MyJournal – 7/21/05 8:21 pm
Yesterday, God met me during my evening prayer time. I was over at the church at 7:30 like I had said for prayer, and a couple of other people showed up—Paul and Leah Witte came, and Eric Wilson (a new fellow) also was there.
It was a really good time for me. I had been really skeptical about who would come, and I don’t even know if I should be disappointed or not, but none of my Leadership Team members were there. Now, I know that Jason was meeting with his small group, and I imagine that Betty and Doug were at their small group, but Mary Martin wasn’t there for any reason at all. She told me today that she didn’t have an excuse.
I’m not going to let that bother me, though, because I was there for myself and not for anyone else or for any kind of church program. Oh, I hope that we can become a Spirit-led church that really is empowered by prayer, but that’s not what last night’s meeting was about. I wanted to pray.
The first half of the meeting went pretty well as I just had everyone go off privately for some alone time with God. We prayed privately for about 30 minutes before getting back together to pray with each other.
It was pretty good for me because I sat down with the passages of Scripture that Mary had given me for Sunday’s worship service, and I just read through them. However, I also read a little from Isaiah 55, and it’s in that chapter where God says…
“My ways are not your ways, neither are my thoughts your thoughts, for my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
That verse resonated with me because it was one of the verses from last Sunday morning’s worship service.
However, the verse right after it was a great encouragement to me. The verse right after it was “My word will not return to me empty. It will accomplish the purpose for which I sent it.”
That was a GREAT encouragement to me. Even though I of course knew that passage by heart, it was a refreshing thing to read it again because I could once again just hand everything over to God to trust him with it all. His word is still His word and it isn’t mine. He is the one who sends it. He has a purpose for it, and he will make sure his purpose comes to fruition.
I don’t have to worry that perhaps I’ve failed in this place. I just have to reevaluate myself to see if I have stayed faithful to God’s call on my life to preach the Word. If I have done that, then I can trust God to accomplish what he wants with it. It’s his word after all, and he promises to do with it what he wants to. That is a great encouragement to me.
I wrote down some other ideas too, but that was the major thing that impacted me. I know it was God speaking to me. I claim that.
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Lord, if it really is true that you will always accomplish your word, then would you please reveal it more to us here at NWBC? Would you please help us to see you more clearly? Would you please help us to be more aware of your word?
In the next couple of days, I just pray you would shape into my heart some big truths from your word that I should share with the people on Sunday.
My big problem right now is that I’m once again stuck in the Linux Research mode at home and the Leadership Team Infrastructure development mode at my office.
I feel really good about the system that you’ve helped me to put in place, and I think it will be something that will be really useful in the future not just at NWBC but also at whatever church I’m leading down the road. I’m also glad that I don’t feel I have to do so much tweaking at it anymore.
Today, I spent a good amount of time working on the dokuwiki site so that I could add some functionality that I thought would be beneficial, and it felt so good to be able to do it. It gives me such a sense of accomplishment when I do something like that. I have so many computer projects that I would like to do…
Make the NWBC giving program cross-platform by removing the ActiveX code like the GTD TiddlyWikki and removing the AutoIt helper scripts in favor of python. I’d love to be able to make it work from within a web server too, but I don’t know if that would work.
Set up the conference computer to run Linux and have our development website hosted on that machine.
oh, and I keep thinking of more things to do with all that.
The problem is that all my thought energy is being devoted to ways I can improve the church computing infrastructure and not to ways I can be more effective in preaching or in ministry. I have to start filling my mind with some other stuff so that I regain that focus! But of course, it is so hard to stop doing what I’m doing now.
I need to find some closure.
So Lord, I don’t have any real motivation for closure. I see so much potential and opportunity in the computer stuff, but I don’t see any potential in anything else. Would you please open my eyes to see the greater potential in the people in our church and neighborhood?
I love you.
J
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