The Greatest Man I Ever Knew

Richard D. Sandlin — October 15, 1933–September 17, 2023 — “Jesus Only”

I’m occasionally asked who my mentors were as a young man. I respond: “Five thousand books and one man.” The one man was my father. I’m grateful for all the older men (and women) who invested in my young life, but none I could honestly call a mentor. My Dad was my sole mentor, and the only one I needed. When I walked out of his house at 18 years old, I knew all the basics I needed to know about God, Christ, the Christian Faith, manliness, and life. My father (with generous assistance from my late mother) set me on the right path in every basic life particular. That’s how much I owe him, and I told him so many times.

Life

You could never have predicted the course of his grace-enriched and -enriching life at its beginning. My father was born into a lower-middle class Kentuckian home to (at that time) two unbelievers, though he was actually born in southern Ohio. Most of my recent ancestors on both my Dad’s and Mom’s side were Christians, but not my paternal grandparents until later in life. My paternal grandfather was an old-time milkman, delivering his pre-dawn route every morning in his horse-drawn milk truck. He and my grandmother had two children, my father and his older sister. When my father was a boy his father left my grandmother, and they divorced. That broken marriage inflicted a heavy blow on my father. His mother was a simple, hardworking woman who provided for two children by babysitting, scrubbing floors, and doing any odd job she could find, riding the city bus all over town to her next job (she never learned to drive). Because she worked so much, my Dad and his sister were forced largely to fend for themselves. It was a mostly forgettable, unpleasant childhood.

At 17 my father joined the new armed forces branch known as the Air Force. My grandmother had to sign for him to enlist since he was a minor. This was during the Korean Conflict, and my father served by loading cargo planes in South Korea. He was honorably discharged as a staff sergeant.

He drifted here and there when he returned home. He went (alone) to many movies as a boy and was enchanted by acting. So he decided to try an acting career and hitchhiked to Hollywood. Like most aspiring actors he scraped by on odd jobs to put himself through acting school. He developed a drinking habit and his life spiraled downward.

Conversion

With no prospects in southern California, he hitchhiked back to Ohio only to discover that in his absence his mother and sister had trusted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior at a Bible-believing Baptist church in his hometown of Middletown. The week he returned, an evangelist was preaching at the church, and my grandmother prevailed on my Dad to attend one evening despite his protests. The evangelist preached on the text “Behold the Man!”, Pilate’s public presentation of Jesus Christ. The sermon centered on the humanity and manhood of our Lord and on his crucifixion, and it convicted my father deeply. He was converted that very evening. Like a surprising number of men at the time, he was called to the ministry simultaneously.

With the guidance of his pastor, he began to preach almost immediately: in pool halls, barrooms, on the street, and in nursing homes. Soon he was encouraged to get more formal Bible training, and he spent a year at two Bible colleges. He returned to Ohio and started preaching again. It was in that same church that he met my mother, ten years his junior, who had been converted as a young girl and had been a faithful church attendee ever since. She was gifted with an operatic soprano voice and regularly sang church solos as well as with musical groups. They were married in 1961. He was 28 and she was 18. They stayed married fifty-seven years until my mother died of pancreatic cancer. They had four children. I was the oldest.

Ministry

My father was twice an evangelist and pastored two churches, one in Pensacola, Florida (he built it to 1000 attendees) and one in Painesville, Ohio (from which he planted numerous churches and commissioned many missionaries). Twice he served as a missionary in Northern Ireland. He preached in Bible and missions and youth conferences and camp meetings to many thousands all over the United Staes, though mostly concentrated in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and in the Southeast. My mother usually accompanied him and sang before he preached. He evangelized thousands of unbelievers (including his own father). He started a Christian day school and two Bible institutes and influenced hundreds of young pastors and other preachers, who flocked to his direct, dogmatic, illustrative, Spirit-filled preaching.

He was instrumental in numerous church plants. He was writing a devotional column twice weekly until almost his death. In the early 70’s Midwestern Baptist College, Pontiac, Michigan, granted him an honorary Doctor of Divinity for his ministry labors. He was always a little embarrassed by this award since he’d never even finished high school. Once he even tried to return the degree, but the founder and his friend Tom Malone, Sr. prevailed on him to keep it. He was affectionately know to many simply as “Doc Sandlin” or just “Doc.”

Convictions

He believed the Bible, and by Bible he meant the King James Bible. He’d had only a 10th-grade education and read poorly. After his conversion, he basically taught himself to read by reading the Bible. Actually, by consuming the Bible. He read it hundreds of times in his lifetime and he marked it pervasively. I would often mention a biblical phrase and he’d remark (for example), “That’s in Exodus 27.” He purchased many hundreds of Bibles during his lifetime and gave away that many as gifts. He believed every word of the Bible was the Word of God. He tried to judge every belief and practice by the Bible. He was from the school of copious Bible-annotaters and -markers. Here’s an example:

He loved Jesus Christ. On his tombstone he wanted engraved his name and birth and death dates and only two more words: “Jesus Only.” No account in the Bible meant more to him than the Transfiguration of our Lord. When Moses and Elijah were removed from the scene after Peter had offered to make one tabernacle each for them and Jesus, and the Father had boomed from heaven that the Son is to be the center of all attention, the three disciples present saw only Jesus. This narrative was particularly poignant for my Dad since as a young Christian he’d placed great confidence in contemporary heroes of the Faith whom he’d met and looked up to, but in the end, they’d all disappointed him. In the end, Jesus alone did not disappoint.

He relished preachers and preaching. He saw preaching as a high calling, recognizing our Lord himself was a preacher. My Dad preached anywhere and everywhere. When he was younger, he preached several times a week and three times on Sunday. His preaching was intense, direct, and biblical. It exhausted him spiritually, physically, and emotionally. I recall his often coming home on Sunday evening after having preached three times, collapsing into bed, and being unable to move. But he reveled in every minute of it.

And he was an extraordinary preacher. I don’t believe this assessment is simply an admiring son’s bias, because a number of people that heard him over the years (some of them quite prominent) stated he’s the best preacher they ever heard. His preaching was intense, colorful, practical, and biblical. Sometimes it was downright mesmerizing. It was unforgettable. You can listen to one of his most memorable sermons here:

He was a mighty man of faith and prayer. Like many Christians of his generation (and fewer in ours), he lived his entire life by faith. If he had a need, he poured out his heart in prayer. He had no retirement program, yet God always supplied his (and our) financial needs. As a child I recall getting up one morning with nothing for breakfast. Not cereal and milk, nothing. My Dad and Mom told me to get down on my knees with them and pray. They simply asked God to keep his promise to provide for his children. A few minutes after we had finished, we heard a knock at the door and a lady from the church we attended held a bag in her arms — “For some reason the Lord led me to bring you these groceries.” No need was too small for prayer. My Dad simply prayed — and expected God to answer. He never played it safe in life. He was always taking a risk and trusting God to provide.

He believed in Christian education long before it was popular. He educated all his children in Christian schools or home school. My sister Leah and I attended the most prominent Christian day school in the country in Pensacola, Florida. In Ohio we attended a day school in Cleveland, Ohio. My mother drove us 1000 miles a week to attend.

He believed sacrifice was at the heart of the Christian life. Jesus Christ sacrificed his very life on the cross for us, and the least we can do is sacrifice ourselves for him. He believed anything we do in life without sacrifice isn’t worth very much. He sacrificed his effort, time, and money for the Lord and for other people, and he expected they would do the same.

Personal

He wasn’t perfect, and this is a tribute, not a hagiography. He was a natural-born leader, and people followed him, especially men. But he was a dominating and too often domineering man. He unnecessarily lost friendships and hurt people due to his identification of final truth with his personal opinions. He was fiercely independent, even to a fault. As was often the case, people excessively self-demanding are equally demanding of others. That was my Dad. But I prefer these flaws to squeamish, ambivalent, cowardly men; and as the Lord worked in his life, these flaws because less pronounced.

He wasn’t an intellectual and therefore found it hard to understand my ministry, but he tried. He was converted into a version of the Faith suspicious of intellect, but over the years he came greatly to respect an intellectual articulation and defense of the Faith, even though this wasn’t his own gift. He was committed to “Lordship Salvation” long before this became a controversy in the 80s, and my own ministerial emphasis on the Lordship of Christ in all of life I first learned from him. Francis Schaeffer also had a great impact on his thinking in this matter.

For a man with only a 10th-grade education, he had a surprisingly large library, and he was a reader. I’m the recipient of his library, and I enjoy scanning his annotations and observing his underscoring.

He met my wife before I did, and he picked her at that moment. He was preaching at a missions conference in tiny Zelienople, Pennsylvania. Sharon Habedank was singing in a trio that night. My Dad was immediately struck by her godly countenance and evident love for Jesus Christ and the Faith. After preaching, he accosted her and boldly told her he wanted her to meet his oldest son. He showed her my photo, with which she was frankly unimpressed. But as a result of that meeting, she developed a relationship with my Dad, calling him for advice from time to time. In less than two years and in need of spiritual guidance, she moved to our congregation in northeastern Ohio to sit under his dynamic ministry.

She arrived in January. We started dating in February. We were engaged in April. We were married in August. She was pregnant with our first son Richard in October. We’ve been married 41 years — all because my Dad was bold enough to choose her after one church service.

Dad was masculine from pate to sole. He instilled manliness in every young (and older) man he met. For him manliness was the old-fashioned, biblical idea of working hard; looking another man in the eye; paying your honest debts; giving an honest day’s work for a day’s pay; enduring life’s hardships without complaining; making good on your promises; rising in the presence of, and giving up your seat to, a lady (he did not believe all women were ladies). He found the increasingly modern idea identifying masculinity with iron-pumping, bulging biceps, and CrossFit training a pale imitation of true masculinity, and usually the result of insecurity. Still, he loved to hunt and fish, though he had little time for these avocations in the ministry. He was a remarkable swimmer, and once rescued me from drowning in a hotel swimming pool when I was very small.

He taught me, “Son, never start a fight, but never run from one.” He was fearless in the face of confrontation. If he ever feared a man (or woman), I never saw any evidence. He was confrontational to a fault.

He was quite striking, and he always looked younger than his age, a quality in which he reveled. He would boldly walk up to people in public and ask, “How old do you think I am?” When he was 70, they would assume he was about 55. When he was 85, they would often guess him to be 60. He didn’t actually start showing his age until the last six months of his life.

He was a baseball player and fan. As a boy he was alone almost all day and played both organized and sandlot baseball, literally (not metaphorically) from sunup to sundown. He was short for his age and usually played second base. He threw right and batted left (as I do), and loved drag bunting down the first base line. He was a Cincinnati Reds fan but his favorite players were the Cardinals’ Stan “The Man” Musial, the Red Sox’ Ted Williams, and the Indians’ (excuse me: Guardians’) Satchel Paige.

I’ll never forget (just as no boy will ever forget) the awe upon walking into a major league stadium the first time he took me to an Atlanta Braves’ game when I was 9 or 10. Baseball is a game fathers teach sons. I'll also never forget my Mom watching tearfully from the window as my Dad hit me sizzling ground balls, one or two of which bounced up and bloodied my nose. He always taught me: “You’ll never be able to play baseball as long as you’re afraid of the ball.” Until about a month before his death he was able to watch major league games with me. I’ll cherish those memories.

He was born and bred Appalachian, and he fancied Kentuckian food: crispy pork chops and mashed potatoes, fried okra, soup beans, cornbread and buttermilk, eggs and bacon, biscuits and gravy, and banana pudding. He could eat an entire pot of boiled peanuts. When we lived in Florida he could have survived on dinners of fried mullet and hush puppies. Three days before he died, when he could no longer hold a spoon, he asked me to feed him vanilla ice cream with a dollop of chocolate syrup.

I’ve already mentioned his love for movies, and he particularly relished Westerns, despite the fact that for many years in my childhood, we didn’t own a TV. He considered Westerns the last truly manly movie genre left. Not surprisingly, he was a huge John Wayne fan. My best memories of him from childhood were my sitting right next to him in our small house in Florida watching old black-and-white Westerns. He was a huge fan of Louis L’Amour books, and especially the memorable To the Far Blue Mountains.

America

He was a patriot. He bled red, white and blue. He hated 60s draft-card-burning hippies with a passion, and preached against them wherever he went. He hated liberals (today called “progressives”) and liberalism. He wasn’t pro-war, but he wasn’t a pacifist by far. He believed that once the United States committed to the Vietnam war, we should’ve vanquished our enemies swiftly with extreme prejudice. He was of the school that the way to save lives is to end wars quickly, and you end wars quickly by unleashing overwhelming force. One of his great heroes was General Douglas MacArthur.

He was a political conservative. He was ultra pro-life and pro-family and pro-free markets. He hated welfare and government handouts. He abhorred big government. He was fond of saying he’d lived through 15 Presidents. Reagan was his favorite and Carter his least favorite. He expected Presidents to maintain great dignity suited to their office. He originally supported Donald Trump but came to see him as the least dignified President he’d known. He liked to say, “All of them make big promises they never deliver on.”

Character

He compiled 15 “character traits” that he drilled into his children, church members, and students. The first was probably the most important: “Learn to blame yourself.” He hated with a passion a victim mentality. By God’s grace, he’d worked hard to overcome numerous hardships and limitations, and he had no patience for individuals who blamed their circumstances or other people for their predicaments. He was fond of saying, “The prodigal son didn’t return to the father’s house until he started blaming himself for his predicament. You’ll never get out of the hog pen of your life as long as you’re blaming somebody else.”

He was an uncommonly generous man. Gift-giving was his love language both personally and ministerially. He always lived by faith and never made much money. He was neither upper-middle nor lower-middle class, but he routinely gave money and gifts to those he loved and those in need. He would walk around Walmart and find a family with a number of children whom the parents were obviously laboring to support and then hand the dad a wad of cash. I could never calculate how much he spent over the years to keep me in high-quality suits and shoes, and he has done the same for my wife with dresses and shoes. He loved missions and missionaries, and while other churches in the 60s and 70s were giving missionaries $50 a month, he sometimes would lead his churches to give them $100 a week.

He was a profoundly grateful man. He often said “Thank you,” and he meant it. There are few sins he abominated more than ingratitude. He believed that no matter how far a person had fallen, as long as he had a little gratitude left, there was hope for him.

As the old-timers would say, he was “as clean as a hound’s tooth.” He was faithful to my mother and never misappropriated funds. He constantly warned of the idea of some “super-Christians” that they could get away with doing things that ordinary Christians couldn’t. He considered that idea the path to destruction.

He came from a generation of pastors and other preachers that believed in dressing to the nines. Preachers as leaders consistently in the public eye, he believed, dishonor God and their calling by dressing cheaply and shabbily, and, despite the fact that he was far from wealthy, he always dressed up in public. His suits, shirts, ties, and shoes were always elegant and impeccable. In the 60s and 70s he wore only traditional black cap-toed derbies or oxfords. He learned to shine shoes in the Air Force, and he was remarkably adept at it. He taught me, “Son, if a man really knows how to shine his shoes, he can see his reflection in them.” He shined them every Saturday night.

He was a keen student of human nature. He would sometimes go to the mall just to people-watch. He wanted to learn people’s motivations, goals, temptations, victories, defeats, excuses. Because of his great interest in people in tandem with his acting background, he was an amusing imitator.

He believed the greatest battles we face are those within ourselves. He had the greatest respect for people who fell down in life, but got up and dusted themselves off and got back on track. He hated quitters. He had little use for people who had it easy their entire lives. He never encountered his oldest great-grandson (my grandson) without reminding him: “Keep getting up.”

My mother once told me, “Your father is the most intense man I ever met.” He was probably the most intense I ever met either. When my Dad entered a room the intensity was palpable. He was never half hearted about anything. He believed that if anything was worth doing, it was worth doing with maximum intensity. He deplored laxity and diffidence and lukewarmness, especially in Christianity. When his congestive heart failure was advanced, he’d still ask me to take him for short walks, often with his walker. But twice he told me, “Watch what I can do if I have to.” He then started speed-walking at such a pace that I couldn’t keep up with him.

Months ago he gave me a small spiral notebook taped shut to be opened only at his death. It contains personal information to me. It ends with these words:

“I did the best with what I had. I gave it my ALL.”

He did.

Conclusion

On his 60th birthday in Pickle Lake, Ontario, Canada where he was preaching, he wrote out the following prayer now taped inside the back cover of my favorite Bible:

“My 60th Birthday Prayer”

It says “The prayers of David are ended,” (Psl. 72:20). And so it is with all of us. You promised “threescore and ten years,” (maybe, “fourscore”). It could be I’ll be cut off in the midst of these, if so, this is the prayer I’d like to end my life and ministry with.

Dear Lord, I’d like for you to enjoy me as much as I do you. I know of no other way of doing this than offering to you this day, “The Whole Burnt Offering.” Nothing for myself or others, but the “Whole,” entirely for you to feed upon and enjoy as you did with your Son. I kneel before you now, knife in hand, my own executioner, to die the death of all deaths, “The Death of Self.” May this life I give satisfy your hungry soul. I cannot bring as the rich did, of the herd. Nor as the common man, of the flocks. But receive, I pray, you, this poor man’s sacrifice of himself. I love you!

That was my father. He was the greatest man I ever knew.

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If you’d like to post memories, tributes or photos of my Dad and his life and ministry, there’s a dedicated Facebook page here.

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For those of you who’ve asked about donations in honor of my Dad’s life, last week he made me promise to convey the following to you.

First, he wants to thank all of you who have so sacrificially supported his ministry. You have meant so much to him.

He wants you to prayerfully consider sending a donation to and/or diverting your continued support from him to one or both of two ministries that perpetuate his own convictions:

First, the Center for Cultural Leadership, which I founded and lead. He stated CCL continues his commitment to the Lordship of Jesus in all things. You can donate at PayPal or Venmo. Or send a check to:

Center for Cultural Leadership

P. O. Box 100

Coulterville, CA 95311

Second, consider Camp Victory, led by my sister Leah and her husband Evangelist George Griffis. He said Camp Victory preserves his love for the old-time Bible-believing Baptist faith. You can donate via Venmo or send a check here:

Camp Victory

846 Camp Victory Rd

Shopville, KY 42501

Thank you deeply for your love and support for my father’s ministry. He was genuinely one of a kind.