- Hey everybody, Pastor Steven Anderson here
from Faith Forward Baptist Church in Phoenix, Arizona
with part five of my life story.
So in 10th grade at Victory Christian,
my attitude toward the school started to really go downhill.
There were some things that I saw
that I felt were very hypocritical,
and there were a lot of my friends
that started going down a bad path.
And so I started to question like,
why am I even here at this Christian school?
Let me give you some examples.
A bunch of my friend group ended up smoking pot
at a party and getting busted and getting in trouble.
And I was pretty horrified by that
because although as a teenager,
yeah, I would goof off
and get into trouble here and there or whatever.
To me, taking drugs was just way over the line,
just wicked, horrible thing to do.
And so I was pretty upset about that.
And it made me mad and it disturbed me
that my friends would do such a thing.
And there was one guy in particular
that was the instigator who had brought the drugs
to the party and had, I don't know, I wasn't there,
but I'm assuming peer pressured or got them to do this.
And so I was pretty upset at this guy in particular.
And I felt that the school just gave him
kind of a slap on the wrist
because of the fact that his dad was on the board
of the school or something.
And I knew the rule book really well.
And my mom used to even laugh at me about this
and kind of poke fun at me
because she'd say to me at the beginning of the school year,
she'd see me like reading the rule book
and sitting at home and just reading through the thing.
And she's like, I know why you're reading that rule book,
Stephen, it's because you're looking for all the loopholes
and you're trying to figure out like how far
you can push things without getting in trouble.
And you kind of, you know, and I'm not gonna lie,
that probably is part of the reason why I was reading.
Pretty sure we were assigned to read it
and I was just fulfilling the assignment,
but you know, she would laugh about that.
And it's kind of true, I did know the rules.
And I remember looking up the rules
and figuring out like what was supposed to happen
to this guy and then noticing how it didn't happen.
He was supposed to be expelled
and he can't come back for X amount of time.
And then when he comes back,
he can't be on the sports team and blah, blah, blah.
And there's all this stuff listed.
And then I saw the guy just be suspended
for a short amount of time.
And then he comes back,
straight back to the sports team and whatever.
That made me upset.
Also at the same time, one of my friends offered me
a VHS tape of pornography.
And I turned it down, but I was just like, what the heck?
Like we're at a Christian school
and I'm being offered a pornography video tape.
And then, you know, other things like that.
And then also in the Bible class,
the teacher started teaching like,
oh, well, if you don't have work, you're not saved.
And it was like over the line
where it was really blurring the lines of salvation
by faith versus salvation by works.
And that made me upset.
And in the past, the school had been doctrinally sound,
but I ended up writing a paper for the class,
just basically like refuting that teaching.
And I really leaned into Romans four, verse five,
but to him that worketh not,
but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly,
his faith is counted for righteousness,
even as David also described it, the blessedness of the man
unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works.
And, you know, that's such a beautiful passage.
And, you know, I ended up getting marked down on my paper
and it said like, you know, marked down for being unbiblical
and for false doctrine
because I'm saying salvation is by faith alone, whatever.
So anyway, my parents were making a big sacrifice
for me to be there.
I mean, they're spending a bunch of money, hours in the car,
taking me all the way there.
And so I just decided this isn't worth it.
And I told my parents, I said, hey,
I think I'm just gonna finish out in public school
for 11th and 12th grade.
And of course they were fine with that.
They were only sending me to the Christian school
because I wanted to go there.
And I love my parents and I'm super thankful
for the fact that they made a lot of sacrifices
for us growing up.
They loved us and really wanted us
to get the best possible education,
the best possible upbringing.
And they're spending hundreds of dollars back then
to send me to that school.
And so I felt bad, like, why am I going here
and they're spending all this money and time
and it's just, it's not worth it.
So I'm gonna switch to public school.
So my little sister, Lisa, she'd already been
in public school for the last five years.
And so for the first time in five years,
we were gonna be going to school together now
at the same school, Wood Creek High School
in Roseville, California.
And so I remember my sister, Lisa,
kind of teasing me and giving me a bad time
about the music that I listened to.
So I was really into music at this time,
and I had very particular musical tastes,
and they were not the mainstream at that time, okay.
So I was listening to a lot of electronic music,
especially from the '80s, I'm listening to New Order,
Simple Minds, Tears for Fears,
and a lot of like European kind of techno and stuff.
And here's the thing, probably now there's a lot of people
that enjoy that as like a retro thing,
or maybe it's coming back or it's popular
on some level in many ways.
But what you have to understand is that in 1997,
nobody is listening to this in the mainstream.
And that's what my sister Lisa is saying.
She's like, you think you're gonna go to school
and you're gonna find friends that listen to your music
and you're wrong and there's no way
that anybody is listening to that stuff and whatever.
'Cause she's saying, everybody listens to my music.
That's what she's telling me.
And for the most part, she's probably right about that.
But anyway, so I show up on the very first day
at Wood Creek High School.
I'm in the first class the very first day.
I sit down just randomly in a seat
and this Chinese girl is sitting next to me.
And I look over at her backpack
and she had like patches on her backpack.
And it was like all the bands that I listened to.
So, you know, I'm kind of like, hey, you know.
So I just hit it off with this girl.
Immediately she's like, oh, you know,
you gotta have lunch with me and my friend,
Anna at lunch today.
So the funny thing is I ended up eating lunch
with those two girls that day and every other day
for the entire rest of my high school career.
So it was just kind of funny that Lisa had said,
"You're not gonna find anybody."
And then it was just like first class, first date.
So of course I came home and gloated to her about that.
But these two friends that I would eat lunch with every day,
Helen and Anna, they weren't saved, they weren't Christians.
And what's funny is that I virtually never hung out
with them except for at lunch.
So it was just like, these were just my lunch friends.
So I would sit, have lunch with these two girls.
It was just the three of us would just sit
and have lunch every day.
I was never romantically involved with either of them.
Neither of them were saved.
I tried to give them the gospel,
but I was just really bad at presenting the gospel
'cause I'd never been soul winning.
And so I didn't know what I was doing.
I had not successfully won people to the Lord.
And so I tried to evangelize them,
talk to them about Christ and being saved,
but I was probably not doing a very good job,
not using the Bible, et cetera.
And so they kind of just scoffed at it
and had zero interest, but we bonded over music
and just kind of hung out and had lunch together.
And what's funny is that I had a very diverse group
of friends at Wood Creek, because I had sort of,
different friends in different classes,
and I had my friends that I rode the bus with
in the morning, my friends that I had lunch with,
it was all very like separate.
I didn't really fit into any major friend group,
and so I kinda just had like this eclectic group of friends.
And what's funny is that I did ride the bus
to school every day, even though ultimately
I ended up getting a job and getting a car,
but because my mom had purchased the bus pass,
I felt like, oh, my mom spent money on this bus pass,
so I don't wanna waste it.
And my friends thought I was insane,
like what, you have a car,
how are you not driving here every day, you know,
'cause that was like the cool thing when you're a teenager,
like pull up in your own car and whatever,
and I just rode the bus every day.
So I kinda had, you know, friends that I rode the bus with
and friends here and friends there.
One friend in particular stands out.
So I had this cooking class, first thing in the morning,
and that's where I met this guy, Michael,
and he was a black guy, and he had just a huge Afro,
which again, probably now is kind of common.
You'll see black people today sporting the Afro,
but again, in 1997, it was something that just,
you never saw anyone else do it.
All the other black kids had short hair.
This guy had a big Afro, and he had a pick.
Those combs, I think it's called a pick that women use.
He just had a big Afro with a pick sticking out of it,
which I felt like in 1997 was a pretty bold move
at the time.
And so this guy and I were, we hit it off,
we were good friends,
and we had this cooking class together,
and the cooking class was first thing in the morning,
and we cooked virtually every day,
and the teacher would have us just cook something small,
like we're cooking like one thing,
like whether it's a side dish or,
it wasn't a complete meal, it was just like one item
that we would learn how to cook that day.
And so, you know, we were in a group
where we were at our table with the six of us,
and my particular group, we decided like, you know,
we wanna do more because the teacher,
she said, if you want to bring in like extra food
to round out the meal or whatever, you can do that.
You know, this is an hour and a half long cooking class.
And it was first thing in the morning,
so I felt like breakfast, you know?
So I ended up really influencing the people in my group
and saying like, hey, you know,
we should turn this into like a big meal every day.
And so we would all like sign up for things in our group.
And we were the only group that did this
where we would just bring tons of food
and just make like a full-blown meal every day in this class.
And so we had a lot of fun with that class.
And the funny thing is that I didn't even sign up
for that cooking class.
I, you know, 11th grade, I signed up for, you know,
the particular classes I wanted.
And then I get my schedule handed to me
and it says, you know, cooking.
And I'm like, what the heck, cooking?
What, I'm taking that?
I was horrified, you know, as a teenage boy,
like why would I want to take a cooking class?
It sounds girly or stupid or whatever.
So I ended up like going into the office and saying,
hey, this is a mistake.
I didn't sign up for this.
I don't want to be in a cooking class.
And the teacher's like, are you serious right now?
She's like, you've won the lottery.
She said, everybody signs up for this cooking class
and barely anybody gets in and usually juniors
can never get in, usually it's only seniors that get in.
And she's like, you just happened to get thrown
into this class, you didn't even ask for it.
She's like, trust me, you want to be in this class.
And I was like, oh, okay, yeah, okay,
well then I guess I'll do it.
And of course, you know, the advisor was right
because it did end up being a super cool, fun class.
But yeah, so my friend Michael from this class,
it's funny because I'd be hanging around
with other friends that were more, you know,
I don't know, my demographic in Wood Creek.
And then, you know, Michael would walk up to me
and he would, you know,
he and I would do some like elaborate handshake
without saying a word, and then he would just walk away.
And the friends that I was with would just be like,
how do you know that guy?
Like, you're friends with this, who is this guy?
Because a lot of people in high school,
they tend to be in a certain clique, you know,
whereas I was just kind of a crossover guy
that didn't really fit into a particular group.
So, and then also my friend Michael,
he would get like the government assistance breakfast
and lunch, and they had just these amazing cinnamon rolls
that were the breakfast.
It was like a Cinnabon type of situation.
And so every once in a while, Michael would be like,
"Oh, I don't feel like my cinnamon roll or whatever."
And so he'd give me that voucher
and I'd get to eat his cinnamon roll.
So the only time I didn't eat lunch with Helen and Anna
was when there was this Bible club
that would happen like once a week.
Sometimes I would go to that
and that was the only time I didn't eat with them.
And at this Bible club,
it was a chance to meet other evangelical Christians
on campus.
And actually one time I even got to preach
in the Bible club
because there'd be like a little sermonette delivered
by one of the teenagers.
And so I got to preach one time
and I ended up preaching on hell out of Luke chapter 16.
And it was a little bit shocking to some people
just because a lot of them were used
to these really liberal churches
where hell is just never mentioned virtually at all.
So around that time also I got my first job
as I mentioned earlier at Roundtable Pizza.
And so when I worked at Roundtable Pizza,
I walked in on the first day
and one of the supervisors looked at me and said,
"It's Guile!"
Because I had bleach blonde hair at the time
and it kind of was stuck out in a weird way.
And again, this was not the style at the time.
Like a few years later you'd see other people doing it,
but it was a little bit anachronistic,
I guess you could say.
But so I had this blonde hair
that kind of did the Guile number.
And so that name just stuck.
So I worked at Roundtable for like three years
and everyone there just called me Guile.
And even on the schedule a lot of times
it would just be written like Guile
and then these are the hours and whatever.
And then Halloween was the busiest night of the year
at Roundtable Pizza.
So I actually dressed up as Guile.
And so I had like a white t-shirt, the dog tags,
the camouflage pants, and the hair was already there.
So another funny thing that happened
when I was at Wood Creek is there was this girl
that I would walk by every day when I was in 11th grade.
And I would always say hi to her, she'd say hi to me.
And we didn't know each other at all.
But you're on a routine where you're kind of going
to the same classes over and over again,
and everybody's going the same direction at the same time.
So I would see this girl every day and greet her.
And we didn't know each other, but then later,
we ended up having a class together and we hit it off.
We were friends, we would hang out.
She was Mormon and I tried to give her the gospel one time
and I spent like an hour and a half preaching to her
and she just would not accept it.
She just said, you could show me anything in the Bible
and it's never gonna change what I believe
because I know what I felt, okay?
But the funny part is that her last name was Anderson,
but I didn't think anything of this
'cause Anderson is such a common name
and there are all kinds of Andersons, you know,
in the phone book, there were like six pages of Andersons
or whatever in Sacramento.
But we ended up having this history class together
and we were supposed to do an oral report
about our family tree.
So I started giving my oral report about my family tree
and she's like, "Whoa, this sounds pretty familiar."
And it turned out that she was my second cousin
once removed.
So that was kind of funny
that we had just kind of known each other for so long
and we became friends, were hanging out all the time
and had no idea that we were related to one another
in a city of two million people.
So my main hobbies around this time were kickboxing,
collecting records and playing music on my keyboard
and I had synthesizers and stuff like that.
Played a little bit of guitar, but mainly keyboards.
And I would go to kickboxing like five days a week.
So I was really into that, I really liked that.
But I would spend a lot of time in record stores,
just going through the bargain bins
and just kind of searching for that pearl of great price
of just finding that gem of some rare cool collectible record
from something that I was interested in.
So I'd go to record stores a lot
and I would also go to used bookstores a lot.
And I would buy a lot of books.
I read a lot of books at that time.
And one time I was coming out of the used bookstore
and this guy rolls up on a bicycle
and he says to me, "Hey kid, you wanna go to church?"
And he hands me an invite to Regency Baptist Church.
And the way the invite was folded,
it didn't say on the outside of it, Regency Baptist Church.
It said, "If you died today,
do you know for sure you wanna go to heaven?"
And so this guy rolls up, hands me that,
and I look at it and I see that question
and I open it up and see it says Regency Baptist Church.
And I say to the guy, I said,
"Yes, I do know that I'm going to heaven."
And I said, "I am also Baptist."
And I said, "I'm a saved Christian."
And I go to a Baptist church.
And he says to me, "Yeah, but does your church go out
and preach the gospel and tell people how to get saved?"
And I said, "Well, no, but we should do that."
And he said, "Amen."
And then he just wrote off.
And I really wanted to talk more to the guy.
I was super interested.
I thought it was kind of weird that he just rolled up,
gave me that invitation and then asked me that question.
And then I said, "No, but we should do that."
And then he just leaves.
And I wanted to talk more.
But here's the thing about that.
That question, more than anything else,
was the question that would have gotten my attention, okay?
And it did get my attention.
Because I, at this time, just had a burning desire
to get my friends saved.
You know, I'm going to school every day.
I'm around all these unsaved people.
And I really wanted to evangelize.
I really wanted to get people saved.
And I felt like I was just a total failure in that area
because I wasn't getting anyone saved.
And I used to pray when I was a teenager
every single night for years.
I would pray, God, please just allow me
to get one person saved in my entire life.
And, you know, that seemed like a big goal to me.
That just seemed like an amazing thing.
Wow, if I could win someone to Christ,
that would be so cool.
Looking back, I think about it,
and God probably answered that prayer
every single time that I prayed it.
Like, I've probably gotten someone saved
for every time I prayed the prayer,
even though I prayed it hundreds or even thousands of times.
But that's what I prayed.
You know, that was my burden of my heart.
And so when this guy said that to me,
man, that resonated with me so much.
Like, wow, you guys go out and knock doors
and get people saved, that's awesome.
So that really got my attention.
And we'd been going to just these liberal watered down
kind of fun center Baptist churches
for the last five years or whatever.
And so I ended up bringing that invite home to my parents.
And I said, this is where we should be going to church.
And so they checked it out 'cause not only did it say that
about the gospel, but on the inside,
it kind of listed independent, fundamental,
King James, non-charismatic, traditional music.
Like it just saw these bullet points.
And so I showed that to my parents and they're like,
yeah, this looks good, we'll try it.
'Cause they weren't satisfied with the churches
we were going to either.
Like we were all kind of just dissatisfied
with the lame churches we were going to.
So the first day that my parents ended up going to Regency,
I ended up being sick, so I didn't go with them.
So I stayed home because I had a cold or whatever.
And they show up at the church and they loved it,
but they come home and I asked my dad,
I'm like, so how was that church?
You know, what was it like?
And my dad's like, well, he said, we really like it,
but he's like, I just don't think that you kids can handle,
I don't know if you guys can handle this preaching.
As he said, this is some hard preaching.
And I'm like, dad, I can handle the hard preaching, dad.
I went to summer camp and you know,
the preacher was preaching hard and I liked it.
I liked that stuff.
And he's like, I don't know, Steve,
I don't think you can, I don't know if you're ready
for this 'cause this is some hard preaching.
I'm like, I can handle it.
So then I ended up going the next Sunday
and the preaching was hard and it was awesome
and I loved it.
So on the next Sunday, when I go to the church,
the first thing I do is look for the guy
that gave me that invite.
And I couldn't find him anywhere in the church.
Nobody looked like him and I'm looking around
trying to identify the guy.
And I asked somebody, I kind of described the guy
and they said, oh, well, that sounds like the pastor.
But I'm looking at the pastor, I'm thinking like,
I don't think that that's who it was.
So I went up and I talked to the pastor
and I said, did you ride a bike?
Did you ride a bike in Roseville?
And he didn't.
And so I'm like, well, you know,
then it couldn't have been you that gave it to me,
but I can't figure out who gave me the invite.
And I never did figure that out.
And so that just shows how God really worked it out
that I would get that invite
'cause it wasn't even a church member that gave it to me.
So either it was just maybe somebody who was visiting
or sometimes maybe visitors or missionaries
will just kind of grab a stack of invites
from the church that they're visiting
and just use it for soul winning while they're on the road.
I've done that before where I'm working out of town
or something, I'll grab the local church's invites
and then go soul winning with it or whatever,
even though I've never been to the church,
never gonna go to the church.
Or I thought about maybe it was just an angel unawares.
But either way, whether this was just a supernatural thing
where God sent an angel, 'cause the Bible says,
be not forgetful to entertain strangers
for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
Thinking that you're dealing with a human being
and it's actually an angel that was said.
And so I wondered that, is this an angel
or was this just some kind of a visiting missionary?
But either way, God sent this guy.
Either God used circumstances to send a human being
that was just happened to be traveling through
or something supernatural, an angel that gave it to me.
But either way, this was exactly what I needed
at this exact time in my life.
I just started recently reading my Bible cover to cover,
really wanting to evangelize,
really wanting to get serious about my walk with God,
but I had no direction, I had no mentor,
I had no good preaching, I had no good church
to send me out soul-winning and teach me how to do it.
I didn't know how to do soul-winning.
I'd never been door-to-door soul-winning,
didn't know what to do.
And so this guy who gave me that tract,
just right place, right time, perfect church for me
at that time that ended up just dramatically
changing my life.
And as soon as I got into Regency, it's like, boom,
I got into soul-winning.
I started growing in the Lord, just super transformative.
And I ended up not only getting people saved door-to-door,
but I started to use those skills that I was learning
to get people saved at school and at work
and in my family and everything.
So Regency ended up being a huge part of my life.
And I'll talk about that more in a later video.
God bless you, have a great day.