Raised in a devout Catholic home, Brian was a proud, self-righteous altar boy who wore his religion on his sleeve. Whenever his parents or sister missed Mass, he would corral them into a room and perform communion. Yet, despite his showy legalism, he was consumed by guilt. Brian knew, full well, that he was a hypocritical sinner who was mean-spirited, lustful, and that he told jokes for the praise of men.

Then, quite unexpectedly, Brian’s mother came to Christ, and his father followed, once they began to read the Bible for themselves. Seeing Brian’s miserable struggle, his mother urged him to read God’s Word as well, starting with the New Testament. Once he did, Brian was convicted of his Phariseeism, realizing he must look to Christ, not the church, for forgiveness. Having his eyes opened, he was born again and soon felt the call to the ministry. Brian currently serves as the pastor of Grace Community Church in Minden, Nevada.

Welcome to the Children Family Life podcast. Children Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture. And today we're going to hear a testimony of one of our brothers that we love, one of the men that has preached with us at our conferences. So Jason, we get to hear the testimony of Brian Borgman. Who is not a preaching and teaching cyborg but a real human being that God has had mercy on and I can't wait to hear his story.

Yeah, there you go. He's a pastor in one of the most beautiful places in the country in Nevada near Lake Tahoe and he's a pastor of Grace Community Church out there. And Brian, we're so delighted to have you today. It's great to be with you guys. Thank you so much.

And so, hey, tell us the story of your life. Okay, so my, I was born in 1967. My mom and dad were, my dad was a country bumpkin. All right, he was raised in a little tiny tiny town in Northern California. And he was Roman Catholic, very, very, very Catholic.

His parents were strongly Catholic. In that little tiny community, You had Germans and you had Swedes and 95% of them all went to the little Catholic church. And so my mom, she was raised in the city. She was raised in Sacramento and she was raised in a very irreligious home, I mean nothing. And so she grew up just going to church with whatever neighbor would take her.

So you know one week it was the Methodist Church and the next week it was, you know, the Mormon Church. And so she just had just really no background at all. So she meets my dad, they get married, but in order for them to get married, of course, she needs to convert to Catholicism. And so she does. And so I was born in 1967 at Beale Air Force Base in Marysville, California.

And my dad went off to Vietnam for about a year and a half. And God brought him home safely. And I was of course, baptized Catholic, just like my dad. And it was I was baptized in the same little Catholic church that my dad was baptized in. So anyway, you know, we're raised Catholic and I would say that my parents were fairly devout.

We went to Catholic school. I was an altar boy. I did my first communion, my first penance, which I was really a pretty self-righteous little boy. If my parents missed mass, I would go and take a piece of Wonder Bread, drag my sister into the room and had a missile with me, and I'd say mass and do communion. Now, obviously, I didn't have any sense of holy orders or transubstantiation, but I was just serious about it and very proud to be Catholic.

And when I did my first confession, we had a priest in our parish who was, he was Sicilian, he was scary. He seemed like a giant to me. He probably was just an ordinary size guy, but he seemed like a giant. And I was so serious about my first confession that I went and I did a face-to-face confession with this monsignor and everybody thought I was nuts, but I really had such a religious pride. I was really a little Pharisee.

And of course, as time went on, course as time went on, you know, as a young boy, I, you know, got into trouble. I had a terrible foul mouth. I mean, here I am as an altar boy going to Catholic school. And I put words together. I didn't even know what they meant.

I had a lustful heart. I would say I was more than just contentious, I was mean-spirited to kids in my class. I would pick on kids, I would pull pranks but not the harmless pranks. I mean, it was really terrible. As time went on, I started to feel guilty about about my sins.

But I had no power whatsoever to change. I wanted to try to be nice to John, but I couldn't. I wanted to try to stop cussing, but I couldn't. I wanted to stop telling dirty jokes, and I just couldn't. The temptation of getting attention and applause was too much.

And so around 1977, 78 probably, my mom went into a Christian bookstore with her sister. And my mom going into a Christian bookstore, she was a fish out of water. And she's standing there and she picks up a Bible and she opens up to the book of Leviticus and she starts reading dietary laws. Now of course, you know, if we were telling it in our evangelical style, she would have opened to John 3 16, not Leviticus. But she opened to Leviticus and what struck her was, wow, God is interested in what people ate.

That's what she took away from reading the dietary laws. Well, it started a deep-seated curiosity in her about what the Bible was really about. And so she started reading the Bible. And of course at that time my dad, he was a feeder driver for UPS and he really did not necessarily approve of my mom reading the Bible because that's not what you did, you know. As a Catholic, that's not really the kind of thing that you did.

You left that to the priest. And so anyway, the long and short of it was is that my mom ended up coming to true faith in Jesus. And she was so excited about this newfound relationship with Christ. And she was devouring the Word. And God gave her a special wisdom with my dad.

My dad was, he was more old school Catholic, and my mom tried to encourage him to read the word and he didn't want to. He was having somewhat of a crisis of faith, I think, at that point in his life, not knowing what was true. But he would have these long runs, like from Sacramento down to Kettleman City and then turn around and come back. And he'd listen to Jay Vernon McGee through the Pipe Radio. There you go.

And so my dad actually, he started listening because he thought that it was sort of like a comedy show because obviously nobody really talked about that. And so my dad started listening to McGee. My mom is sharing the word with him. And he says to my mom, I don't know if I should read the Bible. I don't even know what I believe.

And my mom in her, in God-given wisdom, said, why don't you go talk to Father Ryle? Now, he was a young priest at a neighboring parish, and I don't know why maybe my mom thought he was more approachable. My dad went to talk to this young priest and this priest told my dad, Steve, read the Bible. It's God's word. And where it takes you, follow.

It's God's word. Oh my. And so, right there, my dad had what he felt was the permission that he needed to start reading scripture. And of course he did and he came to a saving knowledge of Christ as well. I was about 12 years old, 13 years old at that time, and I thought my parents were going nuts.

I thought they were becoming religious fanatics, and yet here I was being so burdened by my sin that I would wake up in the morning and feel as a 12, 13-year-old kid, feel depressed because of the guilt of my sin. And, you know, in hindsight, I totally relate to where David says in Psalm 32, for day and night, your hand was heavy upon me. My vitality was, you know, sapped away as with the fever heat of summer. I experienced that. I wouldn't want to go to sleep at night because it was just me, my pillow, and God.

And I felt miserable for my sins. My mom gave me a Bible and she knew that I wouldn't read it unless it was a Catholic edition. So she gave me a Catholic edition of the Bible and told me to read it. And so I started reading it. Of course, thinking to myself, one more religious activity, maybe this will help relieve my conscience.

And I start reading and it doesn't make me feel better. It makes me feel worse. I start reading. My mom tells me start in the New Testament. So I start in the book of Matthew, I get to the sermon on the Mount.

And I read, unless your righteousness surpasses that at the scribes and the Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. And I was destroyed. I felt absolutely hopeless. I went to confession. It didn't help.

In fact, this was eighth grade during Holy Week. So you went to mass every morning. I went to confession two days in a row. My classmates, no eighth grader went to confession. But I went two days in a row, enduring the scorn of my classmates, just trying to find peace with God.

And I couldn't bear it anymore. And so one Sunday night, I was under such a load of sin, and I started reading the Bible, And pretty soon I was overwhelmed and in a flood of tears. Couldn't even read what was on the page in front of me. And I walked into the family room And my mom looked up and she could see that I'd been crying. So she got up and I turned around, walked back to my bedroom.

She followed me, sat down next to me on my bed. And I had in my mind, if I could just confess my sins to my mom, maybe I'd feel better. And it took me quite a long time to spit out all the things that I, that, I mean, I thought I had just done the worst crimes on the planet. And that's how I felt. And my mom sat there and I was so ashamed and after I finished my confession, my mom chuckled a little bit, I always remember that.

And I thought that is extremely inappropriate. I just bore my soul. And now you're laughing. And she looked at me And I had a wonderful mom. She went home to be with the Lord in 2019.

But she looked at me and she said, you need to understand something. She said, your dad and I will always love you. There's nothing that you can do that would make us not love you. There's nothing you could do that would make us, you know, not accept you as our son. She says, but what you need to understand is that God loves you more than your dad or I ever could.

And I looked up and my dad was standing in the doorway and he just sorta nodded his head like he approved what my mom said. He's not a man of many words. And she got up and walked out and I sat there and brothers, it felt like God had lifted the entire world off of my shoulders. Oh, that's wonderful. And what, what struck me as a 13 year old boy was that God loved me, not because I was good, but because he is love.

And I didn't have a clarity. I wouldn't have been able to say, I wouldn't have been able to express justification by faith or the doctrine of regeneration. But what I knew at that moment was that, is that I needed to look to Jesus for the forgiveness of my sins and not the church. I felt like the church had sort of let me down in a sense of leading me to believe that they would take care of me, And at the end of the day, I was still in the slew of despond. And I started reading my Bible voraciously every morning before I'd go to school, every night before I went to bed.

And as I read, it was as if it was every page, God was just opening my eyes to what he had done for me. And whether it was, you know, getting to John three and reading about being born again, I'd read that and I'd say that's what happened to me. I've been born again. And so the Lord brought me out of not just the darkness of my own sin, but in a sense, the darkness of a religion that couldn't save me. And no matter how hard I tried and I tried, and my mom and dad believe that we should start going to a church that taught the Bible.

That of course was revolutionary for us. You know, you didn't take your Bible to mass, and yet now we were looking to go to a church where the Word of God was taught. And we ended up at a little church, not a church that I'd probably go to today, but we didn't know much. Although I will say that we went from the Pope being our pope to J. Bernard McGee being our pope.

Anytime we had any kind of discussion, what does this passage mean or what about this, my dad would say, well, what does McGee say? Anyway, we ended up at a little church that just loved us, and the pastor was a faithful man, just opened his Bible and just taught the Bible simply, and we grew there, and I was baptized there, my dad and my sister as well. And that was just the place where God had planted us. I sensed my own call to the ministry as a young teenager while I was at that church. The Lord really just brought us as a family to Himself.

My sister was converted shortly after I was. It was very much salvation came to the Borgman home and used my mom. In fact, when I preached my mom's funeral service, I likened her to Mary Magdalene and telling everyone that Jesus was alive. And so I feel very, very blessed. God gave me two wonderful parents and a wonderful sister.

And we're very thankful for his, his saving grace and mercy in our lives. Brian, I'm, I hope nobody's mad at me for fast forwarding, but I want to know how you met your wife. Yeah, well, so I was, I think I was a sophomore in high school. I started working at a gas station in Fair Oaks, California. And back in the old days where they were service stations and you pumped people's gas.

And This young gal came in one day and she was the parts girl. So as a service station, we order auto parts and they'd have to be delivered. This pretty girl gets out and everybody was struck by her by her beauty but I thought to myself there's a parts girl with all of her teeth that's amazing It's amazing. So I remember asking her one day, so I'm probably 18 years old, she's 20. And I remember asking her if she was a Christian.

She said she was, and I asked her why she thought she was a Christian. She said, because my grandfather is a minister and my mother is a minister. And I said, well, how does that make you a Christian? And she said, Well, I also made a decision at my grandfather's church. And so for me at that point in my life and my theological understanding, that was all I needed to hear is that she'd made a decision.

Well, I took her to church and the first sermon she heard was on the prodigal son. And she sat there and wept through the whole sermon. Sweet. And So, you know, we ended up getting engaged my junior year of college. We got married very young.

I was 20 and she was 22. But we got married in July. In May, I kind of thought maybe we needed to start reading the Bible together, and I said we should read Ephesians, because I wanted to get to Ephesians 5 to get all this, you know, headship and submission stuff down. I didn't want her to have any, you know, crazy feminist ideas. And so we had to start in chapter one though, because it had been too obvious just to jump to chapter five.

We start reading And as you brothers know, Ephesians 1, 3 to 14 is one long sentence. And we're reading it and she gets really frustrated and she says, I don't understand what Paul is talking about. And I looked at her as if I understood perfectly what Paul was talking about. And I said, why don't you understand? She goes, I don't know.

It seems very difficult to me. And brothers, I'll tell you, this was not the wisest thing, but God used it. And I looked at her and I said, well, you don't understand because you're not a Christian. And it was in a sense, it was a mean thing to say, But she got very angry at me. She's Dominican and she's got, you know, she's got a little Ricky Ricardo, you know.

And she got mad and she stormed off and I thought, well, That was a short engagement. And so I went back, I was a student at Biola at that time. And so I went back to school and that following Monday, I went during one of the breaks to go check my mail with the Student Union Building and she's sitting out front and she has her Bible with her. And I walked over and I said, what are you doing here? And she opens up to Ephesians 1 and she points to verse 18 where Paul prays that the eyes of your heart would be opened and she looked at me and she says I understand that now.

She says for the first time in my entire life, I understand what it means to be born again. And on May 5th, 1987, the Lord opened her eyes and brought her to a saving knowledge of Christ. And she's been the greatest blessing to me. I think, brother, I mentioned to you that she's just the most cheerful, happy person that I've ever met. And she is, you know, she's not only the wife of my youth, but she is, she's the joy of my heart.

So Scott, You booked the wrong guest. What are you doing? Oh man, that is great. What a wonderful story. You know, all these, when we hear these, we get to the end of it, all I can think of is how kind is God.

He'll reach into anywhere. He'll reach anywhere and find somebody and pick him out. What a blessing. All these strange circumstances. That was really a joy to hear.

I hope it's a blessing to people who listen. Thank you so much, Brian, for joining us. Amen. My pleasure. Okay.

Okay, Jason. And thank you. Thank you so much for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast, and we hope to see you next time, next Monday. 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.