The oldest of seven, Ben was raised by faithful Christian parents who not only took their family to church, but who practiced regular family worship. Yet as he came into his teen years, Ben made football his idol. Gratefully, his loved ones and mentors pushed back. Ben’s father challenged his sports obsession. And other men in his life relentlessly set Jesus before him till, one day, Ben was converted as he fixed his eyes on Christ’s finished work. Ben married his wife Jessa at age 19. Now a father of six, he currently serves as pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Springdale, Arkansas. 

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we've got the privilege to hear the life story of Ben Seawald. He's going to be preaching at our national conference, Manhood and Womanhood, the Glory of God in the Creation Order. You're going to hear a story a story of a boy that grew up as a result of a family reformation. Hope you enjoy the story.

Music Jason, one of the really interesting things that's going on right now, it's been going on just for a few years, you have lots of young pastors that are either reforming their churches to an age-integrated pattern, or they're actually planting family integrated churches, and they're young, they're in their 30s and 40s. It's actually, it's a different moment, it's a new trend, and I'm really grateful for it. And so we've got one of those pastors on the line today on the podcast, Ben Seewald. Hey, Ben. Hey, Scott and Jason.

So good to be with you guys today. Yeah, thanks for joining us. Ben is a pastor at Emmanuel Baptist Church in Springdale, Arkansas. What a beautiful place it is out there. So we were really thankful that you're going to tell us your story.

You're going to be preaching at our national conference on manhood and womanhood, the glory of God in the creation order. And so we just, what we want our hearers at the conference to have is a bigger picture of that preacher's life just to connect the hearer with the speaker to help them understand who this guy really is. So that's what we want to do. So, yeah, so tell us about your childhood and the things you experienced? Yeah, so I had the great blessing of being raised by parents who loved the Lord and always, Not only took us to church, but also Were faithful in family worship my father Would always read to us from God's Word usually after dinner and we would just read three books of the Bible and So I remember him reading my mom playing the guitar and and we'd sing together as a family.

And just through their training over the years, they instilled in us the gospel, they taught us the truth. And so, I was really very blessed. I'm the oldest of seven, so I've got four sisters and two brothers. And yeah, my dad, we, so during my teen years, I remember him really confronting me about just idols of the heart. And this was after I had already made a profession of faith at a younger age, around seven years old.

And yet I was, I don't know that I truly understood the gospel until I was in my teen years. And I'm so thankful my parents, they pointed me to the scriptures and they were not afraid to point out in my life, you know, we think that you're following some idols. For me, as a teenager, that was it was sports. I I wanted to be a football player. That was kind of what I lived and breathed for is my life.

And my dad, I remember him just challenging me about that. And at the time, as a young kid, as a teenager, I thought to myself, well, my dad just doesn't understand me. He doesn't support my dreams. And yet, also in the back of my mind, I knew he really loved me and did care about me and what he was saying was probably more true than I wanted to realize in the moment. And so he just challenged me about idolatry.

And through the blessing of God, being in faithful gospel preaching churches, continuing to hear the gospel, not only from my parents, but also from in the pulpit every Sunday. And I was, I really think I was truly converted around 15, after a lot of struggling and dealing with coming to a place where I just was desperate to know for sure, you know, God, if I'm not truly saved, I want to know. I don't want to be one of the people in Matthew 7 who says, Lord, Lord, didn't we do all these things in your name? And yet he says, depart from me, workers of lawlessness. And so, yeah, around 15, I began to see some real change in my life.

I was able to finally fix my eyes on the Christ as my Savior, rather than being so focused on what I'd been focused on before, which was, have I prayed the sinner's prayer correctly? Is my faith good enough? Have I wept enough tears of sorrow over my sin. And looking back, I think maybe I was just, I was so fixated on myself rather than Christ. But as my preachers in the churches that we attended were just kept setting Christ before me by the power of the Holy Spirit.

One day I finally was able to just focus on Christ and His finished work. And so I'm so thankful to the Lord for that. That's really amazing. You know, you're one of those few people who grew up having the Bible read to them. Now, this hardly ever happened in the 20th century.

It's happening a lot more today. And you were in one of those families. How did your dad come to this practice? Because, you know, he was doing this probably 25 years ago, something like that, 30 years ago. Yeah, I just turned 30, so yeah.

Well, and I owe so much to my father and his just as the Lord has led him along over the years that I've really followed in his footsteps and even with the convictions about family integrated church. And so I recall whenever I was six or seven, we were part of an independent Baptist church at the time, and it was not family integrated. And I remember us leaving that church, And though we love many of the people there, I'm in fact still friends with some of them and we love them dearly. But at the time, this church was, they had different events each night of the week, And it was all age segregated. They had children's church and children's Sunday school, and they expected the parents to be out soul winning on Tuesday nights and Wednesday nights that the children would be in, you know, Patch the Pirate Club.

And we just felt like our family was being just torn apart at the seams. At least that's how my parents felt. And so I remember my dad expressing some of these things to our pastor and explaining to me, I was the oldest, so naturally I wanted a reason, Why are we leaving our church? Why are we leaving our friends? He explained that to me.

So I got to watch him wrestle through some of those things. I also have to say part of it was due to men such as yourself, Scott. My dad had read certain of your publications and heard different sermons and things. So I've known of you for quite a while. We attended even a father-son retreat that you were part of.

No kidding. Wow. In Birmingham, Alabama. I remember that. I was probably seven at the time.

I was very young. Yeah. I had my son there with me. He was probably around 10 or something like that. Yeah.

I remember him. I remember him. So yeah, those were things that I got to watch my dad evolve in and come to these convictions. And I got, as the oldest child, I got to see how that changed our family dynamic. But even going back to my grandparents, I mean, even, I think the family worship part of things, that was something that even his father had done to an extent.

And so I think he, he took that from his father and then he just continued that and added certain things in with our family growing up. So catechism, for example, I remember he reached a point where he had us memorizing the catechism and doing scripture memory as part of our homeschool curriculum. So yeah, very thankful for that. So you got yourself married. How long ago did you get married?

We just celebrated our 11th anniversary a few days ago. Okay. Wow, that is great. I was 19 at the time when we got married and met my wife through really at church. And again, that was part of my parents helping us as we were a homeschool family and in a small church.

And so my dad was, and my mom were aware of our kind of limited social settings. And they're not being someone at church I was interested in at the time. They said, well, let's visit some other churches and just travel a little bit and we'll stay, you know, of course, stay connected with our own home church. But every now and then let's go on a trip and let's meet some other people that could be a spouse. And so that's where I met my wife is on one of those trips.

Oh, that's great. We traveled to Northwest Arkansas and visited her church on a Sunday and we met and yeah, went from there. How long did it take you to figure it out? Well, I mean, at the time I was just 18. So I knew, all right, she's beautiful and she seems like she comes from a great family.

So, you know, I was pretty sold right out the gate. Unless I was just thinking, if there are no red flags that come up as I get to know her, then this could be... So yeah, as we talked, as I got to know her, we shared a lot of the same convictions about many things. We came from very similar backgrounds in many ways, both homeschooled families and Baptists, kind of broadly speaking. We had some doctrinal differences, So I was more of a Calvinist and she wasn't.

And so that was kind of always something in our relationship where we had to kind of process through that. And even with her, with her family, you know, is this a deal breaker for us or not? And it ended up not being praise the Lord. Yeah, yeah, we've, but yeah, that was, that's kind of how we got to know each other is just around her family's dinner table. We would, I started driving up to a visit on weekends, even by myself, without the rest of my family, because they couldn't always get away as often.

Then her family would invite me over for lunch after church. So I got to spend lots of time with her dad and brothers and just get to know the whole family. Okay, so you had different influences, reform, non-reformed, through your life cycle. Who are some of the people that have influenced you the most as a pastor, as a theologian, just whatever you think? Yeah.

Well, I'll start with the people that were in my life and then I'll kind of go more broad of names that others might recognize. So, first and foremost, my dad, I would say, and I've already talked a little bit about just his influence, but even some of his theological convictions over the years as we talked. Like, I got to watch him go from being more of free will theology to coming to a biblical understanding of election and predestination. And I remember having hours and hours of debates with my dad and he would always win. I was like, why can't I ever win an argument with my dad?

But I realized eventually that I'm really arguing with God's word. So my father, my pastor, Kevin Smead, the one who was a pastor through my like mid teen years and really under whose preaching the Lord saved me. So just him focusing on the gospel and preaching the doctrines of grace very clearly made such an impact upon my soul. And we had a neighbor guy. One of the things that I appreciate about my father is that he always encouraged us as children not to just hang out with kids that were our same age.

He wasn't against that, but he reminded us of the value of spending time with older, wiser believers. Some of my friends that impacted my life so greatly were actually, they started out as my dad's friends. But as we'd have these families over, a guy named Jake, our neighbor, Dylan, these men that I began to look up to and respect. And at times in my teen years, my relationship with my father wasn't always, it got a little rocky just as I felt like He doesn't quite understand me. But I would go to these other men sometimes and I'd have conversations with them and they would tell me a lot of the same things my dad would tell me.

But sometimes, for whatever reason, the Lord used these other men as well in my life, that started out as my, as my dad's friends, many of them. So yeah, those are some people that were, just from my life, other broader influences. Whenever I was a young man, spent a lot of time listening to sermons while I worked on a golf course, one of my first jobs. And so I got to listen to six or seven sermons a day. And I listened to a lot of Charles Spurgeon sermons from SermonAudio.com.

There's hundreds of them on there. I listened to a lot of Vodi Bakum and Paul Washer. The preaching of those three, I took so much from them. And John Piper would be another one that I've listened to many of his messages. So yeah, those are kind of a few names.

More recently, I've had the opportunity to intern under some other pastors. And I looked at those men as well as people who have just shaped me as a pastor in many ways. So my pastor, Brad Wheeler from University Baptist in Fayetteville would be one that I learned so much from and really our sending church that kind of helped me get established here in this church and also Jeff Johnson who you know and a great resource as well. So I didn't do an internship under him, but he's become a friend. Yeah.

I listen to Jeff Johnson's sermons every once in a while as well. Yeah. I really appreciate him. Books, any particular books, standout books that have helped you? Yeah, that's a great question.

I read a lot of books, but honestly, I keep going back to Spurgeon's sermons. Those seem to have shaped me more than a lot of things. Though I will say that recently something that's encouraged my soul tremendously is the letters of John Newton. I love reading those. They're so full of wise just advice as he's, you know, you're reading somebody else's mail, but it's, as he's writing and counseling other people, there's, I've taken so much from his letters.

So yeah, those, yeah, I love the letters of John Newton. You know, Samuel Rutherford's letters are a lot like that too. Very deep, very devotional. A lot like Newton, Yeah. So plans, prayers for the future?

Well, just to raise my family, continue discipling my children, continue pastoring this church, Lord willing. I've been here for five years and sometimes I've had different people ask, you plan to stay at this church or move on. And I have no plans of going anywhere else. As long as the Lord allows me to pastor this particular church, then I will stay here and just continue pastoring. So that's the plan.

Great. And you're going to come and preach at our conference in next May. That's the plan. Yes. That's the plan.

I want to be there and yeah, looking forward to hopefully bringing the whole family this time because my wife and I attended last time we were originally gonna go as a marriage getaway and we were going to go to some marriage retreat and then we heard Jeff Johnson talk about your conference and we looked at the speakers and we said, we don't wanna go to this marriage retreat, we wanna go to the church and family life conference. Nice, I love it. Then once we got there, we thought, oh man, our kids would love this. We're gonna have to bring them next year, so. No, that's really, Yeah, we've tried to make it a pretty kid-friendly...

Yeah, mom with little kids-friendly place. But you know what was really neat about when you came... You came to our pre-conference, the pastor's conference, and you asked if your wife could come and sit with you. And of course, absolutely. But I thought that that's really nice for a pastor to sit with his wife and hear preachers talk to preachers.

Oh, it was so good. Yeah, my wife is very, it was one of the things that attracted me to her is she's a real reader. She has a real theological mind. I remember one of our first conversations, her dad, He learned I was a Calvinist. And so he said, that's interesting.

My daughter's been reading some AW Pink, The Sovereignty of God. Come here, Jessa, you want to talk to Ben about this? And yeah, so I love learning together with her. That's neat. Ben, last question.

If you were talking to children and you could impart something to them that you've learned along the way that would help them, what would you say? I would say think outside the box on who your friends are and realize that maybe some of the adults in the room, when maybe your parents are having adult conversations, sit in and listen to those conversations, get to know some of those adults and learn from them. And as I said, one friend of my father's, Jake, he ended up being a co-worker of mine at the golf course. And we were the, to my knowledge, we were the only two Christians there. And all of a sudden, our friendship just took off in a different way.

But I learned so much just listening to him talk about his marriage and his family, and he was a few steps ahead of me. So it was such a valuable friendship. So I just encourage young people, befriend the wise. As Proverbs says, those that walk with wise men will be wise. Great advice.

Good deal. Hey, thank you so much for joining us and I can't wait to see you in Ridgecrest for Manhood and Womanhood, the Glory of God in the Creation Order. We're still trying to work out what you're going to preach on, but I'm hearing from different guys, but I'm really looking forward to it. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. I hope you can be with us next time and hope to see you at the conference.

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