Reagan, Jack, Rory, and Brent fixed their eyes on me as we sat on the church steps that difficult morning. They had made too much progress, surrendered too much pride, and risked rejection much too often to let a few hardships discourage them.
“Guys, this is bigger than us,” I said. “God is doing something in this town, and the Enemy is coming after us. The cool thing is that God is bigger than all of this stuff, and it’s actually all a part of his plan. Hang in there.”
I turned to the New Testament to help make my points. For the first time in my life, I had been teaching students about the adversities of both Peter and the apostle Paul. God prompted me to use those Scriptures because I’d been reading them every night. So I reminded the Mighty Men of how Peter faltered and how Jesus restored him. Then I brought up Paul.
“Remember when Paul got saved and started his ministry? Remember what happened? The disciples wouldn’t hang out with him. Only Barnabas would have anything to do with him, and Barnabas had to talk other believers into letting Paul hang out with them. The others in the church were scared to death of him. That was his chance to bail. And this is ours. Paul didn’t bail, and neither will we.”
That day, we prayed for a while, and everybody left with a renewed confidence. I sensed they realized, We’re doing something eternal here, something that matters. And we’re in.
They went back to school and continued to love on their friends. More students accepted Christ. More joined our youth group. Later that year, Reagan plopped into the chair in front of my desk. What he said caught me off guard. “We’re going to put on an assembly in the gym and share the gospel with our whole school.”
“Awesome, man,” I said, not wanting to discourage the poor, ignorant guys with their grandiose ideas.
“We’ve got a plan,” he said. “We have the whole program figured out. I’m going to read this Scripture, and someone else is going to give his testimony, and at the very end we’re going to share the gospel. It’s going to be awesome.”
There I was, at the end of my faith in what God can do. This assembly, this sweet little idea, was against school rules. It was against federal rules. I was scared for God. I thought, How do I encourage them to go forward? This is the real world. This isn’t an eye infection. This is the government. You can’t just do this.
That’s what I thought. What I said was something else. “Well, what do we do next?”
They went to their principal, told him their plan, and asked for the assembly. I looked forward to the relief of the principal saying no. They had been living out loud for Jesus for a while, and almost everyone in school knew that these guys were all about Jesus. It wasn’t a preacher doing it. It wasn’t a youth pastor. Everybody knew me because I joined the Mighty Men for lunch in the school lunchroom. But no one ever said, “Boy, that youth pastor over there is really stirring things up.” Even the older teens in our youth group didn’t know how to react to the Mighty Men. They shrugged them off because they knew they should have done it themselves but hadn’t. But surely the Mighty Men had overreached at last.
I waited for the principal to reject their plan for an assembly.
Reagan walked up to me a few days later. “We’re in,” he said. “They say we can do it. By the way, can you and your band come play?”
“Wait. What?”
I was a member of a college quartet called One Voice. We sang at churches and various events, and I had started writing songs. Now the Mighty Men had pulled me and my singing group into this assembly thing, and I was scared to death. Was I going to be arrested? Would the FBI storm the place?
It wasn’t long before I stood in the gym at Samson High School for a come-if-you-want assembly. Who doesn’t want to get out of class? The place was packed.
One Voice opened with three songs and got out of the way of the Mighty Men. The guys performed skits and acted out a song about God’s forgiveness. After a few testimonies, Reagan preached the gospel. I still remember his closing line: “You can be saved right now.”
Sixty students responded.
The next year, when the assembly was repeated, sixty-five students accepted Christ.
And sixty-five more the year after that.
One year, Reagan witnessed to his baseball coach in the locker room. The coach surprised Reagan by visiting our church soon thereafter. He responded to the invitation and asked Jesus to change him. He is now a pastor.
A new principal and stricter policies were in place for the Mighty Men’s senior year, and only about a dozen students gave their hearts to Jesus. But still, all told, God changed the lives of more than two hundred students during those four years.
It all started with guys who got saved and dug in their roots. Yes, they got attacked. But because of their roots, they stood strong.
That was then.
As I’ve said, Reagan pastors his own church now. But there’s more. Rory is a pastor in Alabama. Jack is a rocking youth pastor in Enterprise, Alabama. Another kid who joined the group later, Wayne, is also a pastor.
This is now.
Point to Remember
God’s mighty men and women respond to adversity by showing their strong roots.