Sermon Transcript
Amen. It is so good to hear all of your voices together singing out to our God. You can go ahead and have a seat, and right now we will dismiss our elementary school students to join Miss Alba in the back. We love having you with us every single week. It is such a joy to have you as a part of our worship time.
If you are newer with us or you’re just wondering what Sunday school is all about and where they meet, you can absolutely follow this group. They’re heading around our building to the back of campus to the kids building, which is where those students will be for this hour, and you can pick them up at that exact same location once we have finished our time together here today. So thank you once again for being with us, kids. We love having you with us. And now Nate is going to come and share a bit about who is speaking today.
Thank you, Laura. Well, last week was our annual Beach Worship and Baptism Service, and We celebrated together. It was such a great time having a multi-generational church fellowship out on the beach, and we celebrated together as 2 of our students were baptized in the Pacific Ocean, and that is always such a great joyous celebration to have. And today we are back with our 7th installment of our summer series that we are calling This Is My Story. Showing how God works the same today as he has always worked.
The God of the Bible is the God of our lives today. Throughout this series, we have heard stories and lessons from various leaders in our church community, and they have connected their stories to the principles of Scripture, demonstrating that the principles found in Scripture still relate to our lives today. In 2 weeks, Pastor Dan will return us to our study in the book of Romans, picking up where we left off before the summer started. But today we will hear from another one of our church leaders, a man with a true servant’s heart. He has served the Foundation Board, the Deacon Board, and has been an integral part of more mission trips than I can even count, and I’m sure he’s gonna tell us a little bit about that today as he shares his story.
Would you please welcome our friend Bill Dwyer.
Thanks for sharing today, Bill. Let me pray for you and then we’ll hear from your story. Lord God, we thank you for Bill and we thank you for the ministry that he has had, and we thank you for the ministry that he will have. God, we know that this is not only Bill’s story, but it is your story that he has lived out with you in his life. God, share through Bill today.
Open our ears to hear from you as we are inspired and encouraged by Bill’s story. God, draw us in nearer to you each and every day. In Jesus’ name I pray, amen. Amen. Thanks, Nate.
Appreciate it. Well, my story doesn’t really begin with me. It actually begins with God Himself. Psalm 139:13, You have formed me in my inmost parts; You wove me together in my mother’s womb. I’m fearfully and wonderfully made.
That’s the starting point. My parents were certainly involved, but He’s the one that made the determination. I was born July 23rd, 1946. My parents got married the year before when my dad returned from the war. I’m the oldest of 4 children.
I have a brother, Don, who’s 4 years younger than I, brother Ken, who’s 7 years younger, and my sister, who’s here, is 8 and a half years younger.
I was very close to my mother growing up, but not really close at all to my father. He was a very, very closed man. I just never really knew what was going on inside of him. I suspect that he probably had PTSD. He was a pilot, a fighter pilot in the war and through a lot of difficult circumstances.
I grew up kind of distant from him, and I grew up pretty much by myself. He was not involved in my life at all, at least not that I can remember. When I was 5 years old, we moved down to Watsonville. The Lord had formed me to be a very adventurous kid and one who wanted to know how everything worked. He also created me to be an introvert and probably hyperactive, which I still am today.
There was a series of books that I remember growing up. They were called the All About series. I remember one particular All About dinosaurs, and I fell in love with dinosaurs. But there’s a whole series of books, and I read every single one of them. I’m just fascinated with them.
In Watsonville, we lived next to a whole bunch of eucalyptus groves with a big creek that ran through everything. And for a happy kid who’s adventuresome, that was just ideal for me. I spent an awful lot of time just exploring that eucalyptus grove and that creek. I can remember several times bringing critters home. From that area.
One time in particular, I found this little western ringneck snake. It was only about 8 inches long. I brought it home, but I had to go to school, and I wasn’t sure what to do with it, so I put it in my sock drawer.
My mother did laundry that day, and you can imagine how that all turned out. I built a treehouse in the eucalyptus grove one year, And that summer, I think I spent most of my time in that treehouse. Later on, my uncle gave me a series of components, and I built my own crystal radio set around my own transformer and everything. And I really enjoyed that. And I realized right then that I wanted to be involved in electronics when I grew up.
When I would— my verse really for this period of time is from Philippians 1:6b, He who began a good work in you will complete it until the day of Christ Jesus. Now, normally when we think of this verse, we think about from salvation, then He’s going to start working. But I really believe He started working in my life right from the beginning, even and especially when I had no idea He was even there or what He was doing. We attended the Presbyterian Church in Watsonville, and I can remember going to Sunday school there, and I can remember sitting in the worship service. I don’t remember anything at all about what was said during those periods of time.
Somehow, though, I knew— I knew some of the Bible stories, like the story of Noah and Daniel in the lion’s den. I remember that God created everything, and I remember something about Jesus. I had no idea what the implications were for anything about those at all.
In our home life, we just really didn’t talk about faith or anything related to the Bible. I guess my feeling was that it must not have been very important to me. During my sophomore year in high school, we moved up to Richmond in the East Bay. And it was at that point in my life that I just stopped going to church. My parents really didn’t have anything to say about that.
I just stopped going. I guess I believed that it wasn’t relevant to my life, and since nobody really talked about it, it didn’t seem to be very important at all. For the next 20 years, there was effectively no spiritual input into my life at all. I was a pretty good student in high school. I got decent grades.
My problem was that I really didn’t want to study, just wanted to go out and play. Later on, that would cause me some serious problems. After graduating from high school, I was offered a part-time job as a grocery clerk in the local Lucky Store. That was very important to me because we really didn’t have any money growing up, and so there was no money for college. But now I could make some money.
So I enrolled at our local junior college and began my pursuit of my degree in electrical engineering. I was at the junior college for about 2 and a half years, and I transferred to San Jose State. I was only at San Jose State for 2 semesters. My past had kind of caught up with me. I was not ready to be there at all.
I was extremely immature at that point in my life, and I just kind of stopped going to some of my classes, and eventually I just dropped out. This was probably the low point of my life. The war in Vietnam was going pretty strong at that point in time, and I enlisted in, in the Navy, as my father had been in I served for 6 and a half years. I was an electronic technician, and I was deployed for 2 cruises on the USS Mountain Katmai. It was an ammunition ship.
We operated out of the Philippines. We would fill up with bombs and projectiles and go off to the coast of Vietnam, where we would offload those to various warships. I can remember the first day I went on board the ship. It was in Port Chicago. We were still in the States at that time.
And I was eating lunch on the mess deck, was right below the main deck, and they were offloading pallets of 500-pound bombs. They would bring them up out of the hold and set them down on the deck. Only they didn’t just set them down on deck, they kind of dropped them down on the deck. And I recalled a story of an ammunition ship that had blown up in World War II. They’d found the anchor 25 miles away.
And I was thinking, oh my, what have I gotten myself into? But I realized very quickly that if it blew up, I’d never know it. And so I began to relax and didn’t think about it much more after that.
After the war ended, my ship was decommissioned, and I was reassigned to the Naval Electronics School at Treasure Island. Which is a really nice spot. I was living in Mountain View with an old friend of mine at that point in time, and I started going back to school at Foothill College. I was taking mostly mathematics, but I ended up taking some accounting as well. I’m not really sure why I did that, but I did.
I was ready to go back to school now.
During this time, I remember having a conversation with my brother Don. He had come to faith in the Young Life organization while at high— in high school. It’s an outreach to high school kids, and he shared the gospel with me. And asked me if I believed in Jesus. And I said, well, Don, hey, that sounds really great to have my sins forgiven, to live forever in heaven with God.
That really sounds great to me, but I don’t believe. How do you change your mind? How does one believe if you don’t believe? Little did I know that in a few short years that question would be answered for me.
College was really quite easy for me now. I did extremely well, and I graduated in 1977. I was recruited by Hewlett-Packard, and I worked for HP for almost 25 years. I started as a production engineer in the computer group and served in various capacities in manufacturing and research and development. Marketing and business development.
I think the high point of my time at HP was the time I spent as the chief technologist for HP’s government business, where I got to travel all over the United States to different bases and different agencies to really talk about where computer technology is going and why, to share about a lot of the products that we were trying to develop and other things that we weren’t trying to develop to help them better understand how to integrate computers into their agencies to better meet their needs. At one particular point, I got to go to the Navy War College in Newport, Rhode Island, to help with their 10-year strategic plan. A very important time for me. In the fall of 1978, my father passed away. And I remember being at the funeral talking to one of my brothers, and saying, telling him really that Dad raised us to be self-sufficient, and I thought that was really a good thing.
Now I realize that that kind of an attitude is not good at all. It’s really hard on relationship. And besides that, it wasn’t even true. I wasn’t designed to be self-sufficient. I was designed to be dependent on God and in community with other people.
This was a struggle for me and one that the Lord is still working on in my life. In 1980, the Lord was going to bring about a couple things that would radically change my life. The first one occurred when I had a little side job with Chuck Seller. It was a restaurant in Los Altos that had live entertainment downstairs. Upstairs.
I was the doorman, and I collected the COVID charge and checked IDs. One night during the week, there was a folk group playing, and it was a very, very slow night. And my future wife, Barb, came in with a girlfriend, and I had an opportunity to sit down and talk with them for a while. Barb and I started dating soon after that. Barb was a flight attendant for United Airlines and had been attending Peninsula Bible Church, PBC, for a while, and she asked me to go to church with her.
Well, I wasn’t too sure I really wanted to do that, but I did want to be with her, so I relented and started going. The pastor was Ron Rich— sorry, Ray Steadman, a noted expositor, and he was teaching through Genesis. And after a few weeks of going, I realized that I was paying very, very close attention to what he was saying. The Lord had begun to open my eyes to the truth of the gospel. We were starting to get serious in our own relationship, so we met with Ron Ritchie, one of the pastors there.
I wasn’t a believer yet, But he could certainly see that I was searching, and so he told us that we could continue on. But he told me, I want you to start reading your Bible, and he suggested a book called More Than a Carpenter by Josh McDowell. After a few weeks of meeting with him, the Lord changed my heart, and suddenly I believed, and I became a new creation. In Christ. I’ve been adopted into His family now.
If it hadn’t been for meeting Barb, I don’t know if I would have come to know the Lord. She’s been a— just a real blessing in my life.
This brings me really to the next verse in my life, and this also comes from Philippians chapter 2, verse 12. It says, work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for God is at work within you both to will and to work for his good pleasure. And what this says to me is he’s doing 2 things in my life that are important. The first one, he’s actually working on my will. That word will really means desire.
He’s changing my desire so that I want Him. He’s also working in me. The word work that’s used there really has the idea of it’s energizing or enabling. So what He’s saying to me is, I’m going to be working in you so that you will want to do the things I want you to do, and I will enable you to do those things. Those things can be scary sometimes.
I don’t know if you know, when God asks you to do something, It’s usually beyond what your own strength will allow. And that’s where it talks about with fear and trembling, because we’re often that way. But when I respond, when I let that which is in me, that new life out, it makes Him happy. And that’s really what I want in my life.
So at PBC, Barb and I started attending one of the adult Sunday school classes called Forum, and my knowledge and understanding really began to grow quite rapidly. My faith grew too, but not nearly as fast as my understanding and my knowledge. We got involved in a couple ministries, one with ushering and one with communion, and later on we became deacons there. The second thing, important thing that happened also was related to Barb. She’d been attending Bible Study Fellowship, BSF, for a number of years, and she kept on suggesting that I go as well.
Again, I wasn’t really too excited about that, but I finally relented and said, okay, I’ll go. It was in January of 1982, and it was in a study on the Minor Prophets like many people here at Bridges have gone through. And I began to realize that the Bible really contained an awful lot of things that were important, that it was not irrelevant to my life, that it was very, very relevant to my life, and that I probably did need God, and that there were eternal consequences to the decisions that I made. I became a discussion leader the next year, and I served as a discussion leader for about 10 years after that. I had to stop when I started traveling on business too much.
But as a discussion leader, we got additional training on important doctrines of the Bible and really how to put together a lesson that might be used in a small group or for teaching. That kind of training and everything really was helpful to me, and it really started me on a lifelong pursuit of Bible study. I really enjoyed doing that.
Although I stopped doing Bible study fellowship at that point in time, after I retired from HP, I started up again, and I’ve been doing that really through this time today. In 1992, my brother Don got reconnected with some friends up at Malibu Club, which is a Young Life camp up in Canada. And he asked— they have— he asked me if I wanted to go up there. They have a week during the springtime. It was called Tool and Tackle during those days.
It’s really a fellowship and a work time. It’s getting the camp ready for the high school kids that will be coming up during the summer. Well, this turned out to be an amazing adventure for us. It’s not an easy place to get to at all. It almost requires a couple of days to get there.
It’s way out in the middle of the wilderness, but it’s an incredibly beautiful spot. And we met a bunch of wonderful people up there, and the project that we worked on was really great. It was a total success for us. It was so good that we’ve been back now for the last 35 years, every year except for one year during that COVID time. Just a real, real special place.
I learned a lot of construction skills being up there as well, and I got to do some fishing, which was very important.
In the late ’90s, I started doing a little bit of teaching at the Forum class at PBC. Now, I think that teaching is probably one of the gifts that God has given me, and it’s one of the reasons why I think He sent me to BSF to begin with and really instilled in me the desire to study the Bible. Now, trying to study the Bible with the idea of teaching is a lot harder because of the tremendous amount of responsibility associated with it. I realized quickly that I needed to study more deeply because the last thing I wanted to do would be to mislead anybody as to who Jesus was and what He’s done for us. When I studied the Bible with the intent of teaching, the Lord asks me all kinds of questions in my mind, things like, why is this passage here?
What is the context? Who’s speaking? What lessons can we derive from this? He also puts reminders in my mind of other passages that I’ve learned about in scripture. But I think one of the more important things that He did in my life when He does that is He shines a spotlight on my own life.
And it’s really led me to make a number of changes in my life, and I’m sure he’s going to be making more changes in my life as we go along. During the study in some of Paul’s epistles, particularly Philippians and Ephesians, when Paul is praying for the churches that he’s ministering to, he always talks about requiring them to, to grow in their knowledge of God. That word knowledge there is not an intellectual understanding. It’s really an experiential knowledge. And I began to realize at that point that I really didn’t know God very well and that he was going to have to start doing something in my life so that I would know him much better.
Around the year 2000, there would be a number of changes that would come about in my life that were very important. The first one involved really me retiring from Hewlett-Packard. And I’ll get into that in just a minute. But up to that point in my life, most of my focus of my walk was on acquiring knowledge and understanding from the Bible. I didn’t know it at that point in time, but He was going to change that.
What He was going to be doing is change my focus to really one more in relationship with Him and relationship with others. Again, as somebody who is an introvert and somebody who is really kind of pretty independent, this would be an ongoing struggle for me and one that He’s going to have to continue working on in my life.
So I took early retirement in 2002, and I think the Lord had something to do with that as well. When I retired, they just established a new recovery ministry at PBC and asked me to get involved in that. I think that fit pretty well because the recovery ministry was really aimed at people who were trying to recover from alcoholism and drug abuse. It was called R&R for Recovery and Restoration. My time in the Navy, I drank way, way too much, and it’s only by God’s grace that I did not become an alcoholic.
But it gave me a very strong compassion for them because I could see how much of a struggle it really was. So I was asked to head up the transportation. We had a series of vans that we would use. We would go to the VA hospital in Menlo Park and the one in Palo Alto, as well as some other sober living environments. And we would bring them to PBC where we would have every Friday night a meeting for people where they would have food and music and testimony of others and times of prayer.
It was really a very, very successful ministry. Later on, I headed up a discipleship group for a number of men, and we would meet at Hobie’s for breakfast one day a week. But the thing that came out of that for me was if I was going to lead them, I needed to be much more transparent about who I was. I need to talk more about the things that I struggled with, the challenges I had in my life. I was involved with that ministry until the pandemic in 2020.
The next change that happened for me was I became a handyman. Initially, I started working for a few realtors, and they would give me the hit list of things that needed to get fixed, and I would fix them. Then after a while, people started calling me, and after doing some projects for a couple elderly widows, I realized that being a handyman in this case was a whole lot more than just fixing something. They always wanted to talk, and I began to realize that I needed to change my approach. This was going to be a whole lot more relational than I anticipated, but it gave me an opportunity to find out more about what was going on in their lives, and I was able to share more what was going on in my life and learn more about how I could pray for them.
This has been a very, very important ministry opportunity in a lot of ways for me. I always thought I was going to be known as an engineer, but I realize now that I’m going to be known more as a handyman. I am sure that as a handyman, my impact has been far greater than I was as an engineer. So that’s a good thing in my life. The next thing that happened is I started with a men’s study at PBC that meets on Wednesday mornings early, where we have some— one of the men would get up and talk about what was going on in his life.
We would have a time of prayer and a time of Bible study. I’ve made a lot of good friends in that ministry and still participate in that. The next thing that really happened was I started doing short-term mission trips. We did a couple medical mission trips to the southern mountains of Mexico, which was a fascinating area. I can remember in one location we’d heard that they were still doing animal sacrifices in that area.
It was really quite a bit different. The next year I did a longer-term trip to India, and that really had a profound effect on my life. I have a lot of stories from that that I won’t even have time to talk about now. But one thing, one time I remember in particular, we were in Bangalore, and I got up early one morning and went up on the roof to pray. And all of a sudden, I was just filled with the joy of the Lord.
But also at the same time, I was filled with tremendous sorrow because of the hopelessness I saw in a lot of the people that we were ministering to. The caste system is really a horrible thing, and it really traps people in poverty. I began to see more and more that my life was truly about relationship and that the Lord was going to have to make more changes in my life.
Not too long after this time, Barb and I changed churches from PBC. We came here to Bridges. And we started in the Mariners class. And I started teaching in the Mariners and some other life groups. I was also asked to join the foundation board and to take care of the 3 houses that we had responsibilities for.
Over the course of time, I ended up with other responsibilities there. This was a very difficult time for me. One year, the Our president died suddenly, and the next year our secretary-treasurer died suddenly. I ended up having to take over the responsibilities for those. I’m thankful for the accounting I once took because that really helped me with the finances during that period of time.
But it was, it was a very difficult time. I wish I was able to be more effective during that period. Of my life.
A few years ago, the Lord put a question in my mind. The question was, why is there anything at all? And it got me really pondering about that question. I haven’t really resolved that completely, but it made me realize from looking at eternity and kind of working back, what would it take for me to really love God in the way that He loves me there. And I realized that it’s hard for me to love Him if I don’t trust Him.
And it’s hard for me to trust Him if I don’t experience Him. And it’s hard for me to experience Him if I don’t know anything about what He’s like. And so that really showed me the importance of doing Bible study and really trying to focus on knowing Him better. This was really gonna lead into more of my life. And it’s going to become really very, very important.
One of the things that helped me, I was doing a study on prayer, and I read a book by Tim Keller on prayer. And one of the things that came out of that book was that one of the things that was missing in my discipline was meditation. So I started meditating, and that’s really helped me tremendously better connect with God. It’s helped me to better understand who I am and who God is and what He’s really done for me. You know, it’s really hard to love Him if I don’t understand the tremendous things and the tremendous love that He has for me and the acceptance that He has in my life.
I know he needs to make more changes in my life, and I certainly welcome that. So last year I left the foundation board, and I started with the deacons, and I look forward to serving people in that capacity. I believe that my time here at Bridges has been the most fruitful time in my life, and I’m really grateful to many of you who I’ve known and got to know very well, and for the way that you’ve helped me to grow in my faith and my love. As Barb and I are getting older and less able to do things that we once did, and particularly Barb’s having more physical difficulties, I know my life is going to be changing again because I’m going to be— need to spend more time with her. That means spending less time in other areas.
My story is not finished. God is not done with me yet. He’s still got a lot of things to do for me and a lot of things to do within me. And I look forward to that time and, and what, what He’s going to be doing. And I’m really happy with that.
I’m so thankful for everyone here at Bridges and all the opportunities that are given me, and I look forward to the future. Well, let me pray for us. Dear Lord, I’m so thankful for all the ways that You’ve worked in my life, for the opportunities that You’re giving me. And I pray, Lord, for all of us that we would get to know You much better, that we would truly understand the love that You have for us and the acceptance. And we look forward, Lord, to the changes that You’re going to bring about in our congregation here so that we may better influence those around us and bring more to knowledge of You.
In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
