I had wanted to meet him. I was told he was going to be at the wedding I was attending. I love to meet old sages at anything, but especially servants of God. He had buried his life in Timbuktu in Mali West Africa. I had heard Steve Saint tell of the story of meeting the pastor of the church he founded. Steve shared the man's testimony of coming to faith in Christ. It was a balled punctuated by stolen vegetables, a scriptural memory club, a bic pen and the grace of God. And as Steve took delight in telling, a narrative on how the man had heard of the story of the martyred missionaries in Ecuador-one of whom, of course, was Steve's father Nate Saint.

The man is showing his age with the lines having fallen to him in pleasant places. His wife's white hair and sweet disposition were both signs that time and God's grace had moved her on towards the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. It was a delight to meet them and talk to them.

Timbuktu is in Mid Northern Mali close to the Niger River. Muslims not able to go to Mecca for the hajj can substitute a trip to the old mud mosque in Timbuktu, Mali. Sankore Mosque has seen its share of visitors. It has been a by-word destination for the West for the obscure and the extremely out there place. I remember in the eighties at Southgate when we were making some videos to promote our missions conference we all loaded up on a bus in the midst of shooting a "rap" of all things, and the sign they displayed on the back window of the bus was 'Timbuktu or bust!"

He shared stories at the table with another couple from our church. I think Joe and Jan were as enthralled as I was. Given three couples from Southgate in Mali and having heard of this couple, I had always wanted to talk to them. But it was the intersection of two veterans, the love of the body of Christ and generosity that made for a delightful turn in the conversation. Let me explain.

Good friends of theirs are good friends of mine. They had served with their mission in a neighboring country in West Africa. Clearly there was a lot of mutual affection, respect and appreciation for the collective representation of faithfulness in the lives of these four.

The sage I was with that night shared how recently their colleagues had driven through their town on their way to visit family in another part of the state. The errand also included a change out in cars-oh life's mundane necessities. Their friends were driving a car that was kept in good shape and was clearly in stead for some more miles. They inquired as to the destiny of the vehicle. Their friends told them that it was to be used to trade in on another vehicle.

In passing, the brother from Timbuktu noted that he would be interested in the car. A brief conversation ensued about possibilities. Price may even have been discussed. Both couples slept on the matter in the midst of a nice visit catching up on life and godliness.

But the next morning was the kicker. Generosity broke out in supple proportion. The Timbuktu couple got emotional as they told me the story. Agreeing to the transaction, special instructions were left for how this would go down...with specific detail on not reading the terms in the envelope until after their departure (now some of you are just a little ahead of me in the story at this point).

The note was one for the ages-one of those notes that you read and never forget. It was a note about generosity, which has a particularly delightful shelf life in the spirit. The note recounted the selling couples gratitude for a life time (many of them were listed) of kindnesses and moments shared of great encouragement. With a measure of emotion, the brother shared how the last paragraph closed. You know now. The car became a gift. It was a generous gesture celebrating friendship between old vets who had labored together and nearby in a cause that will last forever. I do not think they will ever ride in a car that they more appreciate. It is what it represents that matters. It was a monument to fellowship and affection in gospel ministry and of course, to generosity.

The apostle Paul calls Jesus Christ an unspeakable gift and sets the bar of generosity where none of us can reach. But as footnotes on His generosity, you and I can step up and be generous to each other. Oh, it may not be over the top like a car, but there are a million and more ways for us to be generous...and all the while imaging just how God is disposed toward His own.

All right, who is it going to be? To whom will we share generously today?

Dr. Paul Dixon has had a pretty significant influence on my life. I was in his evangelism class as a freshman in college at Cedarville University (then college). His passion to see people come to follow Jesus is contagious. I stood in the window before one of our classes and watched the photographer shoot the now famous picture of him and Dr. Jeremiah walking down the sidewalk in locked step. None of us knew at the time what a metaphor that would be for the seamless transition to a new leader at Cedarville that God would bring about. His twenty five year run as president was pretty outstanding. He has always bled the mission of Cedarville and he would share that mission with others and ask them to be his partner in paying for the all the buildings they built during his tenure at Cedarville.

One of the several forums, included chapel and his indulgence in friendship, which galvanized his impact on me, was a discipleship group he invited me to be a part of at his house. It did not hurt his impact upon me that he and his wife were zealous fans of jacket basketball back in those days. I can still hear that which is unable to be mimicked in Mrs. D's cheers from those short stubby pull out bleachers near the Jacket bench. But let me get back to our discipleship group. Several of us would go to their house at some obscure hour in the morning and he would work at anchoring our roots into the disciplines that would take us deep in following Jesus Christ. He opened his Bible and taught us lessons in following Jesus. They were always simple and full of clarity and challenge. We were memorizing scripture together and seeking to follow hard after Christ. I do not know why I was sovereignly chosen. I was in the group with several others, including a trustee's son who seemed to me to be trying to figure out whether he was going forward with Jesus. I wonder what ever became of him. Dr. Dixon had his arm around him pointing to Jesus.

In that group I learned an important lesson that I have never forgotten. It is amazing what God uses to speak to your heart. Paul Dixon's socks! We usually took our shoes off so we were not messing with Mrs. D's carpet. There was always a time when we knelt to pray together. I remember one morning watching him kneel at his chair. I can still see it in my mind's eye and it was the impression on my heart at the time that had stuck with me.

Now the impression was not related to the quality of the socks he wore. They looked to be right off of the shelf of some great haberdashery. They had no worn marks on them. For years I have been of the mind that your socks go through several lives. The first life is the cotton stage. Then you move onto the polished nylon stage when the cotton is gone in the strategic places and you move toward the silk stage. Caleb's Emily invaded our space a few years ago and now has taken up the dishonor of my sock collection. Who cares unless they have to take your shoes off in ER and you show them your silk socks? Well, thanks to Emily and the last few Christmas gatherings, my sock drawer is working its way back to Dr. Dixon.

But we knelt one morning and in my mind's eye I could see that he was just a man. Sure, all of our spit dried up around him and we swallowed our tongue when spoken to by his immanency, but he was just a normal guy. He got cut from his basketball team in high school (probably the only thing in his life he has not been outrageously successful at), and went home and cried, he told me once. That's normal. When we all knelt at those chairs we were just in the stuff of following Jesus together. There was no hierarchy. He was not super man president; he was just a common guy with gifts from God who gave them liberally to the Lord's work. Now this is not your locker room speech about the other team putting their pants on one leg at a time, but I realized that God uses ordinary guys in ways that please him. Now I have certainly learned that he does not always use us in the same ways and to the same extent. Some thirtyfold, some sixty, some a hundred. You know the drill (Mark 4:20).

That sort of bothered me at first. He wears socks and all just like me (now granted his socks are better) and is a normal guy. I wanted him to be super-human, an angel of God. I would felt better about the leadership at Cedarville. But I have learned the genius of God in thinking otherwise. He just uses common ordinary people who love Jesus and his work in extraordinary ways. Then he collects all the glory.

He just turned 70. Happy Birthday Dr. Dixon! But I hate that. As I am about 120 days away from a half a hundred, I have realized more and more that the heroes upon which I have been standing are finishing out. Dr. Kempton died. Vernon Grounds is 94. Joe Stowell is 65. Bill Wheeler is 85 (his hair looks like that anyway). My buddy Marv is weak. They do not stay around forever. Oh the glory of Jesus, our eternal and unchanging Lord!

What is most bothersome is to consider that they are finishing and, with my peers, we are it. I feel so inadequate to be one of Ezekiel's gapsmen and step up into their wake. I am not like them. I do not have their gifts. I always wanted so much more out of the leadership I followed than what I find in my own heart. Where now are the giants?

It is then that his socks bring me back to my knees, where I ask God to make my ordinary extraordinary for him and for his glory. In our weakness, his strength is made perfect.

Happy Birthday Dr. D! I hope you got a couple pairs of new socks. Thank you for your faithfulness.

There is a phrase in the King James Version translation of 1 Corinthians 16:13 that has always intrigued me, "quit you like men". Maybe a part of the intrigue is tied up in not entirely understanding what the phrase meant. I find the New American Standard's translation so much more clear, "act like men". That is one charge the men in America need to hear. But then, who is clear on what it means to be a man, a man of God?

I remember as Andi and I were rearing our boys (now men, 23 and 20), we frequently pounded in that notion, "the man of God is not a striker". For obvious reasons, we had need of that verse a lot as the boys grew up. Striking was regular fair. I think we derived that challenge from Titus 1:7 and the King James Version's take on the qualifications for the office of pastor. While we pushed hard on anti-striking, we could have filled out the rest of the profile of the man of God with more proportion. The striking part just seemed so relevant as they grew up.

What is striking is the influence a man of God can have over his home, work and community. In many families, I have noticed that there is more spiritual fervor in women than in men. While I applaud and welcome godly aspirations in a wife and mother's heart, an influence pattern I have observed (especially in the shadow casted in a son's life) is that an ounce of the husband/father's godliness seems multiplied in influence to that of a gallon of godly aspiration in the wife/mother. Now this is not some raw sexist comment as much as it an observation I have made about what seemed to be even the negation of a godly mother's influence in the home in the face of the ungodly role model of a father.

There are certainly always exceptions. I have seen some incredible single mothers and of course, the prophet Daniel and his three friends did not do bad surrounded by pagan and ungodly influences in the courts of ancient Chaldea. And they were all by themselves as young adolescent boys. God sets apart the godly for himself. But the argument of this paragraph is for the indispensible place a godly man has to play in his home. We need godly men.

This past week I spoke to man who worked through a really tough experience with a family member he loves. In the midst of working through the carnage that a "professing follower of Jesus"-male had wrought upon his victim, a counselor (a dear godly women) grabbed a hold of my friend and asked something like, "Where are the men? Where are they? How come a male can get away with this in the church? Where are the guys standing up to this man and saying, 'No, this is not the way to live. You cannot do this to women. This is not acceptable and you must change.'?"

Is that the kind of culture of expectation we are cultivating in our churches? Faithful are the wounds of a friend. Iron sharpens iron, as the scripture asserts. Too often we hold out little expectation for godliness, when it is our collective hunger together for righteousness that is a big part of maintaining our resolve to go on in the Jesus' way of life. In my weakness, it is both the power of Christ and the holy expectation of my brothers and sisters that goads me on to faithfulness to Christ. I am not advocating heavy handed moral policing as much as brotherly expectation articulated and expected and applied. We need it from each other. The church that is alive and captive to righteousness has it. We know better and expect it of each other. There is too much at stake not to stimulate each other onto love and good works and holy living. Like never before it is a time for husbands and fathers to "act like men". Men are loyal to their wives and clearly one-woman men. Men are faithful to their promises and commitments. Men lay down their lives for their wives. Men are pure and shun all sexual indulgence outside of marriage, physical and mental. Men take up the honor of their wives and affirm them and protect them. Men take up the duties of fathering creatively and with joy. Men don't let other males jack around in sin and indulgence without calling it what it is and levying a healthy expectation for repentance. Men it is time...time to rise up and "act like men".

As I write, what must be a long and wonderful celebration of a godly man's life is coming to an end. His funeral is today. On Sunday I received word that my friend Wendell Kempton had gone to heaven. Melanoma recently grabbed him by the throat and took his life in full stride in his mid seventies.

All of us who follow Jesus are a product of the grace of God and the person of Christ and the people we get to know and the providence He takes us through. One man who influenced me significantly was Dr. Wendell Kempton. His life touched mine and I live in his debt.

Coach Callan introduced me to him when I was a cager at Cedarville. He would come and speak to our basketball team and hang out with us when he was on campus. I can still hear his passion in my soul and it resonates as I write. Wendell never recovered from God's love that laid hold of him. He loved basketball. His old basketball coach at BBC (Mead Armstrong) was living out his twilight years in my days there and coming to our games. His teammate at BBC, Stan Ballard, was on the faculty. One of my favorite stories of Dr. Kempton is the one told by Stan concerning a trip home from BBC in a car in need of repair. They broke down. Stan and Wendell got out. As I remember the story, they lifted the hood, made a quick inspection and Wendell suggested they pray. They closed the hood, started the car and kept going. Wendell had laid his hands on the car and prayed. What Stan did not know was that that was a portent of what Wendell would do the rest of his life...lay his hands on people and invoke the Lord's blessing and watch God do wonders.

He was a regular part of the speakers group that would share the Word of God during mission focus weeks. That made sense. He was the president of A.B.W.E. (Association of Baptist for World Evangelism) for 30 years ('71-'01). What a distinguished run he had of shepherding that organization along. He was Uncle Wendell to all of the MK's and a father to all of the missionaries. I have been with him at field council meetings. He loved his own and his friends.

His dear wife Carolyn, the mother of his children went home to be with the Lord suddenly with a brain aneurysm at what I remember as 42 years old. I never met her. He spoke often of her in those years.

In the Spring of 1981 I was invited to speak at his buddy's church (Dan Gelatt) in Elkhart, Indiana. Wendell brought Doug Collins (of Olympic and Philly 76ers NBA basketball fame). Wendell had ministered to Doug in his network in Philly (and to Bob Boone, Mike Schmidt, Dr. J. and Joe Gibbs...all of whom spoke this afternoon at the funeral). We sat in the Gelatt's living room and talked about basketball in the NBA. Doug told us about Hondo's (Havlicek) phenomenal stamina and Red Auerbach's tactics in the opposing locker room at the garden (bolted the windows shut from the inside...and turned the heat up). It was a delightful visit for a good basketball player want-to-be. The chagrin came onto the faces of the kids we ministered to on Sunday of that weekend. "Wow, Doug Collins...but who is that other guy?" was the response as we went room to room. I have a picture somewhere that the church published that weekend with our pictures on each side. It was Babe Ruth walking around with an Enon Little League farm teamer...all over again. What a fun weekend!

I ran into his son, Stan, at seminary. Chip off of the block. Smart, well groomed, winsome and engaging. Stan is an able brother. I got to know Mark when he was at Cedarville in the college-coaching loop with Coach Callan.

We stayed in touch through the years and I would see Doctor Kempton at various conferences. He came down to Dallas for a week while I was in Seminary. In his company everyone felt like a dear friend. You were his focus.

When he announced his retirement he began to take a few trips saying good bye to missionaries, many of whom were there because of decisions they had made about their future while listening to that Dallas Seminary grad preach the gospel and call people to service. I was invited to join his swing through Brazil for two weeks. I remember the year as 2001. At Southgate we had just sent a team down to build a little housing unit for a camp in Recife. I joined our team and then met up with the good bye tour and Dave and Ev Southwell (some of the best company you'll ever share abroad) for two weeks. I will never forget those days. I was with Dr. Kempton there when he received the news of a martyred ABWE missionary in Togo. I got to know Ruth Royer Kempton on that trip. God gave him one classy wonderful gal with whom to finish life. She is a gem. She is lovely and realistic and down to earth and has a heart that beats for Christ like few others. She was perfect for him. Coming home in business class (thanks Dave Southwell, I owe you buddy) I observed an episode of Dr. Kempton rifling through his garments and baggage in a desperate search for his passport, apparently a regular discipline he engaged in (as I picked up from the exasperated looks on Ruth's face). She could handle him very well. After quite an archaeological dig, the passport was unearthed. Ruth rolled her eyes and Wendell asked that I always keep that a secret and I was not to tell...does not that kind of a bond expire when a guy goes home to glory? We sat under Cashew Trees in Recife waiting out an afternoon ride and talked all afternoon. The breeze was as pleasant as the conversation. We were remembering old basketball games he had come to at Cedarville. One night he walked in as the game was starting and I was unconscious. Mount Vernon was in a zone and I could not get the ball enough. I had a big night. It felt better...in front of him...respect and admiration does those kinds of things to you.

At his retirement gala when everybody was wanting a piece of him, he left the security entourage (or so it seemed) and the big important people group and came to greet Andi and me. He took time. That was Wendell. Those times and times and half a times with him shaped my life. I will always be grateful.

I will miss his company that I shared infrequently but always affectionately. His memory stirs my resolve to go on for Christ. When you head toward fifty your mentors start to go on before you. I hate that. I feel like those giants are so much more the men of God than I am. I stand on their shoulders, call them, seek their company and counsel and find strength to go on. Wendell is gone. His work is done. I am one of a whole ton of people who will miss his company. I am grateful to God for letting me know him and to Don Callan for introducing me.

Someone has said, "It is a privilege for a pious man to die." God made Wendell pious and that privilege was his on our Lord's day this past week (that day we remember the first day of that first Easter week).

Thank you God for the gift Wendell Kempton was to so many. Thanks for including me in that crowd. Thank you for our hope in Christ- to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.