-Transcript-
00:37 Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to the program.
00:41 Welcome to the cafe. Pastor Clark Covington here. Another message here.
00:46 Yeah, you know, I kind of stopped for a minute because this is a little bit of a different message, a little bit of an unusual message. As I prayed over what to preach on here, as I always do, I always bring every message for this program before the Lord. If the Lord’s not in it, I don’t want to take part in it.
01:07 I don’t want to do it. I only want God’s hand to be on this ministry and by the work of the Holy Spirit, preach what he would have me to preach. And typically I preach on outlines and messages that I’ve either preached to our little fellowship, our little church, or that I’m going to preach to them.
01:29 Or in a rare time, something we’ll put online just for online’s sake or whatever it be. But today I’m just wanting to testify, the Lord had put on my heart to testify about my youth. And I’m gonna do another one about kind of modern-day, but about my youth.
01:46 And it’s so, you know, God’s ways are so unusual, but I do see something very important in this. Because at first I’m thinking, why would I testify about my youth? I wasn’t in church. But I guess that’s the point.
01:56 And I think it’s important that if you listen to this program, KJV Cafe, if you’re a regular listener or not really, but to know your preacher a little bit, to know who is giving you this biblical advice and what background I come from. Because the Lord had me grow up in a just tremendously unique situation. I was not in church.
02:16 I was born in Louisville, Kentucky, which is pretty cool, but quickly was taken up north and my parents split when I was very young. I was five, I believe, when my dad, my mom, and dad were divorced. And my dad, working in TV news, moved around a lot.
02:38 So very quickly he was no longer in the area, so to speak. So I grew up primarily not seeing my dad too much. He’d try to come on weekends.
02:46 I was in New York and he was in Philadelphia. But then when I was maybe 10, 11, 12, somewhere in that region, he moved all the way to South Carolina. And that was the end of seeing him every weekend.
02:58 And then it was kind of like seeing him in the summer and then here and there. So dad wasn’t around. My mom didn’t work.
03:05 We lived with our grandma. And it was a very challenging time. I have just one brother, and he’s a year and a half older than me.
03:13 And I just grew up in a broken house, a broken home. And it was a home full of trials, full of anger, full of frustration, full of violence, full of poverty in an odd way. Because the home we lived in was quite big.
03:34 And the town we lived in, it was very, very nice. And it just was a situation where my grandma, you know, 50 years prior, had built the home when the town wasn’t what it was when I lived there. And she was, you know, in her getting up in her 80s and 90s.
03:48 And my mom developed a very serious mental illness where she was not able to even communicate as we became teenagers with us, really, at all. And eventually she was put into an institution and has been in assisted living ever since then over 20 years at this point. Because we’re talking about the 90s now, so at least 20 some years.
04:14 And so in that time, I experienced many things the world had to offer in a bad way. You know, I was disobedient. I was always getting into trouble.
04:25 I could not really relate to my peers, especially those that had a normal home life. I had a lot of anger in my heart. I thank God for the people that he put in my path to allow me to play sports and have, you know, coaches, hard coaches that were kind of like father figures in a way.
04:43 But at the end of the day, it was a very troubling time. And I had a Bible, and I don’t even know where this Bible came from. I think my mom gave it to me a long time ago.
04:53 And I didn’t read the Bible, but I would lay it on my chest as I as I would sleep because I was going through so much anxiety and stress, and I was terrified. I mean, I didn’t know what tomorrow held, but it was not a good situation at all.
05:05 And I believe that that early upbringing in that environment, and yet it was so weird because I was able to go to a great public school with most of my teachers had PhDs.
05:19 And even though I was not the best student at all, even being an average or below average student in that school still really prepared you for college. Everybody in that school was supposed to go to college. I was going to go just because that’s what everyone did.
05:45 So culturally, the Lord allowed me a good education and families would, you know, even churches would come and help our family as they could. And so I was on kind of the receiving end of a lot of the ministry and on the receiving end of a lot of the problems of a broken home.
05:49 So when I’m up here, you know, behind the microphone, I’m up here in my upstairs office and I’m preaching about the dangers of sin and the problems of sin and the wages of sin, I don’t want you to think that I have not experienced this firsthand, that I have not looked sin in the face and saw what it had done to my own family.
06:06 If I had not seen abuse upfront, amen, if I had not seen what money couldn’t buy, amen, I grew up in a town that was quite affluent and even though I didn’t have it, many other people I knew did.
06:18 And I saw what that did, what money did, what materialism did. It didn’t make them happier, didn’t give them full joy, amen, it didn’t solve all their problems, it just made different problems.
06:28 I’ve always told my wife this, who grew up in a refugee camp, and she’d say, man, you know, if we had a lot of money, we could solve this problem. I told my wife, don’t even think about it. I said, you you won’t solve a problem with money, you’ll just have a different problem, okay, and oftentimes those problems are worse.
06:45 And so as I preach and as I give you insights from God’s Word that I’ve studied, that I’ve prayed over, it’s not that I’m telling you from some silver spoon life that was brought up in the church, or what is that, a silver Bible life,
07:01 I don’t know, a golden Bible life where I was just, everything was perfect and I’ve always been in the ministry and I’ve never lived in the world, so I don’t know what it’s like. I spent 30 some years in the world and it was hard living. It’s a miracle I’m alive, Amen.
07:14 I have been in very bad situations over and over again. I had a season there where I was allowed to come with my pastor, Pastor Mike Road at the time from Glory Bound Baptist, which is now with New Buffalo Baptist, and we got to go to Crossroads Rescue Mission for a season there,
07:28 and he would preach and he would allow me sometimes to get up there and preach for 10 minutes to the men, and I’d look at those men and almost every time I preached at that rescue mission and you had drug addicts in there and alcoholics and all kinds of things,
07:39 I would tell them there is so little separating us two from where you’re sitting and from where I’m standing, so little, and it’s only by the grace of God and the mercy of God and the hand of God that he delivered me out of that awful, awful situation.
07:57 And people make light of sin, they joke about sin, they make light of fornication and adultery, they make light of drugs and alcohol.
08:03 I’ve seen it and I’ve seen the brokenness. I had friends that had bad situations like mine, some of them have died, Amen, and they literally physically died in that sin, and surely many others spiritually have never had new life in Christ,
08:18 have never been born again, and they’re still in grave bondage to that sin, and oh how it grieves me to see that, and oh how it grieves me to see young people desire that, that oh if they could only have that, Amen.
08:30 They see it on social media, if they could just have that lifestyle that’s promoted, oh how brokenhearted it makes me to know that they want that when I have lived it and it is empty and void and disgusting.
08:42 I always liked when brother Adrian Rogers, who is with the Lord now, when he would preach on the radio and he preached about how the beer commercial always has all this beautiful imagery and so forth,
08:57 but they never show the drunk laying in his own vomit in the alley, they never show that. And that’s so true, but the Lord allowed me to see that, you know, the Lord allowed me to see that both of others, the Lord allowed me to be part of that, Amen.
09:11 Oh for so long I was in bondage to sin, and I called out to the Lord desperately in my late 20s, early 30s, and I just begged the Lord to help me.
09:20 I remember vividly telling the Lord anything that’s mine is yours God, I can’t do it anymore, I can’t live like this, and you know what the Lord did? He took me out of that miry pit, he took me out of that mud and dirt and slop and that bondage to sin, and he put me on that solid rock foundation, Amen.
09:40 He got me in, I’m telling you, he, God, got me into a Bible-believing church, got me, got me, allowed me to marry, the only time I’ve ever been married, people can’t believe it, they say, you haven’t been divorced?
09:53 No. Growing up, everyone I knew was divorced, so I didn’t get married until I was older because everyone I knew was divorced, they all told me don’t get married.
10:02 Again, I literally grew up in a broken, the most broken home you can think of, pretty much, and the Lord gave me a Christian wife, a beautiful Christian woman that loves the Lord, Amen, and it serves God, amen, and the Lord, the Lord did that,
10:10 God did that, out of his mercy, out of his grace, and for a hard head like me, I had to be at rock bottom, Amen, I couldn’t be somewhere where it wouldn’t have been that difficult, I had to wait till it was the worst of the worst to call out to the Lord and say, Lord, I’m broken, I’ll give it all to you, not some, because I had already given the Lord some, Amen,
10:32 I had already been saved some years earlier, five, six, seven, eight years earlier, and I’d already given my heart to the Lord, I accepted the Lord as Savior, but then I was living backslid,
10:38 I was living that modern church lifestyle, amen, where it was just preaching on the, you know, nightclub environment, preaching on whatever it may be, and not really convicted of my sin, and I wondered, could this be it? Could this be a godly life?
10:52 It doesn’t seem godly, it doesn’t look godly, it doesn’t feel godly, I can’t do nothing for God, until I truly gave my heart and my soul to the Lord, and I said, you know what, Lord,
11:01 I surrender to you, you know what they say when a preacher goes to preach, they say, he has surrendered to the Lord, that’s what that is, it is a surrendering of our own will, and so we stop saying my will, we start saying thy will, and that’s what got me broken,
11:17 and that’s why I have a soft spot in my heart for them old country preachers that’ll rear back, and spit, and spew, and throw things now and again, and some people don’t like to hear that, but I’ll tell you what, me personally,
11:30 I needed that, and the Lord knew exactly what I needed, and I sat under seven years of very hard preaching, and I needed every, every message, amen, to soften my heart,
11:40 and I know I don’t preach like that, I don’t scream or yell, my own kids, you know, when I’m teaching, and sometimes I got to snap my fingers to raise my voice to make sure they’re listening, you know, I’m not, I’m not a yeller per se, but I have a soft spot in my heart for them,
11:53 because I needed that, so many need that here today, and so I wanted to share this testimony to help you understand where I’m coming from, coming from a life of absolute just brokenness, where I should have been in jail, or in, you know, dead, Amen,
12:10 and coming from that to being saved by the Lord, and forsaking those sinful things, not overnight, it takes time, it took me time, but forsaking those sinful things, the Lord has allowed me in this season of my life, goodness, for the last ten years or so, to serve Him, almost like in a, in a full-time capacity,
12:33 I, you know, I have to work as well, and, and so forth, and then I’m teaching the kids homeschool, but pretty much in a full-time capacity to serve God in the ministry, Amen,
12:44 and to live for Him, and it’s been the best decade of my life, by far, even the worst day that I have with the Lord is better than the best day that I would have had without Him, amen,
12:52 and I come to you with that information, having that experience, and as a younger person, if you’re listening to this today, give God the days of your youth, people say, do you have any regrets, my only regret is I didn’t give God my whole heart and soul sooner,
13:07 and that I played, flirted with the things of this world, and the wages of sin is death, and I got a big payment of that over and over again, to the point where I was almost gonna not be here anymore,
13:17 and I thank God for His mercy and His grace, but don’t let it come to that, if you’re a young person, maybe you’re a parent or grandparent of a young person, don’t let it come to that, you know,
13:27 don’t let it come to that, don’t allow yourself to get caught up in the things and ways of this world, when Jesus Christ has His arms wide open, and He loves you so much,
13:37 He died for you on the cross at Calvary, so that you could be saved, and He has a plan for you, and it’s a wonderful plan, it is a plan that involves this life, amen, we’re not just saved for eternity in heaven, we’re saved from this world, amen, we’re given new life,
13:51 and we have joy, we have it more abundantly because of what Christ did on the cross, so give the Lord the days of your youth, and if you are older, and you’ve struggled with a lot of these things,
14:01 you can identify with a lot of these things, and you haven’t given your life to the Lord, make today the day of salvation, turn to God, trust Him, and you will never regret what He does for you,
14:12 because He is King of kings and Lord of lords, I thank you for listening, tune in next time, Amen.