The life story of Steve and Sandra Hopkins is a story of grace. Hear the contours of God’s grace through the years in the Hopkins family. Grace is powerful enough to lift the most broken. God is kind to those who have been entrapped and He rescues them.

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 Richcrest, North Carolina, May 20-23. Just Before that, a singles conference called Holiness to the Lord, May 19 and 20. Also go to our website.

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Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture for church and family life. Now, so Jason Dome is with me. Jason, pastor of Sovereign Redeemer Community Church right down the road from me. Here we go again, man.

Hi Scott, I've been looking forward to this one. I know, we love Steve Hopkins. We're here to interview Steve Hopkins. Steve is a pastor at Burnet Bible Church in Burnet, Texas, and we've just been so delighted to serve together in the ministry as pastors who love one another and are trying to do a lot of the same thing. So Steve, welcome.

Thank you for joining us. I'm glad to be here. This is great. This really is such a joy. So okay, We want to praise the glory of God's grace by hearing testimonies.

That's what we're doing with these. We do a lot of didactic things, a lot of really, really serious things. And we want it. We want you to tell your story. So tell us the story of your life.

Give us kind of a timeline of your life, where you were born, your family, where you lived, and just, let's start that way. Well, I was born in Dayton, Ohio. Yes, they say I was conceived in Texas and born in Ohio. My parents were met at the seminary in Dayton, at the Baptist seminary there. And my father was a pastor, became a pastor.

You talk about grace, you know, Sandra and I have said for decades, ours is a history of grace. God has just been merciful to us. We see his providence throughout our lives together and in our upbringing and how God brought us together. And it really is just a history of grace. And with some of my background and rock and roll, heavy metal and all of these things, you know, I should have destroyed this thing a hundred times over, but God's grace and mercy carried us through.

So Steve, tell us about your family life. Tell us how you grew up, your dad, your mom, that whole scene. Okay, so I was born in Dayton, shortly back to Arlington, I think is where our home was. Then my dad got a pastorate at a church in Tempe, Arizona. Someone sent me a picture here just this last week, one of our relatives, and said, hey, that church is still standing or the building is still standing.

It was Bethel Bible Baptist Church in Arizona. And it was an independent Baptist church. And my mother was an Indiana girl and I'm not sure where they met. They met at the seminary but I'm not sure where they were married but that was a good life for the first seven or eight years and then everything in our household fell apart. Everything completely fell apart.

So my conversion, I'll start with that. So we're at this church and when I'm seven years old, This pastor that used to be brought in for the revivals, because they would have a revival this week. They would bring in these pastors from all over. There was this one man that God used in a really special way in my life. I don't know if any of you ever heard of a man named Lester Roloff, you ever heard of him?

Yeah. Okay. So he would come through. And I noticed there was something very different about him than other evangelists that would come through. It was serious.

I don't hold the same doctrine that he holds today, but I've gone back and reviewed some of his messages, and I saw those leanings and toward the reformed Baptist faith. But he was very serious about holiness, very serious about the things of God and believed the gospel that he preached. And I remember telling my dad one time, I said, you know, what is it that's different about him and he said kind of just off the cuff he said well you know when we we invite these pastors to come in he said we'll wine them and dine them and put them up in the finest hotel but Mr. Roloff won't allow that He said he wants to stay in the home of one of the families in the church. He wants a quiet room, he said, without a television in it.

And he wants to fast and pray. God used him in an amazing way because when he would preach, it would, you know, I felt my heart pierced with conviction for sin at the age of seven. And really just overcome with grief and knowing that I was a sinner that I was deserving of eternal damnation and and and when you would preach I used to say it used to tell it like this it was like like thunderbolts from heaven and I could look to my left and to my right and wonder why others weren't under as much conviction. But God used that. And of course I was in a church where you had to walk the aisle so I was probably saved a whole lot long, far before the time where I stepped out and walked down that aisle and shook the pastor's hand and prayed with him and all those things.

But God used that in a very special way. You said your family fell apart. What was that? Everything fell apart. My dad started off on prescription medications.

The schedule was always the excuse. You had to have something to be able to keep him going. They gave him whatever, I don't know what. And then they can't sleep. So you had to have something to go to sleep, right?

And then it got worse and worse and worse. It was always prescription drugs, but it ended up with the entire family life collapsing. I remember times where my father ran through the house with a butcher knife chasing people. And I remember ambulances coming in and the middle of the night pumping the drugs out of the stomach. And you know, everybody was going to die.

What was going to happen with the family? Remember little children hiding behind the sofa in the house. How old were you at this time? So this would have been nine, 10, 11. And then at age 12, with all these things going on, my mother trying to hang on, trying to just be the faithful wife.

And I remember at one time it was said that she wrote his last six months of sermons that he preached at the pulpit because he couldn't do it. He was trying to prop him up. And I don't want to shame my father. My belief is he's to this day, he's still alive. I don't believe he's converted to this day.

I visit him and all, but I try to honor him. So seeing as we're falling apart and had fallen apart, basically mom's trying to bring everybody through. She's faithful. And in 1973, March 10th of 1973, we're now living in Burnett, Texas where we live now. And a tornado went through the city.

You can look up pictures on the internet. It was devastating. Homes were destroyed. It was really bad. Our house was destroyed while we were in it.

You know, it was in bed and the roof went off and the walls went out. Everything collapsed around us and we ran into the middle room, hid under the table and everything, the dining table in the center of the house. And after that, we had to move into a, like these trailers that they had set up and for the people that didn't have homes and that sort of thing. And we're living there and it got so bad the whole drug situation got so bad that in the middle of the night you know my mom says hey we need to we need a gun we're going to Arizona. Little did I know that you know going to Arizona was gonna end up being really good things that's where I was gonna meet my wife but this is at age 12 and we are moved to Tucson Arizona So we moved basically in with relatives there for a while.

And then eventually, my mother bought got a piece of land $50 down and $50 a month or whatever that And then we built a house on it or had a house built there. And that's where I was raised up through my teen years and all. And praise God, at the same time all this is happening, a nine-year-old girl up in Wisconsin, her dad's a professor of biomedical engineering and at the University there in Wisconsin he gets moved to the University of Arizona in Tucson and we meet at 11 o'clock at night at a pizza place and this would have been 1980 so I was out of school I guess for a year and I remember sitting there at this table I got enough work I worked as a janitor I was telling kids I said you know cleaning toilets it's a noble profession And there's no job that's beneath anyone. And I clean not 26 toilets a night, but 26 bathrooms full of toilets every night. And anyway, so one night, I meet my wife, she walks in, she's got a friend there, and I got a friend with me, Stuart, and just sitting there hanging out, couldn't afford a pizza, so I'm having a Coke, and I look over, and two girls walk over to the jukebox, never seen them before in my life.

I looked over, and my wife, Sandra, she just barely turned her head, barely turned her head and I caught her face and I went, I turned to him, I said, hey, Stuart, Stuart, what, what, what? So you see that girl right there? He goes, which one? I said, the blonde. He said, Yeah, I see her.

He goes, I'm going to marry that girl. I, you know, I don't know if I thought I was serious or if it just came out of my mouth. I just came out of my mouth. He was like, yeah, right. She's been good for years.

Sure. Words never spoken. The story of my life becomes the story of our life, you know, at that point. And So Sandra and I, we knew each other for four years before we were married and got married, I was 21. Yes, she was probably 19, so we met when she was 15, late 15 there and late 18, I think for me.

And it's just been a, it's been wonderful. The first three years of the marriage were really, really, really rough. And this is something I want to tell, you know, there may be someone that watches this, they say, hey, you know what, we're kind of going through this sort of thing. Well, first three years was really, really, really rough. Our church, we were attending, had no answers, no answers.

No, nothing for marriage, nothing for family life at all. It was, there was just nothing there for us. And I remember, one time my wife going to this pastor's wife and saying, hey, you know, I'm having trouble with, you know, like submission. And she act like she'd never heard the word before in her life. It was like she had no answer for her.

We were really searching. And so we joined a cult. So we meet a man who seems to have some answers and he actually had some biblical answers, but he didn't put them to work in his own life. He was very much a hypocrite. But we were drawn in, and for nine months of our life, we were in a very bizarre cult.

So this is 33, 34 years ago. My oldest son was like six months old. And so we're, you know, we're searching for answers where we think we're getting answers here and it ends up to be this really bizarre, you know, teaching. It's not biblical. And I wish I had more time to go into depth on it, but I'm looking at the clock here.

But I'll try to make a long story short. We began to, we were doing, we were studying the Bible in the evening, Sandra and I at the table, and we each had our Bibles, and we were marking every passage of scripture going from Genesis to Revelation. I had sold a lot of my music equipment for my heavy metal career, whatever, and was using that to pay for the monthly rent and everything. We were living in a house that the rats were so big that they ran the cats off, that's how bad it was. But we were having a good time studying the Bible the other evening.

And we began to look and I said, you know what? What he's saying, it doesn't match what we're reading right here. And she said, yeah, it doesn't. You know, what he's saying here doesn't match what we're reading right here. And in the middle of one night, everybody got up in the middle of the night and said, or we hadn't maybe we hadn't gone to sleep yet.

We hadn't gone to sleep yet. Ryan's on this little bed over there in the corner of the room, our oldest son, like a few months old, six months old or something. And I said, you know what, look at this passage right here. It was the new, what do they call it, the living Bible, paraphrase. And it said, in Proverbs, it said, men flip coins, but God decides the outcome, which is the lots, you know, verse in the Bible.

And so I said, you know, God, you want us to just leave? Give me a heads if you want us to just pick up right now, just leave in the middle of the night and I flip the coin heads Come on Three Real then you got to give me two books of the coin here. I Look the coin again heads. I'm gonna go So Laura don't don't get angry with me I said, but you know if you really need it all over again, I'm supposed to just get up in the middle of the night and pick up my family, all of our stuff, put it in our van and leave, I mean, you can give me three, three flip the coin heads. I looked over at San Diego and I said, God doesn't speak through flipping coins.

And the next morning, that very next morning at seven o'clock in the morning, our only means of escape was towed out of our driveway. Tow truck towed it away because this cult that was taking over the finances of everyone said they would make the payments for the work that we were doing, you know, and they didn't make our payment and our only means of escape was gone. I was on foot. So we got, I woke up, I said, you know what? God doesn't speak through coins.

I'll tell you what he does speak through his word and he'd already shown us that this man's words didn't line up with the word God. So We, at that point, we got really, really nice with everybody. And we said, look, we're just gonna play along, get along till we can get this van back. And they actually got the van back. They were able to retrieve the van, pay whatever the late fees were, late fees, whatever.

And we got that van and I said, we're leaving. I'm taking my wife and child and we're leaving. And these guys surrounded our vehicle. I said, I was gonna make it a long story short. They surrounded our van, They wouldn't let us leave.

They got clad up on top of the van. They unbolted the roof rack. They said, you got that while you were here. We're going to take that off. They took everything we had.

I left all of my Flying V guitars for anybody who knows what those are. Marshall amplifiers, Marshall stacks, left everything. We left there. I had my wife, our child, and a chest of drawers Sandra had bought at a garage store for $10 with our clothes in it. And we were trying to pull out of the driveway and the lead guy comes up and he says, he was the son of the cult leader, he comes up and he says, he goes, you got those, we bought you those boots at Christmas and I took my ropers off my boots off and I threw it out the window and I left barefoot In my socks and I had one dollar in my pocket Okay, no credit cards.

No, no one dollar my pocket. The gas tank was on empty and we left We made it back Through a series of events. We made it back to our area where our relatives were. And on the way back, I remember I looked over at Sandals, and I said, wow, we're gonna have to go back now and tell everybody everything we believed was wrong, everything we thought was wrong. And we became the humblest people on the face of the earth.

No one was lower than us. There was no one in our sight as stupid, as gullible, as foolish as we were, as I was. And so that's the way we went back, just the low lives of the earth. And I remember looking at Sandra, when we were driving back, I said, you know, I said, I really only know one thing right now. She said, what's that?

I said, Jesus Christ died for our sins and rose again the third day. And we rebuilt on that foundation. We rebuilt on that foundation. So, I've used up most of my time here, But so we started having more kids and people would say, why did you all have all those, what got you to where you'd have all those children in the rock and roll world that's some kind of fit and whatever. And It was real simple.

We were driving through a McDonald's drive-through one day and Sandra had been, had just, someone had told her to start taking birth control. She'd been taking it for I think one month. It might have been a couple of months, but I think it was one month. But we're driving through a McDonald's drive-through and I looked over at her, I was at the speaker, I looked at her, I said, so what do you want? And she said, I really feel like God doesn't want me to use birth control.

In the drive-thru at McDonald's, while we were trying to look over, I just looked at her. I just looked at her. I just looked at her, I kind of went, all right, sounds good to me. And that was all, it was all the discussion we ever had. We started having kids.

That was it. You know, she got a Big Mac. That was it. And how many kids did you end up with? We have 16.

There you go. 11 grandkids so far. And I think that's the number with the one that Levi and Katherine are now, Katherine's now bearing. So yeah, We started over with nothing, but we started over with everything. And it was a good foundation to start, to start with nothing and to see yourself as the worst people on the face of the earth.

It was a good place to start. And so we started having kids and God just was always, you know, blessing. We all, we struggled, you know, financially all the time, you know, but I tell people, it's okay. It's okay to struggle financially. I'll tell you what When anything that will drive you to your knees with your family before God is a good thing And we would we would we would be driven continually month after month I remember saying one time you know what We've been doing this for like 15 years.

What? Getting down on our knees together as a family in the middle of the living room floor, saying, Lord, I don't know how we're gonna make it. And every month we made it. Every month. So Steve, at that point, you're back in Burnett.

Who were the influential Bible teachers, authors, who was helping you understand the Scriptures? Okay, so early on there, after we had probably a couple of two children, I would say, so Ryan and Rebecca, there is a pastor that I meet at a pro-life event where we went, and he was a Calvinist. He was a Calvinist Baptist. He was a street preacher. He said, �Hey, you want to come street preach with me sometime.

I said sure. And we actually started attending their church. It was a little home church in Georgetown, Texas. And I started street preaching with him. And he, you know, the first time I was in my twenties and he's like, I said, I don't even know what to do.

He goes, just find your text and give the meaning. So that's how street preaching started, and street preaching now for decades and every Wednesday. Used to be three times a week, an hour down to once a week. One day we'll get back to it. So he was very, he was influential and then from there, you know, started to read different authors.

Aspergen was very influential. The thing that's had the most impact, I would say probably of any writing that's ever been done by men is Calvin's Institutes, Institutes of the Christian Faith. And I didn't just read them, but I listened to them on a site called the Doxology Press. The total depravity of man, I love these sermons. And so it's had a real effect.

He really understands the gospel. But we also were introduced probably 17 years ago to the Puritan writings. So the Puritan books have had a great effect upon us as well. It looks like I'm gonna go over my time, doesn't it? Well, so you've been a pastor for how long?

For 20, well, let's see, 24 years. So I come up on, it's 1996, we started our church. We were family integrated before we knew what that meant. Remember when I ran for US Senate years ago, 1993, I remember this church's pastor in this church and this big church in San Antonio that asked us to come in and be introduced as a candidate for US Senate and this guy standing in front of me is like, he's all upset, you know, oh, you got kids in here, you have children here, you gotta get them out. I was like, no, we keep our children with us, you know, in the service, we keep them with us in the service.

He moved us with what the Bible teaches. And he was all irate and everything. He said, the pastor's gonna come out here and he's gonna call you out from the stage. And this is a televised television church, very famous pastor in San Antonio. The pastor did come out and he said, I wanna welcome Stephen Hopkins.

I stood up and this guy turned beet red. It was in front of me. I said, and he was like, oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I said, you know, I was thinking he was sorry, not because he thought it was a respective men thing, not that he understood that what he was spousing was not correct. People's children should be with them in church.

That's the biblical model. That was a long-winded answer. No, that was Thrilling to hear that story. So leave us with some scripture. Are there particular passages or is there something in the word of God that just stands out over the years of your life?

Jesus is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He made me to leave aside the still waters. He restored my soul.

He leads me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yeah, you know, I walked through the valley of the shadow of death. I will fear their evil. They aren't with me. I wrought.

They staff. They comfort me. Prepare us to table before me in the presence of my enemies. I can't remember the next word. My cup runneth over.

My cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. That's the verse that I go to bed with every night. Wake up with the Lord's Prayer on my face before God. Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.

It's all about His name being hallowed. It's all about His glory. It's all about Him. It's all about the advancement of the kingdom of Christ. A kingdom come, thy will be done.

We're so small in the scheme of it all. He's so great, so great. So I guess those would be the two that would have had the most effect on me. Oh, that's so good. Steve, we're just so thankful to hear such a story.

What a rich testimony. I want to take you down another track. I've been in your home and you're a really good guitar player. And then I learned that you were a head banger, you were a metalhead. So tell us about your experience with music, just the whole thing.

It's a long story. So I grew up in kind of the rock and roll world. And at some point in time, decided with my older brother, we were going to start a Christian heavy metal group. Spandex and makeup and earrings and hair down to your knees, all those sort of thing. And, you know, but it, you caught me off guard here a little bit, but, but, So I don't ever tell anyone the name of the group because I don't want to look up and see the pictures that I don't even show my children until they're like 12 years old or 15 years old.

And we use stage names anyway, so you can't find it, which is good. I think you said this one time, Scott. You know, family, you know, culture doesn't come with certain genres of music. Maybe I'm not quoting you perfectly. Certain genres of music.

And family doesn't really come with that culture. And somehow, the Lord just moved us out of that, moved me out of that. And when our, when a time came where Some of our albums, we sold about 120,000 copies of our music. And a record company had approached one of the members and said, hey, we want to re-release this. And they contacted me and they said, you know, you want to be a part of that.

And I said, you know, I don't really want to be a part of that recently, Lisa. You know, I think it was more destructive to the children. It was inflaming their rebellion and it was just fueling their desire for that kind of music, really. And you know the world could always do it better than the church could do it. They're the ones that invented those styles and so they always do it better.

And then the church is kind of running along behind the, you know, the world trying to play catch-up. Just the opposite back in the 1600s, you know, they're still trying to catch up to Bach, right? And they can't catch him. He's the king, not Elvis. He was a Christian.

And his compositions all began for the glory of God and ended for the glory of God, every one of them, you know. So, you know, I felt like it was destructive. I mean, I remember sitting there one day with a four by four by four cardboard box that was full of fan mail, you know, four feet tall. And I'm digging through it. I'm sitting there reading one day and I go, wow, we haven't helped these children, these young people at all.

And it's just under condition, we haven't helped them at all. In fact, we've just fueled just the option, we've fueled their rebellion. And I still wanna be a part of that. I don't know where all the lines are drawn for those that I'm not gonna sit here and condemn this or that or I don't know where all the lines are drawn. But you know music is powerful.

Music should be used for the glory of God and we really need to be careful with our music. I tell my children I want to be very careful with our music, that it glorifies God and it doesn't lead to worldliness or really create an appetite for the world's music and the world's things, the things of the world. It's destructive. You see the people that have gone on in, when I look at some of my peers that were in the same kind of music and their lives are just a mess and a lot of them are just really destroyed. Some survived but most of them didn't survive, you know, their families didn't survive, their marriages didn't survive.

So I just see it as a destructive path. The world's music is never, it's not the way to go. We've got to be very, very careful. I just said this on Sunday to our congregation. I said, you know, I said, you know who my favorite Christian singer is?

One person raised their hand out of my family or two, maybe out of my family, because they know I've said this so many times. I said, my favorite Christian artist, and I hope that all of you will go and Google his name, and you will look him up, and you will listen to his music. His name is Martin Lloyd-Jones. And a lot of people don't even realize that Martin Lloyd-Jones actually sang Christian music. And I said, well, I don't know of anything he ever put out.

Look up the Westminster Chapel sermons that are available and look up hymns. And While the congregation is singing, the microphone is so close to Lloyd-Jones that you'll hear him singing. He is singing from the heart and he's not always on key. He's passionate and he loves God and he loves the gospel. He sings with just joy in his heart.

He's my favorite Christian artist. Wow, that's great. Well, Steve, thank you. It's a joy to be with you. We love you.

We're so glad to be locked arm in arm with you in the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ, and we're grateful for your church and your preaching and your friendship. Thank you so much. Well, hey, thank you for joining us at Church and Family Life and our podcast. Jason, what a great time, huh? I know it.

Wow. So, join us next time at Church and Family Life podcast. We'll see you next Monday when we launch another podcast. God bless you. 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.