It was a typical frigid February morning on the Lord’s Day. My family was loaded
into the car, and we were headed to a preaching engagement I had at a church
about an hour away. My wife, Shiloh, was reading out loud to me from the
biography of Leonard Ravenhill, one of the saints who had gone before us.
This newfound practice of her reading to me while we drove to preaching
engagements happened accidentally; my wife was reading a biography of Susanne
Spurgeon one day and simply said, “Hey, listen to this,” followed by me saying,
“Wow, would you keep reading?” and thus began a new time in our life. Our travel
time was now taken up with her reading out loud to me while I drove.
For my preaching engagements, my wife would grab the biography on the life of
Leonard Ravenhill, a preacher ablaze with zeal and love for the Lord. It was like a
booster shot to the arm before I preached to hear of Ravenhill’s life, but something
even more wonderful began to happen; we began to have a longing for the type of
corporate prayer meetings that the author, Mack Tomlinson, wrote about. I began
to pray that I would meet someone who could tell us what it was like to attend
those prayer meetings, and I confided this to a friend who would meet with me in
prayer. One day, my friend brought me a slip of paper with a phone number on it.
He says, “Here, this is Mack Tomlinson’s phone number, and he wants to talk to
you.” I was floored that not only would Mack take an anonymous phone call from
a man who somehow found his number on the internet, but he would even be
willing to take the time to talk to me, an unknown preacher from Oklahoma. Mack
invited me and a friend to attend one of their Wednesday prayer meetings, which
was modeled after Ravenhill’s weekly Friday night prayer meetings, which Mack
and his wife used to attend.
The very next week, a good friend and I took off on a five-hour journey south to
the prayer meeting in Mack’s house. We had no clue that where we were going
would change the trajectory of our lives and our families lives and would begin the
forming of deep friendships, the kind that mold and shape who we are. It was at the
prayer meeting that I met Michael Durham, a long-time friend of Mack and the
founder of Real Truth Matters Ministries.
I still remember the prayer meeting like it was yesterday. The warmth and
hospitality of Mack and Linda Tomlinson. The eager smiles and handshakes of the
living room full of people gathered to pray. The prayer time was wonderful; it was
a blessing to see so many families gathered together; the dining room chairs had to
be brought in to provide seats for everyone. There was something else, however,
that occurred during the meeting that resonated with the preacher in me and only
increased my desire to see true preaching fill the pulpits. I had already been
growing deeply concerned and burdened at seeing the spiritually starving sheep at
the churches I visited. When we would leave a place of worship, my wife and I
would often lament, “I can see their bones showing,” meaning we could see the
hunger in them as even a young and inexperienced preacher like myself shared a
simple message about Christ and the Lord’s desire to walk in intimacy with them.
It was at this time in my walk with the Lord that the Lord began to open my eyes to
the shallowness of much of what I knew the church to be.
At the beginning of the prayer meetings, it was normal practice for an elder to
exhort those attending to really meet with the Lord in prayer by sharing a portion
of scripture and expounding upon it. I can still remember sitting on the couch next
to my friend, and on the other side of me was Michael, whom I had just met. Mack
asked Michael to share a word of encouragement with those gathered. Michael
stood up and preached. It was brief, yes, but there was more to the preaching than I
was used to. Something unexplainable was happening. My inner self was smiling
as my brother poured forth words in a way that really left imprints on the hearts of
the listeners. I knew what real preaching was through reading old books, and I
longed for it from myself, but here, I found myself drawn to someone who lived it.
Here before me was a man of conviction. Someone with whom I would eventually
find myself sharing my convictions and concerns for the state of many churches
and who shared many of those same convictions and concerns. The Lord really
knit our hearts together in a unique way after that day.
From there is a long story of two brothers in Christ, Mack and Michael, who took
us in, helped us plant a church, often visited us in Oklahoma, watched over us, and
prayed for us. They walked with me as I navigated the journey of shepherding a
church; they were patient with me as I went through all the struggles that come
with pastoring a flock of Christ’s people. They were with me in my failings and my
victories. It has been four years since I placed the call to an unknown brother in
Texas, and in that time, the Lord has really grown Michael into a mentor for me.
We formed a deep friendship and have continued to grow in the same convictions
regarding our burden for the church. How we both long to see the church lay ahold
of all that she is in Christ; to pursue New Testament Christianity by pursuing Jesus
Christ as the Gospel.
Over the course of the last year, the Lord really began to create in me a burden to
help my brother Michael in his labors at Real Truth Matters. Through much prayer,
the Lord made it clear to us both that the Lord had indeed called me to help
Michael by joining Real Truth Matters as the first-ever Associate Evangelist for
RTM. Even though I do not know the whole path, I trust the Lord enough to just
walk in what he has for me. I can look back over the course of this journey of faith
and see the goodness of the Lord’s hand guiding and leading my family here. I
know with certainty that the Lord is still leading us on this unknown road, and we
continue on in faith.