Join us as we hear how a fourteen-year-old boy raised in a godly home was saved. Joel Beeke says he felt like “the greatest sinner on the face of the earth.” One day, a minister came over to visit and the whole family gathered around. The minister was talking to Joel’s grandfather and said, “for you too, there is a way of escape through Jesus Christ.” Joel told us he heard those words as though they were directed to him and, “that was the moment of my salvation. These words penetrated my soul. And I received it by faith, and the burden rolled off just like Christian in Pilgrims Progress.”

Well, welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture. And Jason, we have a real treat ahead of us we have Joel Beeke. Hello Joel. Hello good to be with you.

Thank you Joel. So Joel is gonna give us his the story of his life and his testimony And we've just been so thankful for you, Joel, for many years. So, tell us the story of your life. Okay, okay. One of the difficult things about telling the story of anyone's life, I suppose, is that people will compare Their life to to your life and I just want to say that I grew up in a Kind of an unusual background And so parts of my story are going to be something that people hopefully can identify with and be encouraged by.

But I also want God to get all the glory for it and I don't want anyone to think if you haven't had experiences like me you know you're not saved or some other other thing because God leads everyone in their own way so I just want to preface my comments with that And the other thing is that in myself, I'm nothing nothing but a sinner and it's everything that's happened to me is that I'm going to tell you right now, it's God's amazing grace. So I want all the credit, all the glory to go to God. So I grew up in a very God-fearing home in one way and yet in a denomination that was solidly, richly reformed in theology, but a bit hyper-Kelvinistic. It was very unusual for someone to be saved and regarded to be just a tremendous miracle, which I still believe it is a tremendous miracle, but what I didn't hear very much of was, God's in the business of doing miracles, and he's a great God. And so I grew up, along with all the other young people in my church in Kalamazoo, Michigan with the idea that genuine conversion was a wonderful thing, but it was usually for older people.

And there's really no expectation that you'd be saved as a young person. My dad was unusual in our denomination in that he spoke to me often about the way the Holy Spirit works in the soul. He would read Pilgrim's Progress for about 30 to 45 minutes every Sunday night and we would sit around him and we'd ask him questions and he'd put the book down and he'd often teach us with tears streaming down his face. So my dad was very, very godly, even though he believed at that time, he changed later, but at that time he believed that the gospel is only offered to people who are already convicted of their sins. So kind of a hyper-Calvinistic view there as well.

So when I grew up, I didn't know, I didn't know of anyone under the age of 50 that really attended the Lord's Supper. I knew of no one who had assurance of faith. I knew of no, no concerned, spiritually concerned young people at all. I heard a lot about easy believism being condemned, but I didn't realize the dangers of what I now call hard believers, but it's almost impossible to be saved. When I was nine years old, I had a very, very bad stomachache one day, and I cried out to god like a child would and Amazingly the stomach ache went away right away and I just like oh God answered my prayer was like Unbelievable, I just didn't think God answered the prayer of a little child like me and so it left me profoundly Convicted I went to my dad's bookcase.

I thought I gotta start reading And I looked through his books and I found one by John Bunyan called The Life and Death of Mr. Badman. And I said, I'm a bad boy, so this has got to be the right book for me. And, you know, it was really an adult book, but I read through the whole thing as a nine-year-old. And about six months later, I read more books, but about six months later, it all faded away.

It all came to nothing. It was all just a common conviction of the Holy Spirit, not saving the saving work. And I went on until I was 14 years old and played a lot of sports. Didn't have many chores to do, grew up in the city. I had two older brothers, tried to keep up with them, and yeah, went to a public school and I was vice president of my class even though I was very shy, very very shy, But what happened was I began to question my dad's convictions that if anybody got saved in the Kalamazoo area, they'd end up in our church because we only had the truth and that type of thing.

So I was beginning to get just a tad bit, not rebellious, that'd be too strong of a word, but questioning. I went to school one day and I had a ninth grade teacher who was an atheist and he wrote on the board and signed his name beneath it there is no God I don't even know if it was legal for him to do that he said to us You give me three minutes and I'll prove to you there's no god and you can have the rest of the hour to try to defend against my position and He did a traditional thing which I didn't know was a traditional thing He talked about the six million Jews being killed in the Holocaust and if God was good and kind, you know, this would be impossible. And well, I had never raised my hand in my entire life in class because I was so shy. So he was astonished when suddenly I stood up and I defended God, I'm not sure even till today if what I said was really theologically too sound, but I said something like this. I said, that's because the Jews said, let his blood be upon us and our children and I said it with that kind of conviction and the man was so astonished to hear me speak that he told me to sit down and we go on with our class and he talked to me after class and after class I Talked him more.

I was defending God, but when I left that day Something happened to me. I'll never forget There was a voice inside of me that said, so at home you're starting to argue against your dad. At school you're standing up and arguing for God. Now who are you? You don't even have a relationship with God yourself.

Who do you think you are? And at the same time My brother and an older friend were going to take a trip in a few months. They were climbing it out to the Rocky Mountains for four weeks. And my parents won't let me go. They said I was too young, 14.

And I felt a need in my soul to know God really, really badly. And so I sat my parents down one night and with tears, I said, would you please let me go with my brother and my friend because I just need to find God. And I thought if I go to the Rocky Mountains, I stand before him. I have deep impressions of God. And to my surprise, they let me go.

So I sat in the back seat for four weeks and they too sat in the front. I was the treasurer and we did that whole trip for $420. Gas was 19 cents a gallon and we camped at campgrounds that were one or two dollars, an expensive one was three dollars a night and so the whole trip cost me one third of that was 141 dollars. But anyway we went all the way out to the Pacific Ocean through Canada came all the way back nothing happened in the Rocky Mountains I was so disappointed. We ended up in Yellowstone National Park and woke up on a Saturday morning.

We had to travel, I think it was 700 miles to Iowa because my parents said, you can only go on the trip if you if you're in one of our denominations churches every Sunday but we couldn't find the keys that morning and My brother and his friend went out in the woods to try to find a twig that could open the trunk. They were convinced that they must have dropped into the trunk. We lifted up our sleeping bags in the tent several times. Nothing. When they went into the woods, I went into the tent and I fell just flat on my face and I said, Lord, I didn't know what was wrong to do this.

I laid out a Gideon's fleece and I said, Lord, if I were the living God, please show me, show me where these keys are. And I was just overwhelmed with the sense that I needed God. And I got off my knees, and it seems like a trivial thing now to anybody who hears it But I felt something hard beneath my knees. I lifted up the sleeping and there were the keys I was like we lifted that up. Well, why didn't we see that before it But what happened at that moment?

Was. I felt like it was a lost center before God and all my sins came back to me like it was a movie. And I just felt overwhelmed with my sin. I, for the whole day they drove, I was weeping in the back seat. Over Sunday, I couldn't stop weeping about my sins.

And then we drove home, which was another 800, 900 miles. And I just felt like I was a reprobate. God was going to destroy me. And I went to all my friends and I was very popular at school even though I was shy. I was good at basketball and stuff like that.

And I went to them all and said, I can't be a friend until I find God. And I went home each night immediately after school. I hold myself up in my bedroom, quickly did my homework. I read the Bible from cover to cover. And I began to read my dad's Puritan paperbacks in his bookcase, and my whole life changed.

I stopped playing sports with my brothers. I just had to have God. And the more I searched, the more hopeless it became. I once a while I got a little hope from reading something in one of those Puritan books, got very little hope. Church.

And It just seemed like there was no salvation for me. I was a reprobate child I felt like I was the greatest sinner on the face of the earth And then I read a book called a rebel made a child about a woman who was had all kinds of physical pain And she loved the lord and It just made me all the more of a sinner. I was just, oh lord, I can never be like this woman. And I was just, yeah, I was just, I was, I actually sometimes didn't even dare walk on grass because I thought God was going to swallow me up like Cora, Dathan, and Abiram. And it was just awful.

And it lasted for about 14 months. And then, amazingly, Amazingly, we received a minister. It was the first minister we got in 41 years. There were only five ministers in a denomination of 10,000 people. And this minister was very gospel centered.

Was not hyper-Kelvinistic at all. And preached the gospel freely, fully to sinners. And that's, of course, what I was, just a big sinner. And he came over to visit our family after he was there a couple months. I was drinking in his sermons.

Oh, man. And that combined with reading the Puritan paperback was giving me a little bit of hope, but I just couldn't hope that God would actually save a sinner like me. And the whole family circle was gathered around and I had a grandfather who was full of doubts all his life and every minister tended to try to encourage him. And this minister did too. And he said to him, Mr.

Ben-Strain, for you too, there's a way of escape in Jesus Christ through faith in him. And Scott and Jason, that was the moment of my salvation. Those words were meant for me and they penetrated my soul to the depths of my being and for the first time in my life I saw clearly that Jesus Christ had done everything for me. I just received it with faith and the burden just rolled off my back exactly exactly like Christian and Pilgrim's Progress, into the empty sepulcher. And I saw for the first time in my life that what I needed was two things.

I needed a Savior to die for me, and I needed a savior to obey the law perfectly for me. I didn't know the terms active and passive obedience, but I saw the gospel so clearly and I saw he had done it for me and I received it and I believed it. My sins were gone and I went to bed and I was like I was like a Pentecostal actually My hands were up in the air and I was just crying out to God. It's just weeping weeping for joy and I'm saved I'm saved I kept saying and at three o'clock in the morning I couldn't sleep it was so overwhelming for me I went down and I knocked on my parents' bedroom. My dad came stumbling out.

I've never woken my parents up in the middle of the night my whole life. But I said, dad, I've been saved. I've been saved. And he goes, oh, oh, wow. Tell me, tell me about it.

Tell me about it. So I told him and told him that Christ was my savior and my only hope was in him and told him what happened. And he goes, well, I can only think of a few people on one hand, I can count them on one hand in the whole church that can say they've had this kind of experience. So you better be careful what you claim. So he kind of discouraged me.

And but it didn't bother me. It was it was the most real thing that ever happened to me. And, and what happened to me was my tongue was on loose. And my shine has disappeared. And I started going door to door in the neighborhood.

I want to tell everyone about Jesus and I talked to everybody at work I talked to everybody at school and Well, I did that for a couple weeks and then I don't know if you guys remember the plain truth from Herbert W Armstrong that sect when you were young and I went to a lady's house and knocked on or rang the doorbell and she invited me in and she belonged to that sect And she listened to me and then she said, well, you believe in the Trinity. I said, well, of course I do. She said, well, the Holy Spirit is not God. And she explained to me that the Greek for the Holy Spirit was actually a neuter, which meant an it. So she showed me in her bible she changed all the references to he and him of the holy spirit to it how you know what to answer I was like what in the world is this about I so I realized I better I'm not really qualified to go door to door yet.

I'm too, way too ignorant. And so anyway, the next summer I worked for my dad again, he was a carpenter. And meanwhile, I was reading, reading, reading, and the Puritan books were used, that's why I'm so book-centered still today. They were used to bring me to greater liberty and understanding of the gospel in Christ. I loved them.

I just consumed them. One day my dad, He built a house for a man who was very, very fussy, and there were weeds that grew up in the front yard, and he didn't want weed killer put on them. So I was the low man on the totem pole, so my dad said to me, you go and you pull weeds for about a month And just have a blanket with you and just go pull every weed out of that man's entire yard So that's what I did for one month And I was thinking about nothing absolutely nothing and this is gonna sound strange and a bit mystical, but just bear with me. I'm sitting there pulling weeds and it was as if the Lord spoke to me. I know it's not an audible voice.

Go forth and preach the gospel into all men, yea, even to the ends of the earth." I was so overwhelmed. I stood up. I looked around. There was nobody there. I was shaking.

I was literally shaking. And I said, this can't be me. The youngest minister in our denomination is 52. I'm 16. I'm 16 now.

This, and I'm too shy. This cannot be me. And yet, It was so overwhelming that I went to the new minister and I said, what is this? And he said, well, he calmed me down. He said, it could be the beginnings of the ministerial call, but the Lord will have to confirm it in other ways.

So just wait on the Lord. And so I did. But I couldn't shake it off at all. And I became president of the youth group. And they asked me to, the first time they asked a young person in the history of the denomination to actually speak at the youth day conference.

So now I had to speak and I was like, oh, I'm way too shy for that. But I did a speech on, I did an address on what think ye of Jesus Christ, five false ways and one true way. And you know, the Lord just wonderfully helped me that time. That was a huge boost in my life that I felt like, well, God could equip me. God could equip me.

And meanwhile, I was playing basketball and the Western Michigan coaches, this is now I was like a year ago, I was 17, and they were going to come out and watch me play a game. I was a junior at that time in high school, but watched me play a game with, at Western Michigan University between the two rival teams in Kalamazoo. I had wanted to do that game for five years in my life since I was in sixth grade. That was my dream. I would dream about it at night.

But meanwhile, I had this call to the ministry and that basketball is consuming so much time and I felt my pride in basketball and so on. And anyway, I wrestled the night before. I read the scriptures. I wrestled for God's will. And the next morning I just felt convinced I had to quit.

I had to give up my idol and give my whole time to preparation for ministry. And so I went to the coach and told him I was quitting. And I came home early that day. And my mother, I walked on the door. She said, What are you doing?

You know, because normally I'd practice for three hours after school. And she's I said, well, I quit basketball today. My dad walked in right behind me and. And my mother said, you better you better tell your dad what you just told me. So I said, well, I quit basketball.

My dad was starting to open the mail and he turned around and he looked at me with a very strange look and I knew, I knew right then that he finally believed I was actually converted. Oh my. That I gave up my idol. And from that day on my relationship with my dad took a wonderful turn for the better. We had spiritual conversations heart to heart.

And my dad started, I told him how I was called to the ministry. My dad Accepted it and he started giving me advice for the future and it was it was wonderful So make a long story short. I was accepted when I was 21. I Studied for four years Canada under one minister went to be pastor when I was 25 of 700 farmers in Northwest, Iowa didn't know a thing about farming Three and a half years I served them and it went fairly well, but then I felt called to serve 700 people who are doctors and lawyers in just outside of New York City and that's when I felt my need for more education and went down and got my PhD from Westminster And then I accepted a call just when I was finishing that and six years five and a half years later and came to Grand Rapids which is 36 years ago. Wow.

So I've been here for 36 years And then eventually the denomination was in, felt I was preaching too much like the Puritans, too free with the offer of grace. So there was a split in the denomination and I was a theological teacher by that time. But I had to start a sad split. Well, they had to start a new denomination. 2000 people came out from 10 churches and I had to start a new seminary and a new book ministry.

So I started everything over. And so that's how Peer to Reform Seminary was born. Started with four students. Today we have 260 students. And the church is also 700 people.

So all three churches I've served in my life have been around 700 people. And God's been very, very good to me, given me a wonderful wife, wonderful children, eight grandchildren, just had one two weeks ago, and ninth one on the way. And yeah, I just want to use my whole life to serve the Lord. And I love doing conferences, reaching out to people, writing books, I Spent a lot of my life writing. I feel closest to God when I write and so I Just love everything about ministry except very long meetings but I love I love serving I love serving the Lord with all my heart And my dad became much more gospel-centered, so did my mother and my family.

And yeah, a wonderful family. My dad passed away on the pulpit. He had a heart attack on the pulpit. My mother lived to be 92 when she died, she had 92 great grandchildren. Oh my, wow.

We have a big family. God is just very, very good to me. Thank you. Thank you, Joel. Joel, transport yourself into the presence of another 14-year-old who's struggling with Assurance of salvation.

Yeah. So you're looking into his eyes and he's 14. He's just like you sort of. What would you tell him? I would tell him that Trust the Lord, trust in his promises, and surrender yourself completely to Jesus Christ.

Read 1 John. There are several marks there that explain exactly who believers are. I would walk you through a few of those marks. Those who are truly assured of their faith are those who hate sin they love the Lord Jesus and sincerity but I would ask him questions about that. Do you love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity?

Do you love the people of God? We know we pass from death to life because we love the brethren. If he was a serious young man and he was wrestling with assurance, I would talk to him along those lines, looking for the marks of grace in himself, resting the promise of God. If he was looking how to be saved, of course, I would just talk to him about the need to repent of his sins and to believe in Christ alone for salvation. Wonderful.

Well, Joel, thank you so much. What a blessing it's been to hear that story and how the Lord planted you in that family and brought you up. And we are so thankful that you at least have today ahead of you and tomorrow, probably the next day, probably, I hope you get another 30 years. Almost like your grandmother, right? You know, every day, Scott, we've got to live as if it were our last day.

You know, my dad always impressed that on us. You know, how can I live most for the glory of God today? And I saw my dad die in one second. We just always got to serve the Lord to the full. I love the text of Caleb where he followed the Lord fully.

And then he went into the wilderness for 40 years and he came back out and he says, he followed the Lord fully All those years with all those murmuring Israelites were dying all around him and he just kept following the Lord fully and that's that's that's what I yearn to Yearn to do in my life just follow him fully to the end praise the Lord Well, thank you Joel Thank you And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. I hope you get a chance to hear Joel Beeke's messages. There are many, many, many on our website. Come to our conference and hear him again. It's always such a joy to have him.

And I hope you can join us at the next podcast next Monday. See you 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.

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