![]() ![]() He held my feet to the fire and kept me accountable. He taught me so much, to memorise Scripture, how to speak, how to behave in people’s homes. I never did get to go to Bible school, but I had a one-on-one teacher in the form of my pastor friend. A pastor and his wife there took me in and this pastor contacted all his friends and said, ‘I have this Irish guy here, would you have him come and preach at your church?’ He asked me to record my sermons and he would critique me and give advice on delivery and speaking. When I was 18, I left Belfast for America and arrived with just a suitcase and 25p in my pocket. I had no idea how I would make it from the congregation to the pulpit, but I had this inner tug, this deep calling, and I preached my first sermon when I was 13.’Ī wedding day message from God: ‘You will reach more people through your writing, than you will in all the years of your preaching.’ I grew up in a culture where men didn’t cry, but I would fight back tears, because I had this burning desire to preach. ![]() But then an amazing thing happened, when I was 12, I got saved at a mission and soon all my heroes were preachers. And so as children, not only were we planted but we were fertilised, watered and pruned. One of my mother’s favourite verses was ‘ planted in the house of the Lord, they will flourish in the courts of our God’ (Psalm 92:13 NIV). I once said to my mother, ‘my friends only go to one Sunday school, how come I have to go to two?’ ‘It’s a back-up plan’, she would say, ‘just in case you weren’t listening the first time.’ We also went to a Sunday night service, the prayer meeting on Monday, Bible study on a Wednesday and the youth service on a Friday. She took her family in one hand and her faith in the other, and said, ‘we are going to serve the Lord.’Įvery week, she took us to church and I always remember that after the morning service, I would go to two Sunday schools - the Brethren and the Presbyterian. She came into the kingdom at a hundred miles an hour and she never slowed down. She was one of the greatest Christians I ever knew, with an amazing conversion experience. ‘Growing up as a young man in Belfast, my mother was the driving force in our lives. My early years – ‘I would fight back tears, I had this burning desire to preach.’ God continues to make himself known through the ‘power of a story’.’ It has been an extraordinary blessing to see how God has used the UCB Word for Today since then, to reach millions of people around the world. 'I preached my first sermon when I was 13 but years later on my wedding day, we received a prophetic word which said God would use my writing to reach more people, than words spoken in the pulpit. ![]()
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