Buckner Fanning, pastor of the Trinity Baptist Church, San Antonio, said that early in his ministry that he was preaching a revival meeting at one of the churches in Bogalusa, Louisiana. In the last service of that revival they asked a young man who had not been a Christian for a long time to give his testimony. As he stepped out on the platform Buckner said it was as if he stepped out of one of Norman Rockwell’s paintings, the kind they used to put on the front of The Saturday Evening Post. His coat sleeves were too short and his entire suit was too tight. He couldn’t button the collar of his shirt and he was tall and lanky. He looked like he had come straight from the country and he probably had. He was very nervous as anybody would be standing before a congregation speaking for Christ for the first time. But he got started with his testimony and he was basing it upon the experience of Abraham, offering up his son Isaac as a sacrifice on Mount Moriah.
As he continued with that testimony in his nervousness he began to use the name Isaiah instead of Isaac. He got those two Bible characters mixed up and he talked about Abraham offering up Isaiah and people in the congregation who knew their Bible began to snicker and there was a bit of uneasiness about them. That kind of thing happens to anybody and everybody who speaks. Somewhere along the way you are going to say the wrong thing and you are going to notice the response of the audience and you will realize that you’ve said something wrong, but you won’t remember what it is. He just noticed that the people were snickering and the people were uneasy. That made him even more frustrated and before he had finished he not only was calling Isaac Isaiah, he was calling Abraham Birmingham. He got to talking about Birmingham upon the top of that mountain ready to plunge that dagger into the breast of Isaiah and it was almost more than the congregation could take as they sat there snickering and laughing in their uneasiness.
Finally he just stopped and he looked at the congregation and without any rancor in his voice, without any bitterness in his voice at all, he gave a great big sigh and he laughed and he said, “Well, folks, I’m doing the best I can for God. I hope you are too.” And Buckner said that’s been a long, long time ago since he heard that, but he had never forgotten those words: “Folks, I’m doing the best I can for God. I hope you are too.”