I had the pleasure of hearing Conley Silsby preach now and then for thirty-some years. He had done some pulpit supply at West Seattle Christian Church in the late 1960s prior to Russ Galbreath’s arrival, and made an immense impression on me as child.
Here are a couple of notes from a sermon by Conley Silsby, probably at Normandy Christian Church sometime in the early 1990s.
The walls in Jerusalem are made up of stone blocks obviously not intended for their current function… but what a function!!
Father said, “Don’t say ‘I can’t get there from here.’ You can’t get there from any where else.”
Cervantes’ Don Quixote was laughed at for trying to bring down windmills with a jousting lance. Obviously misguided, right?
But God does have unbelievable things in store for all of us. Jenn and I, for instance, are like those stones in Jerusalem’s wall. We have a wonderful, stable marriage — almost the ideal, really — and those who know us today marvel at the calming, inspiring influence that seems to hover around us. But if you look closely at the building blocks of our relationship, you’d hardly peg them as an ideal foundation.
I was a porn addict for 25 years, and just a couple years before Jenn and I married had completely surrendered to the addiction, giving up any hope of every getting myself free from it… and then God turned all that around and miraculously delivered me from the addiction literally overnight.
Jenn was a suicidal home-wrecker, having affairs with married men, pastors, and professors over a period of several years. But then God’s grace finally connected with her at a Christian eating-disorder treatment center, and God’s spirit turned her world upside down.
When we celebrated our wedding night on August 22, 1999, we were both new creatures in Christ — new and chaste, reborn 27- and 36-year-olds. And the marriage upon which we were embarking was a God-given flat-out surprise of an adventure, and has been every step of the way.
God is taking every one of us to places we couldn’t possibly imagine… and the only way to get where God is taking us is to surrender our lack of vision to the fullness of His.
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. (Ephesians 3:20-21, NIV)
As a side note… the first time I went to visit Jenn at her apartment, I found the extended passage of the above Scripture written out long-hand on a dry-erase board in Jenn’s bedroom. It was titled, “My Prayer for Greg.”