A Long Time Coming

On Sunday, during our visit to Mechanicsville, we had a chance to catch up with Bill Pippin. Bill had to tell me that he was baptized last month! Bill is seventy years old. He started attending Mechanicsville Baptist when he was fifteen. That was when he started dating Deane who has been his wife for almost fifty years. He says he made a commitment to follow Christ in his late teens, but never got around to being baptized.

He says he had a lot of excuses, but none of them good. One of them was a problem with a pastor. He and Deanne asked him to marry them, but he refused. Not long afterwards that pastor ran off with a woman from the church who was not his wife. Obviously the pastor had some problems of his own.

I asked him if he had been struggling with that decision for a long time, he said for about fifty years. He said there were many times he was ready to respond to the invitation, but his feet would not move! He has been a believer and has been living for the Lord for many years, but he knew in his heart he needed to make that public commitment.

Bill has high respect for his pastor, Don Reed. According to Bill he is a real people's person. God must be using Don in an amazing way, there were two other grown men baptized that day!

I am impressed with Bill's spiritual grown and his unapologetic testimony. It is an awesome testimony.

It also tells me a lot about the influence and responsibility of a pastor. It is an awesome responsibility that cannot be taken lightly.

There is nothing more powerful than the testimony of an ordinary man who has met the Lord!

"When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus."

Acts 4:13