Renee Duncan Interviews me on New Generation
Join me today as Renee Duncan interviews me on New Generation. I present my testimony and then we spring off into several other topics.
 Renee: Greetings everyone. I am so thankful that you have taken time to join us here on Next Generation with King Television. My name is Renee Duncan and I am your host today. It’s a delight to see you here with us during this time. It is such a pleasure when we can come together With other believers around the world and celebrate our savior our lord Jesus Christ, His longing is for us to know Him in a better way.
Today I have a special guest with me. Her name is Terry Murphy. Now Terry is as much a student and she is a teacher, writer, and speaker. Her goal is to stir wonder about God by finding fresh ways to retell the story He’s already written about himself in both His Word and His world. I love that concept. She encourages other writers as a mentor in Word Weavers International, has written articles for several periodicals (my goodness, I’m having a tongue twister today), and has also published a book called A Place for Me in God’s Tent.
This is a 90-day devotional that takes the readers on a tour of Moses Tabernacle to discover how, even in the tent design, God welcomes us into his dwelling place. It is awesome. And at any time you want to look up who Terry Weaver is, Terry Murphy is, You can go to TMurphyWrites. com.
Apparently, I have not had enough coffee this morning, Terry! I apologize for all of the fumbles, everybody. I think that I may be the only one, I’m sure I’m not, but I feel like I’m the only one that tumbles over our words sometimes. Terry, thank you so much for being with me here on Next Generation with King Television. I am looking forward to hearing more about you and the testimony of who Jesus is for you and in your life.
Terry: Well, I’m so delighted to be here, Renee. Thank you so much for your invitation. I’m really happy to be here. You wanted to hear something of my testimony, which I don’t tell very often because it’s, I feel like a lot of people have these dramatic testimonies where they’ve gone down to the depths and then God has pulled them up and my story is more like. This is going to sound odd, but more like Ecclesiastes. Vanity of vanity, all is vanity. I had everything I needed. We were fine financially growing up. I had a loving family. I got straight A’s in school. There was nothing wrong. But for some reason, I just felt like I was, I was depressed all the time and I didn’t really know why.
There wasn’t a good reason for me to be unhappy, but I was. I remember, as a young girl, even, sitting in my bathtub and talking to who I hoped was God saying, “Please be real, God. I need you to be real. And so I don’t really remember exactly what age it was, but I think somewhere in third to fifth grade, we had Sunday school in church.
I was raised in the Presbyterian church and I still really didn’t know God. I mean, we learned about Him and all that kind of stuff. Well, we had a substitute Sunday school teacher, and he was a man, of all things. I mean, that was unheard of. And he came in and sometime during our lesson, he basically did what some people call an altar call, which I had never heard of before. He talked to us about who Jesus was and that we could have him in our hearts. And honestly, I don’t remember one word of what he said. All I remember is at the end of it, I said to myself, “Well, of course, I’m going to go up. This is what I want.” And I remember being shocked that there were only two of us that went up to his desk after the class was over–me and a little boy.
So he took us through the prayer and wrote down in my Bible the date and the time and “Terry was born again at this time” and so that was like that was my beginning moment with Jesus. And I wish I could say that everything went wonderfully right after that, except that it kind of got worse a little bit. I started reading the Bible and I started understanding things that I had never understood before, but mostly what I kept seeing was everything that I was doing wrong. So every time I read it I would bump into something that I wasn’t doing right and I would stop and get depressed again and get upset and so sorrowful.
And then we’d have communion at church and I would just cry and repent and cry and repent. And after a few years of that, I said, “God, you know, I’m such a hypocrite. I keep coming back and saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ And then I go and do it again.”
So one day I decided, you know what, God, I’m done. I’m done apologizing. I’m done asking for forgiveness because clearly, I am not doing anything with these great opportunities that you’re giving me. So I just give up. I’m going to go ahead and keep reading this and I’m going to jump over those places where it says I’m doing something wrong and I’m going to keep on reading.
Because before I had always just closed the book. Every time I came to that spot, I would close the book, and then I would walk away and be so unhappy. But strangely enough, after I said “I quit,” everything changed in my heart. And I started to jump over those things I didn’t understand. I set them aside. I said, “That’s okay. We’ll understand them later.”
And somehow God kept working in my heart to clarify things, just bit by bit, until I understood them. But anyway, I want to encourage people. If you have had an opportunity to talk to someone about Jesus, and you haven’t really seen anything happen, we really don’t know what our effect is in the world. But we’re all affecting someone, and that Sunday school teacher, for me, was the one who turned me around and started me walking in the right direction.
And he may not, I doubt he even remembers that class that he had and that a couple of kids came forward and who they were, but he changed my life just because he presented the gospel to me and told me about it.
And I always think of a story in Scripture too about a very young king by the name of Joash, who was only seven years old when he came into the kingdom. He was a relative of David. So he was a legitimate son of David who could reign in Judah. But his mother and his parents and his grandmother were bad folks. And he actually was, set aside, taken away. Somebody rescued him and set him aside for seven years as he grew up as a little baby.
He was in the high priest’s house. Jehoiada was his name. And when he was seven years old, Jehoiada brought him out. He got everybody to gather around and said here is the real king of Judah and brought him out. And if you read the story in 2 Chronicles from chapters 22 to 24, that’s the story of Joash.
Joash was an amazing king as long as Jehoiada was alive and Jehoiada was his mentor all that time. And as long as Jehoiada was alive, Joash did wonderful things. Once Jehoiada died. He kind of went off the rails. So mentors are really important. And every one of us is a mentor of some kind. Somebody’s following us.
We may be following other people, but somebody is always following us as well. And so the example of our lives. really makes a difference for other people.
Renee: One of the things I will often say when somebody says, “Well, I can’t be a leader. There’s nobody following me.” And I said, “Well, you know that even a toddler is a leader because look at the animals and the adults that are always trying to follow after them to make sure of things.”
So we each lead in a different capacity. And as you were talking about Joash, I was thinking first of all, he was pulled out of a place of destruction and put in a place of hiddenness by God. He was protected for a season of his life so that he could come into the correct position that God had prepared for him to fulfill.
And having somebody to recognize the importance of the hidden time. Speak into his life, protect him, look over him during that hiddenness, and then to be willing to be the one that helps propel them into the proper position, and then to maintain the forward motion. But, when you talked about how (I had forgotten this about Joeash, so thank you for reminding me of it) but you had talked about how, until Jehoiada died, he was doing well, but once the death occurred, and it reminded me, we don’t stop to think about grief and how it affects people. And I am certain that because Jehoiada was a parent, basically, To Joash through the hidden season as well as through the king season, that there was a connection there that when he died, there had to have been a level of grief.
And we all know that people deal differently with grief. And it makes me wonder if, if a couple of things occurred in his life where that grief, he just threw everything to the wind because he didn’t know how to deal with different things of grief. But also recognizing nobody was restricting him anymore.
Terry: Yeah. Wow. I hadn’t really even thought of it that way before, but that’s really good. Because we don’t know. I mean, somebody becomes very important in our lives. And how do we handle that if that gets taken away from us?
Renee: And just think of the pressure that he had to deal with on a continual motion. And I don’t recall if he ever returned, if he was one of the kings that actually did a circle and came back into rightness with God. I don’t recall. Do you?
Terry: I don’t remember that he did. He wasn’t as evil as a lot of the people around him. The other thing was that his family life was really terrible. I mean, he came from a line of really, you know, horrible people. They were actually, his grandparents were actually related to Ahab across the way. So there was a lot of stuff already in his life and the people surrounding him. So yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think he did though.
Renee: That’s interesting. I just have never put the grief together with the circumstances surrounding him. So, I just want to encourage somebody. If you’re sitting there and you have just recently lost someone that has been your guidepost, your director in your life, or even the person who has been there with you in the hiddenness and helped you into your maturity through many, many different means and you have lost them. I just want to bless you in the name of Jesus and I say in the name of Jesus, I ask the spirit of God to flood your life and bring healing to that place of hurt, that place of grief. We never completely lose the loss, the feeling of loss about people that we care for. But we can allow the way that we respond to it to change.
And so in the name of Jesus, I just speak life over you and that the Lord would rearrange that grief so that it becomes a place of tenderness in your spirit about your loved one, but also awakens your heart to recognize those things that you’ve been doing out of alignment with God’s will for you because of grief. And I just say, surrender it to him today. Just ask, can Jesus come right now, in this moment?
Take the grief and forgive me of those actions that I have participated in that were not in alignment with your will and your way for me. Cleanse me of it now and fill me with the power of the Holy Spirit and the presence of your peace. And then let him lead you. Let him be the healer God in your life. Amen.
So Terry, you also talked about, and this is common for several of us that were raised with Jesus in our households, going to church every day. Oftentimes, we don’t feel like our testimony is anything special. And you sit there and you think surely there has to be something bad that happened in my life I can talk about. I’m sure that there is but what we have to recognize is, it doesn’t matter who you are, where you’ve come from. What matters is you’ve made a choice to follow Jesus, surrender your life to him, to choose to walk with him for eternity, because our life is an eternal life. It’s not just, it’s determined by the start and finish of our earthly existence.
It’s eternity. And so when we put that thought in our mind that we’re, we are eternal beings serving an eternal being, that it can help us recognize it doesn’t matter where we came from. What matters is where we are now with him.
And the power of your testimony, Terry, is I think important because you did bring about the fact that you didn’t feel like there is anything. But some man, somewhere, in a moment of opportunity said, “I’m going to tell you that you need this Jesus.” It’s more than just knowing him, knowing about him. It’s knowing him in mind, spirit, and soul. And if he hadn’t have done that, who knows how long it might have been, and who knows if your path would have been fulfilled in that capacity.
Terry: I think one of the things that I had been missing all that time in church was that there was a choice for me to make. It wasn’t just that God is out there and everything, but that He wanted me to choose Him. And I’ve been doing a study on the feasts of the Lord and how they’re all connected with everything.
But in, in the process of that, I’ve also learned some things about, um, the Jewish betrothal process, which is very interesting because when we talk about Jesus coming, that famous scripture of, “Behold, I come to the door and knock,” a lot of times as Christians, we think, “Oh, well, that’s like the be-all and end-all.” But no, in the betrothal process, the knock on the door was the bridegroom coming and saying, “I want to start this whole process that will lead us to a marriage, to a complete union. I want to start living with you for the rest of my life.” And so it’s not just, I want to get in there and be safe so I don’t go to hell and everything. It’s yes, I want to say yes back to you. You want to spend your life with me, I want to spend my life with you too. And it’s not the end of everything, that’s the beginning of everything.
So I had so much to learn, even after I said that yes, because I kind of thought the yes was the end too. But he had a long line of things for me to learn. You don’t develop a relationship with a person overnight. You start getting to know each other. You start learning, “Oh, he likes this and I like that and how are we going to make this life together work?”
And there’s a little wrestling that goes on between you while you work those things out and say, “Okay, let’s learn how to live together as one.” So I really, I really love the idea that being what we call “born again” and choosing Jesus as he has chosen us is only the beginning of our story because beyond that is a deeper and deeper relationship as far as we want to take it. Because he’s ready to go all the way with us and it’s up to us to decide, “Okay, am I going to take a step deeper? Am I going to get a step closer? Am I going to go ahead and let go of this so that I can come closer to you and become more like you, or am I going to stay like me and just be okay with that?” So it’s the beginning of a great journey
Renee: I think that it’s nice to know that you brought that reference in because being raised as a Christian, one of the terms that we always heard when talking about salvation was, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. Anyone who hears my voice opens the door and I enter in.” You know, that was the whole concept and growing up, I wondered, “why is it so important, especially when that’s in the book of Revelation, that knocking on the door?” But you brought in a great illustration of why, because it’s the start of things. You can choose to slam the door, you can choose to allow the door to remain locked. Or you can choose to allow that entrance or the beginning of a deep relationship. And God has given us that opportunity of choice. Yes. Wow, that’s powerful. I think that’s beautiful.
Terry: Yes. So you know, we sometimes think of God as this big ogre out there who’s wanting to slap people into hell and get rid of them and stuff, but he is a God of love who loves people. And he’s out here giving us chance after chance after chance proving to us, “No, I love you. I love you. I love you. I just want to hear you say, I love you too.” Boom. That’s what he’s looking for.
Renee: So, Terry, do they, the marriage process that you were looking at, was that a three-day situation that once the agreement came to the decision of marriage? Or was it a longer period of time for all of that to come together?
Terry: It’s a long process. So you have, there’s like four cups of wine that you drink. The first cup is right after the bridegroom comes, and he knocks at the door. And the woman inside, her father is there, and he looks at her, he says, “Shall I let him in?” Because everybody knows exactly why he wants to come in. He wants to get married.
And she says yes or she says no. So she says yes. They come in and immediately have a cup of wine together. And that just kind of seals the agreement that now we’re going to begin. Then they sit down and they work out their marriage contract together and do all kinds of stuff. And then the bridegroom goes away.
And he disappears for a while, while she prepares herself to become his wife, to become his bride. And he goes away to prepare a place for both of them to live together as husband and wife. And it’s sometimes a year, sometimes it’s more than that, but there’s a process, there’s time that it takes. And when he returns, there’s one final cup to drink and that’s the one that they do right at that marriage ceremony and it says, “It is finished. We are one.”
And so that’s Yeah. Isn’t that wonderful? And that’s, you know, what we’re all striving for, waiting for, is for him to return and say, “Let’s have that last cup of wine, because I’m ready to just be yours forever and ever and ever.”
Renee: Well, Jesus even said at the Last Communion that I will not drink again with you until this is fulfilled. And so that we see that and that’s one of the reasons why we’re referred to as the Bride of Christ. He was with us. He shows that he desires us. He wants to have relationship with us in the purest form and he leaves for that day when he will return and we will be joined with him and celebrate at the marriage supper of the Lamb. That last drink that culmination of everything. So I’m sure that you go into depth on that also in what you are writing, is that correct?
Terry: Yes.
Renee: It’s beautiful you know, it’s just an amazing thing and well, the reason why I was asking about the process is because I do have the knowledge of what we just discussed, but recently I’m participating in activity in some of the Middle Eastern countries, Asian countries, and over there when they celebrate when they start the process the final minutes of doing the marriage, it’s a three-day process. It’s a huge three-day celebration people come together and each day represents something And, so I was just, my mind automatically goes to the fact that Jesus was in the grave three days and resurrected, you know, all of these parallels. So that’s one of the reasons why I was asking if there was an additional process in there that maybe I was unaware of.
Terry: Yeah. Well, there’s, at the wedding itself, of course, there’s several days involved in that. So you’ve got a big party the night before that happens and then seven days worth of festivities. That, that happens during the marriage, the wedding ceremony and all of that, too. So, yeah.
Renee: It’s beautiful how God parallels and weaves throughout his story of eternity with pictures and concepts that help us grasp a better understanding of what he truly desires.
Terry: Yes. And even in the Tabernacle, which is what I wrote in my book, the same thing happens. You have the outer courtyard, which is like not a lot of relationship going on in there. You’re there. You’re part of the crowd and stuff like that. But you can come in closer and be in the inner court, the holy place. And you can get into the Holy of Holies. I mean, the whole progression is to go from outside the camp to inside, to into the very depths and where his very presence is. And that’s kind of a picture of our journey, from not knowing him at all and being way outside the camp to coming in and starting to get, you know, a little familiar with some of the ways that he deals with us and then finally to get to a wonderful, strong relationship with him.
Renee: Well, it’s been beautiful. In my opinion, this has gone way too fast. Enjoy talking with you. We’ll have to do it another time so that we can go a little bit more in depth. I’d like people to hear a little bit more about your book that’s available on Amazon. Can you say the title again, please?
Terry: It’s called, A Place for Me in God’s Tent.
Okay. Well, that is something I would encourage you, if you have opportunity to do so, is to get hold of that book and read through it. I believe that God will open your eyes to deep understandings in your walk with Him.
Well, we have run out of time, much to my sorrow. I just want to say if you’re someone who has not asked Christ to be the Lord of your life to surrender your life to, then contact the number on the screen below King Television. They’re waiting and ready to introduce you to this amazing savior King and Lord of all creation.
And I just want to close and say God bless you in all that you do, and may his way be your way for all God bless you, and go in the peace of the Lord.
Goodbye.
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