# Wednesday Evening Service

Date: June 5, 2023

For sure, and that’s another to make a Presbyterian shout right there. I tell you what, I like that. And stand on something, sure. Amen, the word of God. Praise the Lord for Landmark Baptist College and other good colleges, but just Landmark’s been solid all the years. I remember Pastor Carter way before it really was a thing to stand on the King James Version. He stood on it and did a wonderful job. In fact, he married my wife and me.

Thirty years ago, not this coming Sunday, but the next Sunday, thirty years ago, Pastor Carter married us. He pastored there, I believe, fifty years. And I’m Brother Parsons, been pastor there for several years now, doing a great job, and you’re staying on the same path.

And a hard worker Brother Parsons is, and just just a great pastor. And praise the Lord for Landmark Baptist Church and College, and it would be one I consider for sure, and just a great place. We appreciate them coming through and preaching for us, and Brother Chamber is going to come preach for us. We’re excited about that.

Well, it’s a pleasure to be here tonight and be back here tonight. I was just looking on my dresser the other day. Look at that medallion that I got for that bait casting rod there that I won—my back here. And I haven’t won anything since then. But no, it’s a pleasure to be back here. We were here a couple years ago with our ladies’ group.

Last year we got to travel with these guys for the summer, and Mrs. Aaron asked which one’s which one—I can’t remember how she exactly phrased her question. Something about drama: which one has more drama? I’ll take the guys any day of the week. But, no, it was great to be here a couple of years ago with our girls, with our ladies group, and it’s good to be back. We’ve been through the area a couple of times.

This is probably the favorite part of my job: traveling around with these guys and representing the college, and even with the girls. But last year, our pastor scheduled the first meeting. He called me up one day, and usually I take care of the scheduling, so he doesn’t have something off his plate. But there was a preacher up in Michigan, just outside of Grand Rapids, that he’s… In fact, we went up there with the ladies group, but we weren’t planning on going out that way because we were planning on going up into the Northeast, which we did. But then that preacher was down, and he’s like, “I really want a singing group at my church.” And I was there having lunch with him and our pastor, and the pastor pointed to me and said, “You need to talk to him about that.” And then he looked at me and he said, “Make it happen.”

I’m like, “Preacher, we’re going to be up in New England. That’s a long way away from New England.” Plus, we try to have a booth at the Sood Conference every year, but that year got canceled because of, I think it was the second part of COVID there. So that got canceled. So I said, “Well, I guess we’re going to Michigan. What’s the date?”

And so we went up to Michigan, and he’d been after Pastor Parsons to come up and preach a revival for him. So Pastor scheduled it last year, the Sunday following our graduation. And so we ended up leaving Haines City at noontime on that Friday, drove up through. I thought about calling your preacher when we were coming through about 10 o’clock that night, see if he’d get a coffee with us, but I didn’t figure he’d be awake.

We were driving. We stopped someplace in—I don’t even know where. We stopped someplace in Kentucky and then finished it out the next day. But we got to be up there with our pastor and got to take these guys out, and it’s a pleasure traveling with them and representing the college. We’re thankful that we can be here again.

We’ve got the display table back there. If any of you are interested in Bible College, you don’t have to necessarily move to Haines City, Florida, to go to Bible College. You can take our directed studies. I know you’ve got a Bible Institute here, and we don’t want to take away from that either. But we have a directed study where you can go right from day one all the way through and get your master’s and doctorate if you wanted to do that. There’s some other material back there. We’ve got a little gospel tract back there. We call it our radio tract. It’s Gospel 90.3. It’s our radio station down there. We also have an app that you can download on your smartphone, or you can go online to gospel903.com and listen to classic Southern Gospel and Bluegrass music. And if you listen to it when I’m in town, we do a thing called “The Good Morning Show,” and you can listen to yours truly every morning from 7 to 9:30. They say I’ve got a face for radio, and so we just have a good time with it. Some of it’s recorded; some of it we try to do live.

But you can tune into that. We also have a CD. This is the first time we’ve ever made a CD at Landmark Baptist College, and so of these guys singing here. We took them up this last fall to Faith Music Missions and made a CD with them. And that’s for sale on the back table for $15. Make yourself available to that. It’s always good to have good gospel music.

We do not have it—I know we’ll get this question because it’s becoming such a popular thing—we do not have it online yet. We are working on that. Hopefully this week they’ll be working on that because there’s a whole process you’ve got to go through and sign up with a distributor. It’s more complicated than for the… I gave it to somebody else to take care of that. So it requires a computer. It requires downloading, things like that. I’m 51 years old. I just got a new cell phone. I’m still trying to learn how to use it. But eventually that will be online, and you can stream the music. I know a lot of—they tell me a lot of vehicles today don’t come with CD players anymore. And so people are going to thumb drives or downloading music or something like—I don’t know. I don’t understand all that stuff. I like putting something in there. But that will be available at some point in time. But stop by the table afterwards. The guys will be back there; talk to them, find out a little bit more about them.

We are privileged to have Zach and Verity with us. I’ll just share a little bit about them. Verity and my wife were roommates in Bible College and best friends. She was in their wedding. I think they were best friends, but you’ll have to ask them that afterwards. But they were roommates in Bible College, and she was in their wedding. I had never met them. I had heard about them. I actually went to school with Zach’s brother and never met Zach. I think they went like 18 years. I had heard my wife talk about them all that time, and they communicated a little bit, but they were over in Romania and Bulgaria and that area, and we were living up in Maine. And they contacted us. We got them a meeting in our church and helped them get some other meetings up there. And they walked in after not seeing each other for like 18 years, and it was like they had seen each other last week. It’s just a sweet relationship that they have. I fell in love with Zach and Verity. But no, they’re good people. I love them as servants of God. And then when we moved to Florida, we got to see them again when they brought Isaac down to the college. So we’re glad to have him there. And just seeing all these guys and what God is doing in their lives—just all these guys have come in since I’ve been the Dean of Men there. So I get to work with them sometimes one-on-one, get to sit down and talk to them, get to counsel with them, get to travel with them, be a part of their lives, and see them grow and mature, not only physically but spiritually, and see God work in their lives. And it’s a relationship that we’ll always have, and I’m thankful for that.

If you’ve got your Bibles tonight, turn to the Book of Philippians, the Book of Philippians, chapter 1. It’s my favorite book in the New Testament. I kind of flip-flop back and forth with the book of James because they’re both such great books. But we know that one of the themes of the book of Philippians is joy and rejoicing. And I try to be a happy person. I try to be—I don’t call myself an optimist. My preacher that we were under up in Maine for 16 years, he was the eternal optimist. I mean, his house could be burning down, or his house could burn down, and he would look and say, “Hey, you know what? That wall survived. I’ve got something I can build for him.” That’s just the type of guy he was. Sometimes it drove me nuts because he’d always find the good in the situation. And his wife was the exact opposite; she was a pessimist, so they kind of balanced each other out. I try to call myself a realist. I try to be, “Okay, you know what? I know that guy’s probably going to take advantage of me, but I’m going to help him out anyhow, even though he’s taking advantage of me.” I’m going to try to do that. But I try to call myself a realist, but I try to be happy about it. And I try to rejoice, and I try to be happy. And sometimes you’ve got to create your own joy.

Traveling around with these guys, I don’t have to create much joy because they create joy for me. But come down with me and be the Dean of Men sometime. I don’t have to create much joy because I’m the Dean of Men, and they don’t give me a whole lot to work with sometimes.

The book of Philippians talks about joy and rejoicing in the Lord and having a good spirit. We’re not going to talk about that tonight. We’re going to start here in Philippians, chapter one, and just pick out some words that we can look at. I don’t know how far we’ll get into it, but I got the opportunity to grow up as a preacher’s kid in the state of Maine. My father was my pastor for 27, 28 years, and he resigned the church, moved over to New Hampshire, and he was there until he retired. Then he lived next door to us for about four years until the Lord took him home to heaven. But his favorite verse—and that’s the verse we’re going to start with tonight—is Philippians 1, verse 6. It says, “Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.”

Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, Lord, we love you today. We want to thank you for the opportunity that we have to be here. Thank you for your Word, Lord, that we can take it and look into it and take something out of it and apply it to our lives. Help us take what we learn tonight, and may we honor and glorify you with it. And we pray this all in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. Now we could sit here and we could run off on a rabbit trail called pride, right? There’s prideful, and being boastful, and being confident. Am I right? Our preacher up in Maine, he shared a thing about pride. He made this statement: He says, “Pride is the only disease that makes everybody sick except for the person that has it.”

Ever run into somebody like that? We used to do paintball. Anybody here ever played paintball? My wife thinks I was crazy for doing it because you go out and you let somebody shoot you. I remember coming home one time, I got home, and I had a couple of welts on my arms that she could see. I’m like, “Oh, that’s nothing.” I turned around, pulled my shirt up, and I had like four welts right up in my back. I mean, they were big welts, too. She’s like, “What in the world happened to you?” I said, “We started playing.” I had my own gun, so I wanted to take my pain home so I could shoot my kids with it. But the people that didn’t own their own guns, they didn’t want to take pain home because they had no use for it. So at the end of the day, we’d play no-mercy games. Anybody ever done that playing paintball? That means you go out there and you play until you can’t take it anymore.

I came around a bunker, and he had this guy, about from here to the window, running away from me, and I got my gun and I stitched him right up the back of the leg, and he started dancing a little bit, went right up into his back. Well, about that time, a guy came around the corner behind me and did the same thing to me. And my wife looks at me and says, “Why in the world did you do that to yourself?” Well, I was in a shop one day because I like to have any advantage that I can take. So I bought an extra-long barrel and tried to get better at it so I could stand back further and get that guy and hopefully not get hit.

We were talking about these guys that come in, and there was a guy that walked in one time, and he had this hat on that said, “We kill suckers.” He had a fully automatic gun. I mean, he could put out like 18 balls a second, stuff like this. It’s like, by the time you get hit and say, “I’m hit,” you’re getting hit with like 12 more. That ain’t even right. And so we’re talking about it. And he says—the guy was saying—he says, “You know, it really doesn’t matter how many balls per second that they’re shooting, because if you find somebody that knows what they’re doing, they’re going to get you with a single shot.” And it’s not usually the ones that are talking are the ones that you have to worry about; it’s the ones that are quiet.

And you know, a lot of times that’s the way it is. I remember going into prison. We were with Rock of Ages Prison Ministry one time, and we were working in the state of Vermont. I remember walking into a prison right into a dormitory-style unit. They had all these bunks, and as we’re walking through—we’re going through for the first time, of course, we were visitors, we had the visitor badge on—they were taking us through. And this guy came up, and he started talking to us, and he found out we were preachers, and he started quoting verses to us. “Hey, man, that’s impressive. A guy in prison quoting verses to us.” But the problem was, if you listened to him for more than three or four minutes, he started quoting the same verses. He was over there running his mouth; guys were looking at him, rolling their eyes. Well, it all sounded good on the surface. But a couple months later, as we were going into that prison, he got found out. We walked into that unit one day, and he was standing back to us, didn’t see us walk in, and the language that was coming out of his mouth was turning the air blue. He turned around, and he knew exactly when he turned around that, “Hey, I just got found out.”

But you and I as Christians—a lot of times we can sit here and we know the words to say. We know what we’re supposed to say. We know what we’re supposed to do. But do we have the confidence to go with it? And we see here in verse 6, “being confident of this very thing.” My father was called to preach when he was about 23, 24 years old. He was married, had a couple of kids. He was home from church sick one Sunday morning, and he knew that the Lord was working on his heart and working in his life. And he believed that God was calling him into the ministry. And he surrendered that morning, sitting at home, and surrendered to go to Bible College. And he went off to Bible College and became a pastor. And this was his favorite verse simply because it was real in his life. God started to work in his life when he was a young boy when he trusted Christ as his Savior. And when he was older, he felt, “Okay, God,” he was going to a church. The pastor asked him to be a deacon. He said, “Okay. I’ll be a deacon as long as I don’t have to talk. Just let me come to the meetings. I’ll talk a little bit in the meetings, but I don’t want to get up in front of church and say anything.” He pastored for almost 40 years. Why? Because he had a confidence in the Lord Jesus Christ, in the one that saved him, and he had a confidence all through. He would have still been pastoring even at the end of his life if he could have done it health-wise, and that’s what he wanted; that was the desire of his heart. Why? Because he had a God that he could have confidence in.

You know, a lot of times we as Christians, we look back into the Old Testament, and we look at the stories in the Old Testament, and we look at the things that have happened in the Old Testament. Stop and think about David and Goliath, and how a young boy, a young teenage boy, could go out and slay a giant that was nine-plus feet tall with a single stone. Now, I’ve been hit on the head by a rock, okay? My sister, if you talk to her, if you ever met her, she’s got a little scar right here. I’m guilty, okay? That’s from me. I hit her right between the eyes with a rock. It didn’t kill her, but David met Goliath. If the rock didn’t kill him, David cutting his head off killed him. But he had a confidence.

And we read these stories. We read about Moses crossing the Red Sea on dry ground. And we read that, and a lot of times we look at it and we approach it as, “Man, that’s just a Sunday school story.” But the fact of the matter is, the reality of it is that’s a true story. Moses actually walked across the Red Sea on dry ground. Joshua and the nation of Israel crossed the Jordan River. The walls of Jericho fell down. That was a true story. That actually happened. And you know that same God that took care of Israel in the wilderness, where they wandered in the wilderness for 40 years and their shoes never wore out—that’s the same God that you and I serve today. If he can feed millions of people out in the wilderness with manna from heaven, what do you think our problem is to Him? We need to have a confidence in a God that saved us, being confident of this very thing: God started a work in us.

If you’re here tonight and you’ve trusted Christ as your Savior, God started a work in you. Now, for your preacher here, that work is to pastor. For your assistant pastor, that work is to be an assistant pastor. God started a work in their life. God started a work in my life. I can look back over my life and see where God directed me in certain areas. Stop and think about that. Look back over your life sometime. Just start thinking about different decisions that you made, or you thought you made, but you did it with the wisdom of God. And how, if you had made a different decision, where would you be today?

I remember a time in our life. I worked up in Maine. I was self-employed. I wasn’t a pastor. We worked in our church. I worked construction. Construction was slim pickings in '08, '09 in that area. I did drywall for a number of years, but did some logging. I’ve built my own houses from the ground up. I’ve done all that stuff. But it was to the point financially it wasn’t paying very well. And so we started looking. I had a friend out in Nebraska that he’s like, “Apply for the railroad.” If you know anything about the railroad or working for the railroad, it’s a whole different ball game than working for yourself: guaranteed work, better paycheck. I applied. They called me up for an interview. I had to go out to Nebraska. So I was going to move from Maine to Nebraska. You talk about culture shock. I lived on a dead-end dirt road, had 60 acres of woods. I think I had more trees than that 60 acres in the state of Nebraska had. Now, corn stalks, that was a different story.

I drove out there for the interview, and I said, “Okay, God, I put out a fleece. I said, ‘Okay, God, if this is what you want, then open up the doors. If it’s not what you want, close the doors.’” So we left there. I had the interview on Monday. We left on Tuesday. Wednesday morning, they emailed me with a job offer. By the time we got home on Friday, we had different tests set up in Maine from Nebraska. I went, and we did all that stuff on Wednesday. My wife says, “So, should I start packing or what?” I’d gone through these tests; I hadn’t heard anything. I said, “Well, we haven’t heard anything, so I’d say, ‘Hey, start on it.’” Thursday night, about 8:30, I get an email saying that I failed what they called a strength test. Now, I was cutting wood at the time, working with a chainsaw all day long, working with a cable skitter. God said, “Hey, I’m going to close this door. You just failed a strength test.” And I’m like, “Wow.”

In my heart, I’m sitting there thinking—you can ask my wife this—I walked out of the house. I went over to my shop, and I took my tape measure and threw it against the wall. My wife came over; she gave me a hug. And I said, “I don’t understand this. God could have met all our needs financially through this job.” But in my heart, I didn’t want to go to Nebraska. But yet I was mad at God because he didn’t answer that prayer of meeting our needs financially. But I looked back at that. We were one day of moving out there. We stayed where we were. The next two years, two of my neighbors trusted Christ as their Savior. If we had gone to Nebraska, we probably wouldn’t have ended up down in Florida, from one little decision. We looked back at it and say that was inconsequential, but to God, that meant a lot.

We have confidence. We can have confidence in the God that doesn’t fail. He started that work long before you and I were even around. If we go back to the book of Jeremiah, long before we were born, he had a plan for our life. And we see in Philippians chapter 1 here in verse 6, “being confident in this very thing that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.” We can have confidence in a God. Why? Because we’ve seen him work. We’ve seen what he’s done in the past, not only through the Scriptures, but we’ve seen what he’s done in the past in our own lives. We can trust him for the future. We have no idea what the future is going to hold. You look around at our economy. You look around at the political spectrum. I’m a little frustrated with the whole thing because we stand a chance at losing our governor in the state of Florida. I would love to see him as president and see that—make America, Florida. But I don’t want to lose him as governor either because we don’t know who’s coming in. But you know what? I do know this: God has begun to work, and he’s going to keep performing it until the day of Jesus Christ. No matter where we go, no matter what we do, we can rest assured in this: that he will perform it, and it will be the right way. It will be done right. It will be done true. It will be done honest. He says, “Being confident of this very thing that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.”

Look down at verse 10. I want to just share this, and then we’ll close. Verse 10: “That ye may approve things that are excellent; that ye may be sincere and without offense till the day of Christ.” That you may approve things that are excellent, that you may be sincere. That word “sincere” there—I want to look at that for just a couple minutes. I did drywall for a living. I did drywall for about 24 years. Most of my work was coming in, taping drywall. We’d do hanging—I didn’t do much hanging, especially towards the end, because I worked primarily by myself. But I’d come into a room like this and tape the drywall and hang it. We used to do that popcorn spray ceiling. I hate popcorn spray ceiling. We fixed more of that than I had bags of it, and I couldn’t even give it away.

But I remember one job that we did. It was in a house, and it was about 12 feet in the air. It was a cathedral ceiling, went up like a peak, and I had one four-foot butt joint where two sheets came together. I had one of those in the whole house, and it was on that wall. I got a call back because right below that joint was a light. And I knew that light was going to be there because the box was setting there. But I figured, “Okay, it’s 10 feet in the air, whatever. They’re going to put a light up there and they’re going to shine it down.” No, they put a light up there and they shined it out, right on that butt joint. If you know anything about sheetrock, you put a light on something, and a bright enough light on something that’s going to show up—that’s what this word “sincere” is talking about. I could come in here and I could find every screw hole in those walls where they put the drywall up if I had a bright enough light. I could find every imperfection. You would look at it and say, “I don’t see anything.” I could look at it and say, “It’s right there.” And you know, when we come into our life, we think we’ve got everything hidden, but when we compare ourselves to the Lord Jesus Christ, that’s what this sincerity is talking about.

My pastor—I was talking to him about this one day, about sincerity—he was a missionary to Argentina, and he knew Spanish and he tried to explain it to me through the Spanish. He says they have a word in Spanish that they hold it up in the light of the sun. Have you ever bought a piece of wood or bought a wooden piece of furniture and you shine a light on it? He says down in Argentina, you go to these markets, and people would hold it up in the sun and look at it because they could tell. It’s just like with a vehicle. Ever bought an old vehicle and you think, “Man, that looks really good,” but then you really start looking at it and you find out that the fender’s been rusted out and they fixed it with Bondo? Anybody ever seen that? They shine a light on it. That’s what sincerity is talking about.

And you know the confidence that we have is through the Lord Jesus Christ. When the Lord Jesus Christ shines on us, what does the world see? What does the world see? We have a confidence that we have in the Lord Jesus Christ, but we also see sincerity here: holding ourselves up to the light of the sun, what is the world going to see? And you know, when we live our life for the Lord Jesus Christ, when we give our hearts and lives to God and live for God, and we have the confidence in the Lord Jesus Christ, when the world holds us up to the sun, you know what they’re going to see? The Lord Jesus Christ—the sincerity. What is your life towards God? Is it a life of sincerity? Are you being sincere?

There’s a lot more words that we could go through as you went down through this passage of Scripture. I did this as a Bible study a long time ago, but the Lord just kept bringing me back to it here lately, that you may approve things that are excellent, that you may be sincere and without offense till the day of Jesus Christ. Until the day of Jesus Christ. God’s got a purpose for us. Are we going to be the real deal? Are we going to be real? Or have we been filled in and painted over and made to look good? But we have a confidence that we can have in Jesus Christ. Being confident of this very thing: that the work that he’s begun—not the work that we’re doing, the work that he’s done—from the time we’ve trusted him and even before that, He’s had a plan for our life. Are we fulfilling God’s plan for our life?

If you’re here tonight and you’ve never trusted Jesus Christ as your Savior, don’t leave here. You say, “Well, this is a Wednesday night crowd.” Yeah, it is, but that doesn’t mean that you’re on your way to heaven. If you’re here tonight, you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior, you can’t have that confidence in the Lord Jesus Christ. Are you confident in what God is doing in your life? Are you being sincere?

Bow your heads and close your eyes, if you will, for just a moment here tonight. You say, “Preacher, I need to make a decision just to rest in Him, to put confidence in Him.” It’s more than just a feeling. Sometimes it starts with a decision. “I’ve been so worried and fretting, and I just need to put my confidence in Christ. I need to claim the victory.” God spoke to my heart. I didn’t just rest in Jesus tonight. God spoke to your heart about that tonight. Slip your hand up, preacher. “I just need to rest in Him. I’m going to make a decision just to put my confidence in Him.” God bless many, many hands. That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. That’s what God wants us to do. He’s worthy of that.

Maybe you’re here tonight, you say, “Preacher, there are some things. I think I need to get some things right so others will see Christ in me.” Oh, that song they used to sing: “When the world looks at me, do they see Jesus?” I like to be sincere. I like the world to see Christ in me. God spoke to my heart about some things in my life. I like for the world to see Christ through my life more. God spoke to me about that tonight. Just let your hand up. Oh, me too, me too. I love that. Me too. God bless you. God bless you. That’s wonderful. Let the Lord break into your heart, your life. Would you stand tonight while I have a word of prayer? And I want to say amen. Our organist will just play, if you would, just very softly. And let’s just come tonight to an old-fashioned altar, rest in Him. Let me just say, “Hey, Lord, I’m putting it in your hands. I’m not going to fret and worry. I’m going to have confidence in You. I’m going to rest in You.” Lord Jesus, I have some things I need to get right. I want the world to see You in me. Would you just come and spend some time with our Heavenly Father tonight? We’ll have a word of prayer. Would you come? Thank you, Lord, for Your goodness. Thank You, Lord, for the message, Lord, Your Word. Help us to be confident in You. Father, forgive me sometimes. Maybe I just have fear, pride, Lord, just not putting it in Your hands in confidence. Help us to do so tonight. Help us just to rest in You. Thank You, Lord, You offer rest to Your people in that confidence. Then, Lord, I pray that You would help us to be more like You. Lord, I pray that others would see You through us. Bless these few minutes together, Father, please. We’ll thank You for what You do, in Jesus’ name, we’ll pray. Amen.

You know, it’s amazing, but that confidence really goes back to the Lord: being confident of this very thing, that He which hath begun a good work in you. When you go back to that, hey, He’s the one that led me down this path. He’s been guiding me. I’ve been trying to follow. It goes back to that. That’s where confidence is found. And the devil will have us analyze everything a million times and a million different ways, but rest and confidence is found in Christ. And it’s encouraging that confidence that comes through Christ. I appreciate that so very much. Thank you, Brother Chamberlain, for being a blessing for us. Thank you, young men, for singing for us. We’ve got a minute so we can get a song in there. Y’all got one last song. You knew it was coming. They knew it was coming. One last song. And you can be seated. When they get done singing, we’ll be dismissed.

That’s great. They do a good job singing. It’s brought a good spirit tonight. Thank you, Brother Chamber, great preaching. I appreciate that very, very much. And these young men are going to sing one more for us. It’s been a blessing. My wife was going to stay on the organ, but she found a spider over there. She said, “I can’t play this organ with a spider walking across there.” I was kind of like, “Come on, what’s the big deal?” She said, “Could you preach if there was a snake around there?” Okay, you know. They’re going to sing for us one more time.

Original File: Pastor Paul Chisgar - Wednesday PM 05312023