There's Power in Fulfilling Your Purpose (cont'd)

Hello and welcome to Destin for Victory with Pastor Paul Shepherd, Senior Pastor at Destiny Christian Fellowship in Fremont, California.

And coming your way next, Pastor Paul talks about how Destiny Christian Fellowship got its start as he shares his message, There's Power in Fulfilling Your Purpose. But first, he and I would like to share a few words about the reality of the resurrection because as part of this month's celebration of Easter, we've prepared a booklet which will encourage you with the hope and power of God. With the hope and power of the resurrection.

It's called He's Alive and I'll give you the details of how you can get your copy in a moment. But right now Pastor Paul has joined me. Why should the fact that Jesus is alive be so important to those who claim to follow him, Pastor? The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the truth that distinguishes our faith from all other religions. When we think about it, if Jesus was only an outstanding leader and teacher while on earth and many people, even non-Christians, realize that he was. But if that's all he was, then he is to be named among great men. But we who are Bible believers, we who are followers of Christ, we proclaim because we believe it is absolutely true that the historical fact is not only that he lived and died but that he rose from the grave on the third day. Amen, he lives now.

And he still lives. So that's a different message than you'll get from any religion anywhere in the world. He's not just a great man, he's the God-man, he is the redeemer, he is the one who revelation says was dead but he's alive. See, Wayne, you got me preaching. Who was dead but he's alive and he is coming again for his church. I'm excited because Easter is something we need to all rejoice about because it is what makes our belief system different than any other in the whole world. And I praise God that that day is approaching and once again we're going to rejoice in the truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And what a day that will be, Pastor Paul. Again, this booklet is called He's Alive and it's our gift to you this month for your generous donation to Destined for Victory. Call 855-339-5500 or visit pastorpaul.net to make a safe and secure donation online. You can also mail your gift to Destined for Victory, post office box 1767, Fremont, California 94538.

Again, our address is Destined for Victory, box 1767, Fremont, California 94538. You can't wait till you get everything together to start your business, to start your ministry, whatever God's speaking to you. You can't wait until convenience comes.

Convenience isn't showing up anytime soon. Sometimes doing God's will can be very inconvenient. You'll have some people rise up against you, you'll have some long days and even longer nights. Well, coming your way next on Destined for Victory, Pastor Paul Shepherd talks about how his church, Destiny Christian Fellowship, came into being. Along the way, he'll encourage you to pursue God's specific purpose for you no matter how many challenges come your way.

So let's join him now for today's message. There is power in fulfilling your purpose. I'll never forget starting this church, Destiny. I pastored another church 20 years, then had to go into a time of personal restoration and ministry and went into that, came through some very dark, difficult times.

My wife right by my side. And when we came out of that, when we were a commission to continue on in ministry, then when that continued on, I said, yeah, but I'm not at that church anymore. And I said, okay, and the people who walked with me, who led me through that process, my restoration team, they said, well, if God has told you to stay in California, guess what? That means you're going to have to start a church. I said, I had one for 20 years.

He said, yeah, but that season's over. And now that you've come through what you've come through and God says I'm still not calling you away because people are calling me from other parts of the country. Oh, Pastor Paul, why don't you come pastor here?

People will have an idea for you. You ever had folk just had, they know exactly what you're supposed to do. And then, bless their hearts, and a couple of pastors were very unhappy that I wasn't leaving. I'm just, let me just tell you all what really happened.

Behind the scenes. A couple of pastors quite unhappy that I was staying. One pastor was so unhappy he was talking to his staff meeting about me.

We had never met. It was so bad, no lie, one of his staff members called me to say, my pastor is obsessed with you. He wants you out of this area.

And the staff member said, because he thinks you're going to take all his members. Now that he heard you've been restored and your denomination has laid hands on you and let you move forward, he's scared you're going to take folk. I said, tell him I don't know his church and don't want none of y'all.

I'm not out sheep stealing. He just, I said, well, I hope God gives him rest. And so here we are, we got to stay in the area, because God hasn't sent us away. And I had to tell that gentleman, I ended up having a meeting with this guy. And I ended up telling him, and he was trying to say, well, you know, you really need to, you really, I said, well, here's the problem, sir. I said, the Lord is the one who sent me here, so he's the only one who can send me away. It's not like he sent me here, you can send me away. I said, it don't work like that.

He was not pleased. So fact is, I said, okay, my wife and I, we said, okay, well, we got to stay. And we had to start destiny. We had a meeting, the Barkers lived in a place that had a community meeting, and they're now with the Lord, but Maude and Lucius Barker let us use their community room of their condo, and we wrote only people who had written us to say, if you're staying in the area, you're our pastor. We praise God for your restoration, all that. If you're staying in the area, we're coming, so just tell us where we're going to be. Only people who had said that got invited to the meeting. Somebody said, he's splitting his own church.

I heard that rumor. I said, y'all who got it, wherever you got it from, would you send this reply for me? I'm a smart man.

I got degrees. If I want to split a church, I would do it way better than this. If I wanted to split a church, I had a membership booklet in my church. That was a mega church God had grown through our ministry over 20 years.

I had a booklet of 7,000 names in it with addresses and phone numbers. If I wanted to split a church, I'm not going to email 30-some people. The only reason you got the email was because you had said to us, you're our pastor, and we want to be wherever you're going to be. If you didn't say that, you weren't invited to the meeting.

Why? Because I got to answer to God. When God converts, to use his words to Peter, when you're converted, strengthen your brothers.

You got to do right by God after he has blessed you. Long story short, we got those folks together, said we're starting Destiny Christian Fellowship. I know because just the days before, I had gone to Sacramento and started Destiny Christian Fellowship as a religious nonprofit. Went up there, filled out the paperwork and all that. My wife and I went to the bank after we got our number, a corporate number and all, and could start the corporation. Went to the bank and started accounts.

We took $10,000 of our own money and started this church with $10,000. So when I went to that meeting that we had called, there ended up being about 40 people in there because a few of them had a friend say, can my friend come? I says, your friend knows that I'm not asking them to come. Yeah, yeah, all right, let them come. So we had about 40 people there, and I told them, we just started Destiny Christian Fellowship, and we're going to be in the Bay Area. I said, I don't know where we're going to meet or anything.

All I know is God told me to stay here. It has a bank account, religious nonprofit, so you can get tax credit if you want to start giving to help us begin this church. And that night, they started writing checks. That's how we started Destiny. Then we had to find somewhere to meet.

And you know that story. We couldn't find a place to meet. We ended up finding four different places in four different cities to meet.

It was called how not to start a church. Sometimes we met in Santa Clara. Sometimes we met in Newark. Sometimes we met in Fremont. Actually, it was five places. Sometimes we met, a couple times we met in Hayward at Chabot College, and the fifth place was San Mateo on the other side of the whole bay. I'm like, wait, San Mateo? You got to pay a toll to go have church? Because we live in Hayward. Yeah, that was what it took.

Five places, five different cities. But those handful of folk said, we believe God is in this. We're with you. That's how the church started. You can't wait till you get everything together to start your business, to start your ministry, whatever God's speaking to you. You can't wait until convenience comes.

Convenience isn't showing up anytime soon. We were meeting in these hotels. We had to pay big money for the ballroom, big money to get a company to load in the AV, all the screens and stuff. They were charging us thousands of dollars a week, these companies, to give us sound and video, and then thousands to rent the ballroom. There were some weeks we paid $15,000 just to have two services.

Many weeks, 15 grand, the most expensive of places between the sound company, because San Mateo said, well, this is double time for my people because this is Sunday, and the only way they're going to work for you is you got to pay them double. And guess what? I needed sound. You can have all the anointing in your preaching if you win. The people can't hear it.

Whoo! I bet that message was anointed, but I couldn't hear nothing he's up there saying. You understand what I'm saying? You got to pay $15,000 just to break even that week, and week after week after week. Bottom line is, at a certain point, I got folks together and say, y'all, let's figure out how to be our own sound people and buy some screens, and let's figure this out, because no need of me paying these people double time. And we figured it out. We just figured out how to do it. I said, read up on the manual.

Push that button. That's how we started it. That's how we started the church. And finally, finally, then we had to buy equipment and load in every week for four, almost four years, 44 months, load in, load out.

I mean, you used to sell two vans full of stuff. People were just as dedicated. Members got up six in the morning. They are driving to storage to pick up our stuff and drive to wherever we're going to meet. By the time I showed up at eight something, it's church already, but these people have been working for two hours.

Nobody on the staff, we didn't have a staff. I'm trying to show you when you want to fulfill your purpose, you're going to have to go through all kind of changes. Y'all stop waiting for something to be easy. If God put it on your heart, let God figure out how you're going to get it done. We'll be right back with more of today's Destined for Victory message from Pastor Paul Shepherd, Senior Pastor at Destiny Christian Fellowship in Fremont, California. Remember, you can always listen to this program on demand at pastorpaul.net.

That's pastorpaul.net, and there you'll find a host of great resources at our online store. Once again, here's Pastor Paul with the rest of today's message, There is Power in Fulfilling Your Purpose. People said, How'd your wife come to get those remarks every week? I said, because we had our first service. I said, baby, I need you to tell these folk God is at work in our lives and all that, and so she got used to that, and the people were excited about it, and I said, that's going to be our, that's the way we do church.

We do church because we are a partnership. We started that. Somebody said, did you get that from Joe and Victoria? I said, they got it from me. What you talking about? They didn't get it from me.

They just had their own thing. But anyway, listen, you just got to, sometimes you got to figure it out as you go. But if the Lord is with you, that's what's important. And at the end of the day, you will know you're in the will of God because despite the vicissitudes, despite the enemies, despite all the stuff that comes against you, God's purpose will always prevail. I've built three ministry facilities in California. The first two were in the church that became a megachurch.

Wonderful. I praise God for that church to this day. I'm still in touch with their leadership to this day because it doesn't honor God for you to write off people because you had a bad season together. And so I'm still to this day in touch with people because we don't have personal vendettas in the kingdom.

That doesn't glorify God. And so I built two facilities there. One was a little warehouse, 14,000 square foot warehouse, a little raggedy place, but we grew from 250 to 2,500 in a raggedy warehouse that only sat 300 in the sanctuary. We created an overflow, an illegal overflow. I'll just tell you the truth.

I didn't know it was illegal till one day the fire people came. He said, you know, you're not supposed to have all them people back there. I said, yeah, but they keep coming.

I said, so what do y'all propose we do? Because by then we were having four services. I said, we're having four services. And so we had to create that overflow.

Here's how we created it. People told me, you know, pastor, the 300 were in the room with me, and they said something about the people in the back. And I said, what people? They said, oh, on the other side of that low-bearing wall, we can't knock it out as a low-bearing wall. On the other side of that wall, there's people sitting just trying to hear the service. I said, what? They said, we can't have that.

Put a screen back there and put some speakers back there. That's how we did our first video. And finally it became a full-blown overflow. And the fire chief showed up, said, I really should shut this down because it violates the fire code. But he looked around at the excitement. He said, do these people know how to get out of here in the case of a fire? I'm not lying on the fire chief. He said, do they know? I said, yeah, yeah. We make sure they understand where the exits are. And he turned his head and walked away.

He could have got in trouble. I said, if you don't say nothing... God can do things. And I brought up the facilities because of the two facilities I built when I was leading Abundant Life. Praise God for them. And many souls were won.

Many lives changed, all that in those facilities. We couldn't own either one of them. They were owned by families who used those properties for income for their families. And they told us, you'll never own this, the warehouse. And then they said that again in Mountain View. You'll never own this.

We spent $12 million building something in Mountain View we would never own. And we knew it. They told us, just understand. I said, okay. They said, you can have a long-term lease, but it's always going to be family income for us.

Guess what? When we have to start, I go through my dark season, when we have to start Destiny, I'm standing, I'm preaching in a church that we own. We are buying it right now.

Right now. This one, you know, God will give you all kind of, he'll give you all kind of unexpected blessings. The other two families said, we'll never sell this. This one, when we came to this campus, the owner here said, I'm not a real estate guy, and so I want to sell property. He had bought it because he owned one of the sports teams here, pro sports team in the Bay Area, and they're not real estate people, and they thought they were going to build a stadium down here. That's why they bought up a whole bunch of Fremont property.

And they found out that the stadium wasn't coming. He said, well, we got to unload all that. So the other families at my former church said, you'll never own these. This guy said, you got to own it, because that's the only way I'm going to put you in it. Here's the funny thing.

I'm going way over time, but let me finish this real quick. Here's the funny thing. We said, well, we want to own it, but we're a little church. We've been hopping around in these hotels for four years, and we need the lease first. He said, I'm not real estate. I'm sick of sitting on property I can't use. I want to sell it and be done.

God will give you some ideas. My team and I said, tell you what. We'll buy it from you in three years. What? How are we going to get a loan in three years?

I don't know. But that's what we heard ourselves tell the man. We'll buy it from you in three years. Just lease it to us for three years, and I promise we'll buy it, because it was on the market for sale, and he wanted $95 a square foot way back then. You couldn't get anything close to that for $95 a square foot now, but we came at the right time, and he wanted $95. I said, tell you what. Lease it to me for three years. I'll buy it from you for $90 a square foot. How am I going to tell a millionaire?

But guess what? That's what I told him. After three years, I said, if it takes me four years, I'll buy it for 93. I said, if it takes all five years, I'll give you your asking price of 95. I'm telling a multimillionaire what I'm going to buy his property from. The first year, he laughed and dismissed it. I'm not leasing, so we stayed in hotels another year. And I came back the next year and said, hey, we're still interested in your property.

Guess what? He wasn't laughing, because he wasn't making no money, because he wasn't leasing it to us. And he said, 90, 93, 95, huh? I said, yes.

He said, you got a deal. We bought it in the three years. We're buying it now, paying our mortgage every month. This is ours. Of the three build-outs, this is the only one we'll be able to turn over to the generation coming.

Thank you. In fact, if God bless us really good, we might be able to turn over a debt-free place to him by the time I'm done. So however it is, we're turning over something with equity to the generations coming. And the only charge will be never use it for anything but for the glory of God.

That's all we ask. For the glory of God. Doesn't have to be our style of church, because you see these younger generations, they got their own style. And old people complain, I don't like all that. That's because it's not for you, boo. That's because it's not for you, boo. I tell old people, get up off of the young folk.

If they serving God, let them do their thing. See, I knew what that was like. When I got saved, we got saved in the days of afros.

Yeah, I used to, when I was younger, I had it here. I had an afro, because you know, that back in Jackson Five days. And I had an afro, man. And we were getting saved as teenagers and going to church. One day, a lady said to me, your hair offends me.

One of the old saints. Your hair offends me. The Bible says a man shouldn't have long hair. And your hair offends me. I'm probably 13 years old.

Looking like Michael. Your hair offends me. I went to my dad, who was my pastor. Mother so-and-so said my hair offends her.

Do I have to cut my hair for that lady? He said, no, no, I just need to have a meeting with the older saints. And he had a meeting with them. I didn't get to sit in on the meeting.

They left us all alone after that meeting was over. And as a result, we became one of the greatest churches in terms of soul winning of young people, because the church came to understand, let them do it their way. Oh, Lord, I'm done.

Let's stand. Thanks so much for being here for Pastor Paul Shepherd's message, There is Power in Fulfilling Your Purpose. Remember, for your generous gift to Destin for Victory, we'll be happy to send you by request Pastor Paul's booklet, He's Alive. That's He's Alive, our gift to you by request, when you make a generous gift to Destin for Victory. Just call us at 855-339-5500 or visit pastorpaul.net to make a safe and secure donation online.

And as always, you can mail your gift to Destin for Victory, Post Office Box 1767, Fremont, California 94538. Biblically speaking, in terms of the principles and precepts we learn in scripture, here is the best simple definition for success that I can give you from the Word. Discovering your God-given purpose and fulfilling it with excellence. And that's tomorrow when Pastor Paul Shepherd shares his message, Set Yourself Up for Success. Until then, remember, He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion. In Christ, you are Destined for Victory.