TODAY'S TRUTH
The Hagee family story cannot be told without acknowledging the contributions of the women from generation to generation. Pastor Matt Hagee recently shared pieces of their stories.
Laverta McElvany Hagee was born in 1893 and married Pastor Mattâs great-grandfather, John Christopher Hagee, when she was sixteen. She was the daughter of the Methodist bishop of Kansas and the region of Missouri. One night, Laverta attended a prayer meeting where she asked God for more of His presence, a deeper relationship with Him. He responded by baptizing her in the Holy Spirit. God filled her with unspeakable joy.
Struggling through the Great Depression, she gave birth to ten children â nine sons and the baby girl. Three sons died in infancy, and the others grew into a wild bunch. She needed the joy of the Lord to be her strength! She lived out this verse â the Lord was her salvation, her strength and song (Exodus 15:2). When her children gathered and shared childhood stories, laughing until tears ran down their cheeks, they always remarked on the joy with which their mom lived.
Vada Hagee married Pastor Mattâs grandfather in 1934. Very unusual for a woman in the 1920âs, Vada held not one, but two, college degrees. She was a college professor who taught homiletics and hermeneutics to men who wanted to be pastors. After she married, she preached to standing-room only crowds twice a week.
One Thursday night, she made this announcement from the pulpit, âTonight is the last night that I will stand behind the pulpit and preach. Iâm going to devote my life to supporting my husband and his ministry. And Iâm going to invest my life in my sons. And I believe that God will give to one of them the ministry that He intended for me.â And she kept her word.
No one knew that the 10-year-old boy standing beside her that day would be the one that God used to fulfill His promise to her â Pastor John Hagee. She prayed every day that Godâs will would be done in the lives of her sons. Pastor John avows that this woman was the force that Christ used to shape his life.
She believed that winning the lost was the most important thing that any human being could ever do. Because of her sacrifice, millions of people have heard the gospel of Jesus Christ, millions of lives have been changed through Cornerstone Church and its ministries. Because Vada laid down her life and invested it in her children, millions of souls have been won to Jesus.
