D. James Kennedy - Led by the Carpenter: Finding Gods Purpose for Your Life

LED BY THE
CARPENTER

Finding Gods Purpose forYour Life!

D. JAMES KENNEDY

Copyright 1999 by Dr. D. James Kennedy

All rights reserved. Written permission must be secured from the publisher to use or reproduce any part of this book, except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from THE NEW KING JAMES VERSION. Copyright 1979, 1980, 1982, Thomas Nelson, Inc., Publishers.

Scripture quotations noted KJV are from THE KING JAMES VERSION.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kennedy, D. James (Dennis James), 1930

Led by the carpenter: finding Gods purpose for your life! / D.

James Kennedy.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-7852-7039-6 (hardcover)

1. Christian life. I. Title.

BV4501.2.K4294 1999

248.4dc21

9937814
CIP

Printed in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 6 QPM 04 03 02 01 00 99

To my wife, Anne, and our daughter, Jennifer,
who have made the trip more delightful as I have attempted to
follow the lead of the Carpenter.

CONTENTS

I am thankful to my faithful secretary, Mrs. Mary Anne Bunker, and to Dr. Herbert Lee Williams and Debbie Revitzer for their excellent assistance in editing and research.

I am also grateful to Mr. Dan Scalf, who helped bring this book into existence.

1
GODS PURPOSE
FOR YOUR LIFE

You are the salt of the earth;... you are the light of the world.

(MATT. 5:1314)

W hy did God create you? What is your purpose for living? What did God put you on the earth to do?

I dont imagine these questions were uppermost in Carolyn McKenzies mind when she picked up the phone to call her local radio station with a concern. Yet, at the moment she made that call, she set in motion events that answered those questions in a profound way for her own life.

The power of a concerned mother

Carolyn McKenzie is a Memphis, Tennessee, homemaker, wife to her husband, Mark, and mother to their four sons. One night, she recalled, my youngest child, who is handicapped, was playing with the radio, and I overheard an advertisement for a topless club. One thing that caught my attention was that the advertisement invited young women to come in on Wednesdays to strip for amateur night. Every woman who participated would receive fifty dollars and the winner would be paid a three-hundred-dollar prize. I thought, Its such a shame that they would have that on a radio station with such a young listening audience.

The next day Carolyn picked up the phone and called the radio station to complain about the adbut the station refused to do anything about it. So Carolyn listened to the radio each night, wrote down the names of businesses that ran ads around the ad for the topless cluband then she called those businesses. Im a concerned mother in the community, she said, and this ad for a topless club is running back-to-back with the ad for your business. Is this the kind of thing you want your business to be identified with?

She went on to tell these business owners that the topless club had attracted the attention of the vice squad and the health department because it contained peep show booths where patrons engaged in anonymous sex acts. Trained as a healthcare professional, Carolyn was concerned not only about the moral threat posed by such businesses, but also about the health risks to the community. If youre as concerned about your community as I am, she said, please let the radio station know how you feel about this advertiser and the damage it does to your companys image.

Change didnt happen overnight, but Carolyn was persistent. She kept listening to the radio station, she kept calling local businessesand before two months had passed, the ads for the topless club disappeared from the airwaves.

But Carolyns work wasnt finished. She talked to the district attorney about prosecuting such businesses. He told Carolyn that many of the businesses were operating illegally, but that pursuing violations against them was a low priority in his office. Every call I made, every question I asked, she said, was met with, We dont have enough manpower; we dont have enough money. To me, that was no excuse for inaction.

Carolyn contacted a group called the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families, and she discovered what other people had done to clean up their communities. I learned about a bill that had been passed by the state of Delaware, requiring that doors be removed from so-called peep booths so that the booths no longer offered any privacy. Though it was still legal for people to go into the booths and watch dirty movies, they could no longer engage in sex acts, either alone or with other people.

She got other people in the community involved, she got the D.A.s office involved, and she went to the Tennessee state legislature, testifying before legislative committees. A doctor with her group documented the fact that he had found dried and fresh semen and human waste on the floors, walls, and chairs in the peep booths. As a result, a strong bill was enacted by the state legislature, over the loud protests of the rich and powerful pornography industry.

My daughter is a topless dancer

Sometime later, as Carolyn McKenzie was doing a radio interview on a call-in show describing her battle against pornography in her community, a woman called the show. My daughter is a topless dancer, said the caller. She wants to leave, but she has tremendous credit card debts and she makes good money as a dancer. She doesnt know how to get out of the business. Can you help her? Carolyn agreed to meet with the callers daughter.

When Carolyn met with the young woman, she told her, If you promise to leave the strip club now and never go back, Ill help pay your bills. Carolyn and her husband were not wealthy and had no idea where the money was coming frombut she felt God telling her that He would provide. My heavenly Father has always met my needs, she told the young woman, and I know He is going to meet your needs too. Im not going to ask you to go to church or a Bible study with me right nowbut Im going to pray for you. Then well see together if God provides for you.

Carolyn was just so bubbly and positive, the young woman later recalled, that she made me feel like everything was going to be okay. She put her arms around me, and I could feel the love.

Carolyn and her husband provided short-term help for this young woman, but ultimately the solution to her problems was found in answered prayer. The young woman found a job, and her husband who was AWOL from the navyturned himself in and was reinstated. Within a year this young woman and her husband had paid off all their credit card debt and were paying their bills on timewithout having to sacrifice this young womans morality and dignity. Most importantly, these two young people committed their lives to Jesus Christ.

And that was just the beginning! Since then Carolyn has helped a dozen or more young women escape the trap of the pornography industry, and many of them have accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. Their stories are heartbreaking: Some started dancing topless as young as eighteen; some were single mothers; some were forced into prostitution. Lured by the promise of easy moneyas much as a thousand dollars a weekthey soon found themselves in degrading circumstances, unable to escape, surrounded by filth, violence, drugs, disease, and men who wanted only to use them. Many of these young women drank or used drugs to anesthetize themselves to the pain of their hopeless condition. The strip club managers constantly berated them by asking, Who would ever hire you to do anything but strip?