First Person with Wayne Shepherd

First Person: Warren Wiersbe

Long time pastor, author, and teacher Dr. Warren Wiersbe talks about his life of ministry, starting with his career as a magician. Send your support for FIRST PERSON to the Far East Broadcasting Company: FEBC National Processing Center Far East Broadcasting Company P.O. Box 6020 Albert Lea, MN 56007 Please mention FIRST PERSON when you give. Thank you!

Duration:: 23m
Broadcast on:: 18 Aug 2011
Audio Format:: other

Long time pastor, author, and teacher Dr. Warren Wiersbe talks about his life of ministry, starting with his career as a magician.

Send your support for FIRST PERSON to the Far East Broadcasting Company:
FEBC National Processing Center
Far East Broadcasting Company
P.O. Box 6020
Albert Lea, MN 56007

Please mention FIRST PERSON when you give. Thank you!

Paul wrote to Timothy and he said, "and other things that you've heard from me, you tell other people so they can tell other people." And in my writing and my preaching, all I've done is say, "Here's what God has taught me, take it, see what you can do with it." Welcome to this week's edition of First Person. I'm Wayne Shepard with a very special guest today, Dr. Warren Wearsby. For those of you who know Dr. Wearsby, I think you'll enjoy catching up with this remarkable man. Now in his 80s, who's had such a deep impact on the church for the past 50 plus years. And if you haven't read any of his books or listened to his sermons, you'll find out today why so many Christian pastors still look to Warren Wearsby for leadership and wisdom and ministry. First Person is a weekly conversation with a guest who shares their faith story with us and reminds us all of God's faithfulness and calling. And we're found online at firstpersoninterview.com. Well, I love to read biographies and one of my favorites is titled Be My Self, the Autobiography of Warren Wearsby. An avid reader himself, Dr. Wearsby, has a very extensive library and has a knack for remembering hundreds of stories and quotations. But it is his love for God and God's Word that compels him even after a lifetime of study to continue learning all he can. I called Dr. Wearsby recently, he immediately instructed me to call him Warren, and we began by talking about his ministry, which is now even extending to Facebook. I know very little about it. One of my good friends who's into the media up to his eyeballs says he's monitoring it for me, so I don't know anything about it. Well, you have a couple of thousand fans there on Facebook, and your wit and wisdom through the years has been amplified there, so we sure appreciate it. Yeah, I think what they're doing is quoting. Yeah, well, the lords in control, as long as they don't send me a bill, let them go. So you span quite a period of time from, what, late 40s in ministry all the way through Facebook now? That's quite a career. Well, I began my ministry about, well, I was saved in 1945 at a Youth with Christ rally in my hometown, not far from where you are right now, East Chicago, Indiana. And Billy Graham was the preacher. I got saved that night. Then I started preaching about 19, what's the, when would it have been, '45, '50, 1950. God called me, I was in seminary, and away we went. Well, you passed it in Indiana, and of course, near Cincinnati, Covington, Kentucky. Yeah. And Chicago's Moody Church. Yes, that was the biggest surprise of all, that God would pick me up and put me at Moody Church. And I want to say right now that it was a privilege to follow Dr. George Sweeting. He became pastor of the church when they were in very, very difficult circumstances. A group in the church just wanted to sell the building to the city of Chicago. But Dr. Sweeting did a marvelous job, and following him was one of the greatest honors I think I've ever had. That says a lot right there. How many different positions have you stopped to count them? I know you were with Youth for Christ for a while. Well, I began at the pastoring Central Baptist Church in East Chicago, Indiana. Then we went to Youth for Christ. I helped to set up the literature division. We were living in Wheaton then. Had little house completely surrounded by mortgage juice. And then we left Youth for Christ. But I have to say this, to work with Ted Angstrom at YFC in the headquarters was like going to Princeton and getting an MBA. What a man. He taught me so much. We went down to the Cincinnati area, at least over the river from Cincinnati, Covington. And that was Calvary Baptist Church where they're 10 years, and then got to call the Moody Church. And then when I left Moody Church, Mr. App approached me and wanted me to come on deck as sort of an assistant teacher or something like that. So I think it was in '79 I began flying dead Lincoln. And that was back to the Bible. And then Mr. App passed away. I was called to be director. And that lasted until about 90. Then I thought God was calling us, setting us loose. And we began an itinerant ministry. And that's where your autobiography be myself. I love that title, by the way. That's where it leaves off with about 1990 or so. The last 20 years or so, it's been this itinerant ministry. Are you still out in about these days? Oh my, no. No. Four doctors, my good doctor friends, got together and said, "You're not going any place, brother." Just to sell your luggage to somebody, because the worst place for you is in itinerant ministry. So we said, "All right, Lord, if this is what you want, but we're having a ministry here." Wayne, for the first time, the people are coming to me. I don't have to go to them. And we're getting phone calls and mail and all sorts of things from people I've never heard of. Some people I've known a long time. Can we just stop by and see you? Now, somebody may have started a rumor that I'm going to be raptured or I'm going to die. I don't know. But it's not wonderful to have a group of friends who gather around you like that. I appreciate that. Well, it says much about how God has gifted you and how you've grown in your understanding of the Lord and now I want to pass it on to other people. One of those people is my friend Michael Cat, Pastor Michael Cat from Sherwood Baptist in Georgia. And Michael is a big fan of yours. And he wanted me to ask you about tricks with thimbles. (laughing) Okay, there's a secret of that. All right, he says he has a signed copy. (laughing) Michael's Church is one of the most wonderful I've ever been in. The prayer ministry there and the faith stepping up by faith. Well, when I was nine years old on my birthday, somebody gave me one of those little magic sets that had little tricks in them. And you won't believe this, but when I was a child I was very shy. I didn't want to talk to people, I lived in the public library and read books. But God ordained that I should start doing magic tricks. And I discovered I could tell jokes and my timing was pretty good. So I started renting myself out at, I think, $20 a half an hour or something like that. Which back in those days was a lot of money. And I'd go to birthday parties, one thing or another. And then I started inventing my own tricks. And my first book was published in 1945. And it was called Action with Cards. I was doing card tricks. It was published up in Chicago. And then I did one on mental magic, reading people's minds. And then I did a third one on thimbles. Thimble magic is not seen today, but back in that day we had a lot of fun changing the colors of thimbles and pulling them out of people's ears, etc. And then when I got into ministry I thought, "Well, I don't need these things anymore." And that was the end of that. Michael, I think it's still looking for a copy of that. Did he ever get one? Yeah, he told me he has a signed copy. Somewhere along the line he made an investment. Are you one of those authors I'm guessing you're not that's kept track of how many books you've written through the years? No, Betty does that. She's the secretary of the corporation. She tells me it's up to about 160. Yeah, no doubt. And of course in many different editions, somebody said to me, "Well, I can't believe that." I said, "Well, it is unbelievable, but I suggest you go to Amazon.com and put my name in there and start scrolling." And they did. You mentioned Ted Angstrom. I know Bob Cook was another one of your heroes. Oh, indeed. Who are some of the other people through the years that God has really used in your own life? Well, you start with the youth for Christ's crowd. I was saved in youth for Christ. Tori Johnson gave me a great piece of advice one day. He said, "Young man, find the one thing you do that God blesses and stay with it." And that's all I've done. Preaching and teaching and writing books. That's all I've done. I can't do anything else. Tori Johnson was an encouragement. Bob Cook was like a second Savior who told me he was so wise. He'd say, "Now, Warren, keep your ministry on a miracle basis. If you can explain what's going on, God didn't do it." Now, that's terrific. And that's what we've tried to do. Howard Sugden. I don't know if you knew Howard. I know of him or knew of him and I recognize the name, but I never got to hear him preach. Well, Howard Sugden was a great preacher. He passed through it for 40 years at South Baptist Church in Lansing, Michigan. We were dear friends, traveled together. We were in conferences together. And I think I was probably the son he never had, but he was a great blessing. He knew the ministry. He knew his Bible. Great help to me. Theodore Epp, I was able to watch it close at hand. And if ever there was a man of God, it would be Theodore Epp. I put him in the same category with William Culbertson, an A.W. Tozer, where they walked with God and a problem comes along and the first thing they do is say, "Well, what does God say about this?" And he was a great help to me. We were together only a short time, but I learned so much from him. I recall the first critical letter I got when I began to minister over back to the Bible. Somebody wrote and just let me know what the truth was. And I gave it to Mr. Epp. I said, "How do I answer this?" And he read it, and he thought for a moment. He said, "Like this." And he crumpled it up and threw it in the waste basket. Why waste postage, huh? He loves to tell stories and laugh. We'll continue this conversation with Dr. Warren Wiersby coming up on First Person. When you join us next time, actor Robert Amaya talks about his relationship with Christ. It's my mission and my wife's as well. Let's get beyond the stereotypes of what the feeder world thinks of God. And let's show him the reality of not just the loving God, but I mean the ever abundant loving God. He plays hobby in the new movie Courageous, and you'll meet him next week here on First Person. Warren, you were telling us of the men who have had such an influence on you through the years. Mentoring has always been important to you, whether you are the mentory or the mentor, right? Other people spent time with me. I look back, I can't begin to name them all. But I remember Jason Lobachster, the great British Bible teacher, I taught him how to drive. We spent a week together and I'd gone to here and preach at a conference. He asked me, he said, "I'm going to stay in the states and minister for a while. Need to learn how to drive." He invested, I didn't, he invested hours during that week. And it was like walking with Moses, what a blessing he was to me. I have only returned to others what others have done for me. Bob Cook spent time with me. Dr. Colbertson was a great encouragement. When God called him home after I had gone to Moody Church, it was a real, real loss to all of us. I feel that what Jesus said is true in many areas. "Freely you have received, really give." I have high school students phoned me here in Lincoln and say, "Have you got some time to talk about something?" "Sure, I'm an old man, but come on over, pastor." I just recently spent some time with a very fine young pastor, but he's learning. Paul wrote to Timothy and he said, "Now the things that you've heard from me, you tell other people so they can tell other people." And in my writing and my preaching, all I've done is say, "Here's what God has taught me, take it, see what you can do with it." So it is both a conscious choice and really a lifestyle the same time, isn't it? Well, if you had told me 50 years ago this was going to happen, I wouldn't have believed it. But I'm grateful for other people. I have some pastor friends over the years who just wanted to be alone, just don't bother me. They'll preach and they're gone. A lady said about her pastor, he's invisible during the week and incomprehensible on Sundays. Well, I didn't want to be that way. But others have helped me. I recall calling a very well-known pastor one day, I won't name him, and saying, "I've got this problem, what do you suggest?" And he spent time with me. And when I hung up the phone, I thought, "He didn't have to do that." One of the problems today is we have too many celebrities and not enough servants. And a servant cannot say, "No." Now, sometimes you have to say, "No," because the person is not really operating right. But one of the greatest joys in my life, Wayne, has been to watch other people grow and take over. That's one of the questions I had for you today that actually came from a friend of mine. I told him I'd be talking to you and ask if he had any questions. He wanted me to ask you about your greatest joy. Well, I suppose your is not such a thing as the greatest joy. I can think of so many things that God has done. To me, it's a great joy to find a truth in God's Word and be able to put it in language people can understand. I don't know how many times I've been reading my Bible in my devotional time or in my study time. And I've said, "Well, how long has that been in Bible?" I'm sure you've had the same experience. It's a living word, isn't it? Exactly. But I think one of my truly greatest joys is to see a young Christian grow and then find his or her way into service. So I should think that within a pastor's life, next to leading people to Jesus, just seeing people influenced because you prayed for them and you spent time with them. We're living in a busy generation, Wayne. And I think pastors need to remember what Alan Redpath used to say. I heard him say it so many times, "Beware of the barrenness of a busy life." Wow. All right. What about your deepest heartache in life? To see somebody fail for whom you prayed much. There are certain faces that come before my imagination. And I just grieve. They had great potential. We're in a place where they could serve God and then something happened. I don't know what. And now they're not doing that anymore. And that's a heartbreak. I don't think many Christians realize what a heartbreak Judas was to Jesus. Jesus did everything he could do to get a hold of Judas, his heart, his mind, his will. And it never happened. Well, he was one of the twelve, so that says a lot, doesn't it? Well, Charles Spurgeon said, "If you want to have a devil start with an angel, and if you want to have an apostate start with an apostle." And there's a lot of truth to that because the higher we go, the more dangerous it is. We take ourselves too seriously. We say, "Well, I'm here and I'm safe and I can do what I want to, but you can't." And as a consequence, we have people who fall. I've had heartbreak that way. But we've had so much blessing. God has been far better to me than I ever deserved. And the wife he gave me, people say I couldn't have made it to first base. I couldn't have gotten on the team if it hadn't been for Betty because she's a marvelous manager. I never had to worry about the finances. She took care of that, and she was just been wonderful. Please, give our best to Betty. I know she's close at hand there. She's right above me. We thank God for her. How do you retain all these quotations that you come up with all the time, all these great thoughts from the past? Is that all just in your brain there? Well, God has given me a strange kind of a mind. There's a line in one of Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories where Sherlock Holmes says, "I have a strange mind that retains trifles." Well, I think I have that kind of a mind. It's not trifles that you retain, though. God has given to me a very receptive memory. Now, it's not like it used to be. When you get to be 82, you have to think twice. But I mark books. Whenever I read a book, I mark it. I make my own index in the back. And I can find these things. But over the years, certain quotations have just stuck with me. What I like to remember are the funny stories about preachers. There have been so hilarious things happen. Alright, I can't let that go without asking you for one or two of those. A young pastor who should have known better, introduced A.W. Tozer at a convention. Now, when you're introducing A.W. Tozer Wayne, all you have to do is what you do with the President of the United States. Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States. Ladies and gentlemen, A.W. Tozer. Oh, you have to do. This guy went on for quite a while extolling the merits of Dr. Tozer. He stood in the pulpit and he said, "May the good Lord forgive that man for what he said." Well, a chill went right through the congregation. And then Tozer said, "May the good Lord forgive me for enjoying it so much." See what I mean? Just great stories that you have. Are we utilizing what we have available to us and all the great teaching of the past? Are we thinking carefully enough these days? No, one of the callings in my ministry has been to make sure that I have caught up on the present. I'm not living as an antique, but I'm helping others catch up on the past. The books that I've written on the great preachers, for example, and the great Christian. I wrote them for people to find out, well, who was Spurgeon? Who was A.W. Tozer? Who are these people? Because if you don't know the past, you're condemned to repeat it. George Santiago said that, and it's a great quote. "The young people today are so caught up, many of them. In the latest trends, the latest this, the latest that, that they forget that God was at work centuries ago, eons ago." And so in my books, I have tried to say now, look, you need to learn from John Henry Jawat. You need to find out who was Robert Murray McShane. Because if you don't immerse yourself in the past, the present won't be very meaningful. And the future is going to be horrendous. So I've dedicated my life to doing that. Baker brought out 50 people every Christian should know, which is a combination of several of my books of biographies. And I hope people read it and find out that things did happen before we arrived. Well, how grateful we all are that Warren Wiersby has dedicated his life to reminding us of the great teachers of the past as we serve God in the present and the future. I'd have to add Dr. Wiersby to that list of those who, through their legacy of ministry, will continue to teach and inspire. Dr. Wiersby isn't able to travel and speak the way he once did, but he still mentors today from his home, and his many books are still very popular, helping Christian believers study the Bible and follow Christ. If you missed any portion of today's conversation, you can listen online at the website firstpersoninterview.com. Click on the Listen button for not only this week's program, but all previous first-person interviews as well. Again, that's firstpersoninterview.com. We're also on Facebook at facebook.com/firstpersoninterview. Next week, we'll meet one of the actors in the upcoming movie Courageous, Robert Amaya, will tell his story. Now, with thanks to my friend and producer Joe Carlson, I'm Wayne Shepard. Thanks for listening to First Person. [music] [MUSIC PLAYING]