Raised by secularists, Justin Miller’s family life was a wreck. While in the eighth grade, his parents divorced—a trauma worse than death—and Justin’s mom looked to him to help raise his two younger siblings. Given a Bible at age 11, he read it every morning till age 23, but felt no peace. Newly married at the time, he was powerfully saved when he heard Adrian Rogers preach the true gospel on the radio. His wife came to Christ four months later, and they soon joined a church where the pastor taught through the Bible, verse by verse. As their faith grew, Justin was called to pastoral ministry. Moved by the Puritans’ legacy, Justin has given his life to sound but heart-felt teaching and currently serves as lead pastor of First Baptist Church in Puxico, Missouri.   

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we have another great privilege to hear a life story of one of our speakers at our national conference, Justin Miller, and it's another story of redemption and God's power to raise a man and a young woman out of a broken family into a family that's just experiencing the blessing of God. Hope you enjoy the discussion. Okay, Jason, so we've got a really neat opportunity to hear another life story. Let's do it.

I can't wait. So, Hey, he's one of the pastors at First Baptist Church, Puxico in Missouri. And by the way, he's going to give a message at our big conference, our national conference, Parenting in Babylon. Wow. I can't wait to hear it.

So Justin, welcome. Hey, we want to hear your life story. Yeah, it's great to be with you both, brothers. I follow you guys' podcast and just blessed by all the resources you put out, and so grateful to be here. That's great.

And you got a new book coming out, The Not-So-Loving Side of Gentle Parenting, A Biblical Plead to Parents. Yes. Dr. Johnson from Conway, Arkansas, he reached out to me, wanted me to write on that topic. I was initially kind of resistant, but I'm really glad I did.

It was a great study. I hope it's helpful to Christian parents particularly. Okay, so we want to hear your story. We really appreciate you taking the time to do it. Just how God worked in your life.

Yeah. And he made you for this world. Praise the Lord. Yeah. So I grew up in a secular home.

My mom and dad were moralists, but they were secularists. They did not really have any Christian leanings. Occasionally, they would take me to a church in the community. But someone gave me a Bible when I was 11 years old. And my family life was very tumultuous.

My parents divorced when I was in eighth grade and it was just a really bad, bad deal. But this person gave me a Bible when I was 11. I don't remember who actually gave me the Bible, but that Bible, I read it every morning from 11 to 23, through and through and through and through, and I got very clearly from reading the Bible that God was holy, that God was just, and that God was righteous, and mankind, we were unrighteous, unholy. But I didn't understand the gospel. As a matter of fact, whenever I would read the scriptures, I would look at Jesus as a judge.

I would look at the Ten Commandments being this standard of judgment and then Christ comes and the judgment and just increases, kind of like what Martin Luther saw with God and Christ. But at 23 and God's kindness, I heard the gospel properly expounded And it was like lightning struck my soul. I just was amazed at the substitutionary atonement of Christ, that Christ would die in the stead of a sinner like me, that he would earn righteousness I could not earn, and this was mine by faith. It just absolutely changed everything about my life. And after that, my wife and I, we got plugged into- You were married when that happened?

Yes, so I married my wife when I was 23. She thought she was a Christian, but she wasn't. We've been married, I think, for a few months. I had been going through intense conviction as I was reading Scripture, reading Scripture. I could not escape the reality that I was a sinner and God was holy.

For 11 years, I could not escape it. And when I heard the gospel, God just changed me. We got plugged into a church that preached verse by verse, book by book, which was a gift of God. And my wife actually, God saved her in a share your faith workshop. She was in a workshop learning how to share her faith and God convicted her.

And she realized she didn't know this gospel and God saved her. And that began our journey as a Christian couple, a Christian marriage. Not too long after that, the pastor of the church identified me as a possible elder pastoral person. I get came to his office actually with a list of 20 reasons why I shouldn't be a pastor. And he took the list, he threw it away, and he told me he was going to invest his life into me.

Oh my. And that dear brother for the next three years taught me how to be a Christian husband, father, and pastor. I'm just immensely grateful for him, but yeah, that, so that's kind of my, my testimony in a nutshell. Now, where, where was it that you heard the gospel for the first time? I was, at least that it, that changed your life.

Yeah. So I was in the car and I was listening to the radio and Adrian Rogers was preaching. I know I don't 100% agree with a lot of things Adrian said, but he did present the gospel and he was talking about substitutionary atonement. I just happened to stumble across what he was saying about that topic and I just was glued into it because I never understood the whole, you know, Exodus 34 dynamic. How can God forgive sin and be just?

And Adrian Rogers expounded that, explained that, and it just hit me that I'm saved by grace through faith. God is a just and justifier of all those in Christ Jesus. And it was just, I remember like just feeling, I hate to talk about just feeling, but like my affections were so stirred, I, sunshine poured in my soul. The burden was lifted like Christian and Pilgrim's progress. It just rolled off.

It was an amazing, amazing kindness of God. So, if I'm understanding this right, both you and your wife were both saved in the first year of your marriage sometime. How many months apart would that have been? So God saved me about four months into our marriage and then he saved her about nine months into our marriage. That's amazing.

So by your first anniversary, you have a Christian marriage, even though neither one of you are Christians at the altar. That's unbelievable. Yeah. God has been very, very kind to us. And The church we actually went to and picked, it was the church she wanted to go to because it was her sister's church.

I was wanting to go to more of a charismatic church. I had no idea what to go to. And she said, you got to hear this guy preach. He goes verse by verse, book by book. We've never heard anything like this.

And so I went to that church. I fell in love with expository preaching. I'd never heard the Bible expounded, verse by verse, book by book, and I just couldn't get enough of it. Oh, was all this in Missouri, you grew up in Missouri? No, no, I actually grew up in Dallas, moved to Illinois.

My dad took a position as an executive of this trafficking company in Illinois, and it's there where my family dynamics fell apart, my mom and dad divorced. And then I went to Indiana for a few years in high school, and then I went to college at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. And that's where I met my wife. Okay. And then we moved to St.

Louis after we graduated with our masters in the County and our CPAs and we took accounting jobs there. And so we were in St. Louis, Missouri when all this really happened. So I've been a little bit everywhere. Sounds like it.

So talk about just some of the influences in your life. I know you've already started down that track, but just take us further down the track. Yeah. So my biggest influence was my local church pastor. He poured his life into me.

He would rebuke me when I need to be rebuked. He would encourage me when I need to be encouraged. He took me through scripture. I was going to seminary and he made sure I didn't just become an ivory tower theologian that I employed in the local church. He was a very local church based brother.

He didn't believe you should separate training of pastors from the local church, which I carried that forward in my life and ministry. But he had the biggest impact on me. I can still hear the echoes of the things he taught me when I prepare a sermon every week. Don't miss the point of the text. I can still feel the echoes and hear his voice when I'm tempted to not prioritize my family as I should in ministry about how you don't want to sacrifice your family on the altar of ministry.

So the biggest impact in my life was my local church pastor. And then after that, when God called me to First Baptist Puxico, as I was going verse by verse, I was becoming more Reformed, and not just Reformed in the sense of Calvinism, but Reformed in the sense of everything. Regulative principle, ecclesiology, family dynamics, what that looks like in the church, living per the scripture. And I discovered the Puritans and I fell in love with the Puritans. They just spoke to my soul.

Most of the writings today didn't really speak to my soul. They would inform me about things, but they didn't get to my conscience and they didn't go to my head, to my heart. As I would read the Puritans like John Owen on mortifying sin or Thomas Boston on the crook in the lot and his memoirs were just gold. As I read Jeremiah Burroughs on Christian contentment, the rare jewel of Christian contentment, my soul was just inflamed. And so I wanted to learn more about the Puritans and how to pastor.

So I went on to get my post-grad work at Union to study under Dr. Reeves, who was a guy on the Puritans and Lethem, and then eventually on to Amsterdam, Netherlands, and then Whitfield to study more of the Puritans. I wanted to know how to pasture like the Puritans did. I wanted to be able to get to people's hearts from their from their head and so The biggest influence probably has been the peer to know. I know that's popular to say amongst the reform circles, but for me, I just, I stumbled upon them.

And it wasn't because people liked them, the reform circles, it was just, they got to my heart and the word. And so, and then also the normal guys like Calvin and his institutes where it was helpful, especially on the doctrine of union of Christ. I never understood this idea of imputation really in detail until I studied Calvin's work on the union of Christ, which I believe is the centerpiece of his theology. Perkins was influential And a lot of modern authors, there's a current guy who's actually going to be speaking at the conference. And I'm excited that he's speaking on experiential preaching because he's just phenomenal as a preacher and a dear brother and friend.

But Dr. Borgman, his book, that just came out, Don't Waste Your Breath. I've been going through that slowly and that reminds me of a modern Puritan. I love that book. I absolutely love that book.

So I'd encourage anyone to pick that up. That really is a great book. Yeah. On Ecclesiastes. Yeah.

But as far as parenting, Ted Tripp's book, Shepherd of Your Child's Heart, was probably most influential in my parenting with my children, where he basically gets beyond just the mechanics of it to the heart of how do you parent your children per their heart, help them see their sin and their need for Christ. And so those are kind of the influences. I feel like a modern Puritan. Hey, go back. You had a rough season in your life when your family blew apart.

Yeah. How, how, how is that? How was that? How is that for you now? So divorce, I believe, is more traumatic than death when you split up a family.

I was the oldest son and so when my parents divorced I had two younger siblings and I eventually had to take on more than just the role of older brother. I had to help raise them and that was very, very hard. I did the best I could, but you know, have you ever heard that you guys probably have where the single mom looks to the oldest son to really step in and that's kind of my story. And it's not biblical, it's not necessarily a good, it's not a good thing, but that's just my story, what happened. And so my brother, because of that, went in a bad direction and eventually he died, right tragically at 26 and still miss him to this day.

My sister, by God's grace, God saved her and she's married to a pastor in Oregon and they're doing very well. But it was really tough because when your family splits up and your parents divorce, it shapes the way you view the world and your identity. You get a lot of your identity from your family, who you are, especially as a boy from your father. And when those factors are altered, it really has an effect on you. It did me.

A lot of things you had to work out and honestly hadn't been for this pastors, local church pastor who really taught me and followed me, taught me how to be a father from the scripture. I don't, I wouldn't be doing half the things I'm doing today by God's grace. Wow, thanks for telling us that. That's really, really a remarkable, Remarkable story. Talk about some of your prayers for the future, your local church pastor, and what's brewing in your mind?

What's big on your mind right now? Yeah, so I'm fortunate to pastor First Baptist Pucks Co. We're a 1689 confessional church. We have a seminary that partners with Reformed Baptist Seminary and Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary that we want to train pastors in the local church. And by God's grace, we've seen 20 raised up and sent out to various commissions.

We want to see a 1689 church planted in every county of southeast Missouri and offset kind of the rise of legalism and all these other isms out there. But my hope for the future is just honestly to be faithful to Christ, the pastor of the flock here, but then see Godly men raised up who pursue piety as well as truth and preach the word of God faithfully wherever God would send them out. That sounds fantastic. That really does. So tell us a little bit more about your book.

You're going to give this message on parenting in Babylon that I asked you to do after reading your book, The Not-So-Gentle side of parenting. Just tell us about that book. Why did you write that book? Yeah, so Pastor Jeff Johnson and I were talking one day on the phone about gentle parenting and how it had come into the Reformed church. In our churches, we had known various influences of gentle parenting and we were seeing how parents were doing these things.

And we were kind of pondering why that happens in the Reformed church. Why this philosophy of gentle parenting is coming in. And then he kind of mentioned to me, you should write this book. I was resisted at first because, you know, I've been a reformed pastor, you brothers probably experienced this as well. I have enough pushback in the context I'm in.

I have enough controversy, not that I'm looking for it. I just want to be faithful to Christ and do the things that the Bible commands, church discipline, church membership, we're a family-integrated church, all those kinds of things. We're a very odd duck where we're at. I don't know if I want more controversy than I already have, But Jeff really was very persuasive. So I wrote the book.

I researched into the origins of general parenting. I didn't want to write it on an academic level, but on a popular level, so people could pick it up and read it. But I didn't just want to critique it. I wanted to also expound how to parent biblically on a summation form. And so the general parenting, I think a lot of people buy into general parenting from Christian circles, unfortunately, because they hear general parenting philosophy say you need to communicate to your kids, get them to understand their emotions and things.

And they hear that, that's great. They don't understand what's underneath it, what's underneath those kind of ideas, which is mainly the idea of self-actualization, that human beings are good, you know, all these ungodly principles. And so I wanted to get underneath that so they could see what drives those techniques and those philosophies and expose them and then kind of plead with them to look to the Bible. For God is the author of life. He is the father of lights.

He is the one we look to for all things, and especially parenting. So I wanted them to see what parenting looked like for the scripture. Tell us a little bit more about your family. How many years have you been married? How many children has God given you?

Yeah. So I've been married to my beautiful wife, Joe Dawn, for 17, almost 18 years. And I know a lot of guys say this, but I really did marry up. My wife is an amazing godly woman. She homeschools our children.

She is a mind in her own right and just has this compassionate, godly heart, loves Christ's Church, loves our children. I have four children. My oldest just got married. He's in law school. So I adopted him when he was six.

My youngest, Eden, we adopted her when she was two. So we have on the tail end two adoptions and then we have two biological children. But we're very fortunate that God has given us four children. So my oldest son just got married, he's 23, in law school. My next oldest is Ella.

She's gonna turn 13 this week or actually Sunday and Then my next after that is Isaac and he's 10 and then Eden is 10 as well. So we're just very very blessed My oldest son actually was the prodigal. We raised him in the faith and he went to college and just went haywire. And God saved him at one of our conferences. Dr.

Beeke was speaking at the Forest Glory Conference and lightning struck his soul. And he broke up with his girlfriend who was a non-Christian and just completely transformed his life. And it's interesting, you know, parents think sometimes that their kids are not hearing it, but everything we did with him in family worship that we didn't think was getting through, it came out of him. And now he's a robust, darkly faithful, godly man, part of a great church in Kansas City. And so God is faithful and we're just really grateful for that.

Amazing. That's so great. That is so great. So Let's just say, you know, some young person is listening to this broadcast. What would you tell them based on what God has taught you over the years?

How should they think about their life when they're eight or nine years old or 11 years old, particularly if things aren't going well in their family. I would communicate to them that in the Bible you'll find hope, you'll find Christ. Pick it up and read, And it's the means of grace. I would also encourage them that just because there's turmoil in their home, difficulty, that's not the end of their story. And it will ultimately define them as knowing Christ or not knowing Christ.

I would encourage them to look to Christ that he is a gracious, wonderful savior and that in him they will find more joy and peace than anything in this world could ever attempt to give them. And I would encourage them to give their life in service of Christ in the church. To really look at the local church as the epicenter of life. That's great advice. I really appreciate that.

Well, hey, Justin, thank you so much for joining us. I can't wait to hear your message at the conference on gentle parenting. And we just really appreciate your time. Appreciate what you're doing up there in Missouri. Thank you both, brothers.

It was a blessing to be on the podcast. Good deal. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. We hope you can join us next time. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches.

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