Who Is Ray Hardee?

This is Darren Kuhn with the Masculine Journey Podcast, where we search the ancient paths to find ways that God brings light into a dark world and helps set men free from the struggles that we all face on a day-to-day basis. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds. Enjoy it. Share it. But most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network.

Welcome to Truth Network. I'm Darren Kuhn. I'm the first pumpkin spice latte of the season, and I'm honored to do it with my buddy, Pastor Ray Hardy. What do you got there, Pastor?

So I have a strawberry acai that's been blended, and it's my first of the season, and probably my first in a year. But anyway, thank you so much for having me with you today. Well, what do you do when you find yourself on the patio of a coffee shop with a guy who's Harvard-educated, a former college tennis player, and a pastor of one of the fastest-growing churches in the area? Well, you talk to him about God and Christ and the gospel, right, Pastor?

That's exactly right. Plus, you're around good people like you used to, and your life is all about spreading truth on the Truth Network, and it's an honor to be able to talk about truth. You know, I love what Steve Brown says is, all truth is God's truth. Except he says it a lot cooler. He goes, all truth is God's truth.

That deep bass voice. Well, Pastor Ray, it's interesting that you and I knew each other going way back, but your brother and I have gotten closer as he's become the headmaster of the Christian school our kids go to, Calvary A School. And so, through him, we've gotten closer and reconnected. Isn't that neat? That is cool. And I love it when God connects people in different parts of his kingdom together for his purposes. That's a lot of fun.

Well, it's a lot of fun, and it's really unique. The more I peel the hardy onion from Richard and from Ray and your family, the more I hear some amazing testimonies of literally being the caretaker of a sister, right, with some challenges but amazing gifts. Of having lost your family at a young age.

Your big brother and your dad in a plane wreck. I want to go back and just talk about who is Ray Hardy. Share a little bit about your testimony. I want our listeners, we love profiling people on Truth Talk.

It's one of my favorite things, and you have such a remarkable story. So, my name is Ray. I'm Stan and Betty's son, or third son, and Andrea is my wife. We've been married for 37 years. We have three children, Anna, Alex, and Abigail that are 34, 30, and 26 respectively. We have three grandchildren.

I'm a pastor at the Point Church in Belmont, which we founded 20 years ago, basically to reach people that no one else is reaching by doing things that no one else is doing without compromising the gospel or compromising the truth. We grew up in a situation where we moved a lot. My dad was an ambitious pastor, and we lived in High Point, Conway, New Orleans, Indianapolis, back to New Orleans, to Daytona, and then he had his untimely, at least for us, death in Florida with one of my brothers in a pilot crash. He was piloting, and then we moved back to Conway to be with my grandparents, and then my mom moved to Columbia, and then we moved to Charlotte. She got remarried, and I've been in the greater Charlotte area since I was 11. All that happened before I was 11, so obviously I didn't get married when I was 11.

That happened a little bit later. So, your mom is still living and loving the Lord and married to a wonderful man of God. She is. She's 89.

It'll be the 90th of her next birthday. He's 93 next Monday, so they're both people that have served God in different kinds of ways. He is a missionary in Africa, and mom is a missionary basically to pastors that she's been married to. My mom has been married to two pastors and a missionary. My dad, number two, Thurman Stone, was a very influential pastor on the west side of Charlotte. He also took lots of people to the Holy Land 54, 55 different times.

God graduated him to heaven over two decades ago, or almost two decades ago, 2004. Mom remarried another man of the cloth, but a retired missionary from Ethiopia. So, we're blessed to have a mom who knows how to pick out good men to follow. So, you've been both an MK and a PK in a sense, right?

Yeah, I guess so. I've been going through that, which is interesting because some folks say, oh, those MKs, those PKs, those missionaries' kids or step-kids and pastors' kids or step-kids, they all turn out rotten. They're rebels.

They're going the wrong way. But what happened? Something happened in your life. Tell us how you came to know Christ and the thing that changed you maybe going back. So, I'm grateful that I'm one of those stories that kind of like God completed my salvation before my dad died. However, my following Jesus Christ as Lord and Master and Savior took a little bit more time.

And certainly, MKs and PKs pushed the boundaries. I think a lot of that's because they're trying to discover what faith is and what really is real to them. And so, sometimes they wander off into dark places. And I certainly am guilty of that as well. But a couple months before my dad died, we sat down one afternoon when I was an eight-year-old boy with my mom on the campus of New Orleans Seminary, as a matter of fact, where my dad was in school and then was assistant to the president. And we had a thought, do you love Jesus? Yes, I love Jesus and everything I understood about him. Do you know what it means to be the Lord and to be the Lord and Master of your life?

I said, I know everything that I've been taught and I want to be like you guys. And so, that night I walked the aisle at New Orleans First Baptist Church. Then several weeks later, they came back to the seat where we were seated and my dad was there Sunday night and he was not ministering that night. But they were saying they had baptism that night. They knew I had made a profession of faith. And so, I said, are you ready to be baptized? And I was like, well, yeah, sure, I'm ready to be baptized.

And it was great. When I was saved, I counted like there's 120 people that said we're excited and 200 people that said we're proud of you and all that kind of stuff. It was just a great affirming moment. But I was baptized I think in July of 1969. Well, within just three months, my father was dead. So, I was always grateful for that time when we were able to kind of cement that moment in my life. But the second moment where it really, I took a step with Christ in a deeper kind of way or a more studied kind of way. I was 17 years old and I'd been trying to make sports the God of my life. I was running cross country and track and playing tennis and swimming and got dehydrated and ended up in the hospital with a kidney stone.

And that will make you really spiritual in a hurry. I remember laying on the hospital bed and I knew that if I took more pain medication that they would send me, they'd make me stay in the hospital. I said, God, just please make this pain go away.

And it did. And ultimately the pain, the stone remained, but nevertheless it was something that was kind of a spiritual moment for me. But that Sunday night, my father, stepfather, Thurman Stone, my second dad, just said something in the service. He said, I feel like there's somebody here tonight that needs to make a decision to deepen their commitment to Christ. And it was, I didn't hesitate.

I jumped right up. And so my first father and mom sat down with me, my biological father, and we had this talk. And then now with my second father, I said, you know, Pop, what's what we call him? I said, Pop, I don't know exactly what God means for me to do, but I don't want to be part time or just halfway his.

I want to be off his, and I want to be obedient to what it is that he's saying for me to do, which was a pivotal moment for me and a very powerful moment for me. And then college came with all of its tests of meeting people that are smart and have PhDs by their names and try to get you to doubt what it is you believe. And instead I was only strengthened. But it did lead me to a period in my junior year in college at a major university here in North Carolina where I spent about a year just completely depressed. I mean, for me to get up and to go to school was just a real struggle. What's strange about that is I made the best grades of my life thus far in that year. But, man, I participated in college athletics and I got hurt and I was making almost straight A's and I was elected president of Pi Sigma Alpha Honor Society, which is the National Political Science Honor Society. I was a pre-law guy. I wanted to go to Harvard and go to Harvard Law and become the next L.A. law guy.

You know, a guy who drives fancy cars and had all kinds of girlfriends and that kind of stuff. So there's still things that I struggle with about what should be a priority in my life. And it occurred to me back then after going through this period of depression that I'd kind of made knowledge of God and how I wanted to make great grades and be smart and get into law schools that were prestigious and that kind of stuff. I was even accepted to go to Wake Forest as a transfer, but they didn't have room for me.

So that's why I never ended up going. So I said, I'll just stick it out here. And ultimately God did some extraordinary things in my life during that time. And he showed me that without an authority of what is real truth, that anything goes. Really, you can make words say whatever it is that you want to make the mean. I'll never forget this constitutional law class I was taking with my professor said that Dr. Felix Frankfurter, one of the justices of the Supreme Court, one day he was tired of listening to arguments and he just leaned back and he said, words, words are arguing about his words.

And so to me, that was almost an empty moment. And that really kind of sparked a kind of what's what's the authority? Who's the real authority?

Am I following my faith because my parents followed their faith? Is it really mine? And over the course of a couple of years, including a transfer from UNCC before my last year, what was to be my senior year, I went to Gardner Webb University and it changed my life. I met my wife there.

I found my life's calling there. But it wouldn't have happened if I'd not gone through the dark night of my soul and understood what that's to mean. One of the things I would say especially is that there are people that are out there that you feel guilty because you need help. I was a pastor's kid and, you know, my dad's knew the answers and they knew joy and faith and salvation in Christ and how you don't worry about anything instead of pray about everything.

I knew about all those things. But there are also times where Christ followers need to walk through with somebody that's trained to help you walk through an avenue or dark time in your life that you're facing. And for me, going through counseling meant walking back through losing my father and finding my own identity.

And what did it mean to be that person? And Dana Kilby was my counselor. Her name was Dana, oh gosh, I forgot, Dana Jenkins at the time. And she'd been to Gardner Webb. And what ultimately I did not know is that one day her husband-to-be was going to be my boss at Gardner Webb. And I was going to turn this passion for Christian higher education into recruiting students for 15 years.

I'll never forget, I'd applied to go to Gardner Webb right before my senior year, made no sense whatsoever to leave UNCC to go there. And I just prayed on my bed one morning. I said, you know, dear God, if you want me to go to this place, I've been to Gardner Webb. I like it. I like the people that are up there.

They're people that are just real Christians with really good minds and really good hearts. But I need a sign. I said, I'm sorry for being such a Gideon and putting police out there. Within 30 minutes after I got up that morning, I got a phone call from Dana and she said, you still want to go to Gardner Webb? And I said, well, I've been praying about it.

And she said, well, I found a scholarship for you to go. So the immediate one of those answers to prayer where you can kind of raises the hair on my skin. He was not think about it now, but God called me there.

And since then, I mean, I was 21 years old. God did extraordinary things in my life while I was there. I want you to tell me about those things when we come right back for a quick break and about your sister and the remarkable testimony of being a caretaker or a care, a caregiver to your sister and your book on the Ten Commandments and Harvard degree. What the world's going on with Pastor Ray, Pastor Ray Hardy, more of his story when we come back on Truth Talk.

Don't touch that dial. What a remarkable testimony. What an honor to sit down with Pastor Ray Hardy, a North Carolina pastor who has a lot to share. He was the commencement speaker. My daughter Joy's graduation. He's the brother, one of my best friends.

And he is he just has a great testimony for Christ. Your whole family really has a story. The all the brothers and your sister. And Ray, there's a whole nother side when you're a caregiver. People don't really get that sometimes. I think it's just you just show up and you go and do this. But when you're caring for someone who who has had the challenges your sisters had.

Talk a little bit about that, will you. Pastor Ray, it's so good to have you with us today. It's great to be here, Stu.

Thank you so much. So what after dad died and mom waited three or three and a half years, not for any particular arbitrary time, but she fell in love again. And she met Mary Thurman Stone from Charlotte, North Carolina. We found out that among our two three new brothers or excuse me, one new brother and two new sisters, that one of our sisters was handicapped. And I said, what do you mean by handicapped? So she's a special needs person. And so they told us basically that meant that she had learned was trying to learn how to walk when she was a baby. She was born normally, but she fell and hit her head on the corner of a table when she was like 10 or 11 months old. And she had learned to walk and to talk all over again.

And it took years for that to happen, obviously long before my mom ever met my second father. So we moved into the house together. Looks like Station 43 is running by here to rescue somebody. I heard we're doing truth talk at a Starbucks in Belmont, North Carolina. So they're coming after us. We are outside, folks.

You'll hear the noise and the the cool sounds and some better than others. But Pastor Ray Hardy is with us. And this is so good to be so fun. My perfect pumpkin spice latte of the whole season. And you've got you've got some kind of healthy drink going there. So what? So what? Yeah. So what happened that changed a lot of things in your life, huh?

Absolutely. So one of the things I could tell people is that it's an incredible gift to be around people that are weaker, who are special needs or have special abilities is a better way to put them rather than special disabilities. Debbie was told she'd never learned to walk or talk again. They said she probably wouldn't live to be very long.

She had complicated brain surgeries. Well, Debbie's living a sixty five plus years after that. And she's still she's still living. And she still sings like Richard Tracy showed me a video of her singing.

Yeah, she does the very best she can with what she has. And I would say I've been writing, working on writing a book about Debbie's life, just the lessons that she's taught us about what it's like to be somebody to make the most of what you have. And also, God allowed us to learn. I can't I can never say why did Debbie fall and why she hit her head. I can never give you the answer for why did my dad's plane crash instead of land on the runway?

Just two minutes from runway on Daytona Airport. I can't explain to you why my second father, Debbie's father, died of complications from Alzheimer's disease. But here's what I've learned through all those dark night things in my in my life.

You can either get mad at God or you can lean in the God for his comfort. My mom and I had this conversation just two nights ago. And again, she's approaching her 90th birthday. She lost her first child and was stillborn, not stillborn, but had breathing problems and didn't live very long.

He died the day that he was born. And my mom said, through your dad's loss, the loss of my first baby, through the loss of Robbie with my dad and the crash. She said, I had a lot of questions from God about God and what he wanted me to do, but I never got mad at God. And so I think that that's the key that she taught us to look at not getting mad at God. But so what now?

You can't necessarily answer the why questions, but what now? So what I can say about having lived with Debbie, first of all, she's taught me about maximizing my life. She's writing cards, greeting cards for people at our church right now because it's something that she can do just to say, I appreciate you or God loves you and that kind of stuff. But what people realize is she has to do it with incredible muscle control.

It might take her an hour to write one card and address one card. And so maximizing your personal potential. The second thing is when you have somebody that's handicapped in your life or somebody that has special abilities or disabilities, it makes you slow down. It makes you stop and understand that the world is not going at your speed and you've got to go down and get their speed for a while. And that's that's very important for people like me. And I would say maybe like you were fast people were on the go. We're doing this.

We're running to do that. But there's something unique about how having Debbie as a sister slows us down. I want to tell you, my brothers Richard and Roger are just incredible champions, Rangers, crew chiefs. I mean, they deliberately take time and spend time with Debbie. And I do some these days as well, but not nearly as much as I used to. Debbie comes and attends the church, which I'm pastor.

Roger comes, my older brother. Richard drives down and strategically takes time to be with her. And I've taken some time with her over the years. One of the things that she wanted to do was to compete in running races. And there was a time when she could walk with the walker and participate in fun runs like the short observer marathon. And other times she's meant to be in a wheelchair, but she just makes you stop and slow down. And since just the brevity of life, once I took her to the marathon and marathon, people took off.

The ten thousand meter people took off. And we took off the starting line and she said right before we took off, she said these words, I'll never forget it. She had a walker in front of her. She said, I may finish last, but I'm on my way up. And so we started walking the one mile fun run and everybody's finished long before us. And a reporter, I didn't know it at the time, but a lady walked up beside us and she had a notebook in her hand.

There was no runner around or anything like that. This reporter said, so tell me what you're doing here. I said, well, this is my sister, Debbie, and she really wanted to run in this race. And she said at the starting line, I may finish last, but I'm on my way up. And she said, well, tell me more about her. So we had a little time and turned out she was an interviewer. She was a reporter for the short observer.

And the next morning on the front page of the sports section, there were like three thousand five hundred runners that had run in all these different races. And there was this whole paragraph quote from Debbie Stone about how she was special and that kind of stuff. And so, I mean, it also shows that God takes the things that are the least and elevates them for his purposes, too. And so therefore, Debbie's taught us how to go at a different speed.

The third thing is, is that we might get discouraged and we want to quit and we want to give up. But nevertheless, she's taught us that she never has. She cries. Sometimes she misses her father. She misses her mother because she lost to cancer. When my dad died in a plane crash, Debbie's mom had died of terminal cancer before she was 50. And so there are people that she misses in her life. One of her brothers is gone.

One of my stepbrother but she used to sing with the Poor Souls of each music group and has two great sons and a wife who's now remarried and that kind of stuff. But what Debbie teaches us is that you can find joy even when you've got tears. And so a lot of times people will say to me, you're just too positive about stuff, Ray.

You can, you know, you can try to make something that's really bad something positive. But here's what I've discovered is that when you're around somebody that has little and can't go fast and is looked down upon by most of the world as somebody that is less than. It stops you in your tracks to say, you know what, the most important things are the simple things and the little things and the loving things. The big lesson out of the dark lessons of life, losing losing that you lose a pop to Alzheimer's disease, dealing with Debbie.

Have a Down syndrome niece, Stacy, just as enjoyed our world is that it's not why you probably never going to get the why questions answered is what do you do now? And so as a result of that, what God's taught me to do is how to love on a deeper level based upon the people and the circumstances and situations I've been around them. And also just to know that you're not guaranteed another moment. And so don't take those moments for granted.

Love people that are in front of you in Jesus name. And you also wrote a book about the Ten Commandments, right? It's got the it's got the race car theme on the front. I did. It's kind of an older book in itself published. If some of you want a copy out there, I'll start reprinting it if you want to buy it, but it's called 10 the win winning in the power of 10.

And I had lunch with Zig Ziglar one time one on one before you paid to go in a room with a lot of the people in the early 1990s when he came to Charlotte to speak. And he challenged people to stage and he challenged me in person to say, everybody needs to write a book about what is necessary to be successful in life. I began to reflect on the Ten Commandments. They're not the Ten Suggestions, but they're not just the Ten Cannotments. There's really a powerful principle, a love principle behind every commandment, even though it's stated in the negative.

I mean, you know, so the way I reframe them is the 10 the win is first things first, God is first. Then second, no thing should take the place of the one who made all things. Third, we should always live our lives as if we're always in God's presence because we always are. Fourth, that we take one day a week to rest and recharge our batteries. If God did it, we need to do so. That we make mom and daddy proud.

Even if mom and dad aren't honorable, and some people have mom and dads who weren't honorable, we need to live in an honorable way that honors our Heavenly Father. Only God gave life and only God can take it away. True love waits and real love stays. You know, earn what you own. Don't take it from other people. Tell the truth and enjoy the consequences. And then the grass is not green on the other side of the fence.

It still has to be mowed. So each one of the commandments has a principle that is positive and a demonstration of love to God. I love the way that Exodus chapter 20 begins as God speaking to them. He gives them this covenant with 10 commandments and then lots of different derivations to explain them. He says, I'm the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. So he's reminding them, I'm your savior. I'm your redeemer. I'm the one who loves you.

So love me back. And people think of the 10 commandments as these real high bars that, gosh, you can't keep all those. I mean, so God's saying, hey, can you not sleep with that guy's wife? You know, hey, can you not kill somebody? Would you just tell the truth? Would you not steal for other people's stuff? That's not a real high bar.

If I love somebody, I wouldn't do even better than that. So those commandments are the formative, etched in stone, the formative years in the laws, the whole jurisprudence system of America. Absolutely. And of Harvard University, where you have gotten a degree from recently. Why would a pastor with this kind of life experience and these kind of stories and degrees, you know, leading a successful church. Why would you go get a degree from Harvard? And why did Harvard just appoint an atheist as their campus chaplain? Pastor Ray, I'm glad you're here to help us settle the score here.

What's going on? Well, I can only tell you why I chose to go there. So when I was an undergraduate, I always thought, could I cut it in the Ivy League? And so part of it was personal pride.

Part of it was the fact that I was something of an empty nester when I started. But there are other things as well. I think that in our culture, we have to learn the language of speaking what the world is talking about. So for me to go to Harvard was like Paul going to Mars Hill and talk with the philosophers and the poets and the people that were the thinkers and the theologians of that day, because I wanted to make sure that I could talk in the language that the culture has and put out there with terms like intersectionality and the 1619 Project and structural racism and the various things that you've heard. There's a reason that those things have become important.

So I want to be able to talk with facility about the issues that people are talking about. The other thing I wanted to do was I didn't want to see if I could cut it. I want to see how well I would do. And I did fairly well. I graduated 3.75 average and that kind of stuff. But the most important thing for me after I got there was I had to do a couple of residencies.

So there was times that I was on the campus and then there was times every week when I was on Zoom with people. And I wanted to be a Christ follower that was not the jerk. There's some people that are Christ followers that are not good commercials for Jesus. And so I wanted to show people that I was in the room with them that you can love Jesus and love Christ and still be loving and appropriately inclusive to people as well, even if you don't agree with everything about them. And so I wanted to show them the love of Christ in a practical way and to show them that you can be a Christ follower and also be a gentleman and also be a scholar and also be somebody worth listening to.

Because I think in order to build the bridge between a holy culture that loves God's words, precept by precept and line upon line, I still believe that the Bible is the standard of all truth because it points back to the one who was the way and the truth and the life. And even Harvard was begun upon those kind of foundations to train ministers so there would not be an illiterate ministry to the next generation. But over time things have changed and what I've found is that when you put in a place where knowledge is worship for worship's sake, this is not just true of Harvard, it's true for anybody. Once you begin to want to know the right answer, knowledge can, just like it was for Adam and Eve, become the first temptation to become God. So when you're in a place that is kind of the hallowed halls of academia, one of the most prestigious places in the world, sometimes it's easy to worship knowledge for knowledge's sake. And therefore what seems to be, to make no sense and just a head banger like slap yourself, why would a chaplain, the chief chaplain of Harvard University be an atheist, is that knowledge has led to that kind of thing. Sometimes whether we are people that are Christians who get too full of ourselves or people that are out there in the world that are trying to find meaning and truth and purpose through academia, it recalls to mind the words of the apostle Paul, proclaiming to be wise they become fools.

Their foolish hearts have been darkened. But what I found at Harvard around every assignment, and that's some wonderful people that were there, people that were professors and that I love dearly. And here's what I found though, is that everything I learned had a thread back to what is true in God's Word. Just like you said, the Ten Commandments are the foundation of our judicial system.

I've asked legal scholars and people, district court judges, people that are friends of mine, couldn't you say that every one of our laws is tied back to the Ten Commandments one way or another? Absolutely that's true. And so when you're part of a free country and you're part of a free place of inquiry, like Harvard or Princeton or UNC Chapel Hill or Berkeley or wherever, you're going to find that knowledge can become a God in and of itself. And therefore it can seem perfectly rational that your chaplain could be an atheist, because he has a perspective too. But where I disagree with this gentleman certainly is that I'm very much a theist. I believe God is at the center of it all, that he is the truth. And while he says that we need to find the truth within ourselves, I want to quote Louis Giglio, self-help can't help. Ultimately we have to have the helper of the Maker and the Master and the Lord of the universe for any kind of self-help to help. I can be disciplined, I can work out, I can memorize things, I can make A's, I can go to get advanced degrees from prestigious institutions and stuff like that, but what it did for me is to drive me straight back to the truth of why Harvard was formed in the first place.

It doesn't, everybody. But in fairness to those people that are there for me, they allowed me to express myself and did not condemn me. They challenged me in appropriate kinds of ways, but I felt like it was very much an academic environment and was allowed to state my opinion.

Not everybody does, but those professors did an extraordinary job and we do that. I enjoy how you've always challenged me to think and how your books do that and your blog does that. If you want to learn more about you, what's the best website and also learn about the church? RayHardy.com is my personal blog site. The church is The Point Church Belmont. It's thepoint.cc. .com and.org were taken by other The Points in the world, so we're thepoint.cc kind of for community church.

You can find that on the webpage. Also, I'm Ray McKay Hardy. There's like 50 Ray Hardys with two E's, like the hamburgers were made.

I'm kind of like the hamburger spelling, H-A-R-D-E-E. I'm Ray McKay Hardy on Facebook or Twitter, things like that. I try to use the influence that God's given me to make a difference in the people. I heard something John Maxwell said years ago, and this is kind of a life mission statement for me.

I'll do it with my John Maxwell voice. Do you really? I want to make a difference with people who want to make a difference. Doing something that makes a difference at a time that makes a difference.

To me, that's what it's all about. That means for me building bridges with people, and sometimes it might be things like building houses. I'm working on a project now with local pastors called Reimagine Us with Habitat for Humanity. If we can sweat together, we can get together.

Here's what I thought. We'll talk about making the races to get together, but what if this black church and this white church predominantly goes and builds a house together? What if this Hispanic church and this multilingual church get together and they go build a Habitat house together? We do things like that, and we make a difference. There are people that are friends of mine that cross denominations. We're able to sit down and have these conversations around race and structural racism and things that are part of cultural racism or things like that and cultural violence. There's lots of terms that are used, but at the bottom line, anything that causes us to be separated from one another and separated from God is the selfishness of sin.

I mean, right in the middle of the word sin is the letter I, and I is the problem in the sin. I want to be somebody that builds bridges with people. My personal life mission statement is to encourage people to turn to Christ and become his fully devoted followers, to follow him completely.

I just think it's important that each person decide what kind of stance you're going to take. It's easy to kind of go get on a holy hill or a holy huddle, and I understand that. Sometimes I just want to retreat to me and God and nobody else because only me and him can fix the world together, right? I've found that I've got to go out in the highways and hedges, and some of the ways that I compel them to come into the kingdom of the gospel is by showing that I'll love them, I'll feed them, I'll talk with them, I'll have a spirited debate with them, I'll take them out to lunch.

One of my best friends is an atheist and has been for years, and I've shared the gospel with him over and over and over again, but I don't abandon John because he's different than me because even at the last breath he might decide what race thing is true. What a blessing. Thanks for sharing your story with us. What a story.

Please share this podcast. This needs to be made into a book. What a blessing. Your brother, your family, we love you guys, and thank you for what you're doing for the kingdom, reaching the lost at all costs. I love that.

Sweating together to get together. And doing that for the glory of God and your book and all you're doing at the Point Church in Gastonia, North Carolina, right? Gaston County, North Carolina. We're on the Belmont side. If you come out of Charlotte Airport, if you take a right to go to the city, that's ten minutes away. If you take a left, you'll be right next door to where we are. So we welcome you anytime to come.