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My name is Casey Harpe and I love Jesus.  You would think I could just say "I'm a Christian" or "I'm an Evangelical," or "I'm a Baptist" or whatever, but all of those terms seem to carry some extra baggage with them, so I usually just tell people I love Jesus.

I grew up in a very small town in Georgia, well, 2 small towns actually.  My 2 hometowns are Greenville and Gay, Georgia.  That's right I said Gay (insert joke here).  I've heard them all.  Yes, I was a Gay Boy Scout.  There hasn't been a high school in Gay for decades so I didn't have some weird mascot or anything like that.  When I was very young, I lived in Greenville and then when I was a teenager, Mama and I moved to Gay.  I really consider Gay my actual hometown.  It has more character even if most of the people there are completely crazy.

Anyway, I have been involved one way or another with church as long as I can remember.  Many of my fondest memories growing up involve the church or friendships that grew from there.  When I was about 12 years old, I went with a group from my church to a summer church camp for a week.  It was the typical church camp...basically Vacation Bible School for a week and we got to sleep in hot, uncomfortable beds, but it was fun because it was away from home and with friends.

It was at this camp where I first began to understand who Jesus Christ was.  I had a long way to go in understanding (I still do!) but I can remember that the preacher there seemed to genuinely want us to know Jesus.  One night during the week at one of our worship services, my best boyhood friend, Matt Phillips (a great American) and I prayed to receive Jesus as our Lord and Saviour.

It was a wild night and I remember feeling a weird kind of excitement that I'd never felt before.  I felt really good and I don't discount that night but I'm not 100% sure if I was truly saved after that night or not.  During high school and college, the fruit of my life and walk with Christ (or lack thereof) painted a different picture from that of a true Christ follower.  Through that entire time, I had a limited knowledge of the things of God but the problem wasn't that I didn't know enough, it was that I wasn't living what I knew.  I had what some call a head knowledge of God but no heart knowledge.

I later got to know my friend Jay Sanders.  He became the youth minister at my church at the time.  I am about the same age as Jay so I wasn't one of his students but I learned a lot from him.  He began planning a mission trip to Braila, Romania and opened it to basically anyone interested in going.  When he first mentioned the trip, I wanted to go.  If I had to put my finger on a time in my life when I really began to get serious about following Jesus, it was during the preparation time for that trip.

It was during that trip overseas that the Lord really worked in my life and made it obvious to me that He had called me to be in the ministry in some capacity.  I later went on another trip, this time to Kampala, Uganda.  While this trip was very different from the trip to eastern Europe, both seemed to solidify my calling, in my mind.

As a result, I began to look into what I needed to do to be in ministry.  The first thing I had to do was to finish my college degree.  I began college right out of high school but that was a disaster of my own making.  I wasn't at all prepared for the responsibility and quickly failed.  I began working and kept taking a few classes every once in a while but had never completed an undergraduate degree.  I heard about Southern Seminary primarily through my friend Jay again and also through my own investigation.

I came here for a preview weekend which is a few days when the seminary welcomes potential students to tour the school, hear some great preaching, and get a feel for what the institution is all about.  After that conference, I knew that I needed to be at Southern.  I got busy and completed a Bachelor of Business Administration degree at University of West Georgia in Carrollton, Georgia in the summer of 2008.  Later that summer I moved to Louisville, Kentucky to begin a Master of Divinity degree at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

It is only by the loving and tender mercy of Christ that I am here at Southern and that I will be in ministry.  It's a great privilege to be here and learn so much about God.  I am thankful to so many people who have helped me along the way but ultimately, it's all by the grace of God.  I sincerely hope and pray that I am able to learn and prepare for service in whatever capacity the Lord has planned for me.

It is my prayer that you know Christ.  The Bible says that we are all sinners.  Because of our sin against the holy, perfect, and just God, we all deserve to be separated from Him for all eternity.  There is a terrible place where people are to be punished for sin and separated from God.  That place is called hell.  It's a horrible place the Bible describes as a place where there is "weeping and gnashing of teeth."

On our own, we are all destined for that terrible place.  There is nothing that we can do on our own to get out of that condemnation because of sin.  Jesus Christ, the son of God came to earth and lived a perfect, sinless life, was crucified, died and was buried to take the punishment we deserve for being enemies of God.  Because He took the punishment, we don't have to.  After being dead for three days, Jesus was raised from the dead, defeating death.  That means for those who believe in Him and trust Him as Lord and Saviour, we are no longer condemned.  He defeated death and we can be with Him forever in paradise if we trust Him.  I pray that you know Him and trust in Him today as your Lord.  Amen.