Well, it's that time of year again. 2024 has been interesting to say the least, hasn't it? And we still have a little over a month to go. Allow me to share 24 of the things I'm thankful for in the year 2024 as we get ready to celebrate Thanksgiving this week:

1) For the gift of life given by God.

2) For being born at this time in this country with the Constitutional Republic we have and the freedoms we still enjoy.

3) For my wife, our children and grandchildren.

4) For my brother and his wife, 92-year-old father-in-law, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, cousins and spouses, 85-year-old uncle, and 99-year-old aunt.

5) For my pastor, church family, friends, former co-workers and former classmates.

6) For food on the table, clothes on our back, and a roof over our heads.

7) For the Constitution including the 1st, 2nd & 10th Amendments.

8) For general good health, that's good enough to be a help to my family.

9) For God always meeting all of me and my wife's needs and many wants.

10) For good transportation for jobs, visiting family, and more.

11) For our veterans, police officers and first responders.

12) For doctors, nurses, and medical and natural remedies.

13) For the Trinity- God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit- 3 Persons yet one co-equal and co-eternal God.

14) For our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and He being willing to leave the perfect abode and communion of the Godhead, be miraculously born as a baby, feed us, teach us, love us, and His sufficient, satisfactory, substitutionary, specific, sacrifice on the cross for payment and forgiveness of our sins.

15) For the resurrection, ascension, and second coming of the Lord Jesus the Christ.

16. For God's love, grace, and mercy. For without that, I wouldn't believe and be saved.

17) For the regenerating, quickening, drawing work of the Holy Spirit and His continual indwelling and conviction.

18) For the word of God and His preserving of it all these years.

19) For God's sovereign omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence.

20) For God's sustaining grace to get His people through trials and persecution.

21) For God's holiness and justice and that one day, even though it may seem like evil is winning now, those who are not born again and saved by Christ before death will be judged accordingly.

22) For the promise of Heaven and Glory with the Father and Son when all things will be made right like intended before sin entered the human race, and where there will be no sickness, pain, sorrow, and sin.

23) For my Concerned Constitutional Patriots of America national and local outreach and those that read my articles and watch and share my weekly video shorts and monthly patriot service.

24) For the privilege of pastoring 4 churches in the past as well as preaching and teaching God's word and sharing the gospel from the pulpit, online, and in person.

How about you? What are you thankful for this year? I would be genuinely interested if you would like to share it with me by email. In the meantime, let's remember the church hymn that says we should count our blessings and name them one by one. Until next time, Lord willing.

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Picking up from the end of Part 1, I never would have imagined that I would be a pastor. As I mentioned in Part 1, I did have the privilege of preaching at my first Church as a Christian a few times. But I started getting the desire to preach as a pastor in 1993 while I was working as a full time Teamsters union business agent and officer ;-). It was one of the reasons I voluntarily left and went back to Embassy Dairy as a pasteurizer. The above photo is from my current Church filling in for the pastor.

Again, I know some of you reading this may not be a Christian, or believe you are but don’t talk about it. Like I said, it’s not the main focus of my outreach but it is part of it. Why? Because if anything or everything we try to do to keep our constitutional republic doesn’t work, as with any other kind of death, a person better be born again unto saving faith in the Person and work of Christ. Plus, it’s who I am, but I love everyone. If you’re not a Christian, you didn’t have to read this- but I’m glad you did.

In the Fall of 1997, there was a Free Will Baptist Church in southeast Florida looking for a pastor and I was looking for my first church to pastor. To try to make a long story a little shorter for you, during some of the communication with them and driving down from Maryland once to preach at that church, I was about 75% there in embracing the doctrines of sovereign grace- often called Calvinism. I told the head of the ‘pulpit committee’ where I was with it before the church possibly voted on me. Sometime in late September or early October 1997 he called to tell me that I was voted on to be their next pastor and it was a 79% acceptance vote. We moved from Maryland for the first time as a family and I started pastoring there around November 7th.

The church in the photo above is where I began my first pastorate and started preaching on Sunday mornings and nights and teaching Sunday School and Wednesday nights. I was [at least] the 11th pastor in the church’s 37-year history at the time (you can do the math). It was a small congregation that could not pay enough for me to not work outside of the church, so I began looking for a job as soon as we got there. I worked for a department store for about 10 months and then got a job as a bank teller at one of the local banks where I stayed while pastoring there. So, here I am at a Free Will Baptist Church and I didn’t believe a born-again Christian could lose/forfeit their salvation like the Free Will Baptist Association did. I preached topical sermons for the first few months, so between that, picking my topics on Wednesday nights, and the church using Free Will Baptist literature for Sunday School, there were no challenges over the doctrinal differences at first. But by God’s grace, I was still studying and learning, and soon came to fully believe the doctrines of sovereign grace.

The doctrines are often summarized using the acronym TULIP. Do you know what they are? T- Total Depravity; U- Unconditional Election; L- Limited Atonement; I- Irresistible Grace; P- Perseverance of the Saints. I won’t bore you with an in-depth study and leave that up to you if you’re interested. I did post some of the scriptures in Part 1 though. But if you do want to discuss it, feel free to email me.

The NAFWB were and I think still are, set up similar to the Southern Baptist Convention. The former considered themselves an association not a denomination and claimed that each local church is autonomous. I don’t remember the exact time frames, but the local association of only 3 churches didn’t meet often. As was their policy, they questioned me at the first association meeting but dropped the ball as it were on asking enough detailed questions. And no, right or wrong, I didn’t volunteer (as was advised not to by a former Free Will Baptist pastor) any information on what I believed regarding the doctrinal differences.

Interestingly, my oldest daughter went to Free Will Baptist Bible College (now Welch College) for a year. After skipping a year, she was driving back for another semester in December 1997 and has a serious car accident, so she came to live with us in southeast Florida. She had met a couple of guys in bible college, and they asked if they could be youth ministers at our church. I talked to them and let them know that I didn’t agree with a couple of key Free Will Baptist doctrines and what I believed. They still wanted to come, and the church agreed. Around the same time, I had asked a Christian friend from the church in Maryland I knew was considering ministry to pray about coming to our church as an Assistant Pastor in Training (Chris, if you read this, please forgive me if I don’t get certain details exactly right). I told him about the doctrinal differences too and asked him not to say anything to anyone there. After prayerful consideration he and our church agreed.

Sometime after these 3 men got to southeast Florida, the local association found out that I didn’t agree with those key doctrinal differences and questioned me about it at the next meeting. They were more direct this time, and I answered them directly. After the committee deliberated, they announced that they could not recognize (can’t remember the word they used) me as a pastor in their association and that the church had up to the next meeting in 6 months to either terminate me as their pastor or the church would be put out of the association. We met as a church a couple of weeks later, and the church voted 100% that they were not going to terminate me and didn’t want me to leave, and we sent a letter to the local association stating such.

Having looked back on that time, and of course way before today, I realize that I could have done things differently. Depending on what else I say about the rest of my “Journey in Grace” you may wonder why all that happened and that it was such a waste. God knows I’ve struggled with this and more. We never heard from the local association one way or another, so me, the deacon, and a few others went to the next meeting. They didn’t say anything before or in the beginning of the meeting, so when they asked for the local church delegates to stand, we stood up and they said we were not recognized as delegates. They had 3 women there that were former members of the church- one of them before I became pastor, and said they were the delegates for a church with a slightly different name as our church but from the same city. They said that me and the deacon conspired to steal the church from the local and national association (which was not true) and quoted the Pauline Scripture that says to have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness. We stayed for the rest of the meeting but not the food fellowship afterwards. This was late 1999 I believe. There were numerous Free Will Baptist pastors in the national association that did not believe a born-again Christian could forfeit their salvation. The local association could have handled it differently and perhaps would have gotten the property when our church closed about 6 years later, but they did what they did and cut off all communication.

Well, the next thing you know Y2K is there, and we know how that went :-). We changed the name of our church and was independent for about a year, I think. The 2 men that my oldest daughter knew and still knows decided to move on saying they believed the Lord wanted that to be a time of learning. I believe one of them is pastoring today. Soon we joined the Conservative Baptist Association. There seemed to be a spiritual stigma of some kind, for lack of a better term that kept the church from growing much. We did grow in the sense of allowing churches of other nationalities to share the property. There was a Haitian fellowship already there when I got there, and then we added a Brazilian fellowship as well. In 2004 I started having convictions about leaving for another church mostly because of what happened with the Free Will Baptist situation. So, in November 2004 I left my first pastorate for another church.

The church in the photo above was a former Calvary Chapel church that had become independent. They were located in Mountain Home Idaho about 9 miles outside of town and 1 mile from Mountain Home Air Force Base. They were a sovereign grace baptistic church and the founding pastor/elder had gone to be with the Lord. They had some trouble finding a pastor, and partly because I didn’t have a seminary degree, I had trouble finding another church. I became their new pastor/elder in early November 2004. Interestingly, the bank company I worked for had branches there too and there was an opening ;-) so I was able to keep working while pastoring. There were 3 elders in addition to me. One of them was close to the previous pastor/elder and seemingly had trouble adapting to me as sadly is often the case with pastor changes.

After the ‘911 attack’ and weapons of mass destruction allegedly found, a lot of Air Force members were relocated from Mountain Home Air Force Base near our church. This affected all the churches in our town of about 17,000 including our already small congregation. So, after only being there for about a year, there was already discussions about whether to close and/or merge with a church of like faith right in town. My fellow elders supported me putting the sermons on a local cable public access station there, and later added a Christian talk show called Biblically Correct. Around June 2007 we even put the talk show on a local Christian radio station in Boise. That, participating in parades and flea markets, and more, to share the gospel, didn’t grow the church anymore. Seeing the figurative handwriting on the wall, I started looking for another church to pastor. Came close from the human perspective with a church in a small town of Kansas. Having worked in the dairy industry for 20 years before pastoring, I started communicating with the production manager of a dairy in Birmingham Alabama where my youngest daughter, husband and first child lived. In February 2008 I left the church in Mountain Home, and we moved outside of Birmingham, Alabama. The church in Mountain Home closed 2 weeks later and most of the attenders went to that church of like faith in town.

One thing that I’m not proud of is that I have had two homes that I lost and were foreclosed on. The first one was when we left Maryland for the first church in southeast Florida. We stepped out on faith as it were and left but found someone to rent the place a month or two after we left. It was one of the neighbor’s sons from around the corner. He ended up getting one of his brothers to move in and paid for a while. But we had a conflict because he didn’t let me know about fixing things without telling me per the agreement and deducting it from the rent. Even though the 2nd brother was paying the 1st brother, I wasn’t getting the rent. Long story short, we couldn’t keep up, the 1st brother wouldn’t leave, and ended up losing the house.

Well, when we left Idaho, we did the same thing. This time we found a ‘rent with a pledge to buy’ family a month or two after we left. Thinking that would work out, and it did for a couple of years, they decided to give up their pledge money to get a bigger house for the money because of the collapsed housing market. I couldn’t get what we owed on the house, the mortgage company wouldn’t work with us, we couldn’t keep up, and lost that house too. Whew!!!

In 2009, I believed that the Lord wanted me to start a church out of our house outside of Birmingham, Alabama. The house was situated so that it was conducive to have a small gathering in a room off of the Living Room. I called it Biblical Unity Church at first and the changed it to Biblical Unity Ministries (BUM ;-)). Did that for about 3 years when due to working long hours at the dairy and another issue, I stopped holding worship services and just continued the ministry in concept even to this day.

After having a type of nervous breakdown from working too many hours with not enough help- confirmed by a doctor, I became the 9th salaried employee to leave that dairy outside of Birmingham in a relatively short time. So I took another management position with less hours (but more than 40 a week of course) with another dairy in central Florida in February 2014 because the one in Alabama wouldn’t work with the doctor’s recommendations. 15 months later that dairy lost a major customer and laid me off.

This time we didn’t lose the house because our 2 unmarried oldest daughters rented it out. Moved back to outside of Birmingham in May 2015 just a couple of weeks after grandchild 4 from my youngest daughter was born. The middle daughter misunderstood the oldest daughter and thought we were just coming up for a visit, but when she found out we were moving back into the house, she moved out before we got back. I won’t go into details, but as I mentioned in Part 1 or 2, please pray for her. For the most part, she’s been estranged from her whole family since May 2015 and completely since 2021. I would visit her at her job several times a year between 2017 and 2021, but she asked me to stop.

In early Spring 2016, I started prayerfully considering pastoring my 4th church. A church in a rural area about 25 miles from Birmingham Alabama was looking for a church. Another small congregation that required I work outside of the church, but I was already working for a bank in the Birmingham area. I was able to transfer to a branch closer to the church shortly after finding a house even closer that was about 10 miles away. My oldest daughter still lives in that house, but she is trying to sell it as I type this and move closer to her job in another Alabama city.

Early 2017 is when the unthinkable for me- something I never thought I would do, happened. I won’t go into any details, and I would imagine that even though I hope none of you will do it, you may try to figure out what it was. But a serious sin that disqualified me from being a pastor and deacon came to fruition. I resigned the church in late February 2017 just 10 months after pastoring that church.

Between this and the Free Will Baptist situation, I have hurt a lot of people, grieved the Holy Spirit and greatly disappointed the Lord. I deservedly still reap some of the consequences from my actions and choices including that it has affected the “assurance” of my salvation through Christ. I still believe the gospel and have “evidence” of salvation in about every other area. My beliefs haven’t changed including the area of my sin, it just makes me a hypocrite :-).

In Christian circles, some would say I was saved, unsaved, and may be saved again. Others would say I was never saved until maybe recently. And yet some others would say I have been saved the whole time and that it’s something that a Christian could do since I’m repentant of it. A few of you reading this, especially if you’re family, some former co-workers, some former high school classmates and alumni, some that went to the same church as me in the past, and perhaps a few others, know what the sin is.

I don’t know if I will ever get that full assurance of salvation back that Romans 8 and 1st John 5 talks about. I/we just keep plugging along by the grace of God serving the Lord through our local church, my outreach- Concerned Constitutional Patriots of America, and helping our family and others when we have the opportunity. My pastor also allows me to preach a few times a year and teach, especially if he’ll be out of town, but he and the church leaders know that I will not pastor/elder or be a deacon, and that’s the way it has to be, and because of my disqualifying sin, I want it to be.

Because a born-again Christian is indwelt with the Holy Spirit, he/she will be miserable- certainly more than a person that isn’t, when they commit any sin, but especially what we consider the more serious sins. While works does not save or help save a person, I will always wonder how I could do what I did as a born-again Christian. And yet, God’s grace and mercy is greater than any sin we can commit. Lord willing, I’ll be 66 years old in November of this year. I just hope and pray that the Lord may be pleased to continue to use me and this series of ‘Journey in Grace’ articles as He sees fit for His honor and glory. Thanks for reading, I know this one was long.

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Hello again saints and ain’ts ;-). In Part 1, that I updated including pictures just before starting on this one, I covered my journey from the time the Gospel was shared with me and the Lord saved me until the time I embraced the doctrines of sovereign grace as an 11-year-old Christian. In this article I hope to cover the time I was born until I was born-again at age 28.

I was born in Washington DC in November of 1958 to Irwin Lovitz and Patricia Shannon. Both of their birthdays were in September 1930, so I’ll let you do the math. They only stayed in DC for a few months and moved numerous times to Maryland suburbs. Mom worked before I was born of course, but also for a few years afterwards before becoming a stay-at-home Mom. I’m the oldest of 2 children, with my brother being 3 years and 5 weeks younger.

My parents moved us to Clinton, Maryland Fall of 1965. If you look closely at the photo above, you’ll notice it says “Surratt’s” Tavern. That was also the name of the town before they changed it to Clinton. Any “history buffs” remember who Mary Suratt was and what she was known for? They didn’t change the name of the schools though, and I went to Surrattsville Elementary, Surrattsville Junior High, and Surrattsville Senior High Schools. All 3 of them were in walking distance, but the elementary school was a little further, so I didn’t walk there.

Between Junior and Senior High School, I had a string of bad behavior I guess you could say. One of them was I had a bad habit of not telling my parents where I was. At the Junior High Prom, we were invited to go to the chaperone’s home for a late breakfast. Everyone else called home and told their parents except- guess who? So I was put on restriction for the summer when me and 2 other kids rang the doorbell of a home on the back street by the woods. The other 2 kids took off running right away but I didn’t know why. I waited behind a privacy fence that divided the home’s property and the woods like we’d usually do. The next things I know the Dad had bolted out the front door with a running start and was half way to me before I could my fat legs going. Needless to say, he caught me and kept me in his house until the cop got there. There’s more to the story that you may actually find funny and not boring, but I’ll stop there.

It was also around that time that I was introduced to marijuana by a neighbor friend on that same street. By the time I got to my senior year, I was smoking “pot” a lot more. I didn’t smoke cigarettes though, so neighbors’ parents thought it was okay when their kids hung out with me. They just didn’t know ;-).

Near the end of my 9th grade year, my father came to my school and told me that he and Mom were going to get a divorce. So, it wasn’t at a picnic like the above photo, but of course I was upset like the kid above. My brother would have been in 5th Grade at the time.

While I used the above photo for affect, I don’t agree with what it says. The Bible says that a Christian man should only marry a Christian woman. While I’m not sure, I think most Jewish traditions teach that they should not marry outside of the faith. But my professing Christian mother did marry my Jewish father in September 1956. My brother and I were not raised either, really. We missed out on that Bar mitzvah unlike our cousin ;-). The only Christianity we were taught really, were a couple of childhood mealtime and bedtime prayers, and an occasional visit to a Catholic Church with a family friend.

While they were separated, our parents tried some counseling with us present. I wouldn’t say very much, but my brother and I did find out that our mother had been married before. Whew, was she upset when Dad spilled the beans on that. I actually can’t remember anymore even the exact years, but I think the divorce was final in 1973, Mom remarried a Roman Catholic in 1974, and we moved about 40 miles away to another county in Maryland in 1975.

I had gotten my Driver’s License the last day of 1974. When Mom and Stepdad Mike announced that they were moving to Montgomery County Maryland the summer before my senior year and the school only being about 200 yards away, I was livid. So they agreed to let me drive back and forth to the same High School my whole senior year. Keep in mind, that I was smoking pot pretty regular. They also didn’t card teens much when buying alcohol. Not a pretty picture!

Mike had a green 1969 Chevy Impala that he let me drive back and forth to school. It was a good car that I’m surprised lasted because of spinouts and donuts :-). I didn’t know at the time that Mom was a “closet alcoholic” when living with Dad, but she came out of the closet with Mike who was also a heavy drinker. They would work in Real Estate together most days and drink at the kitchen table. Mike could hold his alcohol much better than Mom. One day during my senior year, after having enough of “I could do anything wrong but it’s not as wrong as wanting to see Dad”, I got mad, put my fist through the wall (good thing it wasn’t at the 2x4, huh?), and ran away. I ran away to some friends in Clinton Maryland having hitch-hiked 5 rides 40 miles, but- went to school the next day.

By the time the High School Prom got there, I asked Mom if I could move in with Dad and his wife. I rolled my eyes when she talked to his wife and made it seem like it was her idea, but it did happen. Dad let me use his Lincoln Continental company car for that, which was cool. I asked to stay until graduation and Dad let me use another Continental they gave him by that time for graduation. I asked to stay with Dad for the summer and never moved back to Mom and Mike’s.

Do I need to speed this up some, am I boring you? Well, I was still doing drugs and added alcohol to it as well. It’s amazing that I didn’t die during this period of my life. As a lady in our church said yesterday, and perhaps prompted me to go ahead and do this Part 2 Prequel, “but God.”

I stayed with Dad and his wife for about 15 months and moved out in September 1977, started to work for my first career job at Embassy Dairy in October 1977 for 20 years, married the first time in July 1978, adopted my oldest daughter Amanda in 1980, second daughter Shelley was born in 1979 (please pray for her if you have remembrance), and youngest daughter Nicole was born in 1985. I still smoked marijuana and drank alcohol off and on until Jesus saved me in December 1986.

God’s word says He chose Christians before the foundation of the world (Eph. 1:3-14). So those born physically He will keep alive until they are born again. I didn’t know that then, but by God’s grace I know now that it is why He protected me and each of His own.

Not everyone will go through what I did. Some less, some more. But either way, God should and will get all the glory. Thanks for reading.

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I had the undeserving privilege of pastoring 4 churches for about 15 years during a 20-year period in the past. I shared this message about 8 years ago at the last Church I pastored. Take it or leave it. May God use it as He sees fit for His glory!