Backstory

Rick Henderson Backstory
Pastor Rick Henderson             November 22-23, 2025

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Note: This manuscript isn’t a transcript of the sermon, but a planning guide showing what the speaker intends to say.

 

My story is weird. Some of the chapters are dark. If I’m an open book, that means sharing things that will be hard for you to hear. Before we take this journey together, let me tell you where we’ll end up.

JOHN 8:34-36 Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.

The destination of my story is freedom, and it’s so good. But that’s not the starting line of my story.

I think we do ourselves a major disservice when we read the word sin in the Bible and only think of it as breaking the rules. Yes, God has commands. There are things we should do that we sometimes don’t. There are things we shouldn’t do that we sometimes do. But to think of sin as merely breaking the rules is deeply flawed and highly problematic.

God is love. Every command he gives flows out of his character; they’re expressions of his love. His commands are like boundary markers that clarify, this is a life of thriving and freedom, and it’s based in love. How many of you parents have ever tried to communicate to your kids, I know you don’t understand the rule that I have for you. But I’m asking you to trust that it’s based on my love for you, even when you don’t understand the why.

If you understand that, you have the cheat code to truly understand sin. Sin is that thing in us that decides that we are going to trust ourselves, our own way, our own ability to achieve the good life. It’s not simply violating a moral boundary—though it includes that. It’s saying I don’t need you and your way. I don’t trust you and your way. I think I’m better off going with what seems best to me instead submitting to what you say is right and wise. Can you see how that is far more than simply keeping or breaking rules?

SLIDE: Pic of Dad and me

My dad was a police officer. As you heard in the video, I loved that. As a kid, it felt like living with your hero. Now, there were times when having a police officer as a father was less than fun.

SLIDE: Pic of young Travis and me

This is my brother, Travis. You’re a smart crowd. You can just look at this photo and tell that he has a punchable face. He needed an older brother to keep him in line, and I was happy to oblige. We wrestled for fun, and we sometimes fought in anger. We bickered like brothers do. I’m left-handed and he’s right-handed. Once, my dad got so tired of our fights that he handcuffed my left hand to Travis’s right hand at dinner and told us to figure it out.

SLIDE: Pic of parents

My dad was the one who explained the gospel to me. He was the one who prayed with me when I put my faith in Jesus. When I was a sophomore in high school, my dad became a pastor. I loved it. I was proud of him. The part of my story that always throws people for a loop is that my parents and I went to college together. Come on, that’s weird, right? And yet, I liked it. They enrolled the second semester of my freshman year. It was fun. There was so much that seemed so great.

To understand my story, you need to know the bullet points of what happened over the next few years after college.

• My parents moved to upstate New York to pastor a church. While there, my dad attempted to seduce a woman his congregation. After being exposed and confronted, he attempted suicide. We almost lost him.
• He recovered medically, but there are some things that just don’t recover. He was fired, and my parents moved back to their home state of Florida.
• He entrenched himself in a pattern of destructive behavior. My mom’s efforts to hold it all together were heroic. Yet, my parents divorced.
• Within a year’s time, he would get engaged to two women and marry the second one.
• Heather and I did our best to adjust to this new reality. Though it was hard, we maintained a relationship with my dad and embraced his new family as best as we could.
• By this point I had two kids of my own and I wanted them to know their grandfather.

One afternoon, I got a phone call from my dad’s wife. He was in the hospital after another suicide attempt. It was touch and go. But this wasn’t my first rodeo. The first thing that popped into my head wasn’t concern for my dad’s life. My first thought was, what did he do?

Over the next few days, the facts became clear. He was guilty of a grievous crime. There was no coming back from this one. My dad was going to prison for a long time.

At this point in the story, I’m a full-blown adult. I’m married. I have two kids. And I’m a youth pastor at church in California. After receiving the news, I had a few days that were pretty dark. But I pulled myself together and was back on my feet. I wasn’t going to let this bring me down. I remember thinking that it would be better for me to disclose what was happening to the lead pastor than for him to find out some other way.

I walked into his office and nonchalantly told him my dad had attempted suicide again and was very likely going to prison. After dropping that bomb, I tried to casually walk out. He stopped me and told me to have a seat. His name was Ron Thompson. Ron had the ability to see something that I could not see. He had this look on his face that was both compassionate and authoritative. He said, “This is a big deal. If you’re going to continue to work here as a pastor, you must go to counseling. We’ll pay for it, but this is non-negotiable.”

I really liked my job, so I agreed to go. I was convinced that there would only be one session. I just knew the counselor would be so impressed by how resilient I was. This will make more sense later, but I had adopted the viewpoint that emotions were fine for most people, but they got in the way. Emotions clouded people’s ability to think clearly, keeping them from making reasoned, intelligent decisions. Again, for reasons that will make sense later, I had spent years trying to mute my emotions.

To be fair, there were three things I always allowed myself to feel. Those three feelings were: happy, angry, and because there’s kids in the room, let’s use the word marital. Happy. Angry. Marital. As far as I was concerned, all other emotions were just a waste of time and energy, and they got in the way of getting on with life. As I arrived at the first session, I was so impressed with myself. I knew my counselor would be, too. I imagined her telling me, “I don’t know why you’re here. I wish my other patients were more like you.”

I sat in the chair. I laid out the facts and waited for her to praise my awesomeness. She wasn’t as impressed as I expected. She kept asking me annoying questions. Those questions felt like sharp jabs to the ribs. On my drive home I was angry. This elaborate coping mechanism I developed, she dismantled like a house of cards, in a single session. And I was stuck having to go back to more counseling appointments if I wanted to keep my job.

It was around this time that I was making the bed one Saturday morning with Heather. I finally asked her a question that had been bugging me. My daughter, Caroline, was close to 4 years old. We had a fun, playful, and close relationship. I loved being a girl dad. But there was a question that I couldn’t shake and I finally worked up the nerve to ask Heather.

When is Caroline going to be afraid of me?

She said, “What?!” I repeated, when is Caroline going to be afraid of me? She couldn’t understand the question. So, I said, aren’t all kids afraid of their dads? She said, “No!” She was never afraid of her dad. I said, I was a afraid of my dad. With sincere love and zero condescension, she said, your dad abused you.

She knew stories from my childhood. It was the first time in my life that anyone ever put a label on my experiences.

When I was of elementary age, we were on a road trip to the beach. My parents were having yet another shouting match. While my mom was driving at highway speeds, my dad, who was sitting in the passenger seat, pulled up the e-brake on our Jeep Cherokee. We did at least one 360 and came to rest in the ditch. Both my parents calmly switched seats, and my dad drove us to the beach.

I was formed and shaped in an emotionally chaotic home. Emotions were high or low—never in between. But the chaos wasn’t limited to verbal and emotional outbursts.

I was hit in the face and knocked off my feet. I was regularly spanked with a leather belt on my bare bottom. I remember standing in front of a mirror as a child, naked, counting the welts after a particularly brutal beating. I didn’t recognize my own body. I couldn’t see my natural skin color. I was covered with purple and black bruises.

At least once I was spanked awake. I don’t know what I did to make him angry. He came home after I was in bed. He started spanking me before waking me up. For years after that I could only fall asleep if my back was to the wall.

There I was, making the bed with my wife. I’m a grown man. I’m educated. I’m a youth pastor with experience helping kids in abusive situations. It wasn’t until that moment that it dawned on me that I was abused. I was then forced to face down some unsettling questions. What if my attitude towards emotions wasn’t because I was stronger and more resilient than others? What if what I believed and the way I thought about my emotions, the way I had attempted to mute them all my life, was because I was wounded?

I want to read a verse from the Old Testament book of Proverbs.

PROVERBS 4:23 Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.

It’s easy to misunderstand this verse as saying, protect yourself from people and things that will hurt you. That is not what this verse means. In Old Testament thought, your heart represented the core of who you are. It’s the intersection of your will, beliefs, affections, and emotions. This verse doesn’t mean to be on guard against people who will hurt your feelings. This is telling us that we are each responsible to be vigilant to ensure that our will, our beliefs and way of thinking, our affections and emotions are aligned with the way of God. He is the source for a life of thriving. Be on guard, don’t let anything bring a wedge between you and his good way.

I had to come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t guarding my heart—I was hardening my heart. I was legitimately a Christian. I trusted Jesus. And yet, I was still living in a kind of prison because I was trusting my way, not Jesus’ way with the core of who I was.

If you’re wondering, Rick! You were a pastor and a Christian. Doesn’t being a Christian mean that you are free from all that? I want to introduce you to Pete Scazzero. He’s a long-time pastor and author. He has a statement that might be helpful.

Jesus may be in your heart, but grandpa is in your bones. And the task of discipleship is to get Jesus more and more into your bones. –Pete Scazzero

He’s talking about what I call the FOO FACTOR.

FOO FACTOR
(Family of Origin)

It’s your family of origin. My family of origin, my childhood experiences, the trauma I experienced were the primary factors that shaped how I engaged hurts, relationships, and my emotional life. Please remember. No matter how it is that we are experiencing being enslaved, Jesus didn’t come to shame us, condemn us, or punish us. He came to set us free.

The Apostle Paul wrote this.

GALATIANS 5:1 It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.

So many of the factors of that shaped and formed me into the kind of person that trusted my own deeply broken way, instead of trusting the way of Jesus—those things were not my fault. I didn’t choose to grow up in an emotionally chaotic home. I didn’t choose to be physically abused. Those things weren’t my fault. But if was going to to live in the freedom that Jesus gives, and if I was going to stand firm and not be enslaved by the brutality and chaos that was my childhood, I had to learn this lesson.

It may not be your FAULT, but it is your RESPONSIBILITY.

It was my responsibility to put my faith in action. It was my responsibility to simply take a next step and keep taking the next step. And as I awkwardly took those steps—I came to see that the Holy Spirit of God was supernaturally at work in my life all along.

• He gave me a wife who wasn’t afraid of the mess I was in, and she wasn’t afraid of the mess in me.
• He gave me a pastor who was committed to my health and well-being.
• He gave me a father-in-law and mother-in-law who love me like a son. My father-in-law is a man who knows what it likes to be raised by an abusive and broken man. My father-in-law became like the picture on top of the puzzle box, helping me to see what Jesus was making me into it.

For me, this is a long, meandering, good journey. At times more like a roller coaster. I’d forgive my dad for all it, going back to the beginning, and I’d be at peace, only to discover a new hurt and the forgiveness process started all over again. Every time I spent time around friends who had great relationships, as adults, with their dads—it felt like I was being wounded all over again.

Instead of stuffing those hurts and pretending like they weren’t there, I could now be honest. I learned what it meant to preach the gospel to myself. I would never have a dad who would be a part of my life, to see what I accomplished, and tell me that he was proud of me. A deep, deep longing for approval would never be fulfilled by my dad. That hurt. And yet, I was growing more aware that my heavenly father loved me and he delighted in me.

Years into this journey of healing, I was driving to work after an especially good and playful morning with the kids. I didn’t hear an audible voice or see a bright light. But it was as if God himself were speaking to me. “The way you feel about your kids right now, is a tiny glimpse of how much I delight in you.” I didn’t wreck my car, but I was wrecked in that moment. I was experiencing what it meant to be free.

One morning I got a call from my mom, and without any warning the prison doors slammed shut on me again. It had been years since seeing my dad in person. He was now in a high security, fairly dangerous prison. I was certain he would die in prison. I was at peace with that. But this unexpected phone call from my mom shattered all of that.

We discovered that my dad had been transferred to a retirement home for parolees who couldn’t live up to the conditions of parole for medical reasons. He wasn’t free, but it was now possible to visit him, and it was easy to visit him.

All those years of learning to trust Jesus, live in freedom, and truly extend forgiveness were being tested. This what you need to know. I had a trip planned to see my brother.

SLIDE: Pic of Travis and me

As you can see, he stills has a punchable face. I was planning to go see him to celebrate his graduation from the law enforcement academy. Ironically, for years he was a corrections officer, working in jails and prisons. Now he realized his dream to be a deputy sheriff. I was confronted with the fact that it would be stupidly easy for me to go see my dad when visiting my brother.

The battle inside of me, the war inside of me was real. As much as I hate to admit it, without even realizing out, I reverted to my old patterns of emotional unhealth. I was emotionally numb about my upcoming visit to see my dad. And I was emotionally enflamed about everything else. I was a powder keg.

Though they weren’t at fault in any way, one afternoon my kids saw that powder keg explode. I was so ashamed and embarrassed that my kids saw me overwhelmed by anger. I was back in the prison of anger and shame, and I felt more dire than ever before. I really don’t think I’d hope that I could be free.

This trip to see my dad was coming and I had to do something. I repented to my wife and kids. I asked people in my church to pray for me. And I began to meet with a counselor again, a godly man who I knew I could trust.

Finally, the day came. I was sitting in a room across the table from my dad. Face to face after years. I went into that situation with an army of people praying for me and that God would bring healing to that moment. And do you know what happened next? It was horrible!

He was aloof. He didn’t take ownership of anything. He didn’t apologize for anything. He treated me like he was doing me a favor by meeting with him. I wasn’t there 15 minutes, and I was ready to storm out. Now, I stayed, but it wasn’t because I was a good person. I wasn’t a youth pastor anymore. Now I was leading a church of 1500 people. Many of them knew where I was. They were praying for me. And they were going to ask me how it went. I didn’t want to go home and tell them that I bailed after 15 minutes. So, I stuck around longer simply to save face. Not proud of it. But those are the facts.

For the life of me, I don’t know how to explain what happened next. I’ll never be able to explain what happened next. I’m not sure that I fully meant the words that came out of my mouth. I said, “Dad, I didn’t come here to fight you. I just want you to know that I love you and I want the best for you.” The man across from me, who had been hardened by years in prison, broke. He wept, the kind of uncontrollable, snot-all-over-you kind of weeping.

Then something happened that I could feel physically. The bitterness, the unforgiveness, the chains were gone. The Holy Spirit of God supernaturally gave me the ability to fully and finally forgive my dad. Then we hugged. We laughed. From that day, until his death from cancer, we talked regularly and had a real relationship.

I saw a miracle happen that day. I felt a miracle happen that day.

JOHN 8:36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.

I’ve personally talked with thousands of men and women over the years of being a pastor. And unfortunate, but common theme is father wounds. I want to say to you, your heavenly father loves you, and he delights in you. You may not believe those words yet. You may comprehend them with your brain, but they haven’t yet settled into your bones. That’s OK. I just want you to hear again, your heavenly father loves you, and he delights in you.

If you can relate to me, if you’re carrying unhealed, unresolved, suppressed, and ignored hurts, would you trust Jesus enough to follow him and his way into healing? Sometimes, men are highly resistant to counseling because there is a stigma that comes with it. I get it, but at the same time, I don’t get it.

Imagine that we found ourselves at war, deployed to the frontlines, and we have to cross a minefield. There’s a guy there who knows the pathway through it. Would you ignore that guy and insist on figuring it out yourself, or would you let that guy show you the way? A skilled counselor is like a guide through the minefield of hurts, walking with you to a place of healing and freedom.

And it’s biblical! When we don’t know how to guard our hearts, it’s only wise to get someone on your team who can help. Doesn’t that make sense?

If you are shackled by hurts of things done to you—Jesus will set you free.

If you are shackled by hurts of things you’ve done—Jesus will set you free.

You might be wearing chains that no one else can see. You might be sitting behind prison walls that no one else can see. With all my heart, from someone who used to be there, Jesus will set you free if you will trust him.

PRAYER.