Redemption Runneth Over
While in college at the age of 18, I did not know the truth about the redemption of Jesus. I had bought into the lie that I could offer God less than the whole of me, and this would be good enough. I couldn’t see how a life lived for Jesus would be a life worth living, and because I couldn’t see how that was possible, I held out. I wanted to be good, and thought I was for the most part—but there was no way I was willing to go all in.
This all began to change when I went to work for the business of my best friend’s parents. You’ve probably heard of this business. It’s famous now. But back in 1997, Duck Commander was nothing more than a few buildings around Phil and Kay Robertson’s house. The work I performed was menial: answering phone calls, packaging and shipping products, taking out trash. But the lessons I learned there were profound. During this time, God was working on me.
I had grown up going down to Phil and Kay’s quite often, when I would spend the night with their youngest son, Jeptha. I realized from youth that this family wasn’t normal. Kay and Phil constantly had people in their home. At my house, guests were infrequent and homogeneous. They lived near us, lived like us, looked like us, and generally shared the same zip code and income bracket.
That was not the case at Kay and Phil’s. People were always there, and these people were varied. There were white people, black people, rich people, poor people, church people, and folks coming out of a life of drugs and alcohol. There were teenagers, middle-aged people, and older folks. There were people there that they knew, and there were folks who were new to them. Basically, every type of person you can imagine rolled through their house. When folks showed up, food and hospitality was almost always involved. And Bible study inevitably followed every single time. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard Phil share the good news of Jesus or with how many people.
During my youth, I was an outside observer to all of this. I recognized it as different. But, since my time there was pretty much limited to weekends here and there, I just sort of dropped in, bore witness to it, and would then go back to my regular life.
Being employed there, I could no longer avoid these oddities. Phil and Jase began to engage me directly in the Bible studies I previously observed as an outsider. I experienced the hospitality and love of Kay and others even more directly. They fed me well (I gained around 30 pounds during this time) and invited me into a life with Jesus.
Through this time, the lies I had embraced were exposed to light. Kay and Phil lived life fully for God and lived a full life. There was nothing halfway about them. Nothing was withheld. They were full of love, full of relationships, and full of mission. They were full of God. Through daily conversations, I became convinced there was nothing good enough about the life I was living. I became convinced that if holiness depended upon me, there was no way I could measure up. But Phil helped me see from his own story that my inadequacy didn’t mean I was rejected.
On the contrary, he introduced me to a God that loved me despite my disobedience; a God who loved me with a costly love—one that cost Him greatly. Being confronted with a God—who is that good and that loving and that just—eliminates the option of half-heartedness. The only two sensible responses are to either reject and run or offer the whole of who I am to this good God. You see, God demands everything. But in exchange, He offers even more: redemption, sonship, purpose, and abundant life ever-lasting. It took a few months, but I eventually relented. In February of 1998 at the age of 19, I became a follower of Jesus. Phil marched us down the bank of the Ouachita River and baptized me into Christ.
You have no idea how much this time (or really this Jesus) has shaped my life. In the short term, my friends changed. My speech changed. What I did with my time changed. But over a longer period of time I noticed other things, bigger things, changing as well. What I hoped for in my earthly life changed. The sort of wife I desired changed. What I hoped for in a future family became very different. I wanted a life full of Jesus—a life that had been modeled well for me by two of His servants.
What Phil and Kay did for me isn’t unique in the Kingdom of God. They were simply two people who had tasted the fullness of God, and having tasted that, could not keep it to themselves. The goodness of God could not be confined within the container of their own life. It spilled out, overflowing into others. I was just one of many beneficiaries.
I’ve found this true in my own life. God is too great to be kept within my own jar of clay. He has spilled out into my family, my friends, my hobbies, my business, and into every aspect of my little sphere of this Earth. God is the great redeemer. He redeems people who then spread that redemption everywhere they go, in everything they do. This affects individuals, yes, but He also overflows into families, communities, economies, governments, and even nations. And this has been His plan all along.
Gary Osborne is an attorney and co-owner of a mechanical contracting company in West Monroe, LA. He and his wife, Erica, along with their two children, serve in various ministries at White’s Ferry Road Church. Gary is passionate about sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ through the expository teaching of scripture.