Testimony: Acey Floyd | Supporter Appreciation Episode

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Hi, I'm John Snyder, and I'm pastor at Christ Church in New Albany, Mississippi, and author of the

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Behold Your God studies. And I'm here with Media Gratia to do another Behold Your God podcast, and we're doing a bonus episode.

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In the last couple of months, we've been talking about evangelism, really the heart of evangelism, so not so much particular techniques.

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But how does the believer understand and cooperate with the

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Spirit of God in evangelism? How is our work to be in harmony with God's?

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Obviously, God is the great evangelist. So we've been looking at some scriptural principles using help from a man, a preacher from the 18th century named

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Samuel Walker in southern England. So what we wanted to do for a number of bonus episodes was just to let you hear from folks at Christ Church in New Albany that God brought to Himself, that He saved, using these principles as best as we knew how to apply them.

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And so our first guest is A .C. Floyd. A .C. works with Media Gratia and has attended here for about five or six years and has been an intern here for a year.

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A .C.'s really reached out to especially to our young men in the church and been a great encouragement to us.

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But A .C. came here as a lost religious ministerial student. And so we wanted you to hear how

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God dealt with his heart to bring him to Christ in reality. If you've sent emails to Media Gratia, then probably

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A .C. is the one that's had to answer them. He works in the office there. So A .C.,

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let me just open it up with a simple question. How did we first meet? We first met about nine years ago here at the church.

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Some of the young men at the church had invited me out to dinner just to talk, to get to know me, to see where I was spiritually.

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And then they invited me back to the church to come see your study, actually. And when we got up here, they called you to see if you'd come.

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And you came, and we met, and the rest is history. So it was a setup, I guess.

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It was a total setup. They baited you with the library. Yeah. Yeah. There are not many people that can be baited with the library, but it's probably not a church growth technique that we'd recommend.

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When you came here, as I mentioned, I remember when we talked, you were still a ministerial student at Blue Mountain College, a college that I'd graduated from.

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You were almost at the point of graduation. And that began a series of conversations that we had.

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You became a youth minister at a church in a nearby city, town. And over the next period of time, we met,

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I don't know, five or six times, and you had questions about ministerial work. Soon after that, though, you started to attend the church.

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So my question, at that time, really, I just assumed that you were a believer.

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So my question for you is, what did God do to take a man who's a ministerial student, and who has everybody telling him he's doing a great job, and it's wonderful that he's given his life to the gospel ministry?

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How did God shake you out of that and show you that you needed him? Well, I'd say that there were two things, primarily, that God used to really shake me.

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The first was the prayer meetings that we would have here at the church, whether it was the corporate prayer meeting on Sunday mornings, or it was the prayer time that we would have during small group studies.

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The first thing that I noticed was that there was such an intimacy to the prayers of the people.

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It wasn't like they were praying prayer number seven or eight, but that they were actually going before the throne of the living and the true

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God and crying out to him as though they knew him. I remember one lady in particular at a small group study.

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She's a widow. She has a daughter who's physically and mentally handicapped.

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But when she prayed, there was such an intimacy there. There was such a dependence on Christ.

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You could tell that in her prayer, she really found Christ to be precious and cast herself wholly on him.

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All that he'd said that he was, and all that he'd said that he'd done in the scriptures, she had taken hold of it and determined to live on it.

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For me, that was the most intimidating thing because I came to the church thinking that I knew the

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Bible pretty well, I felt like I knew God pretty well, and I felt like I knew how to pray pretty well.

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But when she would pray, it would totally destroy everything that I thought that I knew. But the second thing that I would say that God used to really convict me was the preaching of the

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Word. Sitting under your preaching, and Chuck's preaching, and Lanny's preaching week after week, just really began to, in God's grace, peel back the layers of my heart.

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It showed me that I didn't know what it meant to be a gospel minister, and eventually it showed me that I really didn't know the

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God who was, and is, and forever will be. So, really it was the prayer meetings of the church and the preaching of the

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Word here at the church that showed me who I was. I think that it's easy to forget what an evangelistic quality there is when believers gather and really meet with the

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Lord. So instead of the church shifting everything on Sunday morning so that the world would feel more at home with us, obviously there ought to be a loving atmosphere, but not an atmosphere where, so to speak, when you walk out of the worship service, there's no drop to go to the world.

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It's just like, well, it's just the same thing as the world offers me, except that these were really clean people, and the world's not so clean.

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But I think that one of the most evangelistic tools that we have in our possession as believers is to gather together on the

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Lord's day and to be so captivated with Christ that nice, clean people are bothered.

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I mean, it basically raises the question in your mind, like, why? What's the big deal?

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You know, I'm a Christian. We would think, you know, I'm a Christian. I know about Jesus. I know about prayer meetings, but why are you so different?

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And I think that in the prayer meeting, I've noticed that there have been times where we've had, like, college -age prayer meetings here, where some of the young people that I've been concerned don't really know the

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Lord have attended the prayer meeting. And so, you know, I'm a little surprised that they came. Maybe they came to be with their friends.

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Maybe they came because God was stirring their heart. But when they prayed, the ones that I had real serious doubts about, their prayers were distinctly different.

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It would be like one kid would pray, and there would be this, you could tell that there was a transaction occurring, the needy sinner grabbing hold of God through the finished work of Christ and receiving.

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And then the next kid, the one that maybe wasn't really a believer, it's like there was no transaction.

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The prayer was a one -way thing. He was saying things at God, you know, God, we're so grateful for this church, or I'm grateful for my family and my godly parents, and I pray for those people out there that don't have what we have.

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And it's like there was no beggar coming and receiving, no transaction, one way.

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And so really a distinct difference between a believer's prayer and a self -righteous person's prayer.

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Well, when you started to be bothered, can you, you know, oftentimes when we give a testimony at the church here, people talk a lot about what

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God did within them to break up the ground and to convince them. But I wonder, what was it about Christ, since you already had in your head, you know, a lot of Jesus' words, like, so He died on the cross, blah, blah, blah.

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What was it about Christ that suddenly, you know, was illuminated, suddenly, so to speak, became, you know, indispensable to you, that you had to have, that you grabbed hold of?

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Again, I'd say it's two things. First it was the righteousness of Christ.

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Like you said, I came to the church having almost completed my bachelor's degree in biblical studies.

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I'd preached in numerous churches, had participated in various leadership roles at Blue Mountain College.

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And I thought myself to be a really religious person, a very good person,

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I would say a very righteous person. But when I came to the church, and in the prayer meetings and the sermons, this high and exalted view of Christ would be lifted up before me, and His righteousness was preached.

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I began to see my righteousness, my good works for what they really were, which were filthy rags before a holy

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God. I began to see that there was no man or woman or child who'd ever lived in an absolutely pleasing way before God except for the

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Lord Jesus Christ. That there was never a moment in His life, whether He was a small child or an adolescent or a young adult or a man, where He failed to please the

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Father. He said, I always do that which is pleasing to the Father. And the

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Father said of Him, this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. So the more that I saw the beauty and perfections of Christ, I saw

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His righteousness, the more I saw how unrighteous I was. And I felt like after a period of time,

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I could say with the prophet Isaiah, woe is me for I am undone.

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A side of the righteousness of Christ caused me also to say with the apostle

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Peter, woe is me, depart from me for I am a sinful man. But there was also seeing in that, maybe it's derived from the righteousness of Christ, I saw in Christ a sufficiency that I didn't see in myself, that I didn't see in any other person.

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I saw for the first time that Christ could completely satisfy my soul, my heart, my mind, my entire person.

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I didn't have to look anywhere else. I was having a conversation with Chuck Baggett, who's a pastor here at Christ Church in Albany.

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And he asked me this question in regard to the sufficiency of Christ. I was belly aching in regard to my spiritual condition and my financial condition.

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And he looked me straight in the eye and said, AC, if you have to wake up for the next 50 years and go to this job that you dislike and work with the people that are difficult to work with, will

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Christ be enough for you today and tomorrow morning and for every day before your feet hit the floor for those next 50 years, will

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He be enough to satisfy and content your soul? And the Lord used that question to really pierce through my heart, my hard heart, to see that all that Christ had declared

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Himself to be in the Scriptures, thinking particularly of Psalm 16, 11, where David writes and he says,

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You have made known to me the paths of life. There is fullness of joy in Your presence and pleasures forevermore at Your right hand.

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Thinking of that applied to the Lord Jesus Christ. It's busted up and knocked down all of the barriers that I had to kind of quietly say, well,

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Christ really can't satisfy me or content me. And it was then that I truly saw that Christ could satisfy me today, tomorrow, and forevermore.

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As the Lord was showing you those things about yourself and then, you know, so in a sense showing you

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Himself, showing you yourself, and that's a pretty hard thing to, you know, to endure, and then showing you

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Christ. Did the enemy, can you think back on, you know, years ago, were there any lies that the enemy offered you that, you know, to tempt you to kind of turn on a different path or any hurdles that you look back and say, you know, that was a very dangerous thing for me?

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Yeah, there was a continual whisper from the enemy that there is more work to be done, that when

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Christ cried out upon the cross, it is finished. That He was well -meaning, but He didn't truly speak the truth in that moment.

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That the resurrection didn't testify to the fact that the Father had accepted the finished work of Christ.

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So there was always that whisper that Christ came up to the edge of finishing the work of God that He was sent to accomplish, but He didn't quite finish the work.

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So you would have more to do. Exactly. Yeah, so there was more

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Bible reading, more church attendance, more religious duties to fulfill in order to be acceptable in God's sight, rather than trusting in Christ with my whole heart, mind, and soul.

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After the Lord brought you to Himself through Christ, I mean, obviously, we have mutual friends that would ask me how you were doing, you know, friends from college, friends who knew you, who heard you preach before all of this, years before, you know, and who admired your life as a student, who, you know, benefited from things you had said at devotionals or, you know, at campus ministry kind of things.

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And so they would ask me, like, how's A .C. doing? And I would say to them, well, actually,

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A .C.'s been brought to the Lord, and I could see on their face what they thought. Like, oh, you know, are you one of those kind of preachers that makes everybody think they need to get saved again, you know, and which actually, you know, as I said,

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I thought, well, the guy's probably a Christian, you know, there's no reason to doubt it on the outside. When we first met.

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So, you know, it's not that a lot on the outside of your life had to change.

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So what changes have you seen since coming to God? Yeah, the changes that I would say that I've seen within myself do have to do with resting in the finished work of Christ alone.

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It just came so naturally to me to feel this compulsion that I did have to obey the enemy and pray in order to earn

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God's favor, read the Bible in order to earn God's favor, attend church, you know, speak a word on God's behalf in order to earn

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His favor. But now I can do it out of love for Him, resting in what

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He's done in Christ, knowing that I am secure in Him, that I have assurance of salvation, not based on my work, but based on Christ's finished work,

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His work that is infinite and eternal and unchangeable. So that is really all my hope now.

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Whereas before trusting Christ, all of my hope was put in my own efforts.

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So the Lord brought me to Himself by making me weary of that labor. So A .C.,

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I've kind of guided our conversation. So before we say goodbye to the folks, I mean, is there anything else you just want to say?

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If I could say anything else to the people listening to this, it would be that when the states, to you who believe

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Christ is precious. And that was such a convicting verse for me before I came to Christ, because whereas the

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Lord had really convicted me concerning my righteousness, you know, the externals, this verse came to me with full force, convicting me of the internal issues of my heart.

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How did I value Christ? Was He precious to me? Was He the pearl of great price to my soul?

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And I could say that before coming to Christ, He wasn't precious to me. I had a head knowledge.

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I knew about Him. I would say also in total honesty that I had a servile fear of Him, that if I didn't do what

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He told me to do, then He would punish me and that He was a harsh taskmaster. But after coming to Christ and seeing

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Him for who He really is and knowing what He'd really done in His finished work,

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I could say that He is precious to me, that He is more than all the world to me, all the pleasures and the happinesses that I could have ever looked for in this life.

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You know, my marriage to my wife, coming to this church and being a part of a healthy church, the prospect of looking to the future and being a pastor, more than all those things in their accumulated happiness and the joy that can be derived from them, was

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Christ. Christ was precious and of greater value than all of those things.

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Well, A .C., thank you for sharing your time and taking time out of your schedule to come and talk to us about how the

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Lord was kind to you. Before the podcast, we were talking, and really a testimony is just a chance for us to raise a flag, you know, of Christ's kingdom in enemy territory again to say in a world like ours how precious

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Christ really is, how nothing's been exaggerated about Him in the Scripture. It's all been, in a sense, understated, said in a way that a childlike people can understand it.

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Well, we're glad you were able to join us this week, and we'll see you again next week as we hear from others who have been brought to the