Justin grew up in rural Tennessee, working tobacco fields with his father. He loved laboring outdoors with his dad, yet his mom took him and his siblings to church, where Justin heard the Gospel. Around 12, he answered an altar call and was baptized—but in his teen years struggled with his faith. Seeing his younger brother’s own anguish over salvation, Justin knew he had to get right with God. Confessing his sins, Justin was rebaptized. John Piper’s sermons on Romans deepened his grasp of sovereign grace, and in time he committed his life to pastoral ministry. Husband to Tilly and father of three, Justin serves as elder at Grace Baptist Church in Hartsville, Tennessee. 

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we have the privilege of interviewing Pastor Justin Dillehay, who's a pastor at Grace Baptist Church in Hartsville, Tennessee. He's going to tell us his life story. He's going to be preaching at our national conference in May. Hope you can come and hear him.

He's got a great message planned for us. Hope you enjoy the interview. Jason, we've got Justin Dillehay from Grace Baptist Church in Hartsville, Tennessee. He's gonna tell us his life story. I know that last name.

We've interviewed his wife about her book, Dear Hemlock. That's right. Yeah. Hey, we want to hear your life story. And we're just so delighted that you're able to come and tell your life story.

So over to you. How did it all start? Well, thank you for having me on. I'll start at the beginning. I was born in 1982, so I'm almost 44.

I wouldn't say that I grew up in a Christian home, because my dad didn't go to church. He didn't take us to church, but my mom did. And though I wouldn't call it a Christian home, I would say I grew up in a stable home. My dad worked for the electric company for 40 years. We lived in the same house.

We never moved. My mom was a cook at the school at the elementary school where I went for nine years. Was that was that in Hartsville? No, it was in a it was about 30 minutes from where I live now in a little community called Defeated Creek. So I played sports for a team called Defeated.

We took the ribbing for that. And we often lived up to our name. So I'm the third of four children. I have two older sisters and one younger brother. I grew up in the country, rural Tennessee, middle Tennessee, here in Hartsville.

And I would say I had a I had a happy childhood. No trauma, nothing to complain about. My dad grew tobacco, my dad and my his dad grew tobacco, so I spent a fair amount of time in my youth and teenage years working in tobacco. And so I have a lot of happy memories about that. My mom, My parents put me in school at six instead of five, so I was the oldest in my class instead of the youngest.

And so for a little boy, that probably made a bigger difference than I would realize at the time. But yeah, I had a happy childhood. I grew up in a denomination called the Free Will Baptist Church. So, it's kind of a classically Armenian Baptist Church. My pastor was a man named Brother Frank, and he became a real spiritual mentor for me as a young man and as a teenager.

I spent a lot of time with him. And so, I'm not a freewill Baptist anymore. That'll be part of the story. But I look back with gratitude on those early days. I didn't get all the theology that I hold now, but I got good foundations there from him and from the church.

Now, I got to ask you a tobacco question because I got tobacco farmers all around me here, you know, in Wake Forest. And so I've known a lot of people who are addicted to tobacco. Did you pick tobacco? Did you get all that oil all over your arms and your body? Oh, yeah.

You would stain your hands when you were doing it. And I never got tobacco sick, but there was something people would refer to as getting tobacco sick. And it was really bad. And I assume it was just from all the nicotine probably that was absorbing into your skin but thankfully I escaped that. Now they must say tobacco out there do you hear they say tobacca?

No we say we said like tobacco or tobacco tobacco. So very late I didn't realize how labor intensive that that crop is. Yeah. So, oh yeah. A lot of work.

Yeah. But it was fun talking. It was time to spend with my dad and learning how to work and do physical labor. And I'm very grateful. I miss it sometimes.

Is he still doing it? No, sir. No, he's been out of it for 15, 20 years, probably. There's very few small tobacco farmers anymore. It's mostly just huge crops.

And yeah. But anyway, so I grew up in that church. When I was around 12 years old, I answered an altar call. So this church had an altar call every Sunday. It was a big part of the service.

And I remember on Mother's Day, I think it was 1994, I think it was 12, and I answered an altar call and prayed the prayer and got baptized and thought that was a new beginning. So I would say in my teenage years, two things happened. One, I discovered theology. So my mom gave me Matthew Henry's commentary, six volumes, for my birthday one year. And she gave me a free will Baptist commentary on Romans.

So if you can imagine an Armenian commentary on Romans, I got these commentaries. And really this was, it opened a new world for me as far as just trying to understand what I believed about God and about salvation in the Bible and what it meant to be a free will Baptist. So, I learned a lot about Calvinism and Arminianism, reading those things, stuff that I was not getting in my church. I got from books. That was a dueling commentaries.

Yes, really, very much so. I think Matthew Henry, there were no Reformed churches where I came from. So, I think Matthew Henry was just my introduction to historic Reformed Protestantism at the time. And the Free Will Baptist Commentary was more my introduction to scholarship and just serious exegesis of the text of scripture. And I learned a lot of names reading that Armenian-Roman's commentary like Charles Hodge and John Murray and John Piper, especially that became that was how I first learned who John Piper was.

And he was kind of a bad guy, you know, in that commentary. But I discovered theology as a teenager, but I also discovered pornography as a teenager. And that led into, I would say, many years, Most of my teenage years, I spent living a double life, a hypocritical double life, and living with a guilty conscience, not confessing, not coming clean, but hiding. And so at school I was one way, at church I was another way. And the church I grew up in was very clear about the need for holiness and following Christ and submitting to Him.

And so I knew, like I didn't have a kind of false teaching telling me it didn't matter how I lived. And so my conscience was very, very convicted about what I was doing. And eventually, I would say I reached a point where I didn't think I was really saved and I didn't think I could be. I had sinned so many times and asked God's forgiveness and then gone back like a dog to its vomit. I'd done this so many times that I didn't believe myself anymore when I was asking for forgiveness, when I was repenting.

And I reached a place where I thought Esau in Hebrews 12, that's me. Like I have wasted my last chance and I'm going to go to hell. And it was a very discouraging period of life. I don't know how long that lasted, but I distinctly remember feeling that way many times. But again, this was at church.

Everybody thought, you know, they saw the Justin who discovered theology and read the Bible, and they thought, man, you're going to be a preacher someday. That's what they thought. And when I was 18, 19 years old, I was teaching Sunday school at that Free Will Baptist Church, and something happened around that time. So this is me after a few years probably of thinking, I don't even think I'm saved. And I'm teaching Sunday school in my church, and I don't even think I'm really saved.

One night, my mom came to me. I was in the bed. My mom came to me and said, your brother, your brother is crying, your brother, my younger brother, your brother is crying. And he says he doesn't think he's saved. And the issue there was he also had made a profession of faith.

And So she thought and he thought he was saved. And so now he's saying he doesn't think he is. And so she's asking me, can you come talk to him? Can you come talk to him and help him? And I felt like, well, hey, I felt like, what am I gonna tell him?

You know, I'm in the same boat. My mom doesn't even know I'm in the same boat he's in. There's an old story about John Wesley going to, as a missionary to North America and saying like, I went there to convert the Indians, but who's going to convert me? Like, that's literally how I felt in that moment. Like, I don't know what I can do for Him, but I definitely felt like God is...

If I haven't wasted my last chance, this is my last chance. This is God cornering me and saying, you're either going to come clean now and confess what you've been doing or you may not get another chance. And by the grace of God, I came clean that night and I confessed my sins to my mom, told what I've been doing, told about my hypocrisy, and then I shared with my pastor, the man I've spoken of already, whom I was very close to, and he was very gracious and understanding about it, and ended up sharing my testimony to the church there and getting, in that case, felt like I needed to be baptized because I didn't think I had actually been saved. So people often have to make those decisions and that's the one we made at that time. What kind of counsel would you give to somebody in that situation where they were baptized when they were young and then they're not so sure?

It's difficult, and we've had to deal with this a lot. That's a very common testimony among Baptists, especially in the South, because people are so quick to baptize people where I come from. So it's a case-by-case basis. If a person is convinced they were not converted when they were baptized, we will generally baptize them. If they're just not sure, like if they're not sure and they think of all the sins they committed after they were baptized, If they're not sure, we tend to err on the side of we don't want to repeat the ordinance needlessly.

It's supposed to be done one time. So it's case by case. But if someone's reasonably confident they were not saved, we'll say, well, let's do it. But if they're just like, I don't know, then we're like, well, let's just trust the decision that was made at that time and just live out your baptism now. That's exactly how we say it.

We might, the person who says, I think I need to get rebaptized, we usually make them wait a little bit and keep talking and thinking about it. If they're just slapped down, sure they were not converted, then we'll consider it. But some of this is sanctification. I've had those same questions since my actual conversion. I think of all the low points since then.

I'm like, I don't know, was that the time or not? And at the end of the day, that's when I see my conversion at age 19, 2001. But at the end of the day, it's more, I know I was lost and now I'm found. I don't know what time the sun came up for sure, but I know it's shining now. And so I'm not in any doubt about my salvation now, even if there's times when I wonder, was that it or not?

Or was it later? I don't know. But we Baptists, we just have so many problems. We've all got our set of problems. So I would say after that, from like age 18 to 22, after I finished high school, I was just aimless for about four years.

I didn't know what I needed to do. I started to go to college and then I pulled out. I didn't go. So for about four years there, I lived, I was living at home, I was doing odd jobs. I worked for an electrician.

I cut grass, but I wasn't, I just didn't know. I was a poster child for just the aimless young man who doesn't know what God wants him to do. I also was into some bad theology or weak theology at least at that time. I got off into, when the internet came into my life around that time, I got all access to all kinds of unhelpful things. And I got off into some Anabaptist Mennonite theology for a while, and then I got off into some King James only fundamentalism for a while.

But eventually, through the internet, I also encountered John Piper and his sermons on Romans. And that was a real turning point in my life because Up till then, I had been hardcore Armenian my whole life, not just by default. I knew what I believed. I read books. That's how I knew who John Piper was.

I don't remember how I first stumbled upon his sermons online, But I remember the first sermon I ever heard him preach online was his biography of David Brainerd. And I was intrigued by it. And so, I started listening to his sermons on Romans 7, And it was just like a light bulb of this is the kind of preaching I've been looking for my whole life. So you came in with an anti-piper bias based on what you've been reading. How quickly did that fade when you started listening to these sermons?

Well, I had the Matthew Henry kind of experience. So, I was never of a mind that Calvinists were of the devil, you know, and they didn't know the Lord. I knew enough good men to know that wasn't true. So because he was preaching Romans 7 and Romans 8, for a long time it was just gospel sanctification type stuff that I felt I agreed with. But he was just doing it in an exegetical, rigorous, textual way that I never heard anybody do.

I didn't grow up with expository preaching. I grew up with topical sort of gospel sermon every week. And so I wasn't used to somebody expounding the text. And so I would say for about two chapters he just kind of won my trust. And it was all, I won my trust and built me up.

And by the time I got to the golden chain in Romans 8, I was really struggling. I remember one time listening to the sermon on, those who be justified, ye also glorified, and no dropouts. And I remember my mom was listening to that sermon and she looked at me and said, like, you don't believe that, do you? And I was, because, you know, free will Baptist, We did not believe in eternal security. And so when she asked, you don't believe that, do you?

I just said, I don't know anymore. I know I'm not supposed to, but I don't know how to answer what he's saying. And Again, it was just listening to him preach was like a it was like a mini hermeneutics lesson every week just of Following the meaning and the the flow of argument. I'd never been exposed to that. And so He knew my he knew what I believed It was clear he knew what I believed and explained it accurately.

And so I almost quit at the end of Romans 8 because I knew what he was going to say about Romans 9. So I almost was like, I remember thinking, I don't know if I need to keep listening because I'm afraid He's going to convince me. And I felt like God just wouldn't let me do that. And I felt like you owe Him more than that. We've listened to 40 sermons, you know, in Romans 7 and 8 at this point, and you have provided from this, you owe him a hearing.

And around the same time, I was reading Desiring God and especially the Pleasures of God. If there's one book of Piper's that really had a big impact on me, it was The Pleasures of God. And there was an appendix in that book called Are There Two Wills in God? And he was explaining the distinction between God's sovereign will by which he ordains everything that comes to pass and his moral will, his law, like what he tells us to do and not do. And he convinced me in that chapter that that distinction was biblical.

And once I became convinced of that, all my objections crumbled to the ground because I understood what he was saying. I understood what Matthew, Henry, and the Calvinists were saying about God's decree. I just didn't think it was true. And I thought it made human beings into robots and it made God to blame for all the sin that happens in the world. And so, just showing me from scripture that this is what the Bible teaches.

It just it's like it pulled the it pulled the winch pin out of my wagon there and I lost it. I lost the I lost the battle and and submitted at that point. So that was a life changing time. I was probably about 23 years old. So that's about 20 years ago.

Was that before you got married or after? It was before, well before. But it led, But that's what led to me ending up at the church that I'm at now. So, I will come May of this year, I'll have been a member at Grace Baptist Church in Hartsfield for 20 years. Once I became persuaded of the doctrines of grace, the church I was in at the time, I was teaching adult Sunday school at a non-denominational church at that time, but it was not a Reformed church.

I was 23 years old and I felt like My theology is in flux. I don't need to be teaching right now. I need to go somewhere where I can just sit and receive from wiser men, and I want to go someplace that holds the doctrines of grace. So there's only one church like that in driving distance, and that was Grace Baptist in Hartsville. And so I went there and I've been there ever since as a member, and I've been a pastor there for about 10 years.

So when going there, I met all the men who are still my pastors, were pastors then as well. Donnie Martin, Carol Carmen, and Chris Davis, my friend, he came along a couple years after that. But they were there. I told them my story, and my shift in theology, my salvation testimony, my history and just sort of teaching. But I said, I'm here to learn, I'm not here for a job.

And they appreciated that, but they sort of took me under their wing to mentor. And I think pretty quickly, pretty quickly were asking me, do you think, do you have any thoughts about ministry or being called? And I was like, I do, but I've never had anybody to confirm that in a meaningful way. And so that's how that process there began, of just of mentoring and preaching opportunities. And I started seminary online with Southern Seminary in Louisville and did most of that online.

I graduated there in 2013, But I haven't introduced my wife into the story. You have any questions? No, do that. I want to hear how you met your wife. All right.

So around 2010, I'm a trainee. I'm a pastoral trainee there at the church. And this young lady named Tilly Cryer comes to visit the church. And she had a background in our church. There's a reason why she came to our church for counseling, but she came to our church having lost her faith in college.

She's probably 21 years old at that time. She went to college young, and she lost her faith in college. And when that happened, her parents recommended she come and talk to Donnie Martin, counsel with Donnie Martin, my pastor. And so she came out and spent time with him and his wife and the church, and pretty quickly was converted there at the church. And so this is 2010, but she's basically a new convert just coming off a real rough patch in life.

And I'm a pastoral trainee, so I don't have any immediate interest in her at the time. In fact, both of us were dating other people at one point there. But there came a time where some interest started to develop. I remember she sent me an email asking, can a Christian believe in annihilationism? This idea that people go to hell and they burn up and punishment is not eternal.

And I ended up writing her about a 12-page paper in response saying, here's why the answer is no. So She sends that paper to her dad, and her dad emails me and says, why don't we get coffee? And so that started a conversation between me and her father, Morgan. And long story short, there were some rough patches there, and it took a little while. But we were married in the fall of 2012.

And I would say, other than receiving Jesus as my Lord, marrying Tilly has been the best decision I've ever made. So it's been a happy, what is it, 11, 12, 13, almost 13 years, 14 years almost. It's been a very happy time. We have four children now. Come May, Nora will be 11, Agnes will be nine, Henry will be seven, and Cordelia will be three.

So Lord Willing will be bringing all those along with us in May. Oh, that's great. Oh, you got to enroll them in the kids choir. Oh, okay. I hadn't heard about that.

Yeah, we'll have to do that. That's the squiggliest, giggliest, neatest thing that happens at that conference. Well, they would like that. They're songbirds. We sing around the house all the time, and their mother is a good singer, and I can carry a tune at least.

And so they sing all the time around the house. So that sounds great. Okay. Important books. Important books.

I've already mentioned John Piper's The Pleasures of God, just helping me grasp a biblical theology of God and his greatness and his goodness and his sovereignty. That was a pivotal book for me. This book, Why We're Not Emergent, by Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck. It was the first Kevin de Young book, I would say, after Piper, de Young's probably the living writer that's probably influenced me the most. And that was the first book I read.

I would say that influenced me a lot. I've always been of a conservative bent, so I don't think I ever would have gone along with the emergent church 20 years ago. But reading DeYoung's book, it was the first time I'd read a solid theologian interacting with progressive liberal contemporary theology. And so just hearing how he responded, I think was very, it influenced me a lot and it's why I kept reading him. Screwtape Letters, C.S.

Lewis. That was the first Lewis book I ever read 20 years ago. And I think just reading it, the spiritual help I received from understanding my own heart more and the schemes of the devil more. But I think also just reading C.S. Lewis for me, I was in a phase of life where I thought C.S.

Lewis was really bad. And so just reading the book was an eye-opening thing for me. Like to be like, yeah, a guy can get some things really wrong in his theology and still be really helpful in other ways. So I think that was, it was a paradigm shift for me at that time. I don't know if you know the name Thomas soul.

He's not a theologian or Christian, but he's, but He's my hero. Also, I read a lot of Thomas Sowell in my early 20s and particularly his book, A Conflict of Visions, where he talks about the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision, sort of conservative and liberalism. And I think reading that book before I went to college was very helpful and very important because it helped me understand why people come to different conclusions and why different people seem to come to the same kind of different conclusions on so many different things. I felt like that book really helped me just worldview wise with, I think, political theology and political philosophy. That was an incredibly level-headed person.

Yes. Yeah, I wish she was a Christian. I wish she was also a good saint. But those are the ones that come to mind, I think. Yeah.

So what would you say to a kid growing up the way that you did? Yeah, I would say be very thankful. If you have parents that bring you to church, which is most of the kids I preach to every week in our church, that's them. So I feel like I'm preaching to myself when I preach to them. Don't presume that because your parents are Christians and that they bring you to church, that that gives you a ticket into heaven.

But own it, take it on, but don't take it for granted. Like just you, by being reared in the church under the preaching of the gospel and the teaching of the church, and of parents who will train you and give you good material and teach you, that is such a privilege, such a privilege that God has given you and that so many kids don't get. And so on the positive side, just be grateful for the blessing God has given you. And on the negative side, I've been preaching Hebrews for the last year or so, and so I've preached this kind of thing a lot. On the negative side, you're going to have a lot, if you reject this, like if you don't receive and make good on what you've been given, you're going to receive a stricter judgment than those who were not raised in the church and those who did not have the kind of advantages that you have.

That's good, that's really helpful. So hey man, thank you so much for joining us. And I can't wait to see you at Ridgecrest in May and have you come and deliver your message. That'll be really nice. It'd be very nice to have your wife to talk to the ladies at the ladies' luncheon and with my wife and Donna Aschall as well.

I'm looking forward to meeting you brothers for the first time and I really it's an honor the invitation is a great honor not one that I was expecting either so thank you. Okay and thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. I hope to see you next time. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of Scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchAndFamilyLife.com.