Free Pastor Training: God Changed my Life

Free Pastor Training

Follow Logan on his journey as he answers God’s call to become a pastor with free pastor training at CLI.

The Grace of God: How His Pursuit Changed my Life

My name is Logan Roberts and I am receiving free pastor training from Christian Leaders Institute. I live in Northeast Ohio with my wife and our daughters. When looking back over my life, I can see how God was calling me from the darkness. He called me into a life lived with, for, and in Christ. I was very stubborn though. I didn’t submit in humility and love to God’s pursuit of me until August 2010.

Early Struggles

My upbringing was not in a Christian home. We did not go to church. I even made fun of some neighbors who did and tried to share their faith with me. I went to a vacation Bible school over summer vacation to my aunt’s house in Tennessee when I was maybe ten years old. Silently, I mocked it the whole time in my head. However, she bought me a study Bible, and I was interested in it. I remember reading Genesis, John, and Revelation. I found it compelling, but not enough to devote my life to it.

All the way through my senior year of high school, I had a small amount of interest in God surrounded by darkness. I was into being a weird art kid. I made sure I looked the part as well. Partying and drinking were a part of those years as well. After high school, I had no plan. So, a year afterward, I randomly decided to join the Ohio Army National Guard.

Into The Darkness

I was in the National Guard from 2007 to 2013. A friend of mine from school had joined, and I contacted him. I got his recruiter’s phone number. A few months later, I graduated from Infantry OSUT training and with the same unit as my friend. I had a son during the early years of my military time. In 2008, I deployed to Egypt. While I was gone, the relationship with my son’s mother fell apart. When I returned home a year later, we tried to reconcile, but it was too late.

When we found out our son had cancer, we were frustrated and confused by it in the midst of our failed relationship. She met someone else and married shortly after. She and my son moved to North Carolina. I shut down, lost interest, and turned into an absent father. I was devastated by the whole thing.

Life seemed to fall apart, so I drank and partied away months of my life. I crashed my car into a brick wall in January 2010 and was charged with drunk driving. Then, I lost all my friends because I couldn’t handle losing my only means of dealing with life (no matter how harmful that method was). That still wasn’t enough to turn me to God. Instead, I tried to become an intellectual, but that quickly failed. By the summer of 2010, I was partying again, only worse because I knew I had a problem.

God Called Out of the Darkness

My friend and I had National Guard training coming up. We would be gone for three weeks, and I showed up hungover and depressed. He was different. He was going on and on about this youth group he was helping lead at some church. Throughout the next few weeks, he shared the life-changing story of how the gospel changed him. Jesus Christ was now his Lord and Savior. Therefore, it felt amazing to be free from the baggage he had been carrying around. He wanted to devote his life to Christ and the church.

He had some books with him. As we talked, I got interested in and borrowed one. It had much to say about God’s love for me and was filled with scripture references. So, I bought a Bible on the post to read the texts. I was hooked. I was new. Something gripped me about the Bible and God that had never done so before. God became real, and the Bible became alive. And, Jesus became a person in my heart, mind, and soul. I felt the Holy Spirit convicting, reforming, and restoring me into a child of God.

Free Pastor Training at CLI

It’s been almost nine years as I write this. God put a desire in my heart to become a Pastor. I still feel strongly about this, and I continue to follow and live out my faith as a husband and a father. My wife and I have been married for almost eight years. At this time, it is in my family that I find my primary role as pastor fulfilled. We are part of a church plant. One day, I hope to see myself pastoring in this context.

My spiritual dream is to see Titus 2:11 become a reality all over the world, for all people in all times and places. “For the grace of God has appeared, bring salvation for all people.” (ESV). I considered pursuing more traditional means of obtaining an education. However, I’ve found that this nontraditional path I’m on is the path God has set before me (and we see it throughout the Bible). My prayer and hope are that the free pastor training I get at Christian Leaders Institute/CLI’s Leadership Excellence School will prepare me for ministry as a Pastor.

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