Testimony: Laura McCoy | Supporter Appreciation Episode

Evangelism Beyond Techniques and Church Growth

Welcome back to the Behold Your God podcast. I'm John Snyder, author of the Behold Your God series and pastor at Christ Church in New Albany. And we're continuing with our series on evangelism. And in that series, if you were able to listen to or to watch our talks, we really dealt with the fundamentals of evangelism, not so much techniques or church growth approaches or even one-on-one, you know, how to answer hard questions.

But how does God do evangelism? How does He deal with the soul? And if we understand how God deals with the soul in bringing a person to Himself in that wonderful process of mercy, is there something about that that we need to understand so that we can be working in harmony with the Spirit?

And we feel that that really is important, especially in our day, to think through it again. And one of the things that we wanted to do after a long series on that was just to ask some people that we have personally seen God be very kind to.

And we've seen them before and during and after that great process. We wanted them to be able to say something of God's kindness to you guys so you can hear the same thing. So I'm very glad to have Laura McCoy with us tonight.

And Laura and her family have been in the church for a long time. I'm always bad at how long people have been here. But not just a church member, but really a very dear friend. Laura's family, very kind to my family, and our families have been together a lot over the last few years.

So it's an extraordinary joy not just for me to know that you can hear it, but for me to hear again God's kindness to you. So Laura, before we start, just give us a quick bio. Who's Laura McCoy?

Well, I've been married to the love of my life for 19 years. And Trey and I are terribly happy together. And we have been blessed with five children that God gave to us through the gift of adoption. And they are joys and griefs and joys again.

And I live next door to my mom and my grandmother and have been coming to Christ Church for, I think, about 13 years.

Yeah, see, I would have guessed eight. So I'm always wrong. I'm always wrong. Well, Laura, we've asked you, would you be willing, just to tell us, of how God brought you to Himself?

Childhood Faith, Moral Confidence, and Nominal Christianity

Slowly and steadily, really over the course of probably six or seven years. When I was very young, I grew up in a godly home. My parents loved the Lord. They loved each other. They loved us. It was a sweet home to grow up in.

And we were taught from a very early age truths about God, who God was, who God is, who we are outside of Christ. I knew from my earliest remembrance that I was born sinful and needed a Savior. I knew the truths about God, that He was the creator of all things, the sustainer of life, the giver of all good things, that He was sovereign over everything.

I understood and agreed with these truths all my life. I knew that God was my master, whether I wanted Him to be or not. And I was very tender in general as a child, tender towards religion. And when I was ten years old, my dad was my pastor.

When I was ten years old, after repeatedly telling him that I was sorry for my sins and that I wanted to be a Christian and I wanted to serve God, I was baptized. For probably close to ten years after that, I felt pretty secure and safe.

Honestly, I felt like I was a pretty good person, which is embarrassing to admit. In a way, I placed a lot of hope in my morality. I was outwardly very obedient to my parents. Inwardly, I was not. I hated their rules.

I didn't want to submit, but I wanted them to be happy. And I very much wanted people to think well of me. So I really felt like I was a pretty good person and that that was enough. I was not at all taught this heresy, but I feel like truthfully in my heart, I believed that there were kind of degrees of Christianity and that my parents had kind of attained this higher level of closeness to God and that probably eventually that would come for me.

But for the time being, I was just really content to just kind of be a nominal Christian. And I read my Bible with varying degrees of consistency. I prayed a lot. I understood that God was the giver of all things.

And so when I needed something, I talked to Him about it. And I knew He was real, and I knew He could hear me. So then fast forward about ten years, and I got married very young. I was 18, and I very much looked to Trey to make me happy.

I expected him to make all my dreams come true. And he was able to fulfill that for a time. But being human, that was an unfair expectation to place on him. And the first real blow to my self-satisfied apathy was the fact that we could not have children.

And the grief that was overwhelming over that was the first thing that caused me to question, why did God seem so far from me? I didn't understand why. Then a few years into that pain, my dad, I mentioned, he was my pastor.

And he was asked to leave the church that he pastored. That was the only church that I had ever been a part of. So he did, and he and Mama started attending here at Christ Church.

Yeah, and just to say that that wasn't for any immorality. It was a difference in doctrinal views.

The Shock of a New Church, Suffering, and the Death of a Father

Yes, yes, for a difference in doctrinal views. He came to Christ Church, and Trey and I followed a few months later. And church, being a pastor's daughter, church was our life. It was an integral part of me.

So to leave everything that was familiar about church behind was very difficult for me. Coming to Christ Church, everything was different. The music was different. The preaching was different. You were different than Daddy.

The people were different. The atmosphere was different. It was just all very different. And I think the foreignness of it just kind of jolted me into an awareness and kind of an uber-sensitivity to everything that was just what I needed.

I've gone and listened to sermons that Daddy preached that I grew up hearing and thought, I don't remember hearing that. I wasn't listening. I didn't care about those truths. But coming to Christ Church, it was just so new that every Sunday was the preaching just undid me.

You were so faithful to unceasingly preach who Christ is and what is a Christian. I just felt like that was repeated over and over. What really is a Christian? What makes someone a follower of Christ?

And the things that you talked about like a longing for Christ and a desire to commune with God and a grieving over your sins and these things were not the things that described me. And you didn't talk about being a really good person and being a rule-keeper and not doing all the bad things that I had not done in my life.

And so really, I left almost every Sunday crying. But mostly they were tears of frustration because I just felt like that guy's just saying this so strongly like it's the only explanation of Christianity and surely there's a different explanation because my explanation was different.

So I was pretty miserable in the preaching. And then a few months after all that upheaval and coming to Christ Church, Daddy was diagnosed with cancer which was completely unexpected. He was very healthy, 53 years old.

And Daddy was next to Trey, really my best friend. And he was such a kind father and he was my spiritual anchor. I trusted in him spiritually. He was very wise, very close to God. And I think I just felt like I was close to God because I was close to him and he was close to God.

And so having him be sick and then that threatened and then three months later he went to heaven and it was very quick. But the only thing harder than having Daddy die was watching him suffer. And those months that he was sick, he got very sick very quickly.

And watching him, he would sit for hours silent mostly with his head bowed and his eyes closed. He was very weak and in a lot of pain. And you could feel it was this tangible thing that he was communing with God.

And it unnerved me even as much as I knew Daddy. And Daddy always meditated on Jesus. He always had a hymn going in his mind or a prayer. But to see him in such physical distress but his soul at perfect peace.

And I remember asking him, why don't you want to do anything distracting? You don't want to watch a movie. You don't want me to read you a book. And he just said, oh Laura, I'm having such sweet thoughts of Jesus.

And I just didn't know what to do with that. At that point in my life, I was distracting myself as much as possible from everything unpleasant. From the fact that I didn't have children and from the fact that Daddy was sick.

And this growing sense in myself that I wasn't walking with the Lord. And that was about as far as I would let it go in my mind. Things weren't what they should be. And I just distracted myself. Movies, books.

I loved working in my flowers. I did that a lot. Shopping. Anything I could do to take my mind off of the unpleasant things in life. But there was Daddy really going through, not unpleasant but just miserable suffering.

And no desire to distract himself because Christ was his distraction. He was distracted by Christ. Then he died and life went on. And Trey and I were pursuing adoption by then. And a little less than a year after we said goodbye to Daddy, God brought our first son to us.

And he was four and a half years old at the time. And I really felt like finally this emptiness in me. I would be happy. I would feel complete. And even though Lee brought much joy and we were very happy, our little family, I continued just feeling that things were not as they should be.

And there was a weekly ladies' prayer meeting at Christchurch every Wednesday night. And since I fancied myself a very religious person and taking part in such things always, I did regularly attend and participate in that.

But after a few months even, I was very ill at ease in that prayer service. The prayers of the other women, it was so evident that they knew God in a way that I never had. But I would try very hard to form very sincere prayers and try to make them sound like their prayers.

And they never said anything to me or acted in any way like I didn't fit in or my prayers were different, but I felt like the pink elephant in the room. And I was just terrified that they would find out.

I was bothered at that point by the fact that maybe all my efforts and all my life, all my morality had been in vain for nothing. But I was much more bothered by the fact that maybe that was true and what if everybody found out that I was a fake?

Because I was beginning to feel more and more like a fake. And I just didn't want anybody to know. So I was pretty miserable. Then another big blow. A sweet friend, Amber Mathenia, was killed in a car accident.

And Amber and I had known each other but had begun spending a lot more time together. She was really seeking me out, I think. Amber was this vivacious, beautiful, charming, charismatic woman who I was so drawn to.

And looking back from here, I really feel like it was the aroma of Christ that drew me to her. And she was fun and she loved to make you laugh. She loved to laugh. She was a great mom. But when she was killed, I was so surprised by what everybody talked about the most about her.

People talked about all that I just said. But what was over and over like a repeating refrain was how much Amber loved God. It was just said about her over and over. And I remember just being surprised like, well, I mean, sure, but also all these other things.

And then I just felt this realization that if it had been I who had been killed suddenly and people were talking about me, I didn't feel that anybody would sit around and say, well, Laura really loved God.

And then I wondered, why do I feel that way? Why would I feel like they wouldn't say that about me? And why did they say that about Amber? And so that was something that made me really, when Amber died, that was the first time that I really started feeling like I really wanted to see God.

I really wanted to love Him like Amber had loved Him. And like I saw so many lives that had not just been touched by Amber and her kindness and sweetness and funniness, but her love for God. And so I did begin at that point to really start asking God things like, will you let me know you better?

Will you show me where I'm going wrong? A few months after Amber died, the church was going through, was reading through a book called Communion with God by John Owen. And I was finding it very difficult to get into.

And the book deals with love and the relationship between the believer and each member of the Trinity individually. And when I came to the section, Own Love to the Son, which is based on the Song of Solomon.

And so in the book, John Owen compares it to the love between a husband and a wife. And Trey and I had a sweet and wonderful relationship. And I just remember I was sitting on my couch reading and I felt like somebody had dropped a bomb on me, that this sudden realization that I didn't love God, nothing like this.

And then just real honesty flooded my soul that I didn't love him at all. I had all my life, I had believed in God and I had depended on God. And I had asked God for what I needed and I had trusted in him, but I had not loved him.

And I had not done any of the things that I had done out of love for him. I had done them out of love for myself, really. And I remember just sitting there thinking, I don't even know what to do with this.

And it was, I felt almost like an audible voice just said,.

Ask me.

And so I did. I got down on my knees and just confessed that I didn't love God, that I never had. And that I knew he knew that because I knew he knew all things. But I had not known it. And now that I did know it, I desperately wanted to love him and to know him.

And I just felt like over the next few days, he just flooded my heart with love for him. And soon after that, I was reading through the book of Hosea and chapter two in Hosea talks about that they will no longer call me master, but they will now call me husband.

And it was just like the last piece of the puzzle clicked in for me that that was, I had always known God was my master. And so had tried to please him for things I would get from him or to keep from getting punishment from him.

But that now I wanted to please him because I loved him and because he loved me and not to get anything from him, but just because he had loved me and I wanted to please him.

Christ as the Bridge to God

When you think back on that time about, what it was about the love of God,.

You use that phrase.

So what about the work of Christ was it that was such a clear revelation to you? I mean, I know you'd heard the words before, but what was it about the work of Christ that really captivated your heart?

Well, really something that you had said in one of the times that I had met with you that I felt like you were just really misunderstanding me when you weren't, you were very much understanding me. And you said, ask God to show you himself and then ask him to show you yourself and then ask him to show you Christ.

And I left that day thinking I know who God is and I know who I am and I know who Jesus is and what he did for me. But it was really that through all those really years that kept coming back to me and you preached on it so constantly that this huge gap and I had come to feel that gap.

I had come to feel that I was very far from God. And I remember thinking I had been to the Grand Canyon as a little girl and that's how I visualized it. Like I'm here and God is way over there and I cannot get to him.

And I keep trying to bring those two sides together, but I was afraid to let go of what I was trusting in, which was my own righteousness and my own pleasures, things that I thought were giving me pleasure that I would have to let go of if I reached out for God.

But that's what I envisioned, like me having to reach out for God. And I don't remember when it happened that I began to see Christ as that bridge, not even a bridge, but something that brought them together.

Like it's not a bridge you would have to still cross over, but Christ brings me to God. He brought me to God and there was no way I could have approached God. And I think that's what captivated my heart.

Does that answer the question?

A Pastor's Faithfulness, a Father's Legacy, and the Sweetness of Christ

Yeah, yeah. You know, when you talk about your dad, people might think since they didn't know Mike, well, you know, you're a daughter that was loved by a dad and so that's why you say all these nice things about him, you know?

And especially when our loved ones aren't with us anymore, we tend to only remember the great things, and so we kind of eulogize them. But really, Mike was everything you could have hoped for in a friend or a pastor, and I imagine a dad.

I remember when Mike came, having taken a really costly stand on a biblical truth that I think he was right, and it costing him a church that he had helped plant over 20 years prior to that, and having cost, you know, the fear of, you know, this is our life, like you said, this church is our life, so all of our friends are here, you know, and where does the cost end if I take this stand?

And I could just remain quiet, but Mike did it, and he did it in such a humble way, and so one of the things that encouraged me when he showed up, I said to him, like, are you on vacation? Like, what are you doing at church?

Like, aren't you supposed to be preaching? And he said, well, I'm kind of on vacation, and Mike was always just so humble, but from that, you know, then he told me what happened, and from that point on, every week he would say, good morning, pastor, and I think, why are you calling me pastor?

Like, I want you to be my pastor, and the day that he got the call from the doctor that he had cancer, I had met with him for lunch after watching him for a year because I thought maybe he's not as good as he looks, and maybe like under the surface he's this monster, you know, and so me and the other pastors at the church, we just watched your dad in a gracious way, you know, just wait and see what kind of man he really is, and he was everything that we thought he was as a Christian, and so I remember having lunch with him saying, would you be willing to co-pastor with us and to be an elder here at the church, and he said he would pray about it, and then he called me that afternoon and said, I've gotten a pretty bad report, so I think I should probably not make a decision on that, but it really was your dad and your mom both, you know, a real...

When they came to the church, even though through hard circumstances, it was like such a help to the believers here, you know, to be able to have mature believers. I remember my son, my oldest son, your dad's influence was part of what led him to Christ.

When your father died, it really bothered my son, and I remember some of your dad's sermons that were really close to the end that he preached here at the church about Christ, and my older son, who my sermons just rushed off of him like water off a duck's back.

Like daddy's did mine.

Yeah, like yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, dad, yeah, okay, yeah, Jesus, Jesus, Bible, Bible, but when he saw your dad on the edge of eternity talk about the sweetness of Christ, it really shook him in a good way, so I'm glad that those are friendships that are never finished, you know, because of Christ.

By the way, if you want to read a small book that Mike put together just to help explain in simple terms, in layman's terms, all the different facets of the gospel, which often get misunderstood and turned into kind of battle points, it's a little book called Let Us Reason Together, and you can look it up.

We'll put a link to it on the podcast so you can locate it. Thank you so much for coming, Laura.

Thanks for having me.

Well, thanks for joining us. This is the last of our testimonies. We wish we could keep going on. I do, but we hope that it's been a help to you.