Dr. Samuel Proctor preaching at Saint Paul's Baptist Church, Richmond, VA

and what an honor it is to be here also with our distinguished mayor of the city brother kenny and dr jones is superintendent of our schools in richmond and other visitors who have joined for this marvelous occasion your pastor clearly has given excellent and divine leadership to you here in the saint paul's baptist church evidence of this wonderful leadership is everywhere apparent today i saw him on the campus at hampton university in june and he came smiling with that majestic smile that he has and that hypnotizing voice of his and he said i wonder if you would come to the anniversary of the saint paul's baptist church well i've been away from richmond a long time since 1906 and i knew that the church had moved from behind the campus but i didn't know where you had moved and it went about 150 of you who moved you've got more choir members now then you had members but he had so much charm in his voice you know how he is he could sell you a diamond mine in south africa and uh i said yes i would come but i said i wonder if that man knows what he's doing i've got to go all the way from new york city all the way to richmond for the saint paul's baptist church and then he had the nerve to say we have one service at eight in the morning i said well if he wants to do that to me i'll go and suffer through it so he woke me up in the middle of the night to come over here and preach this morning at eight o'clock i went back and took a nap and here i am again i had no idea of what saint paul's had become in my wildest imagination i had no idea and i've got to stand here a little while it'll take me a minute to come down out of this tree i see so many of my friends here in the congregation my former students and some of my classmates who are still around you know god bless you it's so wonderful to be here one of my brothers is here and i don't believe that he will be bothered at all if i tell you how tight we are doctor come and stand up and keep somebody that do you stand up coming dr cummings now cummings was a student who made very good marks in school he was a very dedicated and sincere student and he had a hard time getting through school because his money kept on running out i don't think he minds you knowing that because some of you have been through that money running out all the time and my money used to run out all the time to get through school i did everything that you had to do up there i washed the pots and pans cut the grass beat the trenches out of the springs and in the summertime i did everything painted classrooms you can't name anything i didn't do to get through virginia union and cummins was married he was getting older he came to me one day at that time you know we didn't have a whole lot of students had eight or nine hundred and the president knew everybody he came to me one day and said you know i'm going to have to drop out of school i said oh no not you you're the best we've got you know i've just run out of money can't take my examinations i don't have anything to eat my family needs me to get out and go to work and i said cummings i believe in the lord and you do let's pray over this thing but you you go and come back let's talk it over but you're not going to drop out of school because i knew you see even at that time that god could do anything but fail yeah and i believe that if the cause was right he went about it right there'd be an answer to a thing like that said this is easy a good fella like you keeping him in school he left my office and the phone rang when a man called me from massachusetts saying is your name proctor yes he said many years ago i provided a scholarship for a young fella named procter are you the same one i said well i think i am but they would never give me your name because they thought i was going to beg you for more money i said but i'm the one he said you're the president i'm the president of college he says i'm so proud he said now i'm old and i'm not going to be around much longer he said do you know of another student there who needs money i said one of them just men out of here crying that man provided scholarship money for brother coming to solve this problem and every time i see him down you're one of our finest physicians in the world dr cummings i think about how the lord just touched the whole thing and made a way made away and i want to say to some of you young people here today who think that you can't make it because you don't have all you need right now god has cattle on a thousand hills the heart has got everything god has got everything and god can make things come to pass brother stand up one more time come and let the folks see that's not he's my buddy we're just as tight as wax on the floor tied as a stamp on a ladder and he's a fine person now for this 81st anniversary it seems that you already know what to do as a church you have yourselves in good stride let me speak now on having a personal encounter with christ and i want to preach on this because sometimes you know when you get involved in big programs and big doings you do not want to lose sight of the necessity of helping persons to have their own individual encounter with christ you may have a suspicion about where this sermon comes from but it comes from a woman who had her own encounter with christ in mark 5 28 if i may touch but his clothes i shall be made whole if i may touch but his clothes i shall be made whole walking through the pages of the gospels one thing becomes very clear time and time again we see christ our lord in contact with persons who really needed to meet him persons who were at one of life's extremities or another persons who had come to the end of their rope persons who would run out of options who had nowhere else to turn and had come to jesus as a last resort you remember these persons once it was a woman with a curved spine or again four friends holding a desperate man before him a man with a scorching fever or then a rich young man whose life had turned to boredom or a tax collector who had become curious about who he was or a distinguished religious leader whose faith had grown cold and dry like nicodemus and over and over we find jesus in an encounter with someone who wanted to make a change in his or her life i remember many years ago i was invited to go on a preaching mission to the soviet union i was still at virginia union then and two other ministers were assigned to go with me the baptist world alliance had gotten permission from the soviet government to have us visit baptist churches in the soviet union but they watched what we preached and every now and then we would get off a sermon and then get a note from somebody saying now that sermon went too far another time you'd preach a sermon they said now that got too far away from your main mission stick to your mission well it's hard to preach especially for baptist without loosening up and making some applications you know and extending the remarks a little bit yeah so we sat up in our hotel room one night and said what can we do we had a young lady with us named ilka derevy and co i'll never forget a fine young lady who was our translator and our guide and she was the one telling everybody what we had been saying and so we had a talk with her and said elka what should we do she said stick right to the religious texts and do not get from it at all so we said well here's what we're going to do we're going to paint one picture of jesus after another that's all just stick right there just like an artist just take one encounter after another take the man by the pool of bethesda who would lay in there for 38 years and draw a picture of him and then etch out jesus coming toward them and and then watch what happens there and don't add anything to it don't take anything from it just fill in all the details and then when we got along a little distance we saw her paying more and more attention to this and when the whole visit was over with after three weeks so i want to find out if that girl was listening she's a communist she hasn't had any religious instruction ilka how did we do she looked like she didn't want to say anything she looked all around she says fine well did you listen to the sermons oh yes i listened to all of them well now what do you think of jesus after listening to these sermons she said it is all new to me never had a chance to study the bible never had a chance to study religion and she looked like she wanted to cry like somebody kept something from her she said it's all new to me and got nervous and excited we were about to leave to get on the bus to go out to the airplane well elka what do you think of jesus she looked her left and to her right looked all around and looked dead at us and said jesus was a wonderful person and turned around and ran a stranger to jesus hearing about him for the first time bound to be carried away with what the master's life was all about revealing the love and the power of god and dealing with one broken fragmented life after another well this woman had been sick for 12 years she had a terrible condition hemorrhaging all of her food intake her sleep all of her nurture of a body were wasted in this awful illness and the bible says that her money was gone she tried every cure that she do traveled every town where someone said that she could find help in those days they did not have modern medicine and they depended on people who knew of some remedy you know you know you've been sick and you've told some folks where you work what what you had and then here they come around with all of their remedies and you know better than to take all of that stuff they tell you to take i hope you know because a lot of folks aren't here right now because they took some of those remedies that those folk recommenders but i'm glad this woman didn't meet my grandmother because my grandmother had one remedy she wanted you to try no matter what you had if you had an ingrown toenail arthritis or high blood pressure anything she thought that that little 15 cent bottle of pure castor oil was was all you needed and you just hadn't diagnosed yourself sufficiently but that's all you needed and grandma was mischievous with that stuff you know she will offer it to you mixed with orange juice coca-cola lemons in it the onions chopped up in its sugar honey spirits of nighter spirits of vanilla coconut oil but i found that no matter what you put with that castor oil it had an integrity of its own and it was bound to rise to the height of its dignity if you if you fooled around with it and if you were too sick to go to church said you had to take that caster you not only did not praise the lord all day sunday but you didn't do anything else all day on sunday and a large part of monday was in great doubt as well this woman had tried everything but she heard that jesus had come to town and she did not know jesus can't you see her around the crowd now with her weak frail thin and tired self almost ready to give up she was not embarrassed though i can see her now weaving her way through the crowd eyes open with excitement panting and breathing heavily pressing through that crowd and someone heard her mumbling something because it's in the gospel record someone heard her say if i could just touch his garments i shall be made whole her faith had escalated it was at its height and she believed that all she needed to do was to have her own encounter with jesus she had heard about him that he could heal diseases could make the lame to walk the deaf to hear and the blind to see she believed that god had done something special that here the eternal had just poured out himself into time and space and all of this happened in the life of of this young prophet from galilee the son of god now in our midst she would not allow anything to stand in her way and finally she did touch him and she indeed was healed now those disciples heard him say somebody touched me and they said the common sense thing they said well master with this crowd like this anybody could have bumped against you anybody could have rubbed against you anybody could have brushed you but jesus was sensitive to the suffering of people and he knew the difference between a bump and a rub and somebody taking a little fist a bony little fist and grabbing a little piece of his garment and holding on with a prayer on her lips he could tell the difference and he knew that somebody in a desperate circumstance had touched him he said no this was a different kind of a touch that i felt virtue has gone out of me i felt somebody needing me especially and when she said that she was the one who touched him the master said daughter thy faith hath made thee whole she was not the touch so much that did it it was her her faith in god that exposed to her the inexhaustible power of the living god made it all available to her that's what jesus does for you and for me jesus leads us into the orbit of god's power so that the same power that created the world out of nothing that set the tides ebbing and flowing once twice every 24 hours that power becomes available to you and that's what does the healing that's what straightens out our lives and gives us a new beginning god revealing himself and his power in jesus christ and whoever has a personal encounter with the master makes him or herself therefore exposed to god's marvelous power and when you do that the first thing you notice is that jesus is compassionate no matter how busy he was he could not proceed that he ignored this you remember when he heard blind bartimaeus on the jericho road jesus thou son of david have mercy on me and you remember they said to him then we've got to go we're on our way to jerusalem we've got calvary waiting for us we've got all of this to do we don't have time for a blind man along the roadside but the bible says just three words that will tell us all about the character the beauty the power of the life of christ the bible says that when he heard blind bartimaeus jesus stood still jesus stood still compassion the first thing we learned about the master when we have an encounter with him is that jesus is compassionate and knows how to reach for us i remember some years ago in north carolina when i was at a t college i went over to give a 4-8 speech a speech to a young 4-h club and a young fellow introduced me he made his presentation and he turned around to make a bow to me as i stood up to give my talk and when he did i noticed his eyes were very seriously as stigmatized his eyes were crossed they just dipped right down in the center i don't know how that young fellow was able to read or to see anything his eyes were just completely out of focus i had a hard time starting off my speech worrying about that young fella so young out there in the country in the bushes in nash county who in the world is going to come out here and help this father to get his eyes straightened out sam here you are talking your talk and sitting right down there behind you as a young fellow who needs something else from you besides your talk he needs his eyes straightened out and who knows sam but that god might have sent you over here today to do something for that fella driving back to greensboro from over there nass county i couldn't get him off my mind every time i turned on my radio to listen to the news i'd say sam you've got three fine sons all of them doing so well good health swimming and camping and playing music and sports there's this little country boy out there who's going to be laughed at and teased all of his life and i couldn't get him off my mind i got back to greensboro and i thought to myself now there must be an ophthalmologist somewhere in east carolina who's straightened out a little boy's crossties but i didn't know where he was couldn't think and the lord said duke university has got a big hospital doctors of all kinds can't you connect with somebody there that's not far from him and i know a professor in the theology school named waldo beach i'm telling you the detail now and i picked up my phone and called up dr beast dr beach this is old sam over at greensboro sam how you doing then i laid that story on him he said sam if you're as bothered about that little boy's eyes as much as you are i want to join you myself here's a professor now i didn't have anything to do with it he said we've got a bible class and a big methodist church here in durham and there's a father and two sons who are all ophthalmologists that's all they do is straighten out crossed eyes remove cataracts things like that and sam i think if i tell them you call me about this boy they may want to do something about it now to make a long story short i got a call back from the doctor saying dr proctor we'd be glad to take care of that little fella get him in here to us went over there his mother said well if god wanted his eyes to be straightened out god would have never made him crooked you know how something for god you can't help some people to save your life and she said i said well if god wanted his eyes to be crooked he wouldn't have shown that doctor how to straighten them out so we got together and compromised i said you come over with me i had a nice new mercury car and i remember driving on out of that's kind of going into diamond they took him in that hospital didn't charge a dime didn't charge a dime for one needle one pill nothing you know when you go in the hospital the charger for the kleenex charger for the napkin you get that bill you got everything every aspen i'd like to go to sleep look out you're gonna get charged for a sleeping pill now watch out and the next thing i knew that boy was back down there bragging about his new eyes could see all the little girls started chasing down behind him with his new eyes the next time i saw him was up in madison wisconsin i was at the university he had come to madison to get a very fine job at the corporation he came to see me i said what are you doing he said oh dr proctor i finished high school i got a scholarship to livingstone college and after that i went to a program at carnegie mellon for the master of business administration degree i got my mba and here i am and your eyes ever go back on you no here they are you ever worry about it well he pulled out a mirror and carried in his pocket and he used that mirror to check to see every down and if his eyes let me tell you something that boy was not kin to me not my son no relative at all but if you've been in touch with jesus at all you can't see people suffering without wanting to do something i'm talking now about a personal encounter with christ first thing you find out is compassion compassion flows from him flows into your own life it'll change you and make you different you won't think about yourself all the time you think about somebody else sometimes you want to enhance the quality of the lives of people and you start right in your own home in your own family you stop cussing and calling people bad names you start to figure out what can i do to bring this brother of mine bring this sister of mine out of all of this darkness bring that person to the saint paul's baptist church to hear some of this wonderful music woke up this morning and i had no doubt get somebody singing that song with you changing his or her life you left somebody home this morning i know you did somebody at home want to come with you today somebody's life is turned around the opposite way somebody who needs a personal encounter with christ and then next you'll find out that it doesn't matter who you are don't you know they didn't tell us who that lady was they didn't say whether that lady was rich or poor whether that lady belonged to this church or that church didn't say whether she had a husband or not didn't say whether she had children or not all it said was that she was broke she was sick she was tired she was exhausted and she needed to see jesus that's all we know you don't have to come to jesus with some pedigree you don't have to come to jesus telling who you are and where you started out and who your mama was and who your daddy was you can start out anywhere you happen to be and start your trek toward the master and when you get to him he'll do all the rest he'll make you a brand new person a brand new person doesn't matter how modern your past is how many mistakes you have made none of that matters whatsoever in africa i recall we used to have to use drivers because they didn't want us driving around i was over there running the peace corps and i had a wonderful young father driving me but he didn't have much religion he had grown up paying no attention to that i used to say them all the time you know tanji i wish you would get your life organized but he lived a kind of a rough life but he was my driver one day we were headed toward the village up in northern nigeria and we came to a bridge a narrow bridge the bridge was so narrow only the jeep could pass nobody else but the jeep and when he came toward that bridge we saw a little girl with a big clay pot of water on her head and when they had that water on their heads like that they try hard not to spill it so they walk with a kind of a ballet movement you know in order not to spill the water and uh he saw her coming toward that i said hold it tanja hold it he said this just a little bush girl i said what did you say and he bought out on his horn blew his horn ran that jeep right on that bridge and that poor little child dropped her water pot broke the pot water everywhere and she with her thin frame went running in the other direction we got on the other side of the bridge i said hold it stop this thing we've gotta talk you said she was just a little bush girl that means she's just a little girl who grew up out there in a small village and had no name and nobody cared about it say you know tanja i'm a christian and there are no just little bush girls in my vocabulary i'm way over here three or four thousand miles away from home but all of my faith came with me when i came here and there are no little bush girls over here anywhere you know what we're going to do we're going to stop this jeep right here we're going to go find that girl that she's running right up there we're gonna take her go get her another pot go find out where she got the water from and we're gonna get her a new pot of water and we're gonna take her wherever she was going and see that she gets there safely because at my site she's not just a little bush girl there's no such thing god hasn't got anything around that's just a little bush girl everybody is somebody in the sight of god god knows every hair on my head god knows all of his children there is no such thing we've got to learn that and we've got to teach that to some of our people these youngsters out here doing all these crazy things and destroying their lives you know what their problem is they think they're nothing they don't understand that they're god's children they think they're nothing and so they can kill and shoot and destroy other people because they have no self estimation and i don't know where you get that from unless you're going to get it in the church somewhere here's where you're going to find out who you are what your real value is you're not going to find that out in the street somewhere there are no little bush girls around here everybody's precious in god's sight you come and meet jesus that's the first thing you'll find out that you're gonna have compassion flowing through your life and you're gonna know that everybody is somebody and then you do know she was healed i mean the power did come and she was healed see life is really a power question isn't it life is all about getting over and making something come to pass it's a power issue and if you don't have the power in you somehow it's going to be a drag and what jesus does is to put you in touch with the inexhaustible power of the living god many years ago some of us here in richmond decided that we wanted to have some fun with our families couldn't find anywhere to have a vacation everywhere you went there was a lot of profanity and vulgarity and alcohol and so we decided to go up on the northern neck of virginia up in ophelia now you know you can't find that place unless somebody leads you there it is deep in the country and it's right where the potomac river and the chesapeake bay come together i went up there and had some wonderful friends around there dr royal and brother martin some others had some cottages that they built simple little cottage there's little cinder block cottages with two bedrooms nothing fancy i built my little cottage up there and after i got it finished i said now i don't have any electricity in this place i forgot all about that i thought all you had to do was build a house and you'd get electricity but there was no electricity up there at that and i said no i'm not going to be sitting here using an oil lamp and having an outdoor restroom you know and have my wife pumping water and hauling water and heating i want a radio and a washing machine and i want everything and there i was in the middle of the last century up there and this cottage and no electricity sitting in the dark talking to each other you know and it was terrible i said i didn't realize what electricity meant no running water you know everything had to be heated and a pump oh no we got to do something about this and my wife was telling me you got to do it in a hurry i'm leaving here and and so i found out that the rural electrification program would take electricity to people who were poor well i wasn't exactly poor but i talked to the man and told him how necessary it was he said well if you pay me the deposit pay me two dollars at 18 cents a month we'll bring electricity to your house next thing i knew down there one day i saw the man from rural electrification with his truck and the man from the virginia elected and power company with his truck and the two of millions up this pole and hooked up something and i was he was buying power from the vep ran that line on back to my little house down there and the next thing i knew i had electricity i went to sales roebuck and got an electric pump didn't have to pump water anymore went and got me a hot water tank had hot water inside the house bought me a radio i could hear the news everywhere had an electric stove didn't have to eat hot dogs and hamburgers every day for every meal you know and got me a refrigerator and some milk and orange juice and things started looking up my whole life changed i tell you when i got that man to hook me up with the power line all of life changed now they had a lady up on the road and i noticed she didn't have any electricity she was out there chopping wood every day making kittens wood she had to heat the stove to cook everything she was pumping water and the husband just walked around looking you know and i said don't you wish you had electricity well you have to talk to my husband about it you know how some of these women let the men make all the decisions you know and and he's walking around and she's doing all the pumping in the water heating flat irons and all that hot summer time all that slavery and then at night he's sitting over there mumbling something she's got to listen to that no radio and nothing but he died oh yes he died you know that's been arranged you know he died i want all you all to know that dying comes you know and soon as she buried him tight and knew he was not coming back here from all that dirt patted down firmly next thing i knew that she was in the road asking us how can she meet that man who could hook up her house and her life to the main power line so her life could be changed too we told her how to do it next thing you know you saw that axe lying out there in the backyard didn't need it anymore chopping killing wood had herself a pump from sales roebuck passed by that night she had a pretty little lamp on reading her bible electricity turning on the radio hearing the news from all over the world cooking fish on an electric stove early in the morning a nice refrigerator hot running water could bathe as often as she wanted to every day her whole life was changed because she found the man who could hook her up with the power line you know somebody out there right now whose life needs to be made new you go and help that person to have an encounter with jesus and once that person gets hooked up to the power line everything is different they become new creations in jesus christ because that's all you need you hook up with the power line through jesus christ have your own encounter with him and everything will be brand new god bless you all you

Channel: The Saint Paul's Baptist Church

Views: 9,832

Rating: 4.8823528 out of 5

Keywords: Worship, Preaching, Church, Teaching, Positive Power

Id: TNe10S3dXmE

Length: 38min 15sec (2295 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 03 2020