Desperate Enough to Listen

I’d love telling you the reason revival came to our church was because we had reached a level of maturity that God found worthy of His use. Spiritual strength, organizational strength, all the various kinds of naturally generated strength that can make a person, a place, or a thing appear to be outperforming everybody else. Part of me wishes that’s the way it works, that the Lord sees us operating at the top of our game, and He therefore deems us qualified to be treated by Him with an elite level of His blessing.

I would say instead, though, that revival came to us as a church, and revival came to me as a leader, because we were weak and had nowhere else to go, except to Him. When Jesus is all you have, you realize He is all you need.

Revival came because we were desperate. Or at least I can tell you this much: The pastor sure was desperate. I was out of sorts and out of solutions—desperate enough to know I had nothing to say if I wasn’t hearing from Him.

I’d become senior pastor in the fall of 2015. Long Hollow’s longtime pastor, a beloved man, David Landrith, had passed away from cancer the year before, having led the church through nearly two decades of miraculous growth. And not merely numerical growth. You sensed it just walking in—this amazing culture of love for people who were lost and in need of Jesus. The Holy Spirit’s presence was palpable from the moment you stepped inside. You could feel the evangelistic heartbeat David had fueled and fostered here. It seemed like just about everybody was eagerly involved and invested in bringing people into a relationship with Christ. And I truly believed, coming into this situation, packed full of so many eager and hungry new Christians, that I knew exactly where to steer it from there.

In both churches I’d pastored so far, I’d tried to duplicate the method of disciple-making that had been modeled for me personally. It’s how the Lord had grown me up so quickly as a 26-year-old baby believer, rescued from drugs, alcohol, debt, and disaster, and just about everything else a guy could gain and lose in such a short amount of life. By God’s grace, I had seen this emphasis on discipleship take hold in every church that I’d led—the power of following Christ’s command to “go, therefore, and make disciples” (Matt. 28:19). I’d seen people mature. I’d seen whole families transformed. I’d seen addicts set free and marriages restored. God had blessed those churches beyond measure. Slow growth, but steady growth, the kind where the roots grow deep and the faithful grow tall. The fruit of spiritual multiplication. Generation after generation.

That’s what I prayed for and envisioned, a plan I was simply transferring now into a new and bigger environment. Because I knew I was good at this. I could do it. I’d done it before. All I had to do was just do it again. And everything would be great. And, of course, everybody would love me for it. (Can’t say I wasn’t motivated by that too.)

But, man, did I underestimate what can happen when a big, 6’6”, deep-voiced, high-intensity presence comes in, acting like he knows everything nobody else knows about growing a church.

I was convinced my plan would work. It had always worked. And the people at Long Hollow, to their credit—they let me do it my way for a while. They tolerated me as the new guy, with all my preaching and prioritizing and programming the church for discipleship—which we should have done, and which we still do.

But over time, the emphasis I was forcing down on them from above led to a lot of people thinking all I cared about was getting Christians into small, intimate discipleship groups, and that I didn’t care too much about the lost, at least not as much as the pastor who’d been leading them all these years. And some of them were already telling me, if I didn’t make some adjustments to myself and my leadership style, the next thing I was going to be losing would be the church.

By five years into my ministry here, which you’d think would be enough time for me to really feel like I was rowing the boat, I was sinking like a rock. Spiritually, emotionally, mentally, even physically. And our church’s weekly attendance was sinking right down with me. From 6,700 or so to around 3,400. Just about in half. And a percentage of that remaining number were probably only still there because they hated changing churches more than they disliked me.

Then came COVID.

And the man who was pastoring their church came completely apart.

Desperation can lead you to do desperate things. Ask me how I know. Or maybe you don’t need me to ask because you already know what I’m talking about. Maybe you’re up to your neck right now in desperation, and you’re splashing around for any sort of life preserver you can grab onto to get back to solid ground, to feel spiritually reconnected with God again.

How would you describe what your desperation feels like today? Is it burnout? Just way too much stuff coming at you? At work, at home. In your mind, in your body. You wear the virtue of being overworked like a badge of honor on your chest. You’re tired—so tired—but you’re afraid to let yourself slow down for a minute because the thought of getting any further behind makes you feel more overloaded than ever.

Or is it maybe that feeling of being lost at sea, just floating without direction. You started out thinking you knew where you were headed. All your expectations were still out in front of you. But then something shifted. Something threw your plans off course. People keep looking to you now to know what to do, because that’s your role in the church or your family or wherever you lead. And you want to do it, because you believe you should. But you don’t know how you can. Because you don’t even know what you should be doing yourself.

And you’re desperate. Maybe it’s from failure. Or from crippling bouts with fear. Or financial trouble and all the pressures and worries that can wake you up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. Maybe it’s from losses in your health or your relationships, or from a season of real uncertainty at work, the kind that feels like if the worst-case scenario comes about, it could just collapse all around you at a moment’s notice.

Or maybe you’re like me. You’re a ministry leader. And the only persona you’ve ever really played is the one where nothing is ever allowed to come up at any time that you’re not supposed to be able to figure out or handle. Maybe not perfectly but eventually. If they just give you time.

I’d tell you I used to pride myself on that. I felt inspired by a good challenge. I always wanted to be the person who could do the impossible. Maybe other people couldn’t, but I could. Before coming to Christ, my motto was, “If it’s meant to be, it’s up to me.” Tell me I couldn’t achieve something, that I couldn’t put a plan together for it and accomplish it, and here’s what I’d tell you: You should plan on being amazed at how anyone, having this many things on his plate, could somehow pull off another one as well. And could do it so well.

That was me. The one who knew what to do and made it look easy. After all, I’m a pastor. Desperate people are who I deal with, not who I am. I’m paid to not be desperate, to never look rushed or overwhelmed—to know what the Bible says, to know who God is, to know where He is, and to keep my cool while I’m waiting for Him. People come asking me questions. Desperate people. Not the other way around. I can’t afford to be desperate.

Or that’s what I thought.

Until I was.

And, believe me, I was desperate.

If this was what it was like to be in ministry—pastoring a declining church, something I’d never experienced in all my years of full-time service—I was so done with it. I was sick of trying to keep everybody pleased around me, only to be told how far short I was falling of doing what they expected.

I was trying my best. And yet I was being constantly critiqued and criticized for doing what I thought was the right way, the best way, to get our church growing and thriving again. I cared about revival, but all I could do was just focus on survival. This was not how I saw my life playing out when I’d been given the opportunity to serve God at this incredible place. I wished for more. And now, truth be told, I was sometimes wishing for the exit door.

For two months after being told the church was falling out underneath me, I committed every available breakfast and lunch slot in my schedule for meeting with a revolving door of concerned church members. I asked them, one after another, to help me see what I obviously wasn’t seeing, to point out for me the blind spots that were hindering me from being the pastor they felt like I needed to be.

I’d sit there with both my heart and my notebook lying wide open. I have no other agenda, I’d say to them, except for being here to learn. I wanted the truth. I wanted to know. And I’m sure it was valuably important for me to hear every nugget of honest feedback that they dared to address with me.

But after a while, it just left me reeling. Could all of it really be true? About me? Successful me? About the megachurch pastor in me? I had to remind myself I wasn’t as good as I thought, but surely I wasn’t as bad as others said I was.

It was brutal. It was painful. And I don’t know why I didn’t give up right then, because I know I felt like it. And from what people were telling me, I wasn’t the only one who shared that sentiment.

But somehow, one night, I ended up out on my front porch. Just me. Just sitting there. Just staring off into the distance and darkness. Not knowing what was out there. Little did I know, in that desperate moment, that it would lead to ten months of similar moments, every night without fail—right there, in that chair. Right there, with that view. Right there, where I would finally get quiet and still enough to listen to the God that I’d talked about so much and so often with such authority for most of my adult life. Though maybe I hardly even knew Him.

Because maybe I’d hardly ever slowed down enough to hear Him.

The entire Christian life is about change. At salvation, you and I became a “new creation” in Christ—“the old has passed away, and see, the new has come!” (2 Cor. 5:17). And at every step, “we all, with unveiled faces” are meant to be “looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord” so that we are continually being changed—“transformed into the same image from glory to glory; this is from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18).

We are not meant to stay the same. God meets every one of us where we are, but He doesn’t leave us where we were. We keep following the same Lord, of course, and we seek Him through the same Word, and we worship the same Father and King who patiently hears our prayers and truthfully discerns our hearts. But He loves to do new things. And He loves when His children sing a new song. He loves that look in our eyes when, after we’ve tested again the fortifications of our faith, we more clearly resemble the Son, who never allowed hollow, earthly traditions to interfere with His passion for staying completely aligned with heaven.

And that means hearing from heaven. Listening for the voice of God. Not just the cerebral exercise of knowing things about Him but the essential experience of personally relating with Him. In the quiet. In the questions.

As I sat on the porch for ten months—much of it in silence and solitude—the Holy Spirit of God spoke something into my heart that has already altered me forever. “Robby,” He seemed to say, “you have as much of Me as you want. And I want you to know, there is so much more.”

More of His power.

More of His companionship.

More of His personal speaking voice.

More of Him, and of all the ways He wants to communicate His heart with us if we, His dearly loved children, will simply draw close enough to hear.