God isn’t looking for strong willed individualists. No matter how gifted. He wants humble, broken, bruised, and dependent sons and daughters. People who have learned they can’t make it on their own.

It's essential for life and ministry to intentional be set aside or set apart to enter a time of deep soul searching, learning from God’s word, but more importantly personal rearrangement of your life and lifestyle. To form habits in the private part of your life that will be essential for godliness, relationships, and ministry.

God is all knowing and unchanging. No detail escapes notice. Faithful to complete his plans. But when it comes to our experience He deliberately surprises us with difficult assignments. Sometimes he uses surprises to expose a sin, cultivate a Christ like quality in us or open a door of ministry. But he always supplies sufficient grace to handle the unexpected.

There is no one more persistent than God. We are no match for Him. When He wants to do something, He does it. When He wants someone, He gets them. No thing is impossible. No person is out of reach. When God decides to pursue a person, he gets them every time.

The work of salvation is God's from start to finish. He invites us to the joy of being a means by which He does it. In Acts 8, we have an example of how a simple clear conversation about Jesus is all it takes. In Christ, we can do this.

We know that a ministry is authentic when the person of Christ is central, accompanied by a freedom from the power of sin, and evidencing contagious joy.

When a person dies in faith in Jesus Christ, they are welcomed home, not rejected. This gives us confidence and hope to live boldly before God and others in the here and now.

Times of stress allow us to demonstrate the power of the gospel in real time, to all who see, that we can take it. Those of you under pressure, have no idea how God is using your life right now. You are displaying what faith in Christ looks like to a watching world.

As a church grows and becomes more programmed, individuals can be overlooked. Add to that the scattering of our membership during the pandemic and it can be hard to know who is still with us. There may be individuals asking: Does anyone even know my marriage is struggling or that I’m engrossed in sin or facing financial hardship? Do they even care? Who is there to help and walk with me through it? We have to somehow make sure we’re passionate about reaching more and more while at the same time insuring that each individual is being cared for.

After Jesus was presented in the Temple, two elderly persons rejoiced at the sight of him. The woman, Anna, shows us how ordinary obedience, even in life’s drudgeries and setbacks, is how God chooses to work in extraordinary ways. In quiet obedience, she models who we are, what we are, and why we are, always pointing to where we are—in Jesus.