Jesus never could get noticed in Nazareth.  They had watched him grow up there.  He banged around in wood working in the caprenter’s shop and played with the other children in the narrow lanes that separated one row of homes from another.  He sat at table with his family and with his friends.  He attended Passover each year in Jerusalem and even during that year that he stayed behind, most must have laughed at his precocious nature thinking that he had something to teach the rabbis.  He never quite got noticed in Nazareth.  In fact the query about him was, “can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

I do not know how many people in Metter or in the surrounding area really understood the gift that God gave us in Dr. Michael Guido.  He was so unassuming and so very humble that the notoriety that came to him would not be vastly known unless proclaimed by others.  His life was simply lived to give glory to God and to bring people to Jesus.  The sower sowed the seed and God brought a great harvest through his ministry in many media over many years.  He was a very rare kind of person in a world that has become too heavily populated by superstars.  Measure the meaning of significance in ministry by any standard, and his was a significant ministry.  Only heaven knows the lifes that were touched and transformed by his ministry.  He could have easily made so much money and lived in such affluence.  He could have jetted the world with the message of the Gospel, but God led him and his wonderful bride to spend most of their years broacasting the Gospel message from the studio in Metter, Georgia.

My first introduction to “The Sower” came when I was a college student serving a church on the weekends.  I would learn of him through some of our members who introduced me through the radio broadcast on WLOV out of Washington, Georgia to this deeply textured voice bringing “seeds from the sower for the garden of your heart.”  I wanted to meet him.  Once when Anne and I were going to Jacksonville to the annual Georgia-Florida game, I decided to drive to Metter and spend the night to visit the sower the next day.  I did go to the building but could not ask to meet him.  I thought, “I am a nobody preacher boy and he has  a big ministry; he wouldn’t want to meet me.”  So, I just picked up some literature and left.  It would be many years later that I would not only get to meet him but get to spend time with him.  I have never been more intimidated in my life than when he came one night to a class I was teaching to hear me teach.

Mr. Mike was so very humble.  And his humility was genuine.  He really saw himself as a servant of God simply sowing the seed of the Gospel.  He was also very kind.  He never saw me that he did not affirm me and my ministry.  It made me feel ten feet tall and so very bad because he was so very affirming.  He always rememebered my name and he always showed that he cared.  It was real.  Mr. Mike loved Jesus and loved people.  Only a very few know how little he slept through the years and how much he served.  He was holy in the true and genuine sense of that word.  Not pious, but holy.  Pious people put on airs; Mr. Mike had such a joyful sense of humor that showed he lived in the real world, but he lived here with his heart and soul firmly anchored in heavenly soil.  Going to heaven for him was not arriving in a foreign land.  He had lived there in his heart so long that he just crossed over and knew it was home.

I remember being this past December at the Billy Graham Training Center where the legacy of another great evangelist is remembered, and rightly so.  But I thought at least several times during those days that this could have been Michael Guido.  He is the same kind of man as Graham with the same kind of impact.  Mr. Mike would be embarassed at such an assessment because he was content to serve His Jesus until He called him home.

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