The Journey to a Glad Heart
The Early Years
I have grown up in church. My first memories include our family going to church “every time the doors were open,” as they say. I used to win the Bible drills in youth Sunday School, and I would win the prizes for memorizing all of the Bible verses. I went to every vacation Bible school. I sang in the youth choir. From my first allowance, my parents taught me to give ten percent in the offering. My life has always centered around church.
At the age of eleven the Lord opened my eyes to understand that I was lost and that I needed to repent of my sin and follow Jesus. As I got older, I started to sense that God might be calling me into ministry. I wasn’t sure what particular area of ministry, but I became convinced of God’s call around the age of fifteen. I had a genuine encounter with the Lord at a youth camp and surrendered to ministry. As I moved into college I was licensed into the ministry by my home church, and I started to participate in Samford University’s H-Day program. The H stands for Howard, as Samford used to be called Howard College. Through the H-Day program, ministerial students would be sent out on Sunday to minister at different churches throughout the state of Alabama. I began to take my keyboard with me on Sunday and I would do a mixture of songs and speaking during my part of the service. Churches started calling me back and scheduling me for other things. This grew such that by my senior year of college, I was traveling extensively leading worship and speaking for all kinds of different events.
At the age of eleven the Lord opened my eyes to understand that I was lost and that I needed to repent of my sin and follow Jesus. As I got older, I started to sense that God might be calling me into ministry. I wasn’t sure what particular area of ministry, but I became convinced of God’s call around the age of fifteen. I had a genuine encounter with the Lord at a youth camp and surrendered to ministry. As I moved into college I was licensed into the ministry by my home church, and I started to participate in Samford University’s H-Day program. The H stands for Howard, as Samford used to be called Howard College. Through the H-Day program, ministerial students would be sent out on Sunday to minister at different churches throughout the state of Alabama. I began to take my keyboard with me on Sunday and I would do a mixture of songs and speaking during my part of the service. Churches started calling me back and scheduling me for other things. This grew such that by my senior year of college, I was traveling extensively leading worship and speaking for all kinds of different events.
I continued this for a number of years full-time after school. And the Lord gave us a very blessed and fruitful ministry. For anyone looking in from the outside, they would have believed that things were going really well. The reality was quite the opposite. I had a vision for where I wanted my ministry to go, and God was frustrating that vision. I tried everything I could to make things happen and grow my ministry, but nothing seemed to work. I became very frustrated, depressed, and at times I was angry with God. The truth of the matter was, although my ministry had progressed from an outside view, my walk with Christ had become very stale.
For anyone looking in from the outside, they would have believed that things were going really well.
A Hard Heart
It all came to a head one weekend when I was leading worship for a youth pastors’ retreat. There were around 20 or 30 youth pastors gathered for the weekend to discuss strategy for reaching more teenagers for Christ. During one of the services, the speaker was speaking, and he had asked me to lead a few songs after he finished. As he spoke, I was really struggling. I knew my heart was not into leading any songs. I began to think back to the way things were when I was a teenager. I had a very tender heart towards God. I remember so often during the youth services and at our camps and retreats, that I would be moved to tears at the glory of God, His love for me, and the beauty of the Gospel. I was so willing to do anything God might ask me to do for His Kingdom’s sake. But now, as I sat reflecting back, I knew that I was nothing like that teenager I used to be. My heart was hard, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had been emotionally moved at the thought of God or His working in my heart and life. It was then, the speaker finished and asked me to lead us in a few songs.
Needless to say, I was not able to lead. I sat there for a moment, and then I told the group that I had to make a confession. I shared with them these thoughts, of how I was no longer the tenderhearted teenager I used to be, who was on fire for God, but I had a very hard heart. I told them that I needed and wanted God to change my heart. Then from across the room one of the youth pastors spoke up. He said, “that’s how I feel, I have a hard heart and I need God to do that in me too.” Then another voice spoke up, same thing. And another and another. All across the room many in the group said they had a hard heart and needed God to do a work to change them. It was extraordinary. To think, we were a group of pastors who’d gathered to strategize on how to reach more teenagers for Christ, but we were a room full of hard hearts.
I’m convinced that this scenario is playing out all across our churches. There is an estimated 3500 to 4000 churches that close their doors every year, and it is my firm belief that much of the decline and plateauing in our churches is because they are filled with people who have hard hearts. We are desperate for a move of God to revive and awaken us. Hard hearts are not fruitful hearts.
To think, we were a group of pastors who'd gathered to strategize on how to reach more teenagers for Christ, but we were a room full of hard hearts.
Journey to a Glad Heart
Over the next few years, the Lord removed me from full-time vocational ministry through a strange set of events and put me in the banking world. For the first few years, I was really struggling wondering why God would do such a thing. Understanding my gifts and my call to ministry, why would he put me in a bank. It was the first time since I could remember that I was not leading some kind of ministry or leading ministry within a church. I felt like God had put me on a shelf. But God was really changing my world so He could do a work in my heart.
One day I read this verse, “He who has a glad heart has a continual feast” (Proverbs 15:15b). I loved the picture that these words portray. Reflecting on these words I knew that it did not describe my heart or my life. I prayed right then and asked God to please give me a heart like this, a glad heart. It was not an easy journey, but the Lord slowly began to deliver me from one thing after another. Strongholds in my thinking and behavior that were preventing me from joy. God was delivering me. He was teaching me that He alone can satisfy, and that I could be satisfied in Him no matter where life may have me. I didn’t need a ministry, power, position, or anything, only Him. I began to experience freedom like I had never known, like a weight had been lifted off of me. God opened my eyes to begin to see His hand and blessing all around me in the smallest things. Sometimes I would sit in my house and just notice little things from my children or a special moment where clearly the blessing and glory of God was being displayed, and I would be filled with joy. This is the feasting that the verse in Proverbs means. The glad heart notices the presence and hand of God working all around, and finds joy and satisfaction in it.
The Lord has placed in me a great burden for people who are in a place just as I was, in church but undelivered. Living around the power of the Gospel, able to speak about it, and answer all the questions about it, but not really walking in the power and freedom that the Gospel has promised to bring. My hope is to give my life and gifts to proclaim “the glad news of God’s deliverance in the great congregation” (Psalm 40:19). I want to see people delivered and set free just as I was. My prayer is that God’s people will live in the fullness of God’s love and deliverance that they may walk in fullness of joy and that it would overflow from them to see others delivered and the name of God glorified.
"He who has a glad heart has a continual feast."
LIVEGLAD
You now can probably see where the name of our ministry came from. The Lord taught me how to live, not just talk about or know about, but actually live in the blessing of love and the deliverance Jesus died to give. He also taught me how to have a glad heart. And it was no coincidence that the acronym for God’s Love And Deliverance is GLAD.
Our desire is to help God’s people LIVE, CELEBRATE, and PROCLAIM God’s Love And Deliverance. All of this so that God might be glorified.
