Good morning! This is Pastor Buford here. I pastor Liberty Church on Pensacola, Florida. Welcome to God Today! It is a blessing just to sit with you and share with you a few minutes form my heart. I tell everybody – it took me a long time, a lot of scars, and a whole lot of mistakes to get this smart.
I want to share a little bit out of what I have learned. Someone says, “A wise person that learns from their experience, but a wise person learns from the experience from others.” I want to share a little bit out of my life’s experience. I once was a millennial too. All of you that are millennials today, that terminology we didn’t have back then. But, at 20 years old, I found myself really messed up. I was married. I had a hot wife and I loved her a lot. But, the problem was, I didn’t know how to be married. I didn’t know, really, the difference between love and lust.
I wanted to be with my wife. A lot of things in life, a lot of people that witnessed to me didn’t bring me to a place of surrender to God, it was really marriage that brought me to God, honestly. And want to be married, and how to be married. I didn’t grow up with a great model of happiness and marriage in my family. In fact, I grew up in a lot of dysfunction and a fractured home life. Like many of you today. It created a lot of confusion, and there was a lot of neglect. A lot of things were missing in my life.
When I came to the place where I was just trying to figure life out – this was in a different time era. It wasn’t the 1800s, but it was a long time ago. It was about time of the Civil Rights Movement. I lived in Atlanta and integration and things like that were happening. The Vietnam War and the threat of going to Vietnam – a lot of things were happening. A lot of my friends, just a crazy time. You know, one day, I came to a halt in my life. I decided nothing else was working. I was in a church service on a Sunday morning and suddenly I found myself walking down that aisle. I knelt at an old altar place in this little church. I prayed a prayer that I was guided to by those around me. Everything changed.
The thunder didn’t clap and lightning didn’t flash, and I shed no tears. But, a minute or two later, I stood to my feet a different man, a new person. My wife had been married to one man a couple of minutes earlier, and she would attest to this, now she was married to someone different. My whole life opened up. Everything was changed. I tried to figure it out, I couldn’t figure it out. I came to a place of what faith really is. It is stepping out beyond your understanding and your knowledge and surrendering to a sense that God loves me and had a destiny for my life. You know, it was the greatest moment in my life. I encourage you to make such a decision and take such a step. Let God help you figure life out and your future. He has a great purpose for you, He had a great purpose for me – greater than I could see at the time. It is the same for you – God is not a respector of person. God bless you – it is great to share with you today.