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[00:00:24] Well, good morning everybody. We're in a new series called Begin Again where we're talking about how God will use us in the various seasons of life. How he has a purpose and a plan and we are really immortal until he is finished with us here on this earth. And so regardless of what season you're in, regardless of what station or status in life you find yourself this morning, understand God has a plan, has purpose, and he has something for you to achieve, something for you to accomplish. And so my challenge is that through this series we'll be sensitive to to what is God saying to me in this season of life? For some people it may be I just need to double down and continue to do what I've been doing. I'm doing the right thing. I'm where I'm supposed to be. I just need to do better at the thing that I feel I'm doing best. And that might be the word God gives you. Through this series, I just need to do better the things I'm already doing. For others of you, it may be a time where God is kind of redirecting you, maybe redefining you, helping you to discern a brand new opportunity in life, maybe a business venture, something new that you haven't experienced before, you haven't tried before. And maybe the series will be an affirming type message where the Spirit of God can speak to your heart and give you some affirmation concerning the direction that you could take. I don't know what that looks like for you. I can't even define it for you. I just want to take the principles of this great story of Nehemiah and apply them to our life in such a way that I pray that God will speak to all of us in the weeks that we spend in this study. Because when you find Nehemiah, he's at, as we talked last week, kind of the midlife point of his life. He's at a significant point where a lot of us are or have been, where we kind of look back over our life and we ask ourselves, is this where I thought I would be in this season? Is this what I want to be doing in this season of life. Is there something more? Is there something else? Is there? And it's a time of kind of reassessment and reevaluating life. When you hit that midlife point and that's where he was when Cindy and I hit that zone in life, God redirected us. And we started this church, this met church. It was during that same season. So I can relate to a lot of this story. And as I began to think about what I wanted to share with you this morning, I wanted to share some principles that are kind of unique and some principles that really refine and define the people that God uses, the ordinary people God uses to do extraordinary things. And I identified by way of introduction, like five qualities that you'll always find in someone God is going to use in a significant way. The first quality is calling.
[00:03:01] God will always place a definite calling on their life. And if you're sensitive to God, if you're leaning in and you're listening to him, he will speak to you in such a way that he will affirm his calling on your life.
[00:03:13] Now, it may be for the business that you're in, it may be for the. You may be a student. And right now, in that season, that is your calling right now. But I'm saying God will affirm that. And you will know beyond shadow of doubt, this is what I'm supposed to do. So there'll always be a calling when God is going to use you. Number two. It involves not only a calling, but it involves your character. It involves your character because God will not use us if we are not true to who he has created us to be. Your character is also integrity. It's interesting, the word integrity. We get that word from a mathematical word, an integer. An integer is a whole number. So when you speak of integrity, you're speaking of wholeness.
[00:03:54] You're healthy, you're balanced in life. And someone defined character is who we are when no one else is looking. And I'm just suggesting to your heart this morning that God will call you and he will also use you according to your. Your character. And that's so important. The third word I would give you is competence. Competence. If he's calling you to do something, he will equip you to do it. Now, you may be equipped for a task that you're not yet aware of. And sooner or later, as you venture into that new task, someone will affirm you. I talked about that last weekend, that what you're looking for is you're not looking for consensus.
[00:04:32] Cause remember I said that's what your mama gives you. Consensus. Go, Hercules. Hercules, you know, give you a little participation trophy. That's thank God for mamas that love us no matter what we do. But that's not what you're looking for. You're looking for not consensus. You're looking for affirmation. You want someone to come up to you and say, you know, you're good at this. You actually are gifted at this. Because you're looking for some type of affirmation that goes to your competence to do the thing he's called you to do. So string those three together.
[00:05:00] You've got my calling, my character, my competence. The fourth word I'd give you is commitment. Commitment. God uses committed people. Because when you begin to dial in his purpose for your life, I can tell you you're gonna run into some opposition. You're gonna have some difficulty that will hit your life. I love what Paul Harvey used to say. He said, you know, you're on the road to success when it's uphill all the way. And even the Apostle Paul picked up on that. And he said, there is a great. An effectual door open unto me. I've got great opportunities ahead of me. But then he said, there are many adversaries. Now, when I read that effectual door with many adversaries, here's what I think.
[00:05:40] I think that the door of opportunity will swing on the hinges of opposition. That one of the ways you know you're moving in the right direction and you're not running with the devil is when you run into the devil. So sometimes the good news is the bad news. And you know you're doing the right thing because of some of the headwinds that you're facing in life. But let's put this together. We have a calling. We have character. We have competence. We have a commitment. The fifth thing I would give you that I've just kind of pulled together in my study is the idea of chemistry. Chemistry meaning you know, how to play well and play nice with other people.
[00:06:14] You know how to get along with other people. I've got a little plaque up in my office that I've had for some time. A little leadership plaque. And it says, he who thinks he's leading when no one is following is only taking a walk.
[00:06:29] And every now and then, as a leader, you gotta look back and go, is there anybody back there? Right? Because you have to. Even as a leader, you have to know how to get along with people. You don't have to. You have to work with other people. We're in people business. And those are five qualities, as I've studied, that are unique and that also are very descriptive of ordinary people that God uses to do extraordinary things. And all of those qualities, as you study Nehemiah, all of those qualities are qualities that really define who he was. And as I look through the chapter, and I really want to this morning share kind of a personal chapter out of my life as we are now going into our 30th year of ministry, I want to share a little bit of the story of how we got here. And it really relates so much to my studies in Nehemiah.
[00:07:15] For those of you who take notes, I just share this portion with you before I get into this story. That's kind of the heart of my talk this morning. And that that is the first thing that Nehemiah does. As you open the book of Nehemiah, those first three verses is Nehemiah, first of all, visualize.
[00:07:31] He got his eyes and he got his head around, and he got his heart around what God was calling him to do. One of the first things you have to do when you are embarking on God's purpose for your life is you have to see it before you see it. God will give you a vision. He'll give you an idea of the thing that he's called you to do. In Nehemiah, he had a vision of what God was wanting him to do, go back and rebuild those walls. And so Nehemiah had a vision of that. And the first thing that that chapter opens with is the idea of him visualizing God's purpose for his life. Then you drop down to about chapter, verse one, rather about verse. I'm sorry, chapter one, about verse four. And you see the second quality is not only visualize, but agonize. You see him praying. You see him laboring in prayer. You see him seeking God's will for his life. You see him confessing sin. He doesn't want anything to stand between he and God. He knows God's going to use him. He wants a clean heart. He wants clean hands. He wants to approach this in the right way. So you have him visualizing. You have him agonizing in prayer. The third thing you see him doing is down in chapter two, verses one through eight, where he gets organized, where he is planning and preparing for what God is calling him to do. He builds a team.
[00:08:49] He starts counting the cost. He starts realizing this is what it's going to take if we're going to achieve the purpose that God has called me to achieve. So you have visualize, you have agonized, you have organized. And then the fourth quality is he actualizes. He puts feet to the prayer and he launches out and he begins to do the very thing that that God has now called him to do. Now with that backdrop, I just wanted to share with you some things that are important when you study the Bible. There are three questions that you should always ask yourself when you study the Bible. Number one, what did it mean then? What did it mean then? It's important that you get an understanding of the context of Scripture because a text without context will lead to pretext. You'll misapply and misinterpret scripture if you don't get it in its proper setting. So it's important that you understand, clearly understand the context of Scripture.
[00:09:43] Number two, the second question you ask is not only what did it mean then, but what does it mean now? Not that the meaning has changed, but the application will change. Now, when you study the Bible, understand this. There is no Scripture. The Bible says of itself, of any private interpretation. Meaning that you and I don't have the freedom or the luxury of taking the Bible out of its context, bending it and twisting it to say anything we wanna say the Scripture says concerning itself. There's no scripture of any private interpretation. So understand, every passage has one interpretation, but that same passage may have many applications. You say, well, what is the rule? How do I know if I'm properly applying the Bible? Well, to properly apply a text means that it will not violate any other principles or precepts that you find in scripture.
[00:10:35] So if it doesn't contradict other scriptures in the Bible, it's okay to apply the scripture in a different way other than what it was originally interpreted to mean. Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. In the book of Revelation, I think Revelation 3, you have this depiction of Jesus knocking at the door of a church. Now when I was a little boy in my dad's church, in Sunday school, we had a teaching method back then that probably most of you aren't gonna be familiar with unless you're north of probably 50.
[00:11:05] It was called Flannograph. You boys and girls remember Flannelgraph. Now if you're too young to remember that, you Google that. That was a real thing. And it was these pictures of characters in scripture that would be placed on a piece of cloth to illustrate whatever the Sunday school teacher might be teaching us. They would just put em up there on the little thing, you know, all that technology, that's what we had back then, right?
[00:11:30] And so I remember this passage of scripture being taught, Behold, I stand at the door, knock. So she puts up this door with a stone wall around it, this big old wooden door. And then she has this character that was supposed to be Jesus. I always thought when I was a kid, he looked like somebody off of.
[00:11:51] What was that old band?
[00:11:54] I can't remember. He looked like an old band member, like an old hippie, you know, he had this long hair and beard and everything. He's knocking at the door and. And that's how my little nine year old mind worked. I'm sorry.
[00:12:04] And he said, now boys and girls, that's Jesus knocking on your heart's door and he wants to come in. Well, that's a good application of that verse.
[00:12:14] That's a, that you know, that I mean to understand that Jesus knocks on the heart's door and desires to come in. That's the application. And that's a proper. That's not the interpretation. The interpretation of that verse is he's on the outside of one of his churches wanting back in.
[00:12:30] He's saying, hey, hello. It's supposed to be about me. This thing of ministry is supposed to I will build my church and you are building my church without me. And knock, knock, I'd like to come back into my church. That's the interpretation, but the application still works. It's Jesus knocking on the heart's door. You see the difference? So I'm saying, when you study the Bible, what did it mean then?
[00:12:51] What does it mean now? So that I get a good application? And then thirdly, what does it mean to me personally? Because every time you hear a message, every time you hear someone teach on God's word, you should always say something in your heart like this, Lord, teach me, show me what you want me to hear. Let's don't waste these 25 minutes that we're together this morning. I mean, while we're in this room, God speak to my heart. Maybe he's already spoken to your heart through the worship. Maybe you received something that you needed from worship. Maybe it's now in the teaching time, God may speak specifically something into your life that you'll walk away here going, okay, I needed to hear that. That was what I needed. And I'm saying that if we're open and we're receptive, God will always speak.
[00:13:33] He said, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. And so when we come to a service and we say, God, speak to me. I want to hear from you. He will never disappoint. He never hides the ball. And so the third question I ask myself, okay, what does that mean to me? And when I studied the book of Nehemiah, I was reminded a little bit of the story that really brought us to this place as we approach our 30th year of ministry. And some of our guys on staff encouraged me to share this, because I haven't shared it in a long, long time. And many of you may not have ever heard this. And so I wanna kinda hit the highlights of some of the things that God has done in this place to bring us to this very hour.
[00:14:13] When Cindy and I started out in ministry, my dad was a pastor. And so I worked on his staff. In fact, I started serving on his staff when I was still in high school.
[00:14:23] My junior year, I was working part time on staff, kind of as an intern, we might call him today.
[00:14:29] We did go out in visitation. We did outreach and all that sort of thing.
[00:14:34] I helped with facilities and just basically anything that needed to be done, I did that. And then Cindy came on board and she was working in the office, and she did a lot back in that time. And then we got married. We just continued on in, working on staff with my dad. And after a period of time, we were student pastors. And that was exactly the role that I felt God wanted me to be in as a student pastor. Never in my imagination did I think I would be a senior pastor. What I'm doing now, I never envisioned doing, especially back then. And as I think back over my life, I think I've moonwalked into about everything I've ever done. I started this way and I ended up over this direction. God has just redirected me. Right. I didn't aspire to be a senior pastor, but after serving on my dad's staff for about 10, 12 years, about 10 years, I guess it was. There was some personal issues that he had in his life and he stepped away from leadership. And at that point, the leadership of our church basically said, bill, we feel like the church ought to call you to follow him. We feel like you can hold this thing together, and we feel like, you know, the staff will follow you. And if we take a chance on some outside voice, it may not be the same chemistry. All of that may not work. And so we want you to consider stepping into the role of being a pastor. And wow. I just. That again, that's nothing that I envision doing. But I agreed and I said, well, okay. And Cindy and I went forward. And for the next 12 years, I was senior pastor.
[00:16:01] And it was a crazy, wild and exciting experience that I really wouldn't take anything for. But I was 26 years old, I guess, when I became the senior pastor of a very historic church. In fact, they say it was the first megachurch of the 20th century back in its day. So I was already way out of my league. And I'd have far out punted my coverage at that point. But God strategically put me there for some reason. And so we started our role in trying to be a leader of the church. And in doing that, I always studied what other churches are doing, what other pastors are doing. I had reached out to try to find mentors. Men like Adrian Rogers became very dear to my life and others who would just pour into me and help mentor me in significant and important points of life. And I started noticing a trend, and I'll touch on this. Cause it kind of sets up the rest of the story that led to me starting this church. A trend toward a more contemporary style of music. Now, if you've ever been raised in a traditional church and you've tried to incorporate contemporary music into that environment, you know, that is oil and water.
[00:17:06] There are very few churches that can actually do that. Because if you successfully try to bring both of them in and call it a blended service, then all you do is you take the traditional people that want only hymns and you upset them because you're doing new stuff. And you take the people that want new stuff and no hymns, and you upset them because you did anything old. So I successfully made the whole church upset.
[00:17:31] That's one of the things I pulled off. I was able to make them all mad. And so they loved me. They just didn't like the direction I was going. And so I thought, okay, I've tried this, and this is just not working. And after a period of time of going through a series of things, and again, I'm not gonna give you all the details, we still don't have time. But I tried to relocate it back into Fort Worth proper, back into the downtown area. All different things. I just couldn't get. I couldn't get traction. I couldn't get a lot of movement in that way.
[00:17:58] It wasn't militant opposition that I was running into, but it was just passive resistance. It was people that loved me, but they were hoping I'd settle down as a young man and just get into the rut and just do the routine. While everybody else has done, if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten. And that was the track they wanted me on. But I felt like God was moving me in a new way. And after a period of time, honestly, where I just literally burned myself out, I just got to the point where I was in a great church that took very good care of me. I loved them, they loved me. It's all I'd known all of my life. But I was so unhappy, and I couldn't explain or understand how could I be unhappy in a great situation?
[00:18:38] And so we contacted our dear friends who we helped start a church in Grand Junction at Fellowship Church. Dan and Anna Hooper. You've heard Dan speak here many times. He said, you guys just need to come up to Grand Junction and just be up here for a little while. He had one of the members of their church that ran up a ski resort up above Grand Junction called Powderhorn. He said, I'll call him and just get him to get you a room up there, a condo up there, and y' all just come spend the week and just pray and think about where you are and what God would have you to do. I mean, before you just resign and, you know, just go get a different job, you know, dial it in a little bit. That's what we did. We, you know, Grand Junction. And I don't want you to misunderstand. I wasn't chanting 247 in prayer with candles lit, with a cacophony of angels going, ah. You know, I mean, we walked and we ate lunch and dinner. We did all that. But we spent some time to really reconsider what is God saying to us. And one of the things, guys, that was so profound to me was that God was not using me in that church to change the church. He was using me and that church to change me.
[00:19:39] And that what I was trying to do all this time was change them. And God was trying to change me.
[00:19:44] And I thought, oh, wow. And all of a sudden the idea hit us. And Cindy and I said, well, we could start back then. They didn't call them satellites, we called them extensions. But it would be like a satellite of the old church. We'll start it in a new area, and in the new church, we'll do all these things that we tried to implement in the old church. We'll just do two separate type ministries.
[00:20:04] It was like this light bulb moment came on, and we said, well, okay, what would we call it? Where would it go. Remember, you gotta visualize.
[00:20:12] You gotta see it. We were agonizing. We were praying through it. You know, we were beginning to organize in our mind what's gonna be. What would it look like before we could actualize? And we launched, but we said, okay, well, how about South Lake? That's kind of centered into the area that we're currently drawing from or areas that we don't have a lot of presence in from our old church. We could plant it in South Lake. Now, understand, when we started this church In August of 1996, there weren't a lot of what you would call a contemporary church around. At that time.
[00:20:45] You had Fellowship, which I'm friends with Ed in Grapevine. Fellowship was going White's Chapel was trying to do some creative things during that time. You had Northwood with Bob Roberts, was doing some different things during that time. But you didn't have Milestone, Keystone, Fellowship of the Parks. None of those churches were around Life. Church wasn't here. So we were kind of unique in what we were trying to do. And so we launched out and said, okay, let's see if we could get Carroll High School. Well, one of my closest friends, he's our church attorney.
[00:21:16] And he and I grew up together. His dad was a missionary. And my dad, of course, being a pastor, is Andy Wanscon's. And his wife Lee, as you know, is running for a senate here. I'm sorry for. Yeah, that's right. In our state. And so I talked to Andy. Cause he was on the city council there in South Lake. And I said, man, can you help us get the high school? We're gonna try to start this extension, this satellite in the high school. Andy found out, well, the schools never approved that. They've never leased space to a church ever before. But let's see what they say. And so what. We ended up being able to acquire it.
[00:21:49] Of course, the old church had approved this. They thought it was a great idea. Because they loved the idea of me moving all that new music away from them. As far as I.
[00:21:57] Fine, we're good with that. Keep that new stuff out there. Right? And we'll do all the old stuff over here. And so we set it up. And again, I'm just giving you the Reader's Digest version. But I talked to a core of families that we had back then. Max and Sharon Cannon and Lynn and Marsha, Wesley and Jerry and Crystal Mason. There was just a core of families. And of course, their kids were all a part of this. And the timing of our core group Was kind of coming together. We had probably 25 of us that was gonna go out and try to do this extension, this new satellite, this new thing. And then I thought, well, what are we gonna call it? What are we gonna call it? So I got to checking, and everybody said, well, there's a name that's gonna be hot. You're gonna hearing this. You're gonna be hear. It's kinda like mid Cities and the heb area. And everybody's gonna gravitate to it with the alliance airport development and everything. It's gonna be called the Metropolitan. We're on cutting edge.
[00:22:52] We're gonna call it the metroport Cities Fellowship. Thirty years later, there's us, there's the meals on Wheels, and maybe a humane society thing called. And nobody else is called Metropolitan City as anything. So swinging a mess, but here we are. And I said, well, let's tighten it up a little bit. We'll call it the met Church, because it was supposed to denote. So that's what we did. We moved forward with that plan. We got it ready, man. We got some sound equipment. We were ready to go set up in that high school and have our first service. I had a phone call at the office at the old church, and a secretary contacted me, and she goes, hey, this is Friday. Before we open on Sunday. She said, I just had a call from a man in South Lake, and he said he's getting a judge to file an injunction, so you guys can't meet in the school. Separation of church and state. Well, I didn't know much about the law, but I knew somebody who did. So I called my buddy Andy, and I said, hey, what is this? This guy just. He said, bill, it's noon on a Friday. You're not gonna find a judge anywhere that's gonna rule on anything at noon on a Friday. Don't worry about it. And then he said, besides that, he cited a supreme court decision that had been made not long before that that basically said that if a school district allows any outside organization to meet in their facility for any reason, they cannot then discriminate against the church. And. And what they had allowed to happen at Carroll was they had allowed the boy Scouts to meet in there. So we were saved by the boy Scouts. And so we moved in with that little bit of headwind, that first opposition. And we had that first service. First service, we probably had close to 300 people. Cause we had a lot of people just showing up to kick the tires. A lot of people from the old church were just coming over to see what this new thing was going to look like. And so, man, we launched and for six months, I mean, we set up and broke down the new one. Every week I would go and do the early service at the old church, drive out to the new one and do the service out there at nine something, drive back to the old church and do the late service. I was happy as I could be. It was tiring, but it was exciting because the new church was getting traction. And then after a period of time, after a few months, my guys at the new church were saying, gosh, Bill, wouldn't it be amazing if you were just out here full time and could put your full focus into this church? How much more could we accomplish? And then while that conversation was going on, I had deacons at my old church saying, you know what, Bill, if you could just let somebody else take that new church out there and you just stayed here and we had your full focus here, then, man, we could do so many great things. And both were well intentioned, but both of them were kind of pulling me and Cindy in a different direction. And the best word picture I could give you, and maybe you've been there in your life, is it's like going to the circus and watching trick riders when they're standing on the backs of two different horses. You ever seen that? And you're watching this guy ride and it's so exciting. They're running around the arena, they're and got one foot on one horse and one foot on the other horse. And that's wonderful as long as those horses are running side by side.
[00:25:44] But when one horse goes left and one horse goes right. Let me put it to you this way. Brother's gotta make a decision.
[00:25:50] And my horses started pulling apart.
[00:25:53] I had my old traditional horse that was wanting me to go that way, I had my new horse wanting me to go the other way. And Cindy and I, we just committed it to prayer.
[00:26:01] God, what do you want us to do? Things have changed. This is not what we intentionally set out to do. But obviously you've allowed us to be where we are for a purpose and you're doing something new and exciting. And so what do you want this to look like?
[00:26:15] And man, he just put in our heart, you need to leave the old place and you need to go to the new place.
[00:26:20] The idea, if you want something from God you've never had before, you gotta be willing to go somewhere with God you've never been before.
[00:26:26] One decision was very secure and very stable. The other one was very Scary.
[00:26:32] I mean, we just had a handful of people, about a quarter, as I said, of about 27 that I knew I could count on that were gonna be there. But I was thinking, man, I'm putting my family out there. I've got a house payment, I got a car. I mean, how are we gonna do. I got a little nest egg of savings I could live off. I guess if this thing doesn't work, I can get a job and try to transition, maybe find another church or something. So there was always a little net under the wire. But it wasn't a big net under the wire. And if you've ever started a church are a business, you kind of know where we were.
[00:27:03] And the incredible thing when I look back at it, was Cindy was always so optimistic about everything.
[00:27:07] And you ladies can appreciate this because every study that I've ever done on what women need most in life, the number one thing that pops up is security. A sense of security.
[00:27:17] And that was one of the things that was jeopardized by the distance and the direction we were taking is our security was being really kind of jeopardized. Honestly. I talked to people about faith, but I'd never put myself out there to live by faith. I've told people, oh, just trust God and put yourself. I'd never done that. I had a secure church and a great salary. And, you know, so I was preaching things that I'd actually never had to live. And now all of a sudden, man, I'm out there where I'm like, going, okay, I hope these principles of God's word actually work. Or this brother's in trouble. I am now living what I've been preaching and telling other people to do. And we were trusting God.
[00:27:54] And when I broke free of the other place and we went out In February of 1997, man, God blessed. In some weekends and some weekends, man, we would have less than 100 people show up. And then we would have weekends where we had over 200 show up. And then we'd huddle with our group. And we're breaking all that down. Before we went to CC's Pizza to eat. Cause it was real cheap.
[00:28:17] And we would talk about what happened. Did you see any lives change? Did you see anything? We were using experiencing God as our discipleship mechanism for our small group with our core people. Cause I wanted to feed them. Cause all they were doing is serving others on the weekends. And they weren't getting a lot. So we did experiencing God as a group so that we could be growing in our Faith while we're launching out, trying to reach these new people. And so it was an incredible, incredible experience. And for three years, man, we would have weekends where we had kind of our worship dialed in and the person leading worship would be dialed in. Then we had weekends where honestly I was on the phone on Monday trying to put a band together and singers together.
[00:28:57] I mean, there were weekends where my daughter Shannon and Ashley Cannon, they were like 15 years old. And Jesse, I think you were part of that then. You might have been like 18 or something like that. That was our worship team. And they just said, we don't have anybody, we'll go do it. Our drummer back here now was 11 years old.
[00:29:16] I said, bud, you got the gig, son. You're the great will be your reward in heaven. So. But you're the. That was our band. Donnie, first guy we baptized with the church. Esse's husband, Donnie Beebe.
[00:29:30] Donnie, he's now our CFO and has been for nearly 30 years. Donnie went to a pawn shop, bought a bass and taught himself how to play so we could have a bass player.
[00:29:41] And he's pretty good, actually. He's really good. That was our band.
[00:29:46] And I mean, we're rolling this thing out here like big time, man. We're the next big. Look out, baby. Just stand back, you know here. This church is gonna happen. And back then again, one of the saving graces of us is they didn't have any choice if they wanted to go to a contemporary church. It was honestly, it was Ed or us, it was Fellowship or the Met. Cause you didn't have a lot of the other churches around at that point. So God was blessing us, was getting a lot of traction. We were learning. I can tell you this morning, I still can tell you more things that won't work then. I can tell you things that will work. But the beautiful thing about our people is they were willing to try.
[00:30:20] And the old church, you know, you didn't get too much out of the well worn path. But in the new church, they were like, well, let's try it. What's the worst thing could happen? It'll fail. We'll try something else. And so that became kind of our governing principle is let's try this for six months to see if this thing works. If it does, we'll stay at it. As long as it's not unbiblical, illegal or fattening. You know, we're.
[00:30:41] We're gonna move in that way. And man, that was kind of where we were going for about three Years.
[00:30:46] And then after about three years, the school district called and said, bill, we're setting a precedent that we can't honor for other churches. You guys gotta move out. We can't let you just stay in open ended. And so, man, here we had a big crisis at that point. Where do we go?
[00:30:59] At that time, we had about 230, 250 people coming every weekend. And with children's ministry, that was getting some traction, and student ministry, that was getting some traction, we knew we'd need about 20,000 square feet in order just to have services each week and to be able to minister to the people that were coming. But if you do the math on what that square footage cost in South Lake, even back then, it was about 20 bucks a foot. And it's way more than that now. But that's what it was then.
[00:31:25] Understand, we were a church that had about $2,000 in the bank just sitting there collecting interest. But anyway, we had no money. No money.
[00:31:34] So one of my buddies I went to was Wayne Lee. And Wayne had allowed us to rent offices in his building. And honestly, guys, I gotta share. This is kind of a funny story. We couldn't afford to buy me a desk. Cause Cindy was the secretary and I was the pastor. And so I didn't have a desk. And so she had this idea. We went to Home Depot and bought a solid core door.
[00:31:54] And then she finished out the door and painted the edges of the door black and bought legs from Container Store and screwed the legs onto the. And so the door became a desk. It was actually a pretty smart idea. It was kind of people come in, go, where did you get that? I said, home Depot.
[00:32:14] A little shellac and some paint and some legs from, you know, from a container Store. And you're in business, baby. And so that was. That was my desk. But I went around to see Wayne because Wayne is a.
[00:32:25] He is a real estate developer. And I said, wayne, here's our situation, man. If you hear of anything, you think of any.
[00:32:33] I gotta fish or cut bait on this building thing. I don't know where we're going. And so he goes, man, I'll keep my eyes open. I'll see what we can do. And he told me his story was, Bill, before you had time to walk back around the corner to get back in your office, he said, I had a phone call from Morris Whetstone at Grocery Supply in Houston. And he said, hey, you don't know me and I don't know you, really. But I called the city of Keller and They gave me your name. And he said, they said you might be able to help us with the building that we have that we're about to sell. And Wayne said, well, I think you've got me mistaken with Ron Lee. Ron Lee is a commercial. He sells a lot of commercial property in Keller. I'm a developer. I don't really sell property. And the guy on the other end of the phone said, no, no, no. They said specifically for you, Wayne Lee. They said to ask for you. And Wayne said, I'm sitting there hearing this guy talk about that. Why is he calling me and not Ron Lee? You know? And then it dawned on me, Bill. He just left here. They need a building. This guy's got a building. And so he says, I think I've got somebody that will take that building. And he goes, okay, well, let's keep it on the down low, because nobody even knows we're selling that building. Let's keep it off the radar. He said, what do you think the church could buy that building for? He said, well, I think we could let it go for maybe a million dollars. It's worth about three, but we really need to move that building pretty quick.
[00:33:50] So Wayne comes into my office. He's so excited. Bill, God's answered this thing. He says, God is just, man. He's moved. We got a building, the church has. I said, what? He goes, yeah.
[00:33:59] He said, it's just gonna be a million dollars.
[00:34:05] Owe me of little faith, right?
[00:34:08] I said, wayne, we don't have 2,000 bucks in the account. Bill, God will provide. I mean, he's sitting here, a businessman, and he's having to help a pastor with faith. You know what I'm telling you. So I'm not up here patting myself on the back. I'm telling you, I struggled like anybody, to go, oh, my gosh.
[00:34:24] And so we pull our core together, man. I get my guys together, our advisory team. We get them together. Here's the deal. And they all said, bill, we gotta do it. We gotta do it. This is God. I said, guys, we don't have the money. He said, well, God will provide. I said, okay. So I had Wayne come over on Sunday to the church. And I said, wayne, just present it to everybody. And he did. And everybody, I mean, they had a standing ovation. Everybody gets up, they're clapping. People are crying. Boy, this is God's answer.
[00:34:50] We got a building now. We're gonna be able to meet in. This is gonna be incredible. And, I mean, we had a great service. Everybody leaves. And after it's over. Wayne looks at me and he says, bill, did you mention the fact that tomorrow morning with that letter of intent, we've gotta have a check for $25,000?
[00:35:04] And I said, you didn't mention that? He goes, no, I didn't either.
[00:35:09] And I meant. Did you miss the part that I said we had $2,000 in the account, I can't give them a hot check. And well, I could, but you shouldn't. And I just said.
[00:35:20] I said, well, man, I can't run out on 1709 and say, come back, we forgot to tell you something, we need money. And I realized now why they were so happy. A free building. Thank you, Jesus, man. You know, and so all of a sudden, man, one of the ladies that counted the offerings comes running down the high school, down that aisle and she's got a check in her hand. Now this is where it gets crazy. And you're gonna. This is where I'm gonna. I'm telling you, I'm gonna sound like a.
[00:35:47] I'm gonna sound like a preacher that ought to be in a tent out somewhere getting Rolexes off people. But if this has really happened, she comes running down the aisle with this check in her hand and she hands me this check and it's a check for $25,000.
[00:36:04] And I looked at Wayne, he looked at me, I looked at everybody else. We're standing around and here's what I said. This is terrible. I said, call them and make sure that's not a mistake.
[00:36:13] Isn't that terrible? I said, I want to make sure that they're not, you know, that's not designated funds for, you know, orphan grandmothers with athletes feet or something. You know, make sure.
[00:36:22] Make sure, you know, we're okay to spend that money.
[00:36:27] And he called this family up, their name number was on their check and said, hey, we're from the Met Church and we just wanna thank you for your generous offering, but we need to know, are these funds designated or you want to. And he goes, no. He said his name was Rusty Harrod. He said, we live in South Lake. And he said, we're moving. Our company is moving. And he said, so we're relocating. He said, my wife and I have kind of disconnected from our church, but we've been escrowing what we normally give to our church. We've just been putting that money back into account until we felt God was telling us where to give that money. And he said, we've been here the last two Sundays and we just caught the vision of what this young church could be. And we just felt led to give 25,000, just use it wherever you need it and however way you need to use it. And that was the money that we needed to be able to secure that building. That moved us from the high school to the metro food store over in Keller. And man, from there we raised quarter of a million dollars and renovated, had to renovate it twice. And before God got finished with us there to move us here, we were in six services at our peak, running over 6,000 in these weekend services. It was crazy. We were busing people over from Keller High School cause we didn't have enough room to park. And we said, man, we've outgrown this facility. I don't know where we're gonna go. We looked at buying the rest of that strip shop center. We looked at buying that bank building on the corner. We looked at the old sofomo plant across the street. We said, but how are we gonna get people across the street? Well, you do a sky bridge, watch a state highway, you know, good luck with that. So. So we were looking at all of the options on staying there or relocating. And Donnie, that I mentioned a moment ago, and one of the guys on staff found this property. It was a God thing. And guess what we were able to buy this property for. Are you ready for this? Less than a dollar a foot.
[00:38:06] Less than a dollar a foot.
[00:38:08] And so God just. I'm just saying, guys, just miraculously, at times when I wondered if this thing was gonna work, at times when I wondered if this is where I needed to be, God just provided he didn't fail. And every time we hit headwinds, God just pushed us through because we knew God was going to do something incredible and unique. And wow, has he ever done something incredible and unique. And we just began to see hundreds and hundreds of people impacted through the ministry of the church. We rolled out here, we built these buildings. And one of the things that we were always thinking about is how do we help people?
[00:38:43] How do we help people? What do we do for people when they're hurting? You don't reach people till they get reachable. So we started, even when we were at the grocery store, just helping people out of the back end of some cars with some groceries and said, okay, we could do that. And Cindy would tell me all the time, she'd say, bill, that's the thing. If God ever lets this church get money, we need to do something for people that are hurting. It doesn't need to be about us. She was Always in my ear telling me that. And, man, she loved it when we started doing. So we started doing Thanksgiving baskets. Every year we'd furnish people Thanksgiving food. And so, man, from there, it just evolved and continued to grow into what we call then the Help Out Center. Because we wanted to find a name that indicated what we were wanting to do with these folks, and that's to help them out, get them to where they no longer depend on groceries and help. But we can help them out. So we launched this as a helpout center. And then when Cindy went to heaven, several people said, bill, that was her heart. We ought to name that ministry in her honor.
[00:39:36] So the Help out center became the Cindy Ramsey Center. And yesterday my brother tells me who's the executive director there. He says that we had nearly 900 families that got food just on Saturday alone, not counting what these guys do all during the week. And many of you guys are here on staff this morning. And y' all do incredible work every week to help broken and hurting people.
[00:39:58] So it became our largest home missions. It's its own entity.
[00:40:02] We set it up that way so it could receive funding, but yet it's the largest home mission that belongs to the Met Church. And I'm so proud of what God is doing. Donnie told me the other day, he said, you know, we had an Mai on our property done not long ago. Now this church is worth north of $40 million.
[00:40:21] We started with nothing. We started with a dream. Living out of my savings account some weeks just to keep the high school and keep me afloat. And now when you Fast forward nearly 30 years to see what God has done brought us to this place, thousands of people that are receiving ministry each and every week, I can tell you it is nothing short of a miracle what God has done. So I read a story like Nehemiah, and I see how that can happen. And I see in your life and in your case, man, God has a similar thing he's wanting to do in and through you. It may not be like something that has happened here, but it may be something so unique and so special that your life will be able to touch the lives of people that no one else in this world could possibly touch. So visualize it, agonize over it, organize to do it, and then just activate. Just say, by the grace of God, what's the worst thing that can happen? I'll fail. So what? I failed before. I'm not afraid to try, you know, just go for it. I mean it. Just like I said a moment ago, I can tell you more things that will not work than things that will work well. That in and of itself is great.
[00:41:27] I couldn't have bought that education anywhere else. So man, God's got something for you. Never be afraid to follow his path for your life. Let's pray.
[00:41:36] Lord, thank you for letting me share this morning with these incredible people, those watching online.
[00:41:41] Just a sampling of what you've done in this place. Just looking at a little Reader's Digest version of our story. God, we have nothing to say but praise you and give you glory for all things. It's been about you, it continues to be about you. And Father, as Paul said, if we glory, we glory in the cross.
[00:42:00] And Father, thank you for letting this church make a difference in the lives of people and I pray that it will continue to do so. I pray for my friends, Father, who may never have trusted you as Savior. I pray you'll give them the courage in the closing moments now to say, lord Jesus, with everything I know about me, I now trust everything I know about you.
[00:42:20] Come into my heart, forgive my sin, be a reality in my life and I'll give you thanks and praise for I ask this in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:42:32] Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you have any questions or prayer requests, please contact us by visiting metchurch.com so that we can follow up with you this week. We look forward to seeing you next week.
[00:42:45] Sat.
