“The thief’s purpose is to steal, and kill, and destroy. My purpose is

to give life in all its fullness.” John 10:10 NLT

I grew up in a Christian home and gave my life to Christ at a very young age. I grew up serving Him and wanted to live my whole life serving God and working for His Kingdom.

In my early years, I had a concept of God as a disciplinarian, who would whack me if I didn’t follow the rules. It was mostly a denominational leaning, as our church circles were pretty strict.

As I grew to study for myself, I began to drink in the grace of God, where He knew my faults and made allowances for my humanity. He loved me even though I made mistakes. He died on the cross for my sin knowing that I would blow it even after I accepted Him.

Ministry As Identity

As a young church planter, I was sent out by my pastor to set about building a mega-church. I got in trouble time and again from my leadership because I was too gracious with people, and spent too much time counseling and walking them through difficulty. I needed to spend more time building the crowd, I was told, because it will pay for itself and bring volunteers.

So I began to put up walls with people, because I wanted to please God and my pastor, I wanted to do something great for the Kingdom. I wanted a great big ministry that would meet people’s needs in whatever stage of life they were in. I wanted to build a one-stop shop for all your spiritual needs. The greater good would be served by the organization that we would build.

After working for over 5 years in this way, I became increasingly desperate. I was getting burned out, and had no real friendships. I began to see my mentor, my pastor, as only concerned with results and the business end of ministry, not people and their hurts and needs. My heart had been drawn to ministry to help the hurting and bring the lost to life in Christ.

Through a painful separation with my mentor, I began to understand that I had seen people as a means to an end, not as friends and brothers in God’s kingdom. I repented of my business-like approach, and surrendered to God my whole life and ministry. I also began to seek to follow only God’s leading through His Spirit and Scripture, as many traditions we have in church have strayed from the heart of what God intended.

Having freed myself of some of the misconceptions of my youth, I felt that we were wide open to the power of God flowing through our ministry. I would read miracle testimonies of missionaries and pastors who had surrendered themselves fully to God and experienced a great harvest.

I fasted, I prayed, I studied. I wept. I was desperate for God to move. Many relationships I had in the church were damaged, as I had been so driven for so long I had kept close relationships from forming. I determined to change this, and tried to open myself up to others, become more vulnerable.

This led to greater disappointment, however, as some who I opened myself up to used it as leverage against me. In other relationships, I had placed such a wedge of resentment in their hearts by pushing so hard for so long, that they couldn’t be open and free with me. Experiencing this new hurt, I began to put up walls again and desperately cried out to God.

My wife and I wanted so much to do good in this world, and help connect people with Christ, and watch them walk in freedom. It seemed as though the further we extended ourselves to help people the more they took advantage of us. And the walls around our hearts got higher.

After 8 years of struggle, we finally closed our little church plant, feeling exhausted and broken. It was as though someone in our family had died. We felt utter failure, like our lives were meaningless and we had wasted the last eight years. We were hurt by some of the people we had worked the closest with, as we had hurt them, and cut off all communication with almost anyone we knew from the church.

Three months later, I was on staff at a church just up the road, jumping in with both feet, working almost 7 days a week. We saw in the lead pastor and his wife the same struggle we had experienced, and we connected immediately.

We both worked very hard in different areas of ministry, this new church was so grateful to have us on board, and there was a love and grace that covered the relationship. It wasn’t until six months in that trouble began.

The pastor was having fits of desperation as the church wasn’t growing like he wanted. I tried to encourage him and point out that they were already larger than the average church in America, that there were people coming to Christ regularly and that they had a great volunteer base. No amount of encouragement seemed to reach into his depths of despair.

There began to be a growth-at-all-costs mentality setting in, and the grace that started the relationship was becoming strained. During a particularly tense conversation, the pastor confided in me that he was resentful that they had hired me to help grow the church and we hadn’t grown. I felt stunned, as our opening conversations were all about me helping to love the people and connecting them with God. I pointed out that I had closed a church I couldn’t grow, and wasn’t sure what he had expected.

The final blow came when we were planning a huge Easter Carnival to bring in great crowds and grow the church. It was a plan I had offered in response to repeated staff meeting requests on how to grow the church. As finances were tight and the carnival was a large expense, I was called on a Sunday afternoon and peppered with questions about the budget and planning by both the pastor and his wife.

I asked if we could continue the conversation on Monday in the office during business hours, as the conversation wasn’t filled with any of the fruits of the Spirit, and was becoming increasingly tense. I was told to go and get those things from the Lord, because this was ‘business.’

A little over three months from that conversation, I left this ministry discouraged and burned out, feeling as though everything I touched were a failure. The pastor and his wife had become increasingly controlling and resentful, and our friendship deteriorated. My wife and I were in a deep depression, and old hurts came rushing back to salt new wounds. It seemed as though every church and ministry was more about the bottom line than the hearts and souls of the people.

After licking our wounds for several months, we were having a home Bible study and several people began to talk about a church plant. My wife and I immediately recoiled from the idea, as that sort of a thing always ended in pain and rejection.

As the months went on, the people persisted. We had gatherings of 50-60 people each week and many of them wanted to move forward with a church plant. I finally asked them to pray and we would too.

After 3 months of prayer, My wife and I both separately felt God leading us to surrendering a new church plant. Even if it were to end in utter failure, and the whole thing fell apart, we felt that God wanted us to surrender it to Him. It was a resistant heart that He was dealing with, that I wanted a guaranteed success before I would step out in faith. So we gave in and stepped out.

The first six months were fantastic, people volunteering, worshipping freely, and coming together. It was awesome! We made relationships a priority, worship came first, and people gave freely. Then it started….

Some wanted this for worship, others that. Some wanted big outreach and events, to push for growth, and others just wanted to focus on growing in the Lord. Divisions set in, then back-biting, and a little over a year after we had started, we were back down to four families meeting in a home.

The animosity of some who had moved on was as painful as a knife wound, and as fresh as our first church’s death. My wife and I finally began to come to the end of ourselves. She reached her end before I did, with depression and hopelessness setting in.

The End of Hope

Our marriage, which had always been a strength and encouragement to us, began to grow cold. We began putting walls up with each other, and then I hit my end.

Each day I had to force myself out of bed and off to work. When we met for ‘church’ I felt as though my words were falling flat. I began to drift in my faith. I believed with all my heart that God would come through for you, He just wouldn’t for me. I was back to working seven days a week to support my family and then working in the church weekends and evenings.

We saw miracles of healing, and breakthrough in the lives of the people in our little home group, but I couldn’t believe God for any hope in my life. I was becoming an unbelieving believer. I would fast for you, pray for you, study to help counsel and teach, but I couldn’t see any of  God’s power active in my life.

I believed I would probably go to heaven when I died, I just couldn’t expect any joy or peace in getting there. I felt disappointed and abandoned by God. I felt that He had decided that my lot in life was to suffer and fail, that somehow that was how I would please Him, by being miserable. It was a twisted view of a loving savior, one that I would have argued against coming from anyone else, because the truth is that He loves us and wants to give us ALL the fruits, including joy, but I had accepted the enemy’s deception in my heart about myself, and about God’s love for me.

As God finally let us reach our end, He inserted a ray of hope. I had a pastor friend who had been sharing with me the last couple of years the incredible freedom God had led him to. I remember when he first shared, I thought he finally was stepping into grace, as I had years earlier. But as I hit my end, God reminded me of his story, and I realized he had hit as low a place as I had and God had freed him.

There were two verses God used to absolutely break my heart so that He could put it back together again.

The first was John 8:36:

“and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

I had studied truth my whole life, I was a child of God and my savior was Jesus Christ, but I WAS NOT fully free! I had studied, memorized, prayed, fasted, and searched diligently for God and His Truth for most of my life. Yet true freedom remained elusive.

The second was the parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18, who had been forgiven a great debt but would not forgive his brother a small debt. The master was enraged and sent him to prison and handed him over to the ‘tormentors’ until he had paid all.

Matthew 18:34,35

“And his master was angry, and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him. 35 So My heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses.”

It hit me like a ton of bricks that I was in torment! I had always read that parable as a rendering of the final judgement of hell, and it seemed a bit harsh for holding a grudge, but understanding came flooding in when I realized that my tormentors, or my ‘torturers’ were allowed to work on me because of the condition of my heart.

All my failures and the rejection of others, and now a waning marriage were my daily tormentors. I had tried to pray prayers of forgiveness, to release to God all the years of failure and hurt. I even begged Him to heal our marriage, but both my wife and I were suffering our separate torments and it was pushing us apart.

Hope Lives Again

Through my pastor friend, I was led to Freedom Through Forgiveness Ministry and Nathan Daniels. I was sure it wouldn’t help, as I had studied Biblical forgiveness for years and had prayed the prayers. But I was desperate, so we made an appointment and went to San Diego. Or, Alpine, more specifically. I didn’t have much hope left.

After the first day, I began to feel hope stir in my heart. As God began to unravel the years of hurt and disappointment I felt, He went back further than I could have imagined. He reached all the way back to my childhood, to a difficult relationship I had as a child that sowed the seeds of my despair as an adult.

I found that the enemy of my soul had used this relationship to cut me off from close, loving relationships, and tricked me into putting walls around my heart at a very young age to protect myself. As I worked through this pivotal relationship, I felt a weight fall from my shoulders and God’s presence and love come rushing in more deeply than I had ever known.

Over the next two days, my wife and I stepped into a freedom that we had only dreamed of our entire lives. It was like being born-again all over again. Forgiveness flowed, and even repentance for our part, and the Great Physician reached all the way back in time to heal a hurting child and made a grown man whole.

Over this last year, we have experienced true joy, a lasting joy, and a peace deeper than any we have ever known. Instead of just studying and teaching or preaching about the fruit of the Spirit, I was tasting and experiencing them fully! Truly abiding in the vine as Christ called us to, where the fruit grows naturally and is free for the tasting.

We have stepped into a new dimension of living, free to allow God into the very depths of our hearts where we had kept Him out before. We recognize the battle we are in and have the tools and the understanding to wage war for God’s Kingdom, starting with our own hearts, our marriage, and our home.

And the good news is…… so can you!