No Matter the Vessel, God has Shaped the Clay

Introduction from The Story Retold

While scrolling through Facebook recently, I stumbled upon a sponsored post about a book on Romans and felt compelled by the Holy Spirit to explore it. Romans has a special significance for me and my family, and Steven offers a moving and personal testimony in his study guide introduction. It reminds me of Steven’s words: “God’s plans are always better than mine,” which ring true in this instance. I am grateful for Steven’s willingness to share, and I pray that God’s work through us will be evident in everything we do.

A Testimony by Steven Dent Brenzie

Adapted from the Introduction: A Layman’s Study of Romans

If someone would have told me a couple years ago that I would be writing an introduction to the book that is in your hands, I would have thought they were insane. Thankfully, God’s plans are always better than mine. I wish to include that, at 44 years of age I found myself teaching Sunday School to a very small but very committed group of believers in a very small but very committed congregation. I believe very much that we should always focus on God’s message no matter the vessel, but I also believe that the path of the vessel and the way God has shaped the clay impact this message. This impact helps to explain why God’s Word is universal but the message we each receive is as different as we are. Our redemption and transformation stories have the power to reach others when we allow God to use us for His purpose.

I grew up in a small Methodist church in the middle of nowhere. My parents divorced at an early age and remarried. I grew up going to church camp one week a summer and always felt God’s presence during that time. A significant portion of the congregation left the church when it was assigned a new pastor. She was a Black woman from Africa, and some people in the congregation were racist. The hole left in my life from people that I had grown up around no longer being a part of my life was significant, but worse yet was when half of them came back 4 years later the week after she moved to another church. She was a woman full of the Holy Spirit. Her replacement was a pastor on his retirement gig who used the same 52 sermons every year.

As a teenager, I started working, my church attendance became sporadic, and doubt started to creep in. I never stopped believing that there was a God, but any relationship I had with him was gone partially due to the hypocrisy I witnessed in portions of the church.

Shortly after I graduated High School, I got drunk for the first time. While some might not understand this, I felt that night just like I did during outdoor chapel services at church camp. I was at peace, but it came with a price.

I would follow that quest for peace from the flesh and begin an almost 4-year process of sacrificing all of my values to numb the pain caused by my life of degradation. I would come to know sin in a manner that I could not have previously understood -In the darkness of my rejection of God. The shame was overwhelming. At one point, I was selling drugs to support a life devoid of purpose beyond chasing the next high.

On October 20th of 1999, during an attempted pill and alcohol overdose, I uttered what I now consider a one-word prayer, “Whatever.” God answered that prayer. From that moment, I felt the presence of God again, but I still wandered. I surrendered my drug and alcohol usage to God, but not much else at first. I attended church for about a year, and there were some great people at the various congregations I attended. Once again, work pulled me out of church or should I say, being part of the church lost its priority. I still attended secular recovery meetings, prayed, and focused on self-improvement. The grace of God was enough for a long time, and my life changed.

After a few years of wandering, I found a path that worked for me at the time. I became comfortable with living a life without the crutch of hard substances but still used nicotine and women in a manner that I would detest today.

Despite being lukewarm with God, He was patient and He healed me in many ways. A decade after my “whatever” moment and prayer, things were good. I was working as a clinical coordinator at a local drug detox and rehab, and my neighbors elected me to borough council. It felt great to have a respected career and a place in my community that allowed me the opportunity to give back. However, that God-sized hole, the real faith in God, was still lukewarm at best. As I became involved in more civic responsibilities, the power of man became a new drug for me. The ego that was once deflated to the point of complete desperation started to build.

With each news article that marked my accomplishments and each success at work, I began to stop participating in the disciplines that had led to my blessings.

I started to believe my own hype, lost focus on the original desire to serve others as a vessel of God’s goodness and began molding my actions to feed my self-esteem.

In 2013, I met my wife. We dated a year and married in a small service. We read the Prayer of Saint Francis at the ceremony, but my real prayer life at the time was non-existent. In addition to not attending church, I was no longer attending secular recovery meetings. I decreased my number of civic commitments for a short time period to focus on my new bride, but the power once again called to me, and I came back at a level that represented a full-blown addiction to politics. I did at this time have a conversation with my stepfather about why I didn’t go to church. It may not surprise the reader that my excuse was that churches didn’t practice the teachings of Christ correctly and were filled with hypocrites. In what today I know was a moment God used my stepfather as a vessel, he very calmly said, “you not going to a church is not solving the problem,” and then he changed the subject. A few weeks later, I started attending a local church.

The church I started attending had a loving and accepting congregation. The pastor was a happy man full of Joy and knowledgeable about the scriptures. Still, my walk with God was a Sunday-only endeavor. I am grateful that I had a connection with other believers at the time, no matter how small, because in the fall of 2016, the most consistent example of Christ’s love was reunited with him in eternal perfection. My grandmother’s passing shook me to the core of my being. Despite being convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt where my grandmother’s soul was in the presence of the entire trinity, I doubted my own status. I could have turned to Christ in my grief, but the reality is that I turned more to self over the next few years. I became more and more cynical and focused more on my attempts at impacting the world in the manner that I wished to. There were a lot of positive things and people in my life, and I presented as a confident, accomplished man that people generally liked. However, the depth of my soul was all but empty. I did not know real peace, and my Joy was determined by each additional accomplishment.

In 2017, I started helping with community meals that we served in the church’s basement. For the first time since my involvement in helping others with addiction issues, I was engaged in service without concern for acclaim or adoration. Once a month, I would spend the afternoon and early evening preparing a meal with a group of faith-filled ladies and my parents while experiencing real joy and peace. However, my prayer life remained barely existent, I spent no time in God’s Word, and my relationship with God was surface level. The church hired a new pastor, and whereas the previous pastor’s sermons inspired me to reflect afterward, the new pastor’s sermons provided no inspiration. My church attendance lost priority. Thankfully,

God had called a local woman into ministry to start a sober bar known as the Harbor, which also became a recovery house and a church.

My wife and I had our wedding reception in the sober bar, we were there the first night it was open, and we stopped in every once in a while, on a Friday or Saturday. I started attending church at the Harbor when I was not committed to helping with the other church’s live broadcast, and I started attending The Harbor every week when that commitment ended.

I felt at home right away. My pastor and congregation are awesome and spirit-driven, but I now know that I felt at home in that moment because I realized I was once again willing to re-embrace the “whatever” I had uttered 20 years earlier in a drunken stupor. I was once again willing to seek God, be molded, and be transformed. I started building a relationship with the Holy Spirit again. I still struggled, but I got real. I started acknowledging those struggles and desired to seek a solution outside myself. I lost a job that I loved, and after a small period of anger, I embraced it as an opportunity to focus on my physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Over the next few years, I learned to discern God’s will from my well-intentioned desire of self. The path became clearer the more I trusted and obeyed God. A couple important moments of conviction have led to where I am.

At the beginning of the Covid pandemic, a man I went to church with died of an opiate overdose. The evening, he died, God convicted me to return to secular recovery meetings. I obeyed, and today I still do so and have the opportunity to share Christ’s love, wisdom, and healing power with others. As 2020 continued to change things, God convicted me to host blood drives and community meals in our church’s building. Thankfully, my pastor does not seek to get in the way of other people’s convictions. The community meals gave me the opportunity to work with people of the church in a manner many of them had never done before. It was truly the work of the Lord to watch men that had days before been in prison or a drug rehab giving of themselves to perfect strangers. I was still involved with some local civic activities at the time, but my strengthened relationship with God had removed some of my focus from feeding my ego. At a church retreat in October of 2020, God convicted me to walk away from all of my civic roles. We argued for a while about my role as vice chair of an organization managing the community’s water system, but I obeyed.

I spent all of 2020 unemployed and went back to work in January of 2021. My new work schedule required me to work every other Sunday for 2 months. My schedule did not change, and God convicted me to stop working Sundays after joining the church in the middle of the year. I continued working but took off each Sunday, and they fired me after a year. I was at peace with abiding by God’s requirement for me and found employment where I am not required to work on Sundays. A few months later, I started feeling that God wanted me to start Sunday school at our church since we did not have one. This conviction was different.

It was multi-layered, and there were multiple parts that I needed to say yes to. What became clear is what resulted in this book. We would go through the book of Romans, a book that I once told an Episcopalian Priest I did not read.

I set aside time every week to read the scriptures, read multiple commentaries and study guides, and received inspiration to write the text that will follow. I then spent an hour each Sunday with other church members as we joined together to read and discern the Word.

The lessons in this guide yielded a closer relationship with God the father, God the son, and the Holy Spirit for me and the participants. It is my hope as a servant of Christ that those who read the words on these pages are impacted in the manner that God wishes.

The path God provides for you is through your faith in the risen Messiah and the sacrifice he made, which atoned for the original sin of Adam and your personal sin. You can return to rightness with the God of creation, embrace the gospel of Jesus Christ and be transformed into the person that you were born to be through obedience to the conviction of the Holy Spirit. You can have a perfection to live in while you wait on the eternal perfection in the hereafter. The gospel of Jesus Christ is redemption and transformation for all. It is granted to those who answer the calling and acknowledge their need for a savior.

Glory be to God!

Amen.