Stories of Transformation

Charlie Boyd: And that prayer Pauls praying that you might know the love of God that surpasses knowledge. And in that prayer, the information and the background is good. The Greek word for the first “know” is to know in my experience, to know experientially the love of God that goes beyond what I know in Bible verses about God’s love, and that I would be filled up with all the fullness of Christ.

Discovering that became something I’m praying every day, and I was praying, “God, whatever that is, whatever Paul was praying, and I’m not even sure what he was praying, but whatever he was praying was something that they could know in their lived experience.” And I’m thinking, “God, whatever that is, I want to know it experientially.”

And so that prayer was an unlocking kind of prayer, and it’s still very much a part of my daily prayer life.

Nathan Wagnon: The voice you’re hearing is Charlie Boyd. He’s been in ministry for over 45 years, and it has just been such a joy to learn from him and to see how Jesus has just been faithfully walking with him through all of the seasons of his life. And so today you get to hear his story. So let’s tune in and witness through Charlie’s own words, the faithfulness of God.

Charlie Boyd: I was very fortunate. I grew up in a Christian home. I don’t ever remember a time that my mom and dad didn’t talk about Jesus. I have fond memories of sitting in the living room and my dad and I watching Combat and Dr. Kildare and all this, and my mom would be over on the end of the couch—she would be reading her Bible. And every time Billy Graham came on, we watched all the Billy Graham crusades and all that kind of thing. And we were regular in church.

I trusted Christ when I was 10. I believe at that time it was childlike faith. But I believe that Jesus died for my sins and rose from the dead to give me life forever with him in heaven. And so I think I was saved in childlike faith at that point in time.

But I went to a church where basically it was just evangelistic messages every week. So I didn’t really grow past believing in Jesus and then be a good person, type thing. That’s pretty much all I was taught.

But when I was 15, I got to playing in a rock band and one night we weren’t playing. And so I would occasionally play acoustic guitar with this gal and we played in a Christian coffee house. And that night a group of students came in and they were talking about having a personal relationship with Jesus. And I’m thinking, “What’s that about?” I literally never heard the term.

So I started hanging out with this other youth group and eventually began to grow and hear things that were really drawing my heart towards the Lord. And I ended up rededicating my life to Christ and then began to learn how to read my Bible on a regular basis and to have a prayer life and that kind of thing. And that pretty much propelled me through high school.

I ended up dropping out of the band. I went to college thinking that I wanted to be a general practitioner. I wanted to go into medicine. I’d kind of always had that dream and desire. But when I got to Florida State, I got involved with the Navigators and I had a guy come alongside me and disciple me in the Navs. And so again, that’s another advance forward in my walk with him because I’d always wanted to know how to study the Bible and I’d ask my preacher, and he couldn’t ever give me a good answer.

But with the Navigators, I started memorizing scripture, having a day away in prayer—these kind of things—and learning how to study the Bible.

Nathan Wagnon: So I want to pause here for just a few minutes and make a couple of points. First is, if you’re not familiar with the Navigators, the Navigators is an organization that’s been around for almost a hundred years. It was started by a guy named Dawson Trotman, who ended up having an equipping type ministry, primarily to soldiers and sailors coming out of World War II.

So the Navigators teach four major disciplines, which is Bible study, prayer, scripture memorization, and evangelism. And they do it in a very structured way.

So where Charlie is in his story, what he needed was some structure and some equipping, and he didn’t have those tools. And so through the Navigators he got what he needed.

Now what’s interesting is a lot of times we’ll say, “Hey, I was discipled by a person or by the Navigators or by something else.” I just want to make sure that we understand discipleship in the sense of the Holy Spirit is already moving and operative in Charlie’s life. And as he moves through these stages of development, different people, different methods, different organizations, different experiences are going to enter into his story and the Holy Spirit is going to use those things to give Charlie what he needs in those moments.

When you look at a disciple of Jesus in the early stages, most of the time what they need is community and equipping. And what’s really cool about Charlie’s story, where we are right now, is that he did eventually get those things. So let’s tune back in.

Charlie Boyd: Long story short on that, I was going for interviews at med schools and I just kept feeling that I’m not sure this is what God wants me to do.

And this guy, Dan, he said, “Charlie, whatever you do, would you be a man that stands in the gap between people and God and God and people like Ezekiel? I look for a man who’s stand in the gap.” And I said, “Yeah, whatever I do, that’s what I want.” Because I’d kind of felt this burning in my chest—I want to know God.

And so, well, I mean, it didn’t take long before I realized I’m not supposed to go into medicine. I know there were lots of godly doctors, but for some reason I just couldn’t see myself doing that. But I didn’t know what to do and so I went another year, got enough credits to graduate with some hours so I could teach, and got married.

We moved to a little town in Georgia and started teaching. We got really involved at a church there. Before the year was out, they asked me to come on staff as a student pastor and a discipleship pastor. And I just felt God opened the door for me to do that.

And so I had this deep longing in me—and I didn’t know it at first because information and the cerebral part—I’m a thinker. I mean, on Strength Finders, my number one strength is learner. And so I love to study and I love to dig in. And I think I go deeper than what’s on the surface of the text, mining stuff out.

But I’m reading and I’m praying, “Help me, help them. Heal me, heal them. Do this, don’t do that.” It’s a grocery list. I mean, yeah, we should ask for help and we should ask for healing and we should ask God for things, but it never went any deeper than that.

And again, back in the Navigator days—spend a day alone in prayer. I still got this little book, “How to Spend a Day in Prayer.” Well, I mean, I didn’t do that when I was in seminary and I didn’t do that in my ministry context. I mean, how could I? I was overworked and underpaid and had a young family and had those responsibilities, and I couldn’t figure out how to make life work.

This is a weighty thing to be a pastor-teacher and you gotta handle the word and you gotta dig it, you gotta study. It was just easy for the informational part of what it means to be a good Bible teacher to kind of just eclipse all of what I learned in my upbringing.

Nathan Wagnon: Yeah. What Charlie’s describing here is really, really common, and it’s not just with academics or seminary students or professional theologians or teaching pastors or whatever. It really is a human issue because at the end of the day, if we can take biblical information and use it for something, then we feel a sense of control, I think.

And then the Bible ends up being something that’s a utility that’s to be deployed or used instead of one of the primary means by which we encounter God. And in that sense then, yeah, there’s a lot of people who are having thoughts aboutGod and even verbally thoughts about God and publicly thoughts about God, but not very many thoughts with him. And that’s the thing where a lot of people can get into some pretty deep ruts of doing ministry, teaching bible studies for the church, serving in a ministry, being a lay person that’s super faithful in the church, but then also going, “Yeah, I read my Bible every day, but I don’t remember the last time I really substantively connected to God.”

If that’s you, then, well, number one, you’re definitely not alone. You’re right where Charlie was. But two, there’s also a lot of hope for you moving forward, so let’s keep listening in.

Charlie Boyd: And I mean, that’s basically the way it was for me until about two and a half years ago. But I had this increase in longing.

Interesting little story. There was a lady in the church who had cancer and she had given me some books by a lady named Leanne Payne. One of them was called The Healing Presence. And I thought it was all about if you believe hard enough, you can get healed. So I never read them. And she passed away a couple years back and I went to lunch with her husband. He was asking me, “Did you ever read those books?” And I said, “No, I didn’t.”

And so we talked and I came back to the church and I just passed my library and I walked in. I knew exactly where the books were and I pulled that Healing Presence and it was all about healing from your distorted pictures of God and wounds from your growing up years. And I was thinking, “Oh my goodness.”

So I pulled every book off and I went to Europe and I preached in a church over there for five weeks in Berlin. And I didn’t watch TV the whole time I was there. I read every single book that she wrote and I didn’t agree with all of her theology and that kind of thing. But she talked about this in-one-another-ness with Jesus.

And so that was the start of this journey because I kept hearing echoes and reminders of echoes of when I was 17, 18, 20. And this was guys like Oswald Sanders and Oswald Chambers and E. Stanley Jones and all these people—they talked about this and that’s how I lived, that’s how I read my Bible. That way. Not just reading it for information, but “God, what do you want to say to me? For me?”

Nathan Wagnon: Okay, so Charlie is clearly being extended an invitation from the Lord and the Holy Spirit is clearly moving in him in a way that’s drawing him into more. And what I’m not talking about is a second baptism or a higher echelon of Christianity, or special forces Christianity or whatever you want to call it.

What I’m really talking about is the Lord just going, “Hey, I think it’s time in your journey. You’ve been serving me for decades. You have all this information. But it’s time to bring the information into contact with the relationship and really take major steps, not just to know and to do, but to actually learn to be with me.”

And that’s what Charlie is being invited into. It’s a really special time in his life. I’ve seen it so many times with others where it’s something has got a hold of them and is pulling them into just more—more of God, more love, a wider view, a bigger story. All of those things are happening and, yeah, this is really exciting.

Charlie Boyd: In this process, I started reading other books and digging a little deeper. And then a guy named Mark Moody who had been on staff with me—I’m talking to Mark one day and he goes, “Hey, did you know that Chuck is involved in this thing called the Eden Project?” And I said, “No, I haven’t touched base with Chuck in a long time.”

So he got me and Chuck connected and Mark told me about what he was experiencing, which sounded part of the journey I’m on. And so I connected with Chuck and he told me about this retreat in Dallas. So I went to the retreat and it was just all very, very different.

But I was thinking, “God, I’m going to be open. I’m not going to resist. I’m not going to be negative and critique it. I just want to be open and receive whatever you want.”

Nathan Wagnon: Man, what a beautiful thing. I mean, for Charlie, who is at this point, I think was in his late sixties, to show up at a place where he didn’t really know anybody and things were a little bit different than what he was normally used to. And for him to just open his hands and his heart to go, “Alright, Lord, whatever you got for me, I’m here. I’m yours.”

I mean, it makes me think of 2 Chronicles 16:9—the eyes of the Lord are looking all throughout the earth to find the guy whose heart is fully given over to him so that Yahweh can strengthen them. And man, that’s Charlie Boyd at this retreat, just going, “Man, Lord, I’m yours all over again.” And the Lord blesses that and he blessed it in Charlie’s story. It’s really awesome.

Charlie Boyd: It was life-changing in the sense that I rediscovered language from my early walk with the Lord—language similar to the books I had been reading. And I mean, it was just clear that I’m on this path and you begin to realize the first 30 years of my life—growing up years, I mean, getting married—they were great. Just about anything that I undertook, I was able to accomplish, didn’t hit a lot of brick walls or anything. It was great.

The next 30 years there was an undercurrent of anger in my life. 30 years. And I knew it was there. I didn’t want it there. I mean, I hate to say it. I’m sad to say I regret—I mean, I took a lot of it out on my wife and I pled with God. I mean, if you could see my journals—and I’ve always kept journals. I mean, I think I need to burn them because I don’t want my kids reading them because they’d say, “This man is the most depressed man.” Because I was going, “God, I don’t want to be this way.”

And so about 15 years ago, I hit a wall and I went out and talked to a guy in Nashville. I did a week intensive with him and then my wife and I did three months—every Tuesday and Thursday night—with this counselor couple.

And what the guy out in Nashville told me, he said, “You gotta change your work or change the way you work.” And it was, “I get it.”

And that whole experience humbled me to where I’m not immune to anger, but I don’t have that undercurrent of anger anymore. And not too many years ago, they celebrated my 25th anniversary at the church and they had some people as a part of it stand up and say nice things about me. And the primary thing they talked about was humble leadership.

And I was weeping because I was sitting there and I was thinking if I had not hit the wall, all they would’ve talked about was “he’s a good Bible teacher.”

And so that kind of broke the undercurrent of anger. And it set me up, I mean, to really begin to seek the Lord. And again, it was about three years ago that God began to open my eyes and see things.

Nathan Wagnon: Okay. Yeah. So Charlie is talking about a season of his journey where, using his words, he ran into a wall. And in the kind of developmental stages of the spiritual life, of the journey of discipleship with Jesus, the wall is a period of marked disorientation where things that used to work just don’t work anymore. The way that you’ve been doing things actually becomes counterproductive, begins to wound you and others. And really, deficiencies of character in a lot of ways begin to come out. In this instance, the underlying anger that Charlie had.

And this is one of the seasons where the Holy Spirit met him in a really unique way to show him that there’s a better way—that this was a gentle but firm resolve that the Lord is going, “Okay, it’s time. It’s time for me to do work in this area.”

And praise the Lord, I mean he did. And in large part, what Charlie showed was the humility to go, “Hey, I haven’t arrived yet. I don’t have it all figured out. I need help.” And for him as a senior pastor to raise his hand and go, “Man, I need help”—I don’t know, it’s one of the things I continue to be blown away by Charlie. And one of the reasons I love him so much is that he’s just consistently exhibited that humility. So much so that when the people in his congregation stood up to honor him, those are the words they used. Humble leadership. What a grace from God.

Charlie Boyd: When you get in seminary and you begin to look at text and context and hermeneutics and making sure that you’re rightly dividing the word of God, which is all right and good and proper, it’s easy to begin to think that right information will lead to transformation. And it’s just not true. It’s just not true.

And I read something, I think it was in one of David Benner’s books. He said that the ancient Hebrews and the early church fathers read the Bible two different ways. They would read it to understand it in order to explain it. That’s how I was doing it. But the other way they read it is they would read it and sit in front of it and let it speak to them.

Not “what does it mean to me?” because you can go off with all kinds of crazy interpretation. But “what is it saying to me? What is this text saying to me?” And so I began to add that into my Bible reading.

Nathan Wagnon: In a lot of ways, what Charlie’s experiencing now is that reorientation. When you’re disoriented, then it’s an invitation, not around something, over something, under something, but straight through it. So you have to move through the disorientation—to sit, to raise your hand, to ask for help, to get a trusted guide and then to walk very intentionally through it.

Well, what that does is it reorients you to an image of God that is more accurate than the one that you had when you started. And so the possibilities for what can happen now with a reformed, more accurate, bigger, more possibility-available type of image of God is—is that now you’re ready. You’re ready to take some significant steps forward. And that’s what we’re hearing from Charlie.

Charlie Boyd: Our church has this plan of reading through the Bible this year, and I just got up two weeks ago and I talked about it—it has its place, but what I’m doing is I’m reading just a little section, working my way through the gospel of Matthew.

I sit in front of the text, I pause, sit in silence, ask the Holy Spirit to take God’s word in this text and make it God’s word to me today. And show me that this Jesus in this text lives in me and wants to live his life through me. And then I just read two or three times and then I sit in front of the text until the Holy Spirit puts something in my mind and I start writing.

And I don’t want to miss a day. I just don’t want to miss a day.

Nathan Wagnon: Yeah. Charlie is, as we say in the South, now he’s cooking with grease. Things are happening. That distinction to where instead of reading the Bible for information to be able to use or teach others, which is important—but I’ll circle back around to that in a second—instead, he’s sitting in front of the text in order to be engaged by it by a person.

So his emphasis has shifted away from the words on the page and the doctrine found within the teachings of the scriptures. He shifted away from those things to the reality itself, and that movement is so profound. And that’s why you’re hearing him say it is way different.

Now, what’s super interesting though is if you’re just reading the Bible so that you can learn something or teach someone else or be able to use it in some way, but you’re not connecting to the reality behind the words on the page, then the thing you end up teaching to other people is a truncated version of what it’s supposed to be.

In other words, are people learning the Bible from you or are they falling in love with God because of you? That’s the question.

Charlie Boyd: I mean, I preached identity in Christ, who I am in Christ, that kind of thing. And I knew about flesh and spirit, but when I began to—in the second cohort and the knowledge of self, the reading there and what we talked about, I began to see that the way I defined it is that the false self is the patterned person that I became growing up in a fallen broken world.

Nathan Wagnon: So where Charlie is now in the journey of the Eden Lead cohort that he was a part of—so he’d finished the knowledge of God retreat and a lot of that sitting before the scriptures in order to listen and be encountered by and encounter this reality beyond the words, this deeper way of experiencing what is the true story of the world, coupled with what he’s talking about now, the recognition of the ways that he has been malformed in his formative environments.

When you put those two things together and begin to retrain someone in their knowledge of God and the knowledge of who they are, then you’re going to start to see some significant transformation and cooperation with the Holy Spirit. So Eden Project’s mission of retraining people to connect deeply with God, themselves, and others is literally—I mean, you’re hearing it right now. Charlie is being retrained. The Holy Spirit is doing something in him to unlock capacities that maybe he knew were possible, but now he’s starting to experience. And what you’re going to hear from him is the way that he’s being retrained. It’s really, really beautiful.

Charlie Boyd: This journey of teasing out false self versus who I really am and the deepest part of my innermost self—where my made-alive spirit, made alive through faith in Christ, co-mingles with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the spirit of Jesus. That’s who I am.

And so I was talking to my counselor, spiritual director yesterday and I was unpacking something I’m going through, which is fairly disturbing and conflictual. And he said, “How are you in the deepest part of who you are?” And I said, “Oddly, there’s a peace there.”

And I said, “I am learning to tap into that peace more and more.” And when I am not doing that, my thoughts are running wild and I gotta figure out how to do this and how to say this and make this happen and not let this happen. And I mean, I even—I was laying in bed not about a week ago, and all this stuff is running through my head and I’m doing this battle. And I’m quoting, I think it’s Psalm 73, where in The Message where it says, “I am in the presence of the Lord. Oh, how refreshing it is. I have made, Lord God, my home.”

And I kept laying there and I would move from my head and down here and I’d feel the peace. And so I finally said, “Jesus, I can sense the peace that is rightfully mine. Would you take that peace and push it out into my body and my heart?” Within five minutes I was normal.

So there’s a reality here that the information alone could not bring me into. Look at Ephesians 3:19 and start to pray: What is the fullness? What does it mean to live and to be full of the fullness of God? Pray in addition to your “help me, help them, heal me, heal them, do this, don’t do that”—”God, I want to know you.”

Nathan Wagnon: Charlie is now oriented correctly to the right goal. That’s a really critical piece in the story of transformation because so often the goal, as he said is, “Lord, do this, do that. Help me to glorify you. Help me to be useful to you and your kingdom.” And all those things are good, but we can do all of those things and be aiming at the result instead of the cause.

We can be oriented toward what is happening around us instead of just knowing Christ Jesus. So I mean, I think about Paul and Jesus where Paul says, “Man, all of that stuff, I counted as loss for the sake of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whose sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I just want to know you.”

And then of course, Jesus said in his prayer to his father, right before he goes to the cross, he says, “This is eternal life.” Not that people spend a duration of time in a blissful place where everybody’s happy. No. Eternal life is the quality of life that comes from God, that is relational, and so Jesus summarizes it and says, “This is eternal life that they would know you—have an experiential relationship with you, the only true God—and Jesus the Messiah, whom you have sent.”

It’s interesting because all the blissful heaven stuff that everybody’s looking forward to is actually consequential. It’s coming out of, it’s flowing from the source of the river itself. And the source of that river is God. And that’s why the highest end of mankind, the highest end that you can ever achieve as a human is a deep and abiding relationship—not with the Bible or with activity, but with God himself.

And man, it is so refreshing. And it’s a ton of gladness as I’m listening to Charlie talk because man, the Holy Spirit is taking him there.

Charlie Boyd: Yeah, it’s so good. I want to know you in a way that goes beyond just my Bible information about you and my doctrine about you. I want—show me, show me how to create space. That’s the other thing—you gotta create space to be able to sit in silence, in solitude and slow down in scripture reading with pause and think and that kind of thing.

So I would want 30-year-old Charlie to know that there is such a thing as an experience. And now I’d probably say, “Don’t you remember the passion of Dan Wade and the passion of Tom Cochrane, your student pastor, and the passion that Dan Mano and the Navigators? Do you remember how they read the Bible and how they prayed and how they encouraged you to do these spiritual practices? You remember how real and vital that was? Keep learning what you’re learning and growing, but don’t lose sight of that.”

God has revealed himself in the person of Jesus. And there really is a way of personally knowing God through Jesus. And the way to know God is to create space to be with him. To be at home with him. When you trust him, he makes his home in you, and all of life is trying to create space of what does it mean for me to be at home with him?

I guess for me and the journey that God had with me and the longing and desire that existed in me, I just got to the place where I had to—I had to create space for God to speak in a way different from how I had been hearing him.

Nathan Wagnon: What you’ve seen in Charlie’s story is a progression over many years, decades even, of a God who is love walking with Charlie, incrementally growing him as he’s ready, and brought him to the point where he is now. And the great thing is his story is not over, but he brought him to where he is now and just gave him that healthy anger, that passion to want more, to know God.

And I’m just curious for you, the listener, to ask honestly: Where am I? Do I want more with God? Am I willing to take steps that are perhaps outside of my comfort zone in order to create the space to encounter God in fresh and new ways?

That is our mission at Eden Project, and I hope that stories like this encourage you, even if it’s just a single step to just reach out and learn more. Thanks for listening to Charlie’s story. Who knows? Maybe one of these days this will be your story. Until next time.