, just like all the churches we went to. I mean, we were at a weird Southern Baptist church one night and a Pentecostal church another night and whatever church the third night.

And so we went and again, like nothing happened. And I came home from church that night and I got into a fight with one of the guys in the house. It's a house full of criminals. So fights are easy to get into.

And it was bloody. And I hurt the guy real bad. I was covered head to toe in blood. He was too. And I knew this was my last strike. And I was going to get kicked out of the program, which meant I was going to go to prison probably for like 20 years.

And so I took off. And this is in Double Springs, Alabama, which is in the middle of nowhere. Like if you go to the middle of nowhere, if you go deeper into the nowhere, that's where this place is. And so I'm just running down the road in the middle of the night and nowhere to go.

I burned every bridge. No one to call. I have no one. I have nothing. And I finally just collapsed. I just came to the end of myself. And in a very melodramatic, made-for-TV moment, I just collapsed to the ground and like cried out to the heavens.

It's something you would see on a Lifetime movie, if people even know what that is. The only way it could have been more dramatic is if it would have been raining. Right when I cried out to God, thunder struck.

Or maybe the clouds part and a ray of light shines down on you.

That would have been great, too. But I cried out. Were you going to say something?

I was going to say, in your book, though, you feel like no change after this huge melodramatic moment. At least right then.

I didn't say God save me. I just said, God, if you're there, if you're real, you have to do something. Because I was very angry at God for not existing. I'd been molested and abused. When I was very young, I would pray for help.

Where did I learn to do that? I don't know, but I would pray for help. But I finally, now as an adult, cry out to God again for help. But this time it's angry. You better do something. And then, of course, nothing happens.

But then I woke up the next morning and something did happen. I was a Christian.

This is what I would label as chapter three of your life.

Okay.

What's the word?

Victim, victimizer, saved.

There you go. Man, if you could have got a third V.

Yeah, that would have been good.

V's are hard, though, for alliteration. You have this melodramatic moment on the road. You cry out to a God that you're kind of angry at. Not even sure if He's there. But then the next morning, awake, oh sleeper, rise from the dead.

Christ will shine on you. What happened? Describe that next morning.

When I was thinking about this recently, I've never really thought about it. I preached on the resurrection of Lazarus. And I thought, oh, this is what it must have felt like. You're just dead, and then you wake up alive, and you're trying to make sense of it.

I didn't know, and I didn't really try to analyze it. I was just filled with the joy of the Lord. I went around, and I immediately started trying to evangelize people.

With the gospel, you're probably not even clear on it.

No idea. All I know is I'm trying to tell people, did you know? Can you believe this? I actually thought, so a lot of people in that place, they were pretending to be Christians, too. Because it's a Christian program, and nobody wants to go to prison.

But I didn't know that. I thought I was the only one who was pretending. And I didn't actually know the difference between a regenerate person and an unregenerate person. So I went to the people who were professing to be Christians to tell them, I'm actually a Christian.

I'm not pretending anymore. Let's read the Bible. And they were like, what? Get away from me. I was trying to figure out plans. I wanted to get up on top of the, do you guys have Jack's here? The restaurant, Jack's?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

There's one restaurant in Double Springs, Alabama. It's the Jack's. And I wanted to get up on the roof of Jack's.

Literally.

Literally climb up onto the roof and preach the gospel so that people would hear it as they're going in and out to get their chicken biscuit in the morning. And so, yeah, I mean, I don't know. I couldn't explain it.

But all I know is I woke up and all the things that I loved, drugs, sex, power, like all that stuff, I just did not care about it anymore. I didn't even cuss, which is, you know, like I've seen a lot of people get saved, and that's the one thing they struggle with.

Like, I just, I don't know. I just didn't do it anymore.

Yeah, everything was radically changed instantaneously that next morning.

That's right.

Amazing.

Yeah, it was incredible.

From Prosperity Gospel Error to Reformed Convictions

So, chapter four, would you own this next label as chapter four? Heretic.

Yeah, I would.

Yeah, I think you told me once, I don't know if it's in your books, like you said something like, I got saved and then became a heretic.

Right.

Pretty wild.

Yeah, tell me about that. What was all that about?

Yeah, so the first thing, very long story, but I ended up back in the town where I used to sell drugs and stuff, and I tried going to church, but I didn't know. I mean, I figured a church is a church is a church, right?

So I tried going to visit this, a couple of different churches, and it just didn't go well. I mean, it's not like I got saved and I stopped dressing like a drug dealer. You know what I'm saying?

So your clothes didn't change.

Yeah, I didn't go to Belk and be like, okay, I need a suit. I mean, I still sagged my baggy pants. I still wore like wife beaters, like A-frame tank tops. I had gold teeth tattoos. I used to wear my hat real low, and I still kind of had like an aggressive posture.

Little did you know, all I wanted to do was like talk to people about Jesus, but I would go and I visited these churches and like, son, you take your hat off. This is the house of the Lord. Don't disrespect God.

And it just never went well. Youth pastors would be happy to have me come and like, you know, scare their kids with my really scary testimony. But then afterwards it was like, okay, you can go now kind of a thing.

So I just, I wasn't going to church. Nobody had offered to disciple me. Even, well, okay, I'm getting off track. But the first person who did offer to disciple me while I was out evangelizing in the neighborhood where I used to sell drugs was a guy who taught me the prosperity gospel.

And not a light version of the prosperity gospel. I'm talking like Kenneth Copeland, you know, all in prosperity gospel. And I didn't know any better. I didn't know the Bible. I knew so little of the Bible that this one guy who did try to help me a little bit told me that Jesus was a Jew.

And I was like, let me stop you right there. You're an idiot. Jesus was a Christian.

I laughed out loud at that part in your book.

Oh my goodness.

So I didn't know anything. So he comes and he goes, let me show you this. She touched the hem of his garment and she was healed. And I'm like, well, there you go. It makes sense. He takes you to the reciprocity principle, the blessing and the curses in Deuteronomy.

He's like, you see, if you'll just be obedient, God will give you good things. And if you're disobedient, God is going to give you bad things. And I was like, no, yeah, it's right there.

It's right there.

So I didn't know any better. And so I was just all in. I just wanted to do whatever I thought Jesus wanted me to do. So I thought that's what Jesus wanted. So I did it to the hilt.

So that led you to a bad place physically. You were sick. I don't remember the occasion for your sickness.

I had mercury poisoning.

Mercury poisoning.

And your mom finds you.

Is that right?

Yeah.

You're about to die.

The woman who spent most of my life trying to kill me ends up saving me.

Oh, my goodness.

Unreal.

Yeah.

She drug me out of the bathtub and got me to the hospital.

How did you come out of the heresy of the health, wealth, prosperity gospel?

Yeah.

So we were living, I mean, barely scraping by in Alabama. And I met a guy who said, you know, the military sucks, but they'll pay you. And I said, okay, I need money. So no matter what, I need money. So we joined the Army.

We?

Yeah.

Sorry, me and my wife joined the military. That's another side story. But joined the military. And the Lord sort of used that to get me away from this guy whose influence I was under, which is always the case, right?

The prosperity gospel is usually very culty. And whether it's in a mega church or with one or two people, you're usually under somebody's kind of cultic influence. So I got away from that. And when I was stationed in Seattle, I spent a lot of time on the Internet.

You know, it rains a lot and people are terrible out there. So I spent a lot of time on MySpace.

You like throwing shade on Seattle.

Oh, every chance I get. They think they're so cool. And on MySpace, I saw a Paul Washer sermon, which led me to a John Piper sermon, which was kind of the beginning of the end.

Okay.

You know.

And then did you find yourself, like, reading good books?

Yeah.

Go ahead.

Yeah.

Did you have anybody else that came alongside of you and was discipling you in the truth?

Yeah.

So it was a mixture of, like, Reformed books and Christian rap.

Christian rap.

Christian rap. So, like, this John Piper sermon blows my mind, right? And then I'm like, okay, what else does this guy do? And so I got one of his books and, like, he references R .C. Sproul. So all I'm doing, I'm just chasing, there's a scent, and I'm chasing the scent on the trail.

Right.

So I buy an R .C. Sproul book. The first book I bought from him was, like, this really complicated apologetics book, and I didn't have any idea what I was reading, but I made myself read every last page of that book.

Okay.

And so, you know, this guy references that guy, and you start going, oh, okay, Crossway is a good publisher. Let me, who else, what's going on with Crossway? And so that's kind of, you know, I started, you know, I got on this and that and the third, and so that was the book side of things.

And I kind of, on deployment to Iraq, put myself through, like, my little mini Bible college. Like, I must have read 300 books while I was deployed. And then, yeah, I was listening to somebody put me on to some Christian rap where it was actually, like, decent rap.

It wasn't, like, no offense again to your taste, but it wasn't, like, Toby Mack. And they were, like, rapping about John MacArthur. Like, one of the main choruses in their song was walking around with a Johnny Mac in your backpack.

See, it rhymes, Johnny Mac in your backpack.

Yeah.

And Lecrae has an album where there's a John Piper thing on there, and then Shy Lynn's rapping about election, and I'm like, my mind is blown. I'm like, this can't be biblical, you know?

Yeah.

And so, yeah, Christian rap was a big part of it.

That's so cool. How the Lord would use that as part of your formation.

And it's done now, by the way. Like, what perfect timing, because, like, guys don't do that anymore.

Right.

Lyrical theology, yeah, it's not a thing as much as it was.

Yeah.

I hope it makes a comeback, because the Lord really used it.

Missionary Work in Peru and a Hard Return Home

Chapter five of your life. How about this title? Missionary. That's really exciting.

Again, I want more Vs, but it's fine.

Yeah, it's part of your life, though. So, you're saved, you become a heretic, but the Lord graciously brings you out of that heresy and forms your faith in a solid way.

Yeah.

You finish your time in the military. Thank you for your service.

Yeah.

And now the mission field. You and your wife take off to another middle-of-nowhere place.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

So, yeah, we were, our desire was to reach the Udarina people group in the jungles of Peru, the upper Amazon River basin. And, man, that was a wild four years. Long story very short, we tried to go down there with nine marks DNA.

We tried to, we had the vision of helping locals send out their own missionaries, because it's just easier to cross those cultural barriers, you know. Sean from the jungles of Los Angeles will probably not be able to reach the Udarina people group, as well as a Peruvian who lives just a couple of river stretches away from them.

Right.

We had partners and we had connections locally on the ground. Unfortunately, about six months into our time in the village, we uncovered a pedophile ring and it was being run by people who were ostensibly Christians.

And we tried to stop it. We got kicked out of our village. That was really hard for our teammates. They ended up leaving. We tried to stick it out without teammates, trying to find new teammates. And we went to a different village and tried to reach a different people, the Shawi people, and do stuff there.

But, you know, after that, there was just kind of no coming back. My wife got really depressed. I was sick the whole time I was there. I almost died of malaria. And then I had parasites the whole time.

So after about four years, we just decided it was time to come home.

Yeah.

And it was really hard because my whole identity was wrapped up in being a missionary. And we had invested all of our time and all of our talent and all of our treasure. But as soon as we got home, the Lord pretty quickly affirmed that it was the right decision.

Becoming a Pastor and Shepherding Sixth Avenue

And so last chapter of your story, when you come home, you become a pastor.

Is that right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

How did that come about?

Well, yeah. So, I mean, everyone, since the day I got saved, people were telling me, like, you're going to be a pastor. And at first I was like, great. And then I became aware of what that means. And I was like, oh, no, that's dangerous.

You know, dangerous calling, right? And then through some more encouragement, when I was a member of Capitol Hill back in 2011, I was like, okay, no. This is hard, but good. Dangerous, but necessary. So let's do it.

And then after being a missionary, came home, had no idea what I was going to do. I mean, I don't even have a high school diploma, much less a college degree or seminary degree. And no churches were, like, beating down the door to offer me a job.

So a Presbyterian church said, hey, just come work for us. And, you know, we want you to become a Presbyterian. Take a couple years. See if you can. And we'll pay you to kind of figure out what's next.

And so I'm just still eternally grateful. Particularly one man, Tommy Lee. He just championed me and helped my family figure stuff out. So anyways, we did that. And I decided I couldn't be Presbyterian.

And so I emailed Mark Dever and asked him if he had room for me in the pastoral training internship. And he said yes. And that was it.

Okay.

Yeah.

So now you're back in Alabama as a pastor. Tell us about your church real quickly.

Yeah. So our church was a revitalization. It used to be a Church of God church, Church of God Anderson. And now we're just probably what you guys would be, Reformed, Baptistic, non-Marxist. Baptists in the sense of what your grandparents used to mean when they said Baptists.

And, yeah. When I got there, I used to say that Sixth Avenue was relationally vacuum-sealed, evangelistically inept, and doctrinally apathetic. And so now I don't think any of those things are true. We're doing well.