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Sunday Sit-Down

TIMOTHY JONES

LIFEPOINTE CHURCH CROCKETT

By Greg Ritchie

Messenger Reporter

This is a series of reports the Messenger will be doing each Sunday about local pastors in our area. To see the full interview, check out the video online on our website, www.messenger-news.com The Messenger would like to thank Cutshaw Chevrolet in Grapeland for sponsoring this week’s edition.

When did you first feel a calling to be a preacher?

“My whole life I just knew that I was going to be in some form of ministry, but it was before my my senior year in high school. Because in high school, I did not really want to be a pastor. Right before I started 12th grade, I went on a missions trip. Not abroad – but a local missions trip. I grew up in Pennsylvania. So it was at this church. We were doing a service that night and I just remember, almost as if it was audibly God’s voice, ‘You are going to enter pastoral ministry.’ Yo cannot ever be prepared for what it might look like down the road. I did youth ministry from 2009. I have been working with teenagers the majority of my life”

What is the hardest part of being a preacher?

“I would say the realization that you are not going to have every answer everyone needs in that moment. Sometimes, you think need it right away, especially when they get news of something that seems as if the only way that can happen is with the absence of God. And you want to be able to give – not just the biblical answer that makes joy unspeakable rush to their situation – you want to help them to have peace. Because, sometimes you question, ‘Why is that happening?’ There are certain things we don’t understand at all. I like to think the majority of us get the blessing to be able to look behind and say, ‘Okay, that is what God was doing in that situation. I wish I would have known – it would have made it a lot easier.’ That is the most difficult – not being able to help people see the bigger picture because – like you said – you’re just human as well.”

What do you think God wants from each of us? 

“I think Jesus answered it. When someone said, ‘What’s the greatest commandment?’ He said, ‘Love your God. Love your neighbor.’ That is what God wants. He wants you to love him and wants you to love the people that He loves. Which means we are probably going to have to put aside the hate and bitterness in ourselves and see people the way God sees them. I think that is as simply He can put it. Easier said than done sometimes.”

Is there a certain passage in the Bible that gives you inspiration?

“I have always found a kind of a joint collective of what happened in Matthew believe 13, 14 and 15. All of what happens in those few chapters is within the same 24 hours. In those three chapters, John the Baptist is beheaded. Jesus finds out as He is coming back from his first missionary journey with His disciples. If you have ever been on any kind of missions trip, you are exhausted – you want to take a nap for a week. So He goes off to the wilderness to get away and grieve. 5,000 people not including women and children follow Him and He took pity on them. He taught them and they got hungry. That is when He feeds the 5,000. And that same night He walks on the water and challenges Peter to come out there, too. Sometimes we look at the Bible and we see it as individual moments, not realizing that sometimes, it did  not slow down for them either. The one constant was that Jesus was with them. And we have that same concept today that the Holy Spirit is always with us. We have to be reminded that if we engage His presence with us, it can turn those five fish into enough to feed you and to have leftovers.”

Lifepointe Church meets each Sunday at 10:45 a.m. at 1417 E. Loop 304, Crockett. Call the church at 936-544-8562. 

Greg Ritchie can be reached at [email protected]

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