This is a story of a boy against all odds. Carlton tells the story of his life and how the Lord used simple things along the way to open his heart to the Lord. It is remarkable to see the simple influence of a mother and her simple faith and the simple things that happen in churches.

Hey, welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Let me tell you a couple of things real quick before we get going. Hope you can come to our Theology of the Family Conference at Ridgecrest, North Carolina, May 20 through 23. Just Before that, a singles conference called Holiness to the Lord, May 19 and 20. Also go to our website.

We have lots of resources, over 5,000. Churchandfamilylife.com. Also, I just published a book called The Family at Church, How Parents Are Tour Guides for Joy. I think this book could really help sweeten your local church experience. Okay, let's get on now with the podcast.

Well so hey, welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture for church and family life. And so Jason, here we go again. Jason Dole from Sovereign Redeemer Community Church. Hi Scott, I'm so glad to be here with Carlson today.

Hey, we love this guy, don't we? We do. We don't quite worship him, but We really super like him. Love you two brothers. No, we do.

We think about you all the time. We always wanna do more stuff together and you're such an encouragement to us. Really, you really are. What a blessing. Thank you.

So we're here to talk about the grace of God at work in Carlton's life. And of course, it took a lot of grace to get Carlton going, I know for sure. We want to praise the Lord for his kindness towards sinners in the way that he has cared for them, walked with them, saved them. So Carlton, we want to hear your story. We want to hear what, how, how come you're sitting here with us today?

You know, something, something happened. But like I said, a whole lot of grace, Scott. It's good to be with you and Jason. Yeah. Just a lot of grace.

I was born in Columbia, South Carolina. And when I was born, my parents were married, but when I was very young, they divorced. And so I was a child of pretty early divorce. My mom remarried and took us from South Carolina to Maryland. And that's where I spent most of my formative years in Maryland.

My stepdad, however, was an alcoholic. And he's since gone on to be with the Lord. But my upbringing was really, I'm an alcoholics kid. He raised me, but most of my upbringing, just the problems that my family dealt with was a result of my dad's alcoholism. He worked really hard and he provided, but boy, I've seen it all through, from domestic abuse to my mom and I wondering where we're going to live, to wondering if the lights were going to be paid And the mortgage was going to be paid because of my dad's alcoholism.

And that was a pretty much the, you know, my junior high and high school years of dealing with that. And so, yeah, I joined the Navy when I was 17 and stayed in the Navy for quite a few years. They sent me to college and went back into the Navy as an officer and spent several years doing that. And that's where I met my wife, with my wife, Donna, doing Navy stuff. And the Lord, you know, tapped me on the shoulder while I was active duty.

And I was already serving churches and doing ministry stuff. And I got this sense that maybe I was supposed to preach and teach. And my pastor at the time said, yeah, I think that's the right way to go. And that's it in a nutshell, right? That's about several decades' worth of stuff.

But yeah, growing up was very, very difficult, but the Lord has been merciful. Carlton, did your parents take you to church? What sort of church background do you have growing up? Yeah, I grew up in an independent Baptist church, and, you know, the people who really had an impact on me growing up were all pastors. And my past, I was in church from a very young, young man to a young boy, two or three years old, already singing in the choir.

And cause my mom is a musician. And so she, you know, when she was playing, I was singing. And when she was rehearsing, I was there. And then even in Maryland, the church in Maryland, yeah, she took us. And even when my dad would not go or could not go, and we spent a lot of time in church growing up.

So when, along the way, when were you converted? The one that I remember, because there was a couple times where I felt like I had, you know, and many people have this testimony where I prayed a prayer and I walked up and no, there's no real change. And So I can tell those stories. But the one where I really felt like the Lord had changed my heart and life was when I was probably about 18, 19 years old. I'd already met Donna and my wife, and she had met my family and went to my home church in Maryland.

And I remember, you know, just being overwhelmed by the preaching and recognition that one day I was going to marry and have all the responsibility and not know what I was doing. And I was as a child of divorce and having also seen so many terrible things in my household growing up just just knew I was a sinner and knew I needed the Lord and by his grace he saved me so I was probably 18 or 19 when I really became serious about following Jesus. So you're growing up in this house with a lot of pain in it, and you're going to church, and you're singing those songs. When you said that, I thought, Did those songs hold him in? Were those songs playing a role in his life?

Those songs, those deacons, that pastor and his example and how he treated his wife and how faithful he was. I tell you, one of the reasons I love preachers, one of the reasons why I love the Bible of Christ, obviously, we're commanded to. But for me personally, the only examples of real manhood I had were in the church. So it was those songs, it was those, I still remember most of them, those choir songs growing up, it was home and it was a safe place. Because when we left the church, we didn't know what we were going to go back into for many, many years.

So when I think of my own testimony, you know, that there were some disciple makers who helped this disciple make progress. Give us a dead disciple maker, meaning somebody from the ancient past who you've really benefited from their written sermons or their books or something like that, and give us an alive disciple maker, somebody who's still alive today who's helped you make progress? A dead disciple maker, wow. You know, when I was growing up and in my formative years, there wasn't a lot of reference to the writers and the preachers and the teachers of old. It just wasn't our environment.

You know, we, you know, we didn't quote the Puritans in the church that I grew up in. And so I didn't have a lot. I mean, we, you know, there was preaching and teaching from the Bible. Now, as I got a little older and started doing the reading, J.C. Rowliss had a big impact on my life.

Charles Spurgeon has had a big impact on my life. Charles Spurgeon has had a big impact on my life and folks like that. But growing up, we were pointed to the Bible and that was pretty much it. Live disciple maker, I'd probably have to say my pastor in the Baptist church that I grew up in, Dr. John Maddox, who did my, you know, who I was saved in his ministry, did my pre-marital counseling with Donna coming up on 29 years ago now, and just was a stalwart, a pillar in my life.

This, you know, And I wonder sometimes if we preachers, we know the influence we're having. There I was, you know, 12, 13, 14, 15 years old with a chaotic house, and I would come into this church on the Lord's Day, and he'd stand there and sing and preach. And I just, I remember his example. I remember some of the things he told me when I initially got married, how we ought to live our lives by the Bible. We still have the pamphlet that he gave us that walked us through some things about marriage.

It just meant the world. And he's just a wonderful, wonderful man who, without him, I don't know what my formative years would have been like, and I'm so grateful to God for him. Well, praise the Lord for a church and a broken family in a church year after year. God is so kind to do that. I so praise the Lord for the Church of Jesus where they sing, where you have men who are qualified.

Most of them don't fall away, most of them don't. Some do, and you have that set in front of people who've got a lot of stuff going on in the background. A lot of stuff going on in the background. That's exactly right. And that was my family.

I mean, there were times as a young boy that I was so angry because I couldn't protect my mother. There were times, and my mother tells stories even to this day how she prayed that I wouldn't become, you know, just a rebellious, you know, kind of gangster kind of fellow because of the anger that I had at my dad and at myself for being too young to protect my mother from some of those difficult moments. So our refuge was the church. It was where we went. We went to Bible study.

We went to, we had Sunday school then. We went to Sunday school. We went to the service. We went to the four o'clock program. And some of that was, you know, just faithful service, but some of that was an escape, quite frankly, for us.

You had a mama. I had a mama, still do, by the grace of God. So Carlton, working more towards the present day, you're a church planner, but that's not recent. That happened a long time ago. Could you just sort of walk us through the history of the church that you're serving?

It was 1997 when we started, So we've been around a while now. I was still active duty in the military. And because of the job that I had in the military, I knew I was going to be kind of stationary for a while. But the time did come where I had to kind of put my career on the altar and choose the pastoral Navy career, which I did by God's grace. But yeah, we started in 1997.

We started as a very programmatic, actually I won't even mince word, we were wild. It was crazy in there, it was loud. We were aiming at youth and at the time, if you can remember back in the 90s, there were books that were written, very pragmatic books that were written, but very popular about how to grow a church, if you will. And so I was a student of a lot of those books and a lot of those speakers. And so we were loud and crazy.

And I was very young. I was only 27 years old. And so much could be said even about that but over time just reading the scriptures and being mentored by good men over time we began to reform slowly but surely and you know up up to and including becoming an age integrated church in around 2010, 2011 or so. So you started pastoring about the same time I did. I was 26, you were 27, and I was single.

You were married by then, right? You were married. Yeah, good for you. Yeah, those were wild days, weren't they? You know, we didn't know hardly anything.

The great thing about pastoring in your 20s is you make a lot of your mistakes early on. Not that you don't quit making mistakes, but it's really nice to get them out of the way. Oh, man. You know the old saying, if I knew then what I know now, but God is merciful. He's kind.

So when you look back, what were the scriptures that moved you, carried you in those days in your teens, you know, leading up to the time when you, when you were converted? In my teens, and this will probably sound familiar to most teens, but in my teens, the passages that held me fast to the extent that they did were the passages concerning self-control, concerning where my eyes were to be, where my heart was to be. I was very, I wrestled with those for many years and I grew up in public school. I had all the temptations thereof. I wasn't being disciple necessarily at home and so as a young 16, 17, 18 year old who would come to church and hear the pastor preaching in the Sermon on the Mount and hear the Lord's very, very straightforward commands about where we're to look and what lusts are and what adultery, you know, is in his sight.

You know, those were those were past anything that had to do with self control. You know, guarding my mouth, guarding my tongue, guarding my eyes, guarding my heart. Pretty much those were the passages that I zeroed in on growing up because I needed them if I was gonna have any chance at navigating the world that I was in. As I got a little older and got married and started to pastor. Paul's words to the church at Ephesus, I've gone through Ephesians many, many times, have been a great strength to me.

The first three chapters really explaining who we are in the Lord, the last three really, about what we're to do. Also Paul's letter to the church at Philippi and just his self-sacrificial, the way that he approached living and dying for Christ. Those words have meant a lot to me, even over the last 10 years, for me to live as Christ, to die as gain has become one of the verses around here that our church knows very well because we quoted a lot because there's a lot in there about how we ought to live today. Carlton, what are some of the books that have affected you over the years? Well, obviously the Bible, but that's not what you meant.

Oh man, books that have affected me over the years. Remember that sermon he preached at one of our conferences? I asked him to preach a sermon and the entire sermon was scripture. I do remember that. That was amazing.

I was there. I was just dumbstruck. I thought that was cheating. I didn't know you could do that actually. It was cheating a little, but you know, it's actually, that's actually extremely difficult.

I don't do that very often. You know, that was wonderful. Yeah, it was. That I thought when you were done, I mean, there are all these, you know, people, the whole auditorium was packed, you know, and I thought my first thought was, Carlton, do it again. It was so good.

Yeah. God is merciful. Yeah. Carlton loves the Word of God. That's the message, okay?

And just for the people who were seeing this who weren't there, it was the stringing together of different passages from different places that fit together in ways that you wouldn't have thought of beforehand, but it was really helpful. Yeah, it's great. Wow. Well, I don't know if I answered your question about the book. There have been several, but one of the ones that has had one of the greatest influences on my parenting and on who we are as a ministry, actually Vodi's book, On the Family, had a really massive impact.

I mean, that wasn't written all that long ago, but it was just a massive book for me. Again, growing up, we weren't given a lot of books to read. It was just the Bible. So we spent a lot of time just reading the Bible. Only when I started pastoring that I started reading a lot of different books because I didn't grow up in that environment.

My pastor was, you don't need all that stuff, you just need the Bible. You know, so that's what we read. Oh, man. There's some truth in that, actually. It's not that advice.

Yeah. He was old school. He was old school. He really... So, Cartland, there are a number of pastors out there who are making really helpful contributions.

Who's on your radar as a pastor who you really think is making an important contribution and why? Well, he's not a pastor, but pretty much anything Paul Washer says I pay attention to. His pastor Anthony Matheny, I think, is making some really strong contributions. I appreciate John MacArthur's ministry and some of the things that he's done, particularly over the last several years. Let's see, this is a guy named Scott Brown, no, who I appreciate greatly, listened to Vody quite a bit as well.

And so that's kind of my circle, if you will. So how have you changed over the last couple decades as a pastor? I think at some point I became aware of how much I didn't know. And when I was 27, 28, 29, and just full of zeal, you know, I'm not sure I knew that. I think my largest change has been just continually growing in my trust of the Bible.

That's probably been the biggest change. Our motives were good when we started, but I was very pragmatic and it was really about what worked. And over time, it shifted from what works, quote unquote, to what does God say? And I think that's probably in a nutshell, my biggest change. That and because of that trust, taking the scriptures in large chunks, more line by line, precept upon precept, letting the Bible, letting God through his own words speak to the church and trying to stay out of it You know from you know as it relates to my own ideas and things like that so when I started I would try to program and engineer and you know what the people needed and and and what works and what'll and Somewhere along the line it shifted to Lord you you've already kind of said what you want and you're more than capable of growing your own Church and So let me just rest in you and give the people, give God your people what you have said and trust you for the fruit and trust you for the results.

Amen, amen. So I wanna take you back, way back again, back in the day, in your teen years, when you were struggling with all the things that people struggle with, what's your advice to parents who are in that situation. They've got a couple of kids, they've had some brokenness in the past and it's still affecting them. What's your counsel to that parent? Prayer, obviously.

Pray hard and Talk to the Lord about it all. Talk with your children. Ignoring it doesn't work. And keep them in God's house. Keep the Word of God in front of them so that their faith and confidence is built up, not necessarily in their circumstances, and they don't develop an inordinate focus on what they've gone through, but rather God becomes really big in their vision.

And so praying together, talking about it, and not hiding from it, if you will, what they've gone through as needed, but then staying in the church, staying in the word, and trusting the Lord, building your faith up in God. And Because as you grow in the Lord, as you brothers know, as you grow in the Lord, even some of your difficulties, you begin to, you may not fully understand them, but you can, okay, Lord, I learned this from that and I learned this from that. And you begin to even accept that even somehow in your sovereign plan, Lord, you allowed this for your own good purposes and for the good of your people. So that perspective though doesn't happen right away, particularly when you're younger. And so staying in the word, staying in church, hearing preaching, prayer, there's no magic bullet, right?

You know, I remember literally running down the street with my mother because my father had become violent that evening. He was a violent drunk. And I went on just to say this, but I went on to love him greatly. We had a wonderful relationship at the end of his life. He was very sick the last 10 years of his life and we were very close and God is merciful.

But those early years, I literally remember running down the street with my mother with no shoes on her feet because he didn't give her time to put shoes on her feet, running to a neighbor's house for refuge growing up. Well, you know, how do you get through something like that? She didn't, you know, we never in my case, in our case, we never went to a therapist, we never went to a psychiatrist or anything like that, not saying that's necessarily terrible. But we went back to God's house. And she opened up the Bible and she said, Son, the Lord is going to help us get through all of this and let's pray for daddy.

And that's what we did. And so she faced it, but she faced it with the Bible in her hands and she faced it with faith in God. And she went on to serve my dad while he was slowly deteriorating over the last 10 years of his life, served him faithfully as a testimony unto Christ. So in all things, Christ brothers, in all things, no matter what, keep them before the word of God. So take yourself back, you're 15 years old.

Get locked in your mind, a picture of yourself at 15. So now that boy is sitting in front of you right now. Oh boy. He's right there. Yeah.

He's 15 years old and he looks a lot like you and you're gonna, you're gonna give him some advice. What is it? Take God's word seriously. I would look at my 15 year old self and say, you're not as cool as you think you are. You can't, You can't hide your pain by break dancing, which is what I most certainly did.

Take God's word seriously. You're being taught it. You're being asked to read it. Take God seriously. I would look at him and say, pray, son, cry out to God.

Don't try to hide it in, in, you know, how many girls you talk to while you're walking down the hall or, or how cool your, your, your friends are and the little club that you've joined, but take your frustrations, your anger, your misunderstandings, your pain to the Lord in prayer and stop faking it because I did a lot of faking it. Wow. Well, praise the Lord for His abundant mercy. You know, I think about what David said, He sent from above, He took me, He drew me out of many waters, because He delighted in me. How about that?

Carlton, thank you so much. And everybody, thank you for listening to the Church and Family Life podcast, where we really want to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture. Boy, Carlton's story really underlines that. Amen. So we'll be back at it next week.

See you till then. Thanks for listening to the Church and Family Life podcast. We have thousands of resources on our website, announcements of conferences coming up. Hope you can join us. Go to ChurchandFamilyLife.com.

See you next Monday for our next broadcast of the Church and Family Life podcast.