Where did the people of Trinity Grace Church come from? We are thousands of miles and thousands of years removed from a cross on a hill called Golgotha. How did God bring a people to belief and establish a local church in Athens, TN?
Each of us can trace our story back to a person or a few people who opened their mouths to tell us the good news.
On Sunday, we heard Walt Alexander’s story of our extraordinary God working through an ordinary person to transfer the message of the gospel. And it brought Walt back to life. The following is a transcript of that story:
I want to tell you the story about a man named David Vickery.
In the South, I fear that we don’t so much believe in Jesus as we are inoculated with knowledge about him. When you give someone an inoculation or a vaccine, you give them a little bit of the disease to help them become immune to it. I fear that we don’t so much believe in Jesus as we know a little bit about him & that little bit keeps us from really believing in him. From really following him. From really living as if he’s all that matters.
But for me, that little bit was not enough.
I was raised in a family of Christians. I was a church kid. I learned all the stories & I knew all the right things to say. I learned a little bit about Jesus, & that little bit was enough to keep the real Jesus far away…until it wasn’t.
After years of drinking & using drugs, I went to the University of Tennessee in the fall of 1999 to continue the party. And party I did.
One particular night, the party pushed early into the morning. I had to get home. So I drove. Along the way, I made an illegal turn & was pulled over. Within minutes, I was handcuffed by the police. I was charged with a DUI & possession of drug paraphernalia, because the marijuana I had been smoking as I made the turn was my last bud. I was angry.
I was taken to jail. Like everyone who entered the holding cell that night, I believed I was innocent. I was sober. It was injustice! After a night in jail, two friends bailed me out.
Throughout that day, the sinfulness of my lifestyle began to settle on me. Desperate, I opened my bible. Point & shoot, not the best Bible reading method! Psalm 34:15-16: The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry. The face of the Lord is against those who do evil, to cut off the memory of them from the earth.
I knew who I was. I was the wicked man who the Lord was opposing. The little bit of Jesus I had learned was not enough. I read Psalm 34 & wept because I knew who I was. I was the wicked man. I knew what God really thought about me & it wasn’t good. Before God gives good news to us, He gives us very bad news. That very night, I began to understand the bad news. I came to see & understand for the first time my own sin & guilt before God.
Over the next year, God made me miserable. I no longer found joy in partying. I no longer found joy in drinking & smoking marijuana.
In the summer of 2001, I ran into an old friend of my parents named David Vickery. David quickly recognized the state of my soul & began sharing the gospel with me. Within a few weeks, as he shared with me about Christianity, God opened my heart & brought me from death to life.
As I look back & think of David, I am struck by many things. David is 40 years older than me. When I met him, he had just retired from 30 years of teaching school & wanted to give his time away to helping young folks. David would never think of himself as an evangelist or a teacher or anything like that. In fact, David to this day has a hard time thinking of himself as anything but a failure.
Yet, when I ran into David & began talking with him, I saw a Christian with a different kind of joy & peace. I saw someone I wanted to be like.
David is the ordinary person who told me the extraordinarily good news Christ came to save sinners. David is the ordinary person God used to raise me to life.
