"You can't do that here!" - Riverbend

This night started off like any other before I headed out to the streets. I was so nervous and thinking of ways that I could back out. I parked the car, asked the Lord to go before me, put my backpack on and I was off. While I was standing on the sidewalk I went through a decent amount of tracks, but when I went and stood in front of the Riverbend gates I went through about 300 in 15 minutes. It was crazy! Soon after some guy from the Riverbend staff came out and told me that I would have to be two blocks down either way if I wanted to pass out literature. I politely agreed and started to walk off. Then I thought to myself “Wait, isn’t this public property?” So I looked for a police officer. Not that I wanted to cause a problem, I just wanted to see what the law was. The only one I could find was riding around on a bicycle and I couldn’t reach him. Oh well. On the way back to the car I passed out tracts and had a great one-to-one with two young gentlemen heading in to the festival.

My last night of street evangelism at Riverbend. What a great and challenging time is has been. I have learned so much about my true motives for serving God. It can become so easy to have evangelism become our main priority. But our main goal, our main focus has to be on God and His glory. We serve Him not as a contest to see who can do the most, but simply out of gratitude for saving us in the first place. If we only want our fellow human beings to escape the dangers of Hell then that my friend is Humanism. The glory of our God must be our ultimate goal so the lamb might receive the full reward for His sufferings. In all that we do we strive to keep our lives centered and focused on the cross. It can be so easy to take our eyes off of Jesus for just a quick second. I have seen God work such great things in the past few days. I just can’t wait until next year.

Mercy Me at Riverbend

Last night my wife and I attended the “Faith and Family” night at Riverbend. My wife is just awesome, she would venture anywhere to just hang out with me. What a blessing she is! Anyway, Mercy Me was the headliners of the night and they were incredible. I couldn't’t believe how good these guys sound live. You can tell they really love the Lord and they pour that into their music. One thing I have found now that I listen to a lot of Christian contemporary music is that if a group is sound in their theology their music will reflect that. The lead singer of Mercy Me spoke for about 10 minutes last night as he made a Gospel presentation. He didn’t speak of judgment or wrath, but what I did like is that He didn’t make God out to be something like a cosmic butler or a soft cuddly teddy bear. No, he spoke of God’s holiness and His righteousness. How God created everything, how He is above everything, how He alone is worthy of adoration and praise. He elevated God to His right place – on His throne reigning and ruling!

So much of what I hear from contemporary Christian music paints this picture of God that He is some sort of lost little puppy dog without us, that He has nothing better to do than mope and chase after us. I’m willing to bet that if you listen to a lot of Christian music you will not be able to tell the difference between a song about God and song about someone who is singing about this boyfriend or girlfriend. This is ridiculous to me! Are we talking about and worshipping the same God? I don’t know about you, but my God is bigger than that. My God is one who calls me to serve Him only, to worship Him only. My God is one who parts the sea, who created the universe out of nothing, the One that all of Heaven worships, the One who rose from the dead!

I think Mark Driscoll made a great point when he said “Our picture of Jesus needs to be more than a humble marginalized Galilean peasant, in a dress, with feathered hair, who got beat up while wearing sandals, driving a Cabriolet, rocking out to pop chic teenage music, drinking decaf, talking about his feelings. We need to have a bigger Jesus than that guy.”

In closing, Mercy Me was phenomenal. The quality of the live music was clear as a bell and the Gospel was clearly proclaimed. I don’t know if it gets any better than that…

Riverbend - Bessie Smith Strut

Tonight was again a great night of serving Jesus Christ. Some of the things that happened I was just amazed. Tonight I was able to pass out 500 of the giant 100 dollar bill Gospel tracts. I spent most of my time walking up and down the sidewalk and passing them out to folks who had setup their chairs to check out the large crowds this afternoon. It didn’t take me long at all to hand these out tonight. In under 2 hours…500 tracts. I am convinced that if others would participate we could pass out 2,000 or 3,000 in one night.

As I was walking down MLK I heard one guy say to me, “Way of the Master?” I turned and saw a guy standing of the sidewalk with his Bible. I walked over to him and we introduced ourselves. He pointed to one of his friends and when his buddy turned to look at me he said, “Ty?”

“Keith Higgins?” I replied back.

Ok, this is where God just amazed me tonight. Keith Higgins in from http://www.savedfromwhat.org/. The crazy thing is Mark Cahill is the one who put Keith in touch with me about 2 weeks ago. Keith brought his group up here from Atlanta to witness and minister to the folks at Riverbend. What a huge blessing! I couldn’t believe it. We had a brief talk and I let him get back to witnessing and open air preaching.

After passing out all the tracts I had I thought it was time to engage some people in a one-to-one conversation. There was a street preacher there with some crazy signs and he was really getting a lot of people heated so as I saw them walk away disgusted I would try and stop them to talk. One group of guys consisted of a Catholic, a Muslim, and a Hindu. After I asked them a few questions about their faith I said, “Guys I would like to present the Gospel to you in a much different way than this guy behind me, Ok?”

They completely shut me out. They all 3 turned their backs and said “No way!” The Catholic guy even told me, “I’ve been to Catholic school all my life I know the Bible inside and out.” And off they went. I will pray for them. I feel like I should have done more or said something different, but they are not rejecting me. If you witness and share your faith remember those people are not rejecting you, they are rejecting the Lord Jesus Christ. So be faithful and boldly take a stand to further the kingdom.

Riverbend - Day 1

For the first night of the Riverbend festival it seemed to start a little slow. I’m sure it was just that I hit the streets before the majority of people made their way downtown. For the first night alone I was able to pass out 500 giant one hundred dollar bill tracts. Not bad for just a few hours work. Most people took them without saying a word but I did get quite a bit of rejection as well. Most of the comments that I heard were things like…
What is this?
What’s this for?
WhooHoo! I’ve got a hundred bucks!
Can I buy beer with this?
As I was standing out on the street corner passing out the tracts a couple of kids came up to me and asked if they could have some more because they wanted to help me pass them out. After I checked with their parents I loaded the kids up with tracts and they had a blast handing them out. Very sweet of those kids, huh?

As I was passing the movie theater downtown I noticed two Mormon missionaries sitting on a bench just taking in the scenery. I approached them with the tracts and we began to have a talk. They were from the Red Bank area so when I invited them to my home for a Bible study they said that they couldn’t because I lived outside of their area. “No problem.” I said, “I will come to you. Just give me your contact information.” So they did. I will be making a house call to these missionaries very soon.

At one pointed I began to notice a lot of people carrying some other types of Gospel tracts. I followed the crowd looking for the source thinking I was going to run into some Jehovah’s Witnesses. But I was wrong, it happened to be some guys from a Baptist church in Dayton, TN. We had a brief talk and then they invited me to hang out with them while one of their members was going to do some street preaching. I told them that I was just going to kinda hang back and listen to what they had to say. I knew that this would be a great opportunity to use a spring board to talk to others.
As soon as this guy hit the street corner he opened up his Bible and started preaching away. Don’t get me wrong I am a big fan of open air preaching – if it is done rightly. This guy didn’t attempt to draw a crowd and I couldn’t really make out anything that he was saying. The people that were passing by were having a good laugh. When I noticed them, I would get their attention and asked them what they thought of those guys. Most people didn’t really have anything good to say…at all. I even noticed one of the guys talking to 3 teenage girls and he was flaring his arms all over the place and I could almost hear him a block away. (Back ‘er down a notch or two, my friend.) As Christians we have to be so careful when speaking to others. Watch your body language. Pay close attention to the tone of your voice. If your listener is soft spoken (like most teenage girls) then adjust your countenance as you speak to them.

I saw one guy skipping past the street preacher smiling and I knew I had to speak to him. Believe it or not his name was Damien. He was one cool dude. I liked Damien a lot. He is a 55 year old goth-type of guy. He was sporting a pony tail, black painted fingernails, and dressed all in black. We had a great talk and about the things of God and hopefully I left him with a lot to think about. Wes was the next person I talked to but our talk didn’t last too long because his buddy came looking for him. Wes told me he was a Christian so I asked him to open his Bible to Exodus 20 and judge himself by the standard of the 10 Commandments and see how he turned out. I hope he does it.

There was one church out there that had a whole truck loaded down with bottle water that they were passing out. One of the guys stopped me and asked me what I had. I told him “Gospel tracts. Would you like one?” He said “We are just two Christians reaching people two different ways” them he handed me a water. I was very impressed by this group. They had people all over the block that I was on passing out waters to the thisty crowd. It was so good to see the way that Christ can use his body of believers to reach people in all types of ways. As I was making my way back to my car I again passed this group as they began to circle up and pray before they left. I bet there were twenty of them or so. I just loved seeing that. I will be sure and contact this church just to let them know how their presence was noticed.

So the end of my first night of Riverbend this is what I left with:
500 tracts distributed
3 Great one-to-one conversations
2 LDS missionaries presented with God’s unchanging truth
One church using something as simple as bottle water to reach a community with God’s love.

All of the glory goes to God alone. I am again just so thankful that He will use a chuckle-head like me to reach out to this world. Keep reading, more Riverbend adventures to come.