141. Live on Location with Lee Howell - Nicuragua Trip

I do not mean to be mean. I do mean to be mad. Those that criticize this kind of preaching, they don't like authority! If you ain't got the King James, you ain't got... Hey, if you don't have a King James, you don't have a Bible. You'd be surprised. Son, don't go to sleep while I'm talking. Hey, hey, hey, don't you lay your head back. I'm important. I'm somebody. I love you. You know I love you. Have I convinced you I love you? You better nod your head yes, are you? Come on, put it out there. Stay awake and you listen to me. I still believe if you have a cold day and healthy, probably get my balance a little woman. I'm a preacher. When you got dressed today, you dressed deity. This is the For Freedom podcast. A podcast that is part of the RFP network that seeks to bring freedom in Christ from the spiritual abuse of legalism. And so fundamentalism is designed to unpack the idea of authority from Scripture. The problem with that is that that's not the defining principle in Scripture. It is a part of the Scripture. But the defining principle in Scripture is love. I found my freedom in you. I found my freedom in you. I found a joy I can't lose. And thank God it's true. You wrapped your arms around me. And heaven broke through. From the moment you found me, I found my freedom in you. Welcome to the For Freedom podcast. This podcast exists to bring the freedom of the gospel for everyday Christians with everyday issues. Now here are your hosts, James Safer and Brett Martin. Welcome back to the For Freedom podcast. This is your host, James. Brett here. We are excited to be recording together. This is, Brett, I think the first time we've been able to record together in person. And we are down in Nicaragua, Central America, on a mission trip here with United Christian Mission. And it's been a great time so far with our group. We've got four from my church, four from Brett's church, and then the Grand Poupa. Lee Howell here with United Christian Mission. And just excited about what's going on. Brett, how have you enjoyed this last couple of days? Been here. And this is your first mission trip. I know. This is my first mission trip. Like you said, we are live on location. Of course, by the time this comes out, it won't be live. But we are live on location in Nicaragua. This is the first time that we have been, I have been on a mission trip. A lot of people in my group, it's the first time they've been on a mission trip. And this has been quite an experience. It's been a rewarding experience. I really didn't know what to expect. But we have been bam, bam, bam. We've been doing ministry. We've been in homes. We've talked to families. We've helped people. We've reached out to people. We've preached the gospel. We're not done preaching the gospel. We're going to preach the gospel twice tomorrow. Great, great opportunities here in this ministry. But the big question on everybody's mind is, would you go up to the cross again? Well, let's set some context here. We've got, again, the Grand Pupa Lee here. And there's a cross way in the distance. Way in the distance. And they said, oh, it's a trek up. I pulled it up on my Google Maps. It's 342 meters. No one knows what meters is because it's only used when people swim. And that's not even really a sport. And so we're trying to figure it out. I'm like, okay, we'll go up it. And so I'm like halfway up. And Lee's like, you're halfway to halfway because we've got to come back down. And my heart rate's racing. And we finally make it up there. The view was fantastic. And I may eventually do it again one day. But, man, was it a halt. And Lee here, he's with us. He's been, this was his third time going up the mountain. Yep, third time. And with three times, he still is crazy enough to go even a third time. I tell you what, I was on the front porch sipping my coffee this morning, watching you go up the side of the mountain. You saw us come down the side of the mountain. I saw your red shirt that you were wearing. I was like, oh, there they are, there they are. So we were having a good time. Yeah. Good deal. Well, Brett, what, or let's go to Lee. Lee, what's something that we've done this trip? Every trip you go on is different. What's something that has been unique that we've been able to do or see that has been something that stood out to you that was really special? Well, I've, so this will be my 12th mission trip. And, you know, you just, you always worry and you always wonder. People kind of look to you for the plan. But, you know, God, it's, it's always amazing how God can move you around. And, and you, you get to see and experience things that you had no idea that, that we're, we're going to be a part of your trip. And, you know, I think one of the things for us, the dynamics of having two different churches that had never met, but everybody's willingness to serve, you know, to have that servant mentality, zero complaints, zero incompatibilities. You know, we've just, we're, we're serving the same God. And I've, I've really enjoyed seeing that out of the two groups. I think that's, that's something definitely unique because normally the groups that I've had in the past, they, they've all known each other for a very long period of time. And other than you and Brett, nobody had to ever even met each other. So I found that really interesting. Yeah. And one of the things, a couple of things that stood out to me the most was just the living conditions when people are going to these houses. This is normal life for them. And it's dirt floors, not only no AC, but no ventilation. I remember one instance we stopped at a, at a church and we went in the parsonage and it was just a shed on the side of the church. And just like a shed that I'll put my mower in, but that man's been living in that parsonage 14 years. And I left out of that and I looked at James, I looked at Amy and our group and I said, we are just so spoiled in America. We just have no idea what it's really like out here. Yeah. I felt the same thing when we were at that church and it was eight foot by 34 foot, 280, 240 square foot. It's him and his granddaughters, his wife. They all live there. Yeah. Most people have sheds in their backyard bigger than where he was living. And like I said, 14 years. And so definitely the, the need there. One of the things that I thought was just, we've been challenged to memorize a verse and have a devotion ready. And for me, you know, I've prayed through some things and figure out where the Lord's leading. But every devotion from two different churches, three different churches, if we're counting Lee there, he didn't know what we were planning either. All nine of us have come up with a verse or devotion that has somewhat flowed together. Right. Either talking about prayer, patience, being still and knowing the Lord. Just verses that are on our heart that I thought, man, it's just been great to see the Lord work through those situations. You know, in a church, in two churches that haven't met each other. Nope. We didn't meet Amy and Michelle beforehand. I didn't know who Travis was. I've seen him on a Zoom call, but we didn't know each other. And to see our people interact well, work well, has been just really, really cool. So much have I enjoyed it. And looking forward to what we've got planned tomorrow with the church, two church services, and then heading back to a binoculet. It's going to be a great, great time. So what else do we think has been important to us this week that we should share? Well, listen, I have just had a great time. We had a little get-together with some of them. There was an Educate a Child program that United Christian Missions puts on to help kids through their education. And that's a way to bring the parents in and to bring the parents into the church, share the gospel with them, get the parents coming to church. That's the end goal. Like the Educate a Child program is a great program, but the goal is the gospel. It's to get the gospel to the parents. It's to just like Lee had a real good – one of his main emphases is having a dad in the home and being able to see some of these dads with their kids and praise them. And listen, I heard Lee tell one day, listen, I don't see many dads in the homes. And it's good to see you're here with your dad. And they came – that dad came to our get-together that we put on. And, man, we fed the kids fried chicken. We pulled out the Jenga games. And we pulled out the Connect Fours. And, man, just had a great up time. They're serious about the Jenga here in Nicaragua. I mean, there was some serious planning. It was, you know, it was high stakes. But just to be a blessing to those kids, to give those kids a meal that you could tell they don't normally get. Me and you, we drive back at a million gas stations with fried chicken in them every day. But to see those kids eat that chicken, something they don't get very often, it was great to be a blessing to them. And it's just – I've enjoyed this trip so much. This is a mission trip where it's not sightseeing. Although there's some of them. There's always some of that. But you're working. You're doing. You're doing ministry. And that's what I love about it. Yeah, one of our ladies got to adopt one of the girls. And we got to talking to the family. And we said, well, where's the mom and dad at? And she said, she doesn't have a mom and dad. Her brothers are raising her. She recently went through a divorce. And it's been tough on her. And she said, I get to be her mom. She came up and gave me a big hug and talking to the lady there. And she said, just warm my heart to know I get to be that figure in her life. And, you know, for me, having a mom and dad, having a stepmom and a stepdad, if I need something, there's support around me. I can call my dad and say, hey, dad, hard times are coming. I need your help. Mom, I need some help. Stepmom, she's bought vacations for us to go to the beach. We're going to the beach here in a couple of weeks for Christmas time. She's just taking care of it a bit. She doesn't have that. And now she's going to have someone to step in and sort of fill in that world that's been missing. Are we allowed to mention first names of the children? Yeah. Okay. I want to talk about Leonard's story. Yeah. Because we went to Leonard's house way up a hill. I was not prepared for that hill when we trekked up there. And so we got up there. I had to catch my breath, and we finally got up there. We got in the home. And what I mentioned earlier, this was the dad that you said, Lee. You said, man, I'm glad that there's a father in the home. You don't see that often. Is he a new kid to the program? Yes. So we had just added him to the program that day on that visit. And then we were able to bless this family. James, talk about how we blessed that family. Yeah, this was a cool time. We went out and got some rough cut lumber. I mean, splinters everywhere. Logan, one of the guys in our church, he's an AD, so he's not really active in a lot of things. They don't really do much in his school. And so he's got splinters all in his hands. Me and Travis, we're rough hands. We don't have any of that. So we built this rough bed, the rough bunk bed, and we assembled most of it here at the center. And then we drove it to their house. And we walked in with all this. I guess they had somewhat knew that we were coming. They had cleaned up the floor a little bit. And we set the bed up. We assembled it all there. We put the mattresses on. And their little brother, Kenner, who's potentially going to be in the program maybe next year, come running in there, climbed up the stairs, jumped on the top of the bunk bed. And you could see just the excitement on his face. But Leonard is 13 years old. And this is going to be the first time this past day, a couple days ago, was the first time he's ever slept on a bed that wasn't on the floor. And I grabbed one of our girls, one of the ladies, and I said, I want you to imagine for the very first time in your life, a church through the partnership of a ministry takes you aside and says, hey, you've been on our heart. We want to help you out. We want to provide some things for your schooling. We want to provide some things for your family. And then a couple days later, some gringos from America show up, put together a bed, and they bring it in your house. And the neighbors begin to say, hey, what's going on? Well, how did you get a bed? My kids are still sleeping on the floor. And Leonard would be able to say, well, I started going to this church. And this church has been helping my family. Would you come to church with me? Imagine the gospel witness that it's going to have. I said, but on top of that, the hygiene of him not sleeping on the floor, his brother's having a bed. And we asked Kenner, because he was playing some Pokemon Go with me, I said, did you enjoy your new bed? And he said, it's not my bed. It's my brother's bed. So, but to see the excitement on their face and to see what the Lord's doing in a small way that we see as so insignificant. Man, how often is it that, I mean, I'll be sitting there, and we just recently redid some rooms, and I went on Amazon. I bought a bed kit. It was shipped to my door the next day. We put it together, and boom, the kids have a bed. They've never not slept on a bed that hasn't been on the floor. Like, that's just our way of living. But to them, it is a complete change of the way they live by just being a blessing. Now, Leonard came to our get-together and was actually adopted by a couple from your church. Yeah. And that was quite a blessing. It was, yeah. Was it cool in there where y'all weren't putting that bed together? Man, there was no movement of air whatsoever. The dad comes in there, and he's sort of helping us out a little bit. We're running the power tools. And finally, he walks in with, like, a little three, four-inch fan that plugs into an outlet, plugs it in, and it felt like the room got 10 degrees cooler. We're in the back of a house. It's concrete, bricks. I've seen pictures. Y'all just sweating. Oh, man. Just, like, tied goats in a pepper patch. I have sweat my weight in sweat this week, especially going up the mountain. Oh, yeah. One of the guys that's with us, one of our leaders, he lit us up. And I kept asking, are you ever going to sweat? He just never broke a sweat. And finally, at the end, he said, my shirt's a little wet. I said, it's nothing compared to how wet my shirt is. So, good deal. That's good stuff. We've had a great time. Well, we were at a church this week, and we'll sort of end with this and get out of here. And thank you guys for tuning in. We were in a church this week, and as we were in there, one of the, above the pulpit was a verse. It was John 6. 67 through 7. 67 through 70. And we're going to ask Lee to read it for us. And we're just going to talk about it for a minute because it was something that sparked a couple of things in me and Brett's mind. And we may do a full episode of this here soon, but just want to wet your appetite a little bit about a random verse that we saw that helped us a lot this week. All right, here we have it, John 6, starting in verse 67. It says, Then said Jesus unto the twelve, Will ye also go away? Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believed and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God. Jesus answered them, Have not I chosen you twelve? And one of you is a devil. And that wasn't just any verse. That was King James English. I hate man. I hate man. Love it. That's right. So as we think through that verse, a couple of things that stood up to me as I was reading was, Jesus is giving this question to his disciples. What are you going to do with your life? And Simon Peter, the disciple that's so much like most of us, puts his foot in his mouth and says, Where are we going to go? What are we going to do? Like, you have the words of life. And Brett, share with us the thought you had when I shared that verse with you, when you began thinking about that one bit. I began thinking about, you know, people that leave the church. Like, they get hurt. They have trauma. Because you think about the context of John chapter six. You've got the, very quickly, we'll go more into detail this later. But you've got the feeding of the five thousand. People are following Jesus because they were fed. And he knows this. So he turns around. He hits them with some hard truth. He hits them with, I am the bread of life. You must eat of my flesh, drink of my blood. No other way to the Father except through me. And people started to leave it. And then he turned around and only the twelve were there. But that's the context of the... At one point in that, they asked him, I believe, is not this your mother and sister and brothers? Yeah, is your mother and father with us? How can you say you came from heaven? Yeah, and he looked at them and said, they're not my mother and father. They're not my mother and sisters. My mother and father and mother and sisters are the ones with me. Right. And only those that are with me will be my mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. Right. So, I mean, that's a hard pill to swallow. So, Jesus is laying out these hard truths. And it's a little hard pill for a lot of people to swallow. So, they begin to back away from Jesus. And at one point near the end of the chapter, Jesus turns around and only the twelve are with him. And he says, will ye also go away? And to what we were talking about, what that hit me is it hit me with people that have experienced church hurt, church trauma, things like that. They get hurt and they leave the church. But then there are others that get hurt. But then they come back. And when they come back to the church, I hear them in my mind saying the same thing that Peter said. Where else are we going to go? You have the words of eternal life. And that was my story when I wanted to leave. I wanted to leave so bad because I've been in so much abuse. And I've been manipulated so many times. But where else am I going to go? Jesus has the words of eternal life. Is there anything you wanted to say about that scripture? Yeah, so I agree with exactly what you're saying. You know, you see it in young adults. You know, maybe there's that one person at church that frustrates you, that makes you, maybe you dread a meeting with that person. But you allow that person to separate you from these group of believers that are going to help you grow and help you to become a better Christian, someone who's closer to the Lord. But when we allow that one person to have that much power over our lives, we never will know the blessings that we've missed by allowing that to happen. So, you know, like you were talking, we just have to, we have to endure, we have to pray through, and we have to communicate with people. Don't let things fester that we can go ahead and handle within the church congregation. Yeah. One of the things I was thinking about was when you, and we say this often, it's sort of a little tongue-in-cheek, but you're going to get cheated every once in a while in a grocery store. And yet you still go back to that grocery store. Or, you know, the deal that you thought you were getting when you had the coupon for half off, and you go to use it, and they go, oh, sorry, this was actually expired yesterday. And you get mad at them when you go, man, I wish I could have used that coupon. But then the next week you go back, and even though you were hurt, and it was not necessarily a trauma that you could be heard in a way of abuse, but you still had hurt. You still go back. And oftentimes, when a church hurt happens, we blame the church, and inevitably, God and his creation and his word gets blamed as well. When God's word never hurt us. It may pierce as a dividing sunder of a sword that's going to hurt us in our conscience and cause us to maybe have to deal with the Holy Spirit in a way, but the word didn't hurt us. A fallen man did. Exactly. And oftentimes, we use the fallen man, and we say, okay, that person hurt me, and so therefore, I can't go and be a part of any church. Where what Peter is saying here is, I don't have any other thing to do. You are the words of life. I'm going to stay here. And then Jesus, in that same moment again, he's beginning in chapter 6 where he begins to lay out, I've chosen you 12, and one of you is the devil. And none of them, even Judas himself, didn't even realize him. I don't think he realized in that moment he was going to be a devil. I believe they all look around each other like, one of us is used by Satan's lady. Hey, we're here with you. Like, we're part of you. And then it wasn't until, you know, later on in this book, in chapter 19, when Judas begins to be revealed as the one who betrays him. So we begin seeing that picture of betrayal, misjustice. And even thinking about that, since my mind's on it, two people directly betrayed Jesus in his moment of most weakness. Peter and Judas. And I believe with my whole heart that if Judas would have sought forgiveness from the Lord afterwards, there would have been forgiveness. Absolutely. Peter went out on the boat. Judas went and killed himself. They both ran from the Lord. But Jesus couldn't go to Judas because he killed himself. Right. Exactly. Jesus went to Peter and he gave him another chance. And oftentimes we fail to realize there are second, third, 15, 30,000 chances that God gives us to have repentance. I've just got done preaching through Jonah. And the sovereignty of God and the grace that God gives Jonah where he constantly over and over and over again is giving him chances to repent. That should be a reminder to us that God's given us to repent. He wouldn't tell us to forgive those who hurt us seven times, 70 times if he wasn't willing to do it himself. Yeah. One thing that I got out of what you just said was when you looked at the 12, the 12 didn't even know which one of them was the devil. Yeah. It was hard for anyone to tell but Jesus. And only time revealed to everyone else which one was wrong. I think sometimes churches can be like that. Not every church because churches are run by fallen man. And, you know, sometimes you're going to have a bad experience at a church and it's just a bad church. I mean, look at Paul writing to Corinthians. He didn't write to Corinthians because everything was hunky-dory. He wrote to Corinthians because they were doing some messed up stuff. Yeah. And they needed to be corrected. So sometimes you're going to get into a church and, man, things aren't going to be going the right way. That doesn't mean you give up on Jesus. You give up on the Bible. You give up on Christianity. The Lord might be leading you to another church. From my own experience, I've been in some bad churches. But I can tell you I've been in more solid ones than bad ones. Yeah. You know? And so you just got to let the Spirit guide you in that regard. Yeah. And I think it's understanding that about the fruits you're going to know them. Right. That doesn't always mean a person. It can mean a church as well. Exactly. I don't know how many times I've talked to someone, counseled someone, and they'll say, Pastor James, I walked into the church and I just knew this wasn't the church for me to be in. And by walking in there, and then as they sat through the service, what they felt was actually coming true, the manipulation, the pastoral authority, the overbearing of a pastor, because there is a spirit of what goes on with that. And so I believe the Holy Spirit gives us that direction and guidance. But again, it's not quenching the Holy Spirit. It's allowing the Holy Spirit to guide us and to bring us back. And it's over time. I understand it's a time and process. It's a process that as people get hurt, they have to work through that. We've talked about the spiritual identity disruption that we had talked about a couple of weeks ago. And there's that grieving process and the hurting process and the reflection process that we go through as we begin this journey of understanding where we're at. Amen. So. All right. Well, we are excited about the next couple of days. We'll give another recap on this when we finish up. But the three ginger gringos are going to be signing off. And to close this out, we're going to tag it on here at the end of this episode. We've got a special treat for you. We've got James singing, Here I Come to Worship in Espanol. Amen. Amen. So be looking forward to that after this is over. Absolutely. Amen. So, until next time, to God. I'm sorry, I'm thinking about you singing. Not the pastor. We need glory. I found my new name. I found that good grace. I found that healing. And the tears fell down my face. When I found my beginning. That has no ending. I found that second chance. I found my best friend. I found my forgiveness. I found my happiness. I've been singing ever since. I found my freedom in you. Thanks for listening to the For Freedom Podcast. If you enjoyed our content, do us a favor by liking, subscribing, or sharing our podcast on whichever podcast platform you use. Be sure to join us next time for the For Freedom Podcast.

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