I’m in the fourth quarter of ministry,” Evangelist Junior Hill said to those attending the evening session of the Alabama Baptist Pastors Conference at Gardendale First Baptist Church on Nov. 15. “Some smart aleck told me, ‘The way you look, you’re in overtime.’”
Although still preaching and cracking jokes after 55 years in ministry, the 74-year-old said he has been thinking about what it will be like to see Jesus.
“I’m coming down to the end, and I’ve been thinking a little bit about it,” Hill said. “Sometimes, at night when I lay down to sleep, I think what it’s going to be like when I appear before that judgment seat of Jesus.”
Emotional at times, he said at the end of your life, it’s not about how many sermons you preached, how big your church became or how much money you made but about whether you surrendered all you had to God, even if it was nothing more than rotten rags.
Using Jeremiah 38:7–13 as one of his texts, Hill explained that when the prophet Jeremiah was thrown into a deep pit, a man by the name of Ebed-Melech asked the king if he could take him out of the pit. So Ebed-Melech let down a rope, but with the rope, he let down rotten rags for Jeremiah to put between the rope and his skin so that his skin would not be cut by the rope.
“Here’s a man who walked the face of human history, and when God gave the summary of his life, He gave mention that [Ebed-Melech] gave rotten rags to Jeremiah,” Hill said. “The truth of the matter is [God] isn’t interested in glitz and glamour but rotten rags that are given in the name of Jesus.
“We think we better give Him our strengths, so we offer up to God what we know,” he continued. “He’d like to have some churches that’d fall down on their faces, that’d say, ‘We don’t have anything to offer You.’ God takes rotten rags given in the name of Jesus and makes something wonderful.”
Tearing up, Hill told the audience about a recent trip he took to central Florida to preach at a church. The night before he was to preach, he only got one hour of sleep.
“I woke up about as bad as a human being could feel,” Hill said. “I said, ‘Oh, God, I can’t go to church today,’ but I knew I had to do it.
“This is so precious to me that I won’t ever forget it,” he went on. “I got down on my face and said, ‘Dear God, I don’t have one thing to offer You today but my utter weakness. I don’t want to go to church; I don’t feel like preaching. All I have is my weakness.’ … That morning, God saved 41 people. He wants some old rotten rags, because that’s all you got to offer Him.”
Because God has used his weaknesses to reach many for Jesus Christ, pastors conference leaders wanted to honor him. It would be the first time for Hill to be honored collectively by Alabama Baptists.
Receiving a standing ovation, Hill was presented a special plaque with a collage of pictures and Scripture verses and a five-day trip for two to The Grove Park Inn Resort & Spa in Asheville, N.C.
Conference leaders also put together a video with pictures of Hill and messages from friends, including Rick Lance, executive director of the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions; Jerry Vines, pastor emeritus of First Baptist Church, Jacksonville, Fla.; Johnny Hunt, pastor of First Baptist Church, Woodstock, Ga.; and Steve Gaines, pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church, Cordova, Tenn.
But what moved Hill to place his head in his hands and cry was not the plaque, trip or video — it was a personal letter from Evangelist Billy Graham that Kevin Hamm, president of the pastors conference and senior pastor of Gardendale First, read out loud. Hill then was presented with the framed letter. “I don’t know any other evangelist that has had any more impact than Junior Hill, my friends,” Hamm said. “He just preaches Jesus.
“We just want to tell you how much we love you,” he said to Hill. “To God be the glory; great things He has done.”
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