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AMARILLO, Texas?Junior Hill read aloud the words from the letter written to him by a struggling pastor. “I literally ache all over,” the pastor lamented, admitting he felt like a failure and was ready to quit despite no immoral act or deliberate sin.
Hill, the Hartselle, Ala., evangelist who has preached to preachers for decades, said the young pastor and many like him could learn something Hill has learned from experience.
“Failure is an instrument of God’s grace by which he teaches us things we wouldn’t learn any other way,” Hill related to the audience during the final session of the SBTC annual meeting.
Preaching from 1 Corinthians 12:7-10, where Paul speaks of his power being made perfect in weakness and a thorn in his flesh that kept him from being exulted, Hill said Paul’s thorn did several useful things.
-First, it turned Paul’s exultation into humiliation, Hill said.
“If anybody had reason to be exulted, it was the apostle Paul.”
Hill said Paul had a “desirable preparation”?a Roman citizen trained in the best Jewish schools and a Pharisee?a “dramatic conversion experience” on the Damascus road, a “distinguished designation” as the apostle to the Gentiles, and “divine revelation” in his apostolic role.
“If you had all those things, you’d be a little proud,” Hill said, noting that because of that God gave him a thorn.
Paul had his weaknesses too, such as a physical appearance and a speaking style that was unimpressive. That God would use Paul’s lack of charisma is evidence that “not many wise, not many mighty” are called. “God in his sovereignty has called zeros” to serve him, Hill said, explaining that the “base” things God uses to confound the wise literally have the meaning of less than the numeric value of one.
-Also, “that thorn made friends out of his foes,” Hill contended, adding that the thorn “was in fact the strength of his life” that moved him from a zealous persecutor to a beloved apostle and teacher.
Hill said he remembers coveting the preaching skills of people such as the late Vance Havner or W.A. Criswell, only to realize later that God had crafted him to be like no one else for a purpose only he could fill.
“The point is that he made me and nobody in this world can be as good a Junior Hill as I can. ? What you think is your weakness God says, ‘I’m going to make it your strength.'”
-Finally, “Paul, with God’s help, saw his problems ultimately become pleasures.”
Hill recounted how in 1961 as a seminary student at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and pastoring a church in Mississippi, he mentioned to his deacons one Sunday that he believed the church’s message of salvation was for all people regardless of skin color. The next Saturday when he drove into town and entered the barber shop for a haircut, the barber announced to him that the church had fired him the previous Wednesday.
“My heart was crushed beyond understanding,” Hill remembered. But 43 years later the peace, consolation and “the lessons God taught me in that terrible experience” are invaluable, he said.
“If you will see (hardship) in the light of God’s sovereignty, you will see him turn those problems into pleasure.”
