Yesterday was a good day, eventhough I lost my voice before service started and struggled the rest of the way. I was planning to continue our series on the 5 Functions of the church (evangelism, ministry, fellowship, worship, discipleship), evangelism is our next sermon topic with text coming from 1 Peter 3:15; "But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear; having a good conscience, that when they defame you as evildoers, those who revile your good conduct in Christ may be ashamed". But this text has been a complete struggle to pull together for me and I don't know why. I know the meaning of the text but formulating thoughts with out being too technical is challenging. Instead, I preached my post from Thursday; "Run for Cover" from 2 Corinthians 4:7-10 but I changed to topic to "God Uses Weak People". God blessed the message. I wanted to whoop so bad but could not due to hoarseness. The last point of the message got me; "In our humanity and weakness, we can't loose!" What a blessing! I'm still riding on high from this message and I think it's because I was preaching to myself after the week I had last week. Thank God for His word.
On Saturday, I met with our potential contractor to finalize his proposal by determining what was flexible in his cost. I'm trying very hard to stick to our plan of covering our loan payments for 5 years with the balance of loan to minimize our exposure to interest rate so all monies paid by the members will go directly to principle balance and yet, still have all repairs done at the same time. It will work but it's going to take some serious negotiations on my part but I do this all day at my current employment, thank God for the experience. Hey, Isn't it amazing how God positions us in life be it career, education, relationships, etc to help us advance the kingdom of God? I never thought I would be in this position as a pastor using my career skills in the church. Thank God!
Yesterday was our last softball game. We loss by 1 point after being down by 12 but it was a good game and fellowship with my brother and friends. Tonight, is our last basketball game before going to the playoffs and we're favored to win.
This week is going to be pretty busy for me with bible study on Wednesday, meetings throughout the week, work, study time, and ME time. We'll pull through it all.
Clinton, praise God for blessing his Word on yesterday. I too had trouble with my text, only because I was on vacation last week and did everything in my power to stay away from sermon writing. The Lord in his faithfulness, blessed the message because he knew that the people really needed a rich Word from Him. God be praised!
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