Free Salvation on Sand Mountain by Dennis Covington Page A

Without church walls, it seemed more delicate and temporal, though, and Brother Carl’s sermon echoed the theme. He talked about the flesh as grass, passing in a moment, of earthly life being short and illusory. He talked about the body as “fleshy rags” that he would gladly give up in exchange for a heavenly wardrobe. But at the center of Carl’s sermon was the topic of God’s love, which he seemed to first discover fully even as he talked his way into it.
    “It’s got no end,” he said, “no bottom, no ceiling. Paul says nothing can separate us from the love of God through Jesus Christ. And let me tell you, sometimes we find His love in the little things. The fact that we’re here today is a sign God loves us.” Amen. “The fact that we got a brain to think with, and a tongue to speak with, and a song to sing. I just want to thank Him for waking me up this morning,” he said. “I want to thank Him for giving me food to eat and a roof over my head. Sometimes we ask Him to work big miracles, but forget
to thank Him for the little ones.” Amen. “But he’s a great big God, and He never fails. His grace is sufficient to meet our every need. He’s a good God, isn’t He?” And everybody said amen.
    Then Carl invited Brother Charles to give his testimony. In Holiness churches, a testimony is a personal story that reveals God’s power and grace. It’s not meant to exhort or instruct the congregation — that would be preaching — but simply to praise the Lord. In practice, though, the line between testifying and preaching is not so clear-cut.
    Brother Carl and Brother Charles hugged, and after a few introductory comments about the beauty of the afternoon and the love he felt from everybody gathered there, Brother Charles began to testify. It was a story, both lurid and familiar, that could only have come from the South.
    “Up until I was five years old,” Charles said, “I lived in a tent on the banks of the Tennessee River at Old Whitesburg Bridge. Y‘all know where that’s at. Then my mother got remarried, and we moved to a houseboat at Clouds Cove.”
    Clouds Cove.
    “My stepdaddy was a drunk.”
    “Amen,” said J.L., who knew something about drunks himself.
    “My real daddy lived to be eighty,” Charles said. “He died in the Tennessee penitentiary, where he was serving a life sentence for killing his second wife. I was like a lamb
thrown into a den of lions when we moved to Clouds Cove,” Charles said. “In 1948, when I was six, we lived on nothing but parched corn for three weeks, like rats. We slept on grass beds. We didn’t even have a pinch of salt. Now, that’s poor.”
    Amen. They all knew what it was like to be poor.
    “By the time I was eight, I’d seen two men killed in our house. I was afraid to go to sleep at night.”
    Help him, Jesus.
    “I made it to the eighth grade, but when I was just shy of turning thirteen years old, I got shot in the stomach with a twelve-gauge shotgun. That was the first time I heard the audible voice of God.”
    Praise His holy name!
    “There I was, holding my insides in my hands. Them things, they really colored up funny, I thought to myself. Then I had the awfullest fear come up on me,” Charles said. He was pacing back and forth by now, a loping, methodical pace, his huge, dog-eared Bible held loosely in one hand like an implement. “I saw a vision of my casket lid closing on me, and the voice out of heaven spoke to me and said, ‘Don’t be afraid,’cause everything’s gonna be all right,‘ and I felt that shield of faith just come down on me!”
    Hallelujah!
    “God’s been good to me!”
    Amen.
    “He’s been good to me!”

    Amen.
    “Doctors told my mother I had maybe fifteen minutes to live. ‘There’s no way he can make it,’ they said. ‘Almost all his liver’s shot out, almost all his stomach.’ I was on the operating table sixteen to eighteen hours. They had to take out several yards of intestines. I stayed real bad for