John Snyder tells his life story. He grew up as a rebellious self-centered teenager… whose shame finally drove him to his knees. His story brings a message of hope for parents of children who are not walking with the Lord, identifying the good things his parents did as he was going through his seasons of rebellion.

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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, for the Reformation of the Church and the Family, and Jason Dobe, so good to have you with us again on this broadcast. Hi, Scott. So, Jason, you're the pastor at Sovereign Redeemer Community Church, and we've been working together for decades, So this is going to be really fun interviewing John Snyder. Hey, John.

Hey. So John is a pastor at Christ Church, New Albany, Mississippi. And as you can see, he's all bundled up. Yeah. It's a winter wonderland.

Down there. And, you know, it's always winter, but never Christmas in Mississippi. But so, John, yeah, it's cold down there. There's snow flurries. Yeah.

So I'm outside to celebrate the few snow flurries we'll get in the whole year. That's great. That is so good. Well, we want to do something a little different here. We want to hear your life story.

We want to hear how the grace of God moved upon you. And, you know, John, you have a testimony. The Lord saved you out of a particular kind of life, and I think what we really want to do is really celebrate the kindness of God in our lives, and you know, just to recognize, you know, what David said in Psalm 40, you know, he lifted me out of the miry clay, you know, in Psalm 18 He said, he sent from above, he took and he drew me out of many waters, many waters. That's the story of our lives, really. So John, tell us the story of your life.

So give us kind of a, give us a quick timeline, you know, where were you born and just give us a quick overview and then we'll just kind of work through some of the details. Yeah. Born in a little town called London, Ohio, out in the middle of a bunch of cornfields. And grew up in a very serious Christian home with a mom and a dad that really lived out the things they said in front of me. I was quite rebellious, you know, nothing extraordinary about my sin, really very ordinarily sad and selfish.

And it wasn't until my second year at college, studying for the ministry actually, that I realized that I was a hypocrite. And All my book knowledge, all my religion, all my preaching was all about John. So when the Lord opened my eyes to that at age 20, you know, He wonderfully saved me. I got married to the young lady. I was courting in college.

Her name's Misty. And now we have four children, and we're in North Mississippi, pastoring. So, you grew up in a Christian home. What was it like? Yeah.

Well, small family, just me and one sister. I came first, so my parents probably decided that was enough, kids after me. I do remember, if you think about spiritual influences, I remember two things in particular. My mother was converted when she was pregnant with me. She was very young when she had me.

And my father was converted soon after. And I remember my mother, particularly her prayer life, when my father went to seminary, which was when I was 16 years old. We moved down south so he could go to seminary. And this was really at the height of my really just angry, rebellious attitude, just making life miserable on everybody. And I remember getting up in the middle of the night, about 430 in the morning to me was middle of the night, and going to the restaurant.

And as I walked down the hallway, I heard we were in West Memphis, Arkansas, which was not a nice place. There was a lot of drive-by shootings and things that occurred. So I heard some noises in the house, in the dark house, and I thought, we're being robbed. So I'm looking around for a baseball bat, you know, and I think I've got to protect my family. And anyway, so I just froze for a second while those crazy thoughts are going through my head and I heard my mother's voice and it was my mother in the living room.

Now I knew that my mother worked a job to help my dad who also worked a full-time job and went to seminary full-time. So I knew that she didn't get to bed till about midnight and it was 430 in the morning and she was knelt in the dark beside the couch. So it's not that she didn't she prayed first so as not to disturb anybody with light. And I didn't understand this at the time, but she was praying for me. And in fact, I had just come in the house from having snuck out the window and been doing stupid stuff.

And when I snuck back in, I heard my mom pleading with the Lord and she didn't know I'd been out and it was just her normal thing. Wow. So I never forgot that, you know, that she went without sleep to plead for my soul. The other thing was, even though my dad was a younger Christian, I remember him really becoming very earnest about the Lord when I was young. So let's say around age 5, 6, 7, I noticed that he would disappear every night after supper and the news.

He would kind of disappear to his room. And he had an open Bible study Bible, and he would just pour over that Bible. He still has it, but Over about a four-year period, pages were falling out because he would just pour over it. And he was reading George Mueller. And so those two things stick out of my mind among many of things that I could not forget.

When I wanted to tell myself there was no God to live for. I knew there was a God. I just knew that I didn't want to live for Him. So you're a rebellious kid. Your dad is training for the ministry.

And he's a new believer, right? Or at least he's newly awakened or something. So, you know, he probably doesn't understand everything about the significance of a rebellious son and things like that. How did he deal with you? Well, actually, they were both very patient with me.

I was religious. I mean, I had my head full of religion, so I used to push all the religious buttons. I would just call out any inconsistency I could even imagine I was seeing. They both were actually really patient. I remember both of them just No matter what smoke I blew their way, all the junk I would say to try to excuse my life, they would basically Their answer was always the same.

You know there's a God and you'll never be happy unless you serve him. And I would shoot off a comment, within certain limitations, they didn't let me be smart eloquent to them. So they did maintain a certain behavior in the home, but in my heart. So that stuck with me. I remember one of the evidences of conversion was that, so I was in college.

I went home that Christmas. I was converted in November, 31 years ago. And So I went home for that Christmas break. It's the first break I'm a Christian. I just remember really, I wrote him letters and I talked to him to tell him how thankful I was for all those years and how sorry I was that I had been such a jerk.

When they met my fiance, who now is my wife, my father said to her, they had a meeting without me, my father said to her, the day John left and went to college was the happiest day of my life. And, and it was so my wife, you know, my wife laughed, like that's funny. And then she said, my father just had this Haggard look on his face and she thought, what am I doing? You know, I'm, I'm moving in with the guy. But I had been converted.

Oh my. So what, what would you, what would you say to parents who have a kid like you were? Yeah, I would say, crying out to the Lord, not despairing. I mean, you know, I've, I've been in the pastorate for 21 years now. You guys have been in the pastorate.

We've been in it long enough to see the teenagers that broke the parents' hearts, and then, you know, in their 30s maybe, coming back. And there's a young man in our church right now who really rough life from home till you know 30 broke his parents heart and now seems to have been wonderfully converted and he prays out and they're meeting and Every other parent he doesn't know this but every other parent that hears him pray, they come to me and they say, you know, when I hear him pray, it just stirs my heart to ask the Lord again to save my kids. So, other than praying though, just a consistent genuineness, so not a perfection of course, but consistency and a real honesty with your kid about, yeah, so here are the ups and downs of the Christian life. I'm not a great parent, but I belong to a great Savior. John, when I think about my own discipleship, just making progress in the Lord, when I have those thoughts, I actually see faces of people who invested in my life.

You probably see faces too. Just introduce us to some of those faces and tell us what they did. One face is a man named Clyde Cranford. He's gone to be with the Lord now. He was actually a music minister in a large church where my family was attending.

He took an interest in me, And he began to kind of pursue me, you know, a friendship with this rebellious kid. And so when I hit bottom at college and through a series of very selfish choices that led me, that the Lord used to show me the truth about myself. He was the man I called. So I went and spent the weekend with him. He actually is the one that led me to the Lord.

And then he began to—my parents had moved back home, So they're back in Ohio. My father was pastoring and Clyde was the man that for the next two years really discipled me I just would go to his house every weekend and I mean I just couldn't wait, you know to get there and he would talk to me about the Lord and I had a notebook and I wrote everything down he said. And I remember he was the first adult that I listened to, and I let him say hard things to me because I wanted to know, I wanted to grow in the Lord. I didn't keep my mouth shut because I would get in trouble if I shot back. I kept my mouth shut and I listened.

And I remember saying to the Lord when he would have to say hard things to me, and he was a very loving person, but when he would have to rebuke me, I would just say, I would pray while he talked to me, and I'd say, God, this is really hard to listen to, but I want to become like your son, so please help me to humble myself. And I would just say that all through these talks. I would look at Clyde and he would think I was... But really, I'm praying. I'm saying, help me, God.

I'm so arrogant. And it was... Those two years were the most quick growth that I've ever had as a believer. Now, was he in town with you, or you were traveling to his house on the weekends? Yeah, well, he was in West Memphis where we lived, but I would come, it was two hours from my college, so I ended up just traveling every weekend.

Another influence on my life would be a pastoral influence and a godly influence was a young pastor named Joe Martin. When I was 20, he was 30, and he was on the West Coast in Washington State, and he was just so genuine. Not very theologically savvy. He hadn't gone to a lot of schools. So when it came to reading books, I had read a lot more books than he had at that time.

But just to watch a man pour out his life shepherding a very irreligious culture, it was the first hand experience of that that really helped me. And then another gentleman, the last one I'll mention is Richard Owen Roberts. He befriended me about 30 years ago and he's been a helpful guide through the years when I really feel like I'm stuck. So you said you hit bottom. You know, it's interesting people hit bottom and they turn to the Lord, you know, that's really a good thing.

When you when you say you hit bottom, What are you talking about? People hit bottom. There are different kinds of bottoms out there. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So mine was some very shameful, selfish choices that I was making. And so nobody else knew about this. But I knew. My conscience had been trained as a young person by one of the things my mother did was nightly, I was so hyperactive.

The deal that she would offer when I was a kid is, if you'll go to bed, when we say go to bed without having another argument and then you're in trouble, is if you go to bed immediately, I'll read to you. And so I said, great. All right, so I'm in bed. And she read the entire Bible through to me. And then she read like George Mueller biographies and Hudson Taylor.

And so I had those things in my head. My conscience had this extremely kind of elite view of what the Christian life would look like. You know, you should be like Hudson Taylor. And then in college, when I went from high school to college, I really cleaned up my act outwardly, because I told myself, well, you're going to go study for the ministry now. You've got to be a good kid.

But you clean up the outside, and you stuff it into a trash can and you tighten down the lid and then it blows off the lid. In the way that I was behaving, some very immoral choices, it just became—the Lord used that to just show me that I really deserved the hell that I knew existed. And I had said that a thousand times, but I never believed it. And particularly, it was when Clyde talked to me about Christ becoming the curse, that it was the love of God, not the wrath of God. It was the love of God that was like a wrecking ball against my apathy.

And it just crushed me, you know, that I had lived against a God who had continued to love me and pursue me. So I felt like I went to bed that night and I just said to Christ, I don't know what you want to do with me. You can, you know, I don't know, maybe I need to be kicked out of college for my behavior. Maybe I'll never be allowed to preach. That would be fair.

You could even send me to hell. This is not a bargain, no more bargains. You can just have me and I want to love you. And so that's how that was hitting bottom bottom for me. That's, that's amazing.

So trials, what, what trials, have shaped you along the way? Yeah, well, a couple. So personal, one was when we moved to the little country of Wales, my wife and myself, and two little kids under the age of like 20 months and under. And when we got there, we had some problems with money. We didn't have much money to begin with.

We were students, but when we got there, we had some money problems. And so I really felt like it looked like we were going to have to come home immediately after being there a month. We didn't have enough money to buy groceries. It wasn't anything that I had done wrong. It was another situation that was beyond our control.

So my bank account went empty to my shock. So I really was concerned. My wife's family were not yet converted. Her parents are now Christians, but they weren't then. And we had made quite a boast that the Lord had made it clear this was obedience and not just a nice idea and that he would provide.

We tried to get jobs. We couldn't get jobs anywhere in Wales because unemployment was about 20%. So we were really destitute. And I remember one morning getting up and telling my wife, I just need to be alone. And I went out about five in the morning out into, nobody in Britain wakes up at five.

So I went out into the parks in the city and I just cried out to the Lord and said to him, if you, you sent us here. So if I misunderstood that, I need to understand how I was wrong. So that's one option. The other option in my mind, logical option, was I have sinned against you and I'm being sent back home because of my carelessness. And if that's what I've done, I need to understand that.

The third option is, you're not the God I told everybody you were. And if that's true, I need to know that because I need to quit lying to people for money. And so I just laid it before the Lord and I had a perfect peace to say those kind of things. It wasn't like I felt like I was twisting God's arm. I needed to know He was who He said He was before I preached anymore because I was so sure I was doing what the Lord told me.

We got up and we went to church later that day and the pastor of a church of a thousand people who rarely ever came to our house because he was so busy, he showed up at my house that day and he said, I'm sorry, this may seem strange, but I just felt that I need to talk with you, can I talk with you in private?" So I said, sure? I hadn't told anybody. He said to me, are you having financial problems? Actually, I'm destitute. And I wouldn't have told you had I not just asked the Lord, you know.

So I'm going to have to humble myself and say, actually, it's bad. And he said, don't despair, leave it with me. And the Lord from that point forward for three years provided everything we needed without ever asking for a penny. We followed the George Mueller pattern because my my wife's family said when you go over there You'll make money by begging and I said no actually we won't you know? And so the lord did that and the day we got back to the united states the money dried up, you know amazing Oh, wow Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna do a little machine gun thing here with you.

Okay. Tell me two books that affected you the most. A.W. Tozer's The Pursuit of God, certainly one. And another book is not, I don't think is the greatest book, but it did affect me.

And it was right after I was converted, and that's Brother Lawrence's little book, The Practice of the Presence of God. And it was just because I was alive to God for the first time. So suddenly even government class at eight o'clock in the morning in college was was a chance to worship the Lord Yeah, no, that's great. Okay Preachers preachers that taught you yeah, we are we are we dead or alive preachers, which one? Yes Yeah, so I would say Vernon Hyam, the pastor in Wales who was Martin Lloyd-Jones close friend and actually performed doctor and Mrs.

Lloyd-Jones funerals. Vernon Hyam passed away just a couple years ago. He showed me how the loveliness of Christ was the greatest, it was the great attractor in church. That's all he offered us and I found him irresistible. I have greatly benefited by Mr.

Roberts pointing us to the bigness of God. And I'm always benefited, I think, always by Paul Washer's painting of the cross. What phases have you gone through, theological phases? Well, yeah, I grew up Southern Baptist, so I grew up fairly Armenian, but a serious church in Ohio. You know, Southern Baptists are not that popular.

So it was a group of real believers, and I really am thankful for that. But I remember in seminary doing a study on the doctrine of regeneration thinking I already knew everything about regeneration. So I read Stephen Sharnak on the new birth and to my great shock I completely disagreed with this man. He said regeneration caused faith and repentance and I was sure he was wrong. So I went to the scriptures and with Sharnak and some other help, I realized that I had been wrong all my life.

And so I had already become aware of God's right to elect the sinner to become his child, to send justice and mercy alongside each other from eternity past. But regenerations were all that kind of reformed thinking hit the road in a practical way. So that would probably be the most significant shift theologically. Okay, so just to kind of wind up here, what's burning in your soul? What were you pointing your soul, your energies in the days ahead?

Yeah, well, as for tasks, what's on the horizon, I am 51 now, and So another man and I planted the work where I'm at. We planted the church 21 years ago. I would like to think that I'd be healthy, you know, into my 70s, but I am aware now, in a way that I haven't been before, that I really need to make it a priority to do what God would have me do and the other pastors that I work with, to get the church on an ever better foundation so that when John isn't here, the church is still healthy. Because I mean, you know, the first 10 years, everyone came out of kind of not so healthy backgrounds. And so it was kind of everyone just came to me and said, John, what do you think?

And I would say, well, this is what the scripture says. And so that pattern has been hard to break, and I have not been careful enough. So I feel a weight for that. For my own soul, I don't want to end the race slower than I began it. And I feel that temptation.

You know, when you're in your 20s, settling down and being prudential is never a temptation. You know what I mean? That was the last thing on my mind. But in my 50s, and when the people in the church treat you so kindly, I have felt this horrible, quiet enemy whispering to me every day that it's a nice place to stop, you know, and just kind of take a nap. So that scares me.

Yeah. John, thank you so much for sharing with us. It was really a delight to hear all those things. You know, you were a rebellious teenager. You know, I don't know how many times I've said to parents, this story's not over yet.

And that's true with you. What a blessing. Yeah, and it's not over yet. I'm glad. It's not over yet.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on guys. Great to see you again.

Yeah. Well, God bless you and may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Yeah. And you too. 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.