Ricky Kendrick

Hello, my name is Ricky Kendrick. I was born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I grew up in East Lake and went to Elementary and Jr. High School there. Then I attended City High School. One day about half way through my senior year, my principal (also my basketball coach), “Coach Pifer” called me into his office. He spoke quite a bit, but then, getting to the point, he bluntly told me, “Mr. Kendrick, there is no use for you to continue to be in school. You have missed so many classes that it looks like you are not serious. You are dismissed, effective now!”

“Wow!” I thought, “I’ve really messed up big time.” When you live for the moment, you can’t see what’s right in front of you, due to the choices you make. You may justify yourself in your own mind or blame others, but as they say, “You made your own bed; now lay in it.”

What a shock to my autonomic nervous system! It crushed my pride. At last, a big dose of reality smacked me right in the face. THE PARTY WAS OVER! No more skipping school and hanging out with my friends, doing who knows what. I was now in the real world. “Get a job, boy!” I wound up with about seven different jobs in a very short time. I had no vision or purpose, aimless as can be. And, Oh yes, LAZY. All this made for a bad combination.

Still not at the end of my road, I continued on a course of self indulgence. Whenever I wasn’t working, my time was spent on partying. All the money I made was literally going up in smoke. My grandmother had said, “You were such a nice young boy before you went to that school and got around those other boys.” What she, as well as many other parents, haven’t been willing to face is that their little “Johnny” (or in this case “darling me”) had become the bad influence on others’ children.

Outwardly no one knew it, but inwardly I was miserable — hopeless. I had already tried religion — Jesus and the Baptist church in my neighborhood — but I had been drifting since I went to High School. In Junior High, I had won the Bible award, but starting in High School, I really wanted the acceptance of my new-found friends. Peer pressure strikes again! How true the saying was in my case: “Bad company corrupts good character.” I was like a garden that was not closely watched over, and so the weeds of self-centeredness had now taken over. I had become like a thorn bush that my parents and the teachers at school could not touch without being pricked by my disrespect and disregard of their authority.

All that I had experienced in my neighborhood Baptist church had been very superficial. The big draw that our church had on us young people was sports, gooney golf, softball, weight lifting, basketball, and movies (good, clean ones, of course). I had turned to the church looking for the true Jesus Christ, only to find a false one. I found no one to lead me to the surrender of my life. I did not know it then, but the reason was that no one else had done it. Surely people in the church tried to help me with some type of moral reform, but they had no power to guide me to true repentance.

After about a three months of being out of school and working, I was driving to get my date one night, and on the freeway in Chattanooga, where I-75 and I-24 split, it started pouring. I was driving at no more than 55 mph, when suddenly my car started spinning 360 degrees on the road. I thought to myself, “Oh, my God, please help me!” I was terrified! My adrenalin rushed through my body so fast, I could feel my heart in my throat. To my dismay, after my car turned full circle, heading again in the same direction I had been traveling, I slowed down, ever so cautiously. Can you guess what the first words out of my mouth were?

“God, have mercy on me! I know you are real, but I don’t know how to find you!” I sat trembling for a few minutes, reflecting on what had just taken place. After getting enough courage, I drove off. My mind was racing and couldn’t help pondering once more, “Is God real? How can I find Him?” I had been disappointed so many times before.

From time to time, I was pricked in my conscience about my sin and the direction my life was headed in. Even though I was only 18, I knew somehow deep inside that I was on a downhill spiral, desperately needing help, but from where and from whom?

Eternity is instinctively in every person. I couldn’t shake that nagging, gnawing feeling that God was real and I was estranged from Him, and He from me. I attempted to find help from one of the leaders of the Baptist church, a deacon named Darrell. Sadly, he only had time for his four and no more. Later, he and his wife divorced. He too must have been a slave to selfishness while pretending to live in freedom.

I used to wonder how many others were also wearing a mask, like myself and so many other teens who filed into church, only to later whisper our filthy jokes. Sick, isn’t it? But how many have lived in this reality? Just as the Living Bible says in 2 Timothy 3:5, “Yes, they will go to church, but they won’t really believe anything they hear.”

Later on, I had the opportunity to rent a house with two men who I considered as pillars of the church. Several months after living with these youth leaders, Collin and Steve, I moved out in total disillusionment. There was nothing in any of our hearts to have a common life of unity and love. The best we could muster up toward having a common life together was to play ping pong once or twice a week. The stark reality was that we shared nothing more together than the cost of the rent. Becoming more and more confused, I began shrinking once more into my unbelief and doubt.

“Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” I continued my search. Way too often, I ended up in all the wrong places. For sure, I was lost, but deeply hungry for something real and meaningful. I was not going to be satisfied with just having “a form of godliness.” I wanted godliness. I could not settle for Fool’s Gold, with just going to church on Sunday. I knew that I desperately needed to be set free from my sin. It had me. Even though I suppressed my conscience again and again, this was one reality I could not escape from, no matter where I went or who I was with.

It was impossible to ignore these things when all the friends were gone and I was left alone with my thoughts. My reality then seemed so void and my future pretty bleak. Over the course of the next few months, there were several times I went into the church all by myself, late at night. I knew that if anyone knew this, it would have been forbidden, but I knew I wasn’t going to hurt anything or anyone. Having the key to the basement door where the weight room was, I headed up the hall leading to the upstairs chapel, without turning on any lights. Once there, I really prayed that God would make Himself real to me. He knew I meant it, and so did I. I didn’t have anyone else to impress. Somehow, I knew God was real, but finding Him was my quest. I had gone to this neighborhood church most of my life, but I was truly dying in the church.

I began to speak to many of my friends about Jesus and how I wanted to know Him and have a good conscience. Some were very open and supportive, while others would just say, “Oh! Come on man, get real! Don’t talk to me about this religious stuff.” But as the weeks and months continued on, my desire to be forgiven and be cleansed from my sins only intensified. It wasn’t that I was noble or anything like that — quite the contrary. I was realizing much more clearly what a desperate place I was in.

I flashed back to a young couple whom I had met the previous year. They had been staying with an old friend of theirs who just happened to be my Sunday School teacher. The visiting couple were Gene and Marsha Spriggs. Somehow I was drawn to get in touch with them again. Now, I am eternally grateful to them, and I owe my very life to them. For truly, Gene introduced me to the True One, the real Jesus Christ (1 John 5:20).

Here’s what happened! This couple loved Jesus with all their hearts, and they would have “rap sessions” on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Many young people would come to these meetings, and we would sing and sing and sing. We would share from our hearts with one another.

It took me quite a few months to realize that God was not in the Baptist church, and that I needed to be 100 percent with these disciples of the Vine House. Gene and his wife and those with them were different. It seemed that in the busyness of life, others in the past had been to busy for me. It was not so with Gene, because in the Busyness of his life, he was not to busy for me or the others that came to the Vine House. I never want to forget that, so that I too will not be too busy for others whom our Father sends to us.

Finally I realized that the life I was witnessing was what I had been looking for and longing for in all these other relationships before, but they where not sent by God to lead me out of the world. Is it possible that God still sends men of God to help poor lost sheep such as I was? I say the answer is, “Yes!” I am living proof of it. No one before had the authority to call me or others into obedience to the gospel, as Paul spoke in 2 Thessalonians 2:13, or as Jesus did in Matthew 7:13-14. This is true even for today. Likewise is Matthew 7:15-20. “Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

So, the call still stands in Revelation 18:4-5, “Come out of her, My people.” I am so glad to have come out of the mystical “Body of Christ” into the true and living Body of Christ where I could live for others and no longer for myself (2 Corinthians 5:14-15). I am sure there are many others who are just as I was — locked up in themselves, aching to be sent free to love, as they are longing for a preoccupation other than selfishness.

Has your pastor ever shared Luke 14:26-33 with you? How about Mark 10:29-30 or Matthew 10:34-38? Someone shared these things with me and the others in the Vine House days, and many more of the “hard sayings” of our Master and Savior Jesus Christ. Gene bonded us to this Christ — the Christ that was worth giving up everything to follow. This is the foundation of the Vine House disciples, even to this day. There is no other foundation that can be laid except Jesus Christ — total surrender to Him. So we learned a long to time ago that you can’t receive the message of a man if you do not receive the messenger.

I wonder how many of the people that came to us in our early days might think they received the message, but don’t have any idea that they didn’t receive the messenger that was sent to lead us to our Master and Savior, Jesus. I want to share one last thought that our Father in heaven showed us: 1 Timothy 2:5. We, the Body of Christ, are the mediators between men and Christ. We lead men to the true Jesus, while Jesus is the mediator leading men to the Father. Only those to whom our Father reveals this will receive it.

Ricky Kendrick