Paul White grew up never doubting the reality of God and the efficacy of the sacrifice for his sins. He cannot remember ever having a different view, nor did he experience a time of rebellion. He has no dramatic conversion story except the dramatic mercies of God to cause the lines to fall in pleasant places.

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast, Church and Family Life Exists, to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture. And today, Jason and I have the delight to hear the life story, the conversion story of Pastor Paul White. Paul is a pastor at Covenant Bible Church in Taylor'sville, North Carolina. Dear friend, speaks at our conferences. And of course, we've got him on because we want our conference speakers to give their testimony so people who listen to their messages can get a view of their life, get a broader picture of this guy.

And it's really been a blessing to interview these men. Jason isn't this nice to be able to do this? It's wonderful Paul and I recently got back from Malawi so we spent a lot of time together last month. Yeah no kidding yeah this is a it's a real joy to be able to do this. I'm thankful we can do this.

And especially with Paul. So Paul, we, we just want you to tell the story of your life. And then we might butt in every once in a while and ask you a question. But so who is this guy? I appreciate it.

Well, I think most of the men who've been on here, anybody who's ever had to give their testimony, you feel obligated to try to be faithful to tell the story, but not make it all about yourself. And that's always difficult, especially when you have a testimony that is quite extravagant. And those types of testimonies tend to get a lot of attention. And I have one of those testimonies that's actually pretty hard to believe. As a matter of fact, I would venture to say the broad majority of evangelicals, if I gave them my testimony, they probably wouldn't believe it.

But it is pretty impressive. So I'll give it and I'll let you decide. One passage of scripture that recently was brought to my attention when I was given my testimony somewhere else with some other people was Psalm 16 6, which says, the lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. And when you think about that passage, you know, the concept of the lines falling is not a random act of events. It's actually the providence of God laying out the lines of a person's life.

And that is my story. That's the story of my conversion so I want to begin there because it is pretty I believe astounding I've been reading through William Ames has a pretty popular work called The Mero of Divinity, which is basically a systematic theology. And I think everybody should read it, because if you just read a few pages in, you'll realize that men have spent their lives trying to articulate and to describe this God that we worship. And if we put all of our minds together, if we've got all the greatest theologians together to try to articulate what the Bible teaches about God, we're all scratching the surface. The Bible says these are merely the outskirts of God's ways.

We've barely even, in our very finite way, tried to describe this God that has revealed Himself to us and who's done, obviously, mighty things throughout history. But when it comes to my testimony, it begins with that God that we can't even describe setting His affection on me in eternity. And I think from Scripture I could say that the reason that I exist is to be a vessel of His mercy, that He wanted to display His mercy in someone like me. As I go forward from there into time, I have what some people might call a pretty bland testimony. But I think anybody who's come under the saving mercy of God needs to understand that that is, it's almost indescribably wonderful that God, that we can't even describe, we can't comprehend Him and will spend all of eternity learning and knowing Him would set His affection on one of us sinners, a sinner like me, not just generally, but would say Paul White is going to be an object, a vessel of my mercy.

And then from there, as I said, the lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. I was born into a home where both of my parents were Christians, are Christians. I was the first worship service that our church had after my birth. I was there. I've been in church my entire life.

The only worldview that I have ever known is the worldview that is presented in the Scriptures. The only thing I've ever known is that I am a sinner in need of God's mercy and that God sent his son to live and to die as a substitute in my place so that I could be brought into his church, brought into his family and reconciled to him. That's all I've ever known. When I meet people who were brought out of a different lifestyle and maybe they can say, well, for years I rebelled, for years I've done this or that, I maybe didn't believe in God or whatever, I don't know what that's like. All I've ever known is what the Scriptures teach, and I don't think that that makes my testimony less appealing.

To me, that's even more wonderful that God would do that for me. I think knowing myself, if I had been given an inch, I would have taken a mile and would probably not be alive today. But that was the kind of home that I was born into. I was born into a Christian family. We were faithful church people, Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night.

Anytime the doors were open, my parents still live, I would guess, within two miles of the church that I was raised in. My grandfather was a pastor there before I was born. So that's all that I knew. I remember distinctly, and this would probably be about the age of six, very distinctly, I guess it would have been on a Sunday night, we were driving to church and I leaned up between the captain's chairs of our Ford Aerostar minivan. We had one of those.

And I asked my parents, I was, I leaned up and asked my parents, how do I get saved? How does a person get saved? Again, I had never contemplated that I was not a Christian or would not be a Christian or would not believe the things that I was taught, but I guess that goes to show that I was also instilled with the understanding that I had to make my faith my own. I had to come to the Lord myself, that my parents' faith would not just be mine simply because I was born to them. And looking back, you know, the answer was probably not as theologically astute as they may give now, if somebody asked that question.

But I was pushed in the direction of God. I understood that I had to go to God myself. And so in that church on Sunday night before the evening service, there would be what we called the men's prayer room. All the men would gather into a back room and pray before the service. And the prayer room, once one man began to pray, all of the men simultaneously prayed out loud for 10 or 15 minutes until the Spirit led everyone to kind of bring their prayers to an end at the same time.

And it was usually very confusing to me as a young boy to sit there and everyone was praying out loud at the same time. But I remember in that prayer meeting, I prayed, God, if you will come into my heart and save me, I'll never sin again. You lying dog. So looking back, that shows I didn't have a full comprehension of what it meant to have redemption applied to me. And of course, in those churches, you make your profession of faith, you're baptized.

I went through that, that whole deal. It wasn't until about four or five years later that I actually made what I believed to be my first real legitimate profession of faith with an understanding of what it meant in those churches. And they're still around. There's a division between making Jesus your Lord versus receiving Him as Savior. And I don't know that I ever imbibed much of that teaching or bought into it much, but I do remember coming to that understanding where I realized that being a Christian was more than just coming to get something.

It is that, and I knew that, but it was also a coming to submit yourself completely to the dictates of Jesus Christ as King. And that was an understanding that obviously I'm still growing and learning what that means. I think that's a part of being a Christian, but that came later at about the age of 10 is when I made the profession with that understanding. Now, I don't believe that we're born again by profession of faith, so that's why I describe those professions of faith. At what point I was truly regenerated in those years, I couldn't tell you.

The mysterious working of God in my life, for some people, they can go to that moment when they stopped doing all of these things that they had lived in, and from there their life was different. Well, I was a child raised in a Christian home. I continued to do the things that I was taught to do, continued studying, continued being a part of the church, continued obeying my parents, and grew in those things. I can never remember a time in my life when any of those things was a drudgery. Church was always a blessing to me, a joy to me.

I never remember not wanting to go to church. I do remember my mom making me wear some really itchy dress pants that I hated. But I never, never disdained worship. Never disdained being around the people of God because that's all that I ever knew. The one thing for me that I would say was a great turning point for me was when I was in high school and had a Sunday school teacher who would tell us often that we should be reading our Bibles every day.

Now, I'm sure that I had known that before, and I've got Bibles from my childhood with notes and things in them. I know that I had read the Bible, had been in worship, had sat under preaching, had enjoyed preaching. It had never occurred to me for some reason that I needed to take my studies, my pursuit of the Lord with regard to reading the Bible into my own hands, if you will. That just wasn't something that was pushed in those circles. I went to church, I enjoyed the preaching, I agreed with the preaching, I was taught, I was educated.

But to buy a Christian book, it had never crossed my mind that I could buy a book and read it on my own. But I remember distinctly that him saying that, you need to be reading your Bible every day. And I would think, but I hate reading. I did not like reading any type of literature. I was a teenage boy.

And so I remember praying because I came under conviction for that. I remember praying, God, would you give me a desire to read your Word? Because I know that I don't have it, but I should have it. And From that point, it seems like, and maybe some time passed, but through the years, that prayer has been the one that has sort of, that God has answered far more beyond anything that I understood at that time. That is what led into being more involved in the church in teaching Sunday school classes there in that church on my own.

As opportunities arose, I understood as an older, even as a boy, if I'm older, I should be helping to disciple those who are younger. So I would have opportunities to teach Sunday school classes. I would take it. Any opportunity that was given to me, I would willingly take it because I understood that that was what I should do. And through that, avenues began to open up where I had to study the Scriptures more and more and more.

And eventually the opportunity arose for some of us in the church that we were in at the time to go and plant our own church. I had never heard of church planting. I had no idea what it meant. I was invited because I was going to play in the band and I liked to play in the band. That's all that, Even looking back, the music that we were into was a very seeker-driven type of atmosphere that we were aiming for.

Even that, I had no idea that existed until somebody said, hey, do you want to come do this? My scope of the Christian life was always narrowed to what I was being given from pastors and church leaders and my parents. It wasn't until other young people came and said, hey, why don't you come and do this, that I even discovered those things. But so anyway, we planted the first church in 2010 under that ministry philosophy. It grew to about 150 in a year, which when you're just trying to attract people with those types of things, it's easy to attract people and it was very easy.

Good personalities, good music, good lights, it's easy to get people to come. After a year we decided that a group of us would come back to my hometown and plant a campus. This is what we were, our language was a campus of that original church. And so I was appointed as the campus pastor to be sent out to plant this other campus. Again, all of this is to me, I'm just going along with these opportunities that are given.

I don't understand much, But I did begin to read and to study. It was about those times, around this time that I began to listen to men like a John Piper, you know, the gateway drug. And he mentions, he'll mention this guy, he'll mention this book, and I begin to chase that line because my mind was, I was realizing I can do this, I can search for these things on my own. So I'm learning as we're planting that church, I'm learning more about the Bible, learning more about what it means to be a pastor, what a church is, all of it pretty much as I just would take a wild hair and get a book. The first two books I ever read from the local library where we were living was The Reason for God by Tim Keller, a apologetics book, and an early edition of Calvin's Institutes that were in the, I had no idea that you didn't, that there were levels, introductory levels of reading.

I just knew these were names that I had heard. The first banner of truth book that I ever ordered was Religious Affections by Jonathan Edwards. I read through that and I remember learning a lot, but getting to the end of it thinking, this is so far beyond anything I've ever thought of. And still I could go back to it now and probably couldn't comprehend most of it. The point being, I would just hear a name, I would hear a book, I would get it, hear a name, get a book, hear a name, listen to a sermon, just sort of picking, chasing whatever I could.

And that's when my world began to open up to things like Reformed theology. Reformed soteriology was first, obviously, through the planting of the second church and the way that those two churches worked together and eventually separating, I sort of found myself pastoring a church, coming to that realization after the fact, oh, we're a church, and these people are here, and I've been preaching and I've been studying. It was never something that I was aiming for, ever. Never would have dreamed that I would be pastoring a church. So anyway, that was about 2011, 2012, I guess.

Whenever that happened and those two churches separated because of my extracurricular reading, we immediately cleaned off the membership roster and reconstituted as a confessional reform Baptist church. We all read through the 1689 Baptist confession. We went through it together. My first membership class that we had, those who were there will remember it was on a Saturday, and I'm pretty sure it was about eight hours long on a Saturday. I printed off overhead projection transparencies of all of our documentation and it had a literal overhead projector.

Most people don't even know what those are anymore. And had, you know, wet erase markers and went through this thing for, because I didn't, I just didn't know any better. I just knew we have got to get some foundation here in what we're doing. And again, I keep coming back to the lines just seem to fall in pleasant places. People who were there in the early days who didn't, you know, weren't crazy about sound doctrine left and wonderful people have come.

The Lord has continued to bring us saints who intimidate me spiritually in their walk and in their study and in their living. I've had no opportunity to cool my jets or take it easy when it comes to study. There's no way that I could, even if I wanted to, you know, pull one over on our congregation, preach a sloppy sermon, or slide in something that was, you know, weak, because I have people who I know would catch it. They would say, what are we doing? Things like that.

It has just been, the Lord has just been in front of me, but also, like he says in Psalm 23, goodness and mercy following me, chasing me almost down this path that when I look back, I can't take any credit for anything that has ever happened in my life or ministry at all, except for the bad things, bad decisions, silly lights, silly things that we don't like that. Hey, Paul, could I derail you for just a minute and throw you into another category, into the family category, and just ask you how in the world did you meet Christy? How did you get married? What is your family composition now? Okay, so family.

I met Christy through friends. She worked at the mall at a kiosk in the mall selling rainbow flip-flops. I started working a job when I was in high school. So as soon as I graduated, I immediately had a full-time job. The same was not so for most of my peers.

So while they would hang out at the mall, I was working and they met her, knew her. Eventually we got together and met through them eating, you know, buffalo Wild Wings together. I wasn't interested whenever, you know, she sort of approached me. I wasn't interested. I actually told her, you know, in so many words, my experience with females is that most of them are not worth my time.

And I believe that she felt that she was worth my time. And so she continued to nudge and she was. And so we began to hang out. I told Jason the first time that we ever hang out, hung out together apart from the bulk of my friends was at a family pool party that her family was having a birthday party. And I'm not really much for swimming.

I stood in the waist deep swimming pool in my cutoff jean shorts with my arms crossed. I just stood there. I was, I let her know that it was going to be a blast. If she would go with me, it was going to be a blast. So we began to hang out.

She came to church with me. I began to realize, you know, maybe this girl is actually, you know, a marryable person. I heard her sing and that pretty much sealed the deal when I heard her sing. So we were together for one year. We got engaged And then exactly one week later, we went to the courthouse on my lunch break.

We got married. I went back to work and she and her grandfather proceeded to move her belongings out of her house into the little single wide trailer that I had been living in for a month in preparation for being a married man. I wanted to plant myself firmly in that way and have a place. So anyway, so we, so yeah, we, we, we, we, we were together for a year, engaged for a week, got married at the courthouse. I think most people probably assumed, you know, we got married under, under negative circumstances, but it wasn't, We, I just, I knew not long after I, we began to, to be together.

I knew, I told her I was going to marry her and that's, so that's what I did. How old were you, how old were you when you married her? Probably 21, 22. Had, had neither one of us had any idea what it meant to be married, not a clue. And again, God's grace in preserving our marriage and keeping us from ripping each other's heads off is unbelievable.

And she's one of those people that I've been able to watch be sanctified before my eyes. I can see little growth in my own life if I look back. But with her, I've been able to literally watch. And looking back, I think she would profess to actually become converted under my preaching during those early days of that second church plant, but she professed to be a believer before then. But then from that point, watching the Lord bring her in from the girl at the flip-flop kiosk in the mall to now a mother, we have six children now, a godly mother of six children who, if she hears or learns something from the Word of God that should order her life that she's not doing, it's like it's done.

Like the next day, it's like, there it was, you know, I did it. For me, it would be six months or something. I'm still wrestling with this thing. And why can't I get it? For her, it's just, so I've just been able to watch that, just a wonder of God's sanctifying grace.

But yeah, so, so, but yeah, we've been married for 14 years, maybe. But we do have six children. The oldest is 12. The youngest is one year, three boys, three girls. And it's these, these are more just gifts.

Somebody asked me when I was in New Jersey, a man said, how many kids do you have? I said, I have six children. He said, do you like them? And I said, yes. And I tell them all the time, they're my favorite people in the world.

It's difficult to get me out of my study, but it's even more difficult to get me away from my home and my family. I don't want to be away. I tell my wife, she has made a home for us here that I don't want to be away. Somebody asked recently, what do you do for vacation or what do you like to do for vacation? I said, I don't need a vacation.

I live in what feels like a constant state of vacation, because I love my wife and my family so much that I don't feel the need to get away from it. So it's God's grace. I had never heard a sermon series or anything that I remember on biblical marriage or the roles of men and women or the blessing of children. All of that I came upon later When I'm in the middle of it, so the fact that I haven't completely ruined every bit of it or driven every bit of it into the ground, it's just God's grace. He's been very, very kind to me.

So yeah, that's our family. Wow. What a delightful story. That was really fun to hear. Isn't God kind?

Oh man. He picks us up and he keeps carrying us. Absolutely, yes. And he'll keep carrying you. Yeah.

So glad you found a good wife. Isn't that just so helpful? Yeah, well it's, when, it's a testimony to scripture. People, There are things that the Bible teaches that you can affirm, but you don't learn it until you actually experience it. The Bible says, he who finds a wife finds a good thing, and a single man can say all day long, I want to be married, I want to be married.

He has no clue what a blessing it actually is to find a good wife. The Bible says children are a blessing from the Lord. And you can say all day long, I love kids, I love kids, I love kids, until you actually have them and you experience it. I mean, it's reality bearing witness to the God of reality, the God who established all of these things. So it's wonderful.

The unity of the Spirit with your wife is one of the most powerful things in the world. Yeah. It really is. Well, Paul, thank you so much for telling us all those things. I heard things I never knew and I just really, really appreciated your testimony.

And I pray people come and hear your messages and at our conferences. So thanks a lot. Thank you. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. We'll see you next time.

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