Preachers encourage Alabama pastors to worship, stay in tune with calling at Pastors Conference

With a sermon on ‘Amazing Grace’ and the prodigal son, I realize I am walking all over familiar territory tonight,” said David Jeremiah, pastor of Shadow Mountain Community Church, near San Diego, to the crowd of 2,300 pastors and others present at the 2005 Pastors Conference Nov. 14.
   
“But this time around, God helped me understand it in a way I had never understood it before,” Jeremiah said. “I am convinced this story is really not about the son at all — Jesus is the hero of the story.”
   
That statement summed up the whole conference, held at Whitesburg Baptist Church, Huntsville, said Harold Fanning, Pastors Conference president and pastor of Shoal Creek Baptist Church, Decatur.
   
“The theme was He Is Exalted, and we prayed it would be all about Him — that the Lord would be exalted. I think that was accomplished,” Fanning said. “It was fantastic.”
   
The congregation ended the evening of praise on their feet singing “Amazing Grace” a cappella. “Grace is God coming to us,” said Jeremiah, the conference headliner. 
   
In the trilogy of “lost” parables in Luke 15 — the lost sheep, the lost coin and the prodigal son — for the theme to be consistent, the father would have to be seeking out the son rather than the son returning to the father, he explained to the congregation.
   
If the idea was for the treasured possession to come back, “the sheep would show up at night back at home and the coin would flip up on the table and be found,” Jeremiah said. “The initiator is always God. It is the initiative and love of the Father that found the son.”
   
It is that same initiative and love that sought out Peter and molded him into a powerful man of God, said Edwin Jenkins, director of the office of leadership and church growth for the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions.
   
Jenkins was one of five Alabama Baptist speakers who joined Jeremiah and two Georgia speakers in the lineup addressing the crowd of pastors during the daylong conference.
   
The local church is “headquarters for the work of Christ on earth,” Jenkins said. And for pastors to see Christ exalted in the local church, they must apply the Peter Precept.
   
“Ultimately, when you trace your calling back to whenever that was, it comes back to those two key words (like Peter’s) — ‘follow me,’” he said. 
   
Following like Peter did involves the principle of character development seen in Mark 8:34, Jenkins said.
   
“Jesus does not in any way dilute His calling,” he said. “It requires sacrifice and it requires that we operate by His rules.”
   
Character development continues into times of challenge and crisis, Jenkins said, such as Peter faced when he denied Christ. “When there’s a brick wall beside you, behind you and in front of you, what do you need? You need a Savior and that’s what he had,” he said. “How do you get back to where He wants you to be? Follow Him.”
   
Evangelist Junior Hill of Hartselle encouraged pastors to allow Christ to use those times of crisis to learn valuable, irreplaceable lessons. 
   
Hill spoke of a note he had received from a pastor in which he confessed, “I feel like such a failure.” Hill said it is very likely that all pastors have felt that way but questioned whether failure is always a bad thing. “Failure is an instrument of God to teach us things we couldn’t learn any other way,” he said. 
   
In 2 Corinthians 12, Paul is shown to have plenty about which to be proud. But God, Hill said, has a remarkable way of turning exaltation into humiliation.
   
Paul was unattractive physically, unappealing as a preacher and unpopular with the people. But God made friends of Paul’s foes and his weakness — in the sovereignty of God — became his strength. He even took pleasure in his problems.
   
Hill said God delights in calling not the mighty, the miracle workers or nobility but those “rednecks of the backwoods” so that the glory may be given to the Lord Jesus. 
   
According to him, one of the problems with the church today is that people understand too much. “If you can explain it, God probably didn’t do it,” he said, adding that failure “makes you constantly aware that you need God.”
   
To stay humble through failure but avoid falling into moral sin, Len Turner, evangelist from Woodstock, Ga., said “just stay in love with Jesus … and don’t lower your standards.”
   
The key is being intimate with God, Turner explained as he preached from 1 John 1. “The key is … being in the Word, having the Word down deep in us … and walking in the Spirit of God day by day.”
   
Michael Mason, an evangelist from Hartselle, asked the roomful of pastors if they stayed plugged into the Spirit and the calling of God or if they resembled the multitude of Elvis impersonators worldwide — 35,000, to be exact.
   
It is a strange feeling to know that many people wake up to pretend for another day that they are someone else, but Mason said he fears “there are also way too many who are impersonating preachers.”
   
“They have the degree, the suit and tie, the whole bit — but they haven’t been called,” he said.
   
Pastors should have a distinct calling — or be “gripped by ‘go,’” Mason said.
   
The calling of Billy Cagle, pastor of Flint Baptist Church, Decatur, for example, led him to speak to the conference despite having nearly lost his voice.
   
Cagle drew enthusiastic applause when he announced, “Please pray for my voice. It’s about gone but my 13-year-old son was saved yesterday.”
   
Reading from Mark 5:1–13, Cagle said, “The writer gives us a picture of the kind of power Jesus has, power of demons, death and disease. I want us to leave here saying, ‘Oh, what a Savior.’”
   
He set the stage for Jesus’ encounter with the Gadarene demoniac, saying “society could not help him. They didn’t know what to do with him, so they isolated him, they bound him up, but they couldn’t change him. Society doesn’t know how to handle sin.”
   
While society cannot transform, declared Cagle, the Savior can. “We live in a world that is sliding into hell. Just take this book (the Bible) and preach it. The power of God will fall on you and will change your ministry.”
   
Roger Willmore, pastor of Deerfoot Baptist Church, Trussville, spoke to the pastors about the proposition before believers in Philippians 2:5–11: Is Jesus both Savior and Lord?
   
“When we say Jesus Christ is Lord, we are saying Jesus is Lord and Master of the unseen,” Willmore said of the part of man where battles are fought and won — the heart and soul.
   
He said the issue of the Lordship of Christ is not a debatable one. For believers, it is not a question of will they crown Jesus Lord, but when will they crown Him.
   
Richard Walker, pastor of Macland Baptist Church, Powder Springs, Ga., said the time to crown Him is now.
   
“Our major task is to lift up the Lord Jesus as the One to be worshipped and adored,” Walker said, preaching from Psalm 150.
   
He exhorted the congregation to continue praising the Lord throughout their lives.
   
“We can praise Him with our preaching in churches, but we can also praise Him while we are driving down the road,” Walker said. “We should praise Him for His mighty acts, for His saving power, His delivering power, His abundant blessings and His unending love.”  (TAB)