In Gratitude for Voddie Baucham
As God works to build up and purify His church, he does so graciously. He does so by giving good gifts to his people. Ephesians 4, a text exhorting the church to pursue unity in the bond of peace, explains that the fundamental means that God uses to establish that unity as well as maturity is the gifts of faithful “…evangelists, shepherds, and teachers.” Jesus gives gifts to men in the form of faithful leaders whose fundamental task is to herald and apply God’s word to God’s people. We, then, shouldn’t treat lightly the faithful ministers God has given us. They are gifts, after all. On Wednesday night, we lost just such a means of grace in the death of Voddie Baucham.
I first heard of Voddie when I was in high school. He came and preached at our church. His preaching was marked by fire, humor and a clear call to believe in the gospel of Jesus. He warned prophetically about the ideologies swirling about that sought to challenge God’s authority and lure Christians into cul-de-sacs of compromise and sin. It was wonderful, and the first time I had heard such clear, impassioned preaching.
Shortly after Jenny and I were married, I snuck into a large homeschool conference to hear him deliver a keynote message on the importance of the family and discipling your children. I stood in the back and heard a profound and masculine call to disciple your children, to aim at raising children who were more faithful, clearer thinkers, and who joyfully obeyed all that God commands of them. It was a call to raise children who would stand on your shoulders and delight in all that God is for them and all that God had made them for in the world. He was unapologetic about all the things currently taboo in modern America. What God had called them to entailed their being distinctively men and women. Faithfulness to the authority of Jesus and the grace of God was something that should shape every facet of our lives and every part of society. Nothing could be off-limits to the claims of Christ. I left with a clear mandate to lead my family, and to raise our soon-to-arrive children with a holy and unapologetic ambition.
In the years leading up to the madness of 2020 and the confusion that mired much of the church, Voddie’s voice was a call to biblical sobriety in the face of intoxication with Critical Race Theory and counterfeits to justice. He was criticized and ostracized for his clarity, but he maintained a commitment to what was true and refused to apologize for saying it anywhere he could. His words were clarifying and worked like steel into the spine as I sought to navigate those years faithfully.
Voddie Baucham is one of God’s good gifts, given to His people at just the right time. I am thankful for the impact he had both on the broader church and on the life of my family and in our church. May we not treat God’s gifts lightly, but give thanks for them, even as God receives Voddie back into eternal life.
