OAC staff appointment

Greetings all,

I wanted to share with all of you that read my blog that I have just recently been appointed to a staff position with Open Air Campaigners (OAC). Over the next 4 to 6 months I will be praying for God's provision and direction as me and my family transition from secular employment into full-time ministry with OAC. Open Air Campaigners is an evanglistic mission organization that primaily shares the gospel through public proclomation in the Open Air. If you are interesed in finding out more about OAC you can go to the link I have at www.oacusa.org and to get to my page click on "our staff" and it will take you to mine and all of the other staff evangelist. The last couple of weeks for me have been very busy and I have not had a chance to update my blog. Hopefully in the future I can be more timely in my postings.

It is Christmas season and all of the hustle and bustle that goes along with it. Tomorrow night at chuch we are having a children's Christmas play, which is always very well done. Last week myself and a couple of my friends went out witnessing on Black Friday and it was incredible to share our faith with many anxious shoppers as they waited for the doors of the store to open. I share this with you because God placed this idea in my mind while driving home from a men's meeting at church and I could have desmised it and that would have been all the farther it went but, I acted on this thought and recruited as many men as I could find to go with me for this outreach. I do not want any of you to think for one minute that I did this on my own strength because it was all God. I just pray that this story will inspire you to take a chance and do something out of the ordinary for God, he is worth it! If you want to read more about this witnessing event you can at the OAC website in my newsletter. Praise God for all of the blessing he has bestowed upon me and my family to him be all Honor, Glory, and Praise. Amen.

Correction

In my last blog I stated that my son was 4 and 1/2 years old, actually his is olny 4 1/2 months old. Sorry about to error in the post.

Busy lately

As the title says....... I have been busy. I just stated a myspace account and I have placed some blogs on there and have spent the last couple of days getting it organized and also spending necessary time with my beloved family. I don't know if I have mentioned before but, I have a 4 1/2 old son who takes up a lot of time. He is truly a blessing from God. We have a total of 3 children. My other children are a girl, who is 11, and another boy, who is 7. Tomorrow is Sunday and we are having a missionary at church and I always enjoy hearing about the work missionaries are doing to spread the gospel. My daughter has a friend spending the night tonight and I pray that as she gose to church with us tomorrow that God will draw her to him through the Holy Spirit. I also would ask that each of you that read this post, that you would pray that the Lord of the harvest would send forth may laberors in the the fields of souls. May God bless each one of you for your faithful service. And if you are not a believer and are reading this post, I pray that the Holy Spirit will reveal the love and desire that God has to fellowship and invite you into his kingdom through the belief of his son Jesus Christ and the remission of your sins.

In His Service,

Zane

Wednesday night

Tonight I was at church and on Friday me and my daughter will be going to a praise and worship service. As I drove home tonight I realized that I did not have the same excitement after church as I have had in the past and then I realized " that is ok" because I have matured in my walk with God. Everything now is not about excitement and energy it is about having a continuous relationship with my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and allowing the comfort of the Holy Spirit to work in my life through the entire day not only in certain situations yet, all of the time. Today at work I handed out a Gospel of John, which I have not done for a week or so and I felt satisfied knowing that I am still doing God's will and my level of commitment has deepened. The fact that this has not created a higher level of excitment is ok, because I am now more consistent. As I look at the Gospels, Jesus never got overly excited about what God was doing through him and we are all to become more Christlike as we grow closer to him. If anything I now can rest in the assurance that God is still the center of my life and the more center he becomes the less emotional I become and that is because I no longer get that rush of excitement when things occur I have come to expect them because God is in control. I don't know if this post has helped anyone other than me yet, I pray if any of you have similar feelings it will encourage you to keep you faith strong. After all strong is the only way our faith should be because our faith comes from God.

In His Service,

Zane

1 Timothy 1:12

" And I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has enabled me, for that he counted me faithful, putting me into the ministry"; Wow... what a powerful verse and each of us are able to claim it as our own if we are faithful with the ministry that God has called us into. We just need to be obedient to his call on our lives and in our lives. These can take many shapes and sizes. What I mean by this is that you may be called to say a polite word to a co-worker tomorrow and allow God's love to shine through you, or you may be called tomorrow to stand up for your faith when a co-worker makes a comment that is rude or distasteful towards the convictions you hold as a follower of Jesus Christ. There could be many other scenarios that could and will apply for each of us tomorrow or the next day and I pray that this post will inspire you as a believer to go out into all the world and preach the gospel either through words( which I feel is most effective) 0r through actions,( which is also important yet, people can not hear our actions and come to repentance). One final note I would like to leave you with is recently I discovered a website that outlines the Church History since Christ walked the earth until present day. Tonight I read an article by
David Calhoun & Covenant Theological Seminary, on Augustine's book "The city of God" and it was very, very, good and I feel that taking the time to read this book in the future will be a worthwhile investment. I say investment because the book is approximately 1000 pages. I would encourage any of you that have a desire to learn more about church history to at least read the article which can be found at http://www.churchtimeline.com/imperial.htm scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the PDF file for Augustine's Theology of History. It is well worth your time. May God continue to richly bless your life as you journey on towards the fulfillment of his purpose for you ministry.

Sunday

Today was a great day. I got up early and went to church with my son and daughter. The message that the pastor gave was very inspiring and filled with truth. I have noticed of late that he is preaching messages that are more conservative in nature yet, they are very accurate to the word of God. I have struggled sometimes in the past with a some of the ideas that have been presented from the pulpit of the church I attend but, lately I would agree and applaud the pastor for his straight forward direct approach and if his sermons do not please some people he is willing to accept that for the growth and encouragement of the fellowship of believers. I also had a wonderful time praising the Lord in the service this morning also. The songs that we sang seemed to really inspire an atmosphere of worship, not that the song did the inspiring it was my willingness to yield to the Holy Spirit and humble myself before him. I truly believe sometimes our worship is not always what it could be and that is because we are to proud to show emotions or to humble ourselves in the presents of the Lord. In fact we can worship God daily in Spirit and in Truth as Jesus told the woman at the well, as long as we come before him, God with a attitudeof humility and gratitude. Tomorrow night is my Bible study night and we are going through the doctrines of grace and it has been a great study thus far. Well, I pray all of your days throughout the week go as well as mine did today and God bless each of you that reads this word on encouragement.

End of the week

Well today was Friday....the end of the work week. I had a overall good week and now I will spend quality time with my wife and children. Tonight we are going to play a board game as a family and have rootbeer floats. Sometimes I feel like I do not spend enough quality time with my family so I am going to try to make a point of doing that more. In fact I will be cutting this entry short because I need to be more attentive the needs of my wife. I was listening to a message by Paul Washer and he spent about 30 minutes talking about how we need to love our wife's as Christ loved the church so I must go now and be more Christ like in my relationship with my wife.

In His Service
Zane.

Keep the faith

Well this is my second post and...... I had a great time of fellowship and worship tonight in church. The Pastor spoke on Revelation 2:8-11 and brought out may good points. I agreed with most of the points that he used and felt refreshed by the sermons and now I am ready to finish my work week strong. On the way home I had a great discussion with my daughter. She is 11 years old and I am very proud of her. She was speaking about how she can be a witness to her friends at school and how she can influence them in a positive way instead of being pulled down by them. She told me that all of the kids in her class pick on and call each other names. I told her this was not a very Godly way to act and she agreed. She admitted to laughing at some of the things that were said by her friends, but now she is going to try to not laugh at all and make her friends aware of the fact that she does not want to enter into this type of behavior or accept it by laughing. She also mentioned to me that she does pray for her friends and hopes that they will come to know the Lord Jesus Christ as their Savior. It was a real inspiration to talk to my daughter about such weighty spiritual matters and it has caused me to re-evaluate my commitment to witnessing at work during the day. A friend of my told me that people see your faith by you living your faith. I now understand what he meant because that is exactly what I told my daughter and I gave her some suggestions on how to put this into action. I pray that God gives me the grace and opportunity to share my faith tomorrow with many that I come in contact with throughout the day.

God bless,
Zane

Getting Started

New to blogging...I have enjoyed reading blogs and sharing ideas with others so I felt that starting a blog of my own to be able to share my ideas, which are not mine, but my Lord Jesus Christ, would be a logical next step in my ministry for the Lord. I was inspired by an article I read by John Piper about why Pastor's should blog. Granted I am not a Pastor, although I am a street preacher and an Evangelist which in essence is very similar to a pastor so I though I need to start a blog to get involved with the community of blogger by sharing the gospel in cyberspace. All who are reading and do not know who Jesus Christ is or why he is so important I encourage you to continue to check back to the blog regularly so you may learn about the truth that I pray will be shared through this site. If you are currently a believer or follower of Jesus I hope you participate and share your ideas with me so we can grow and encourage others to together for the glory of God's Kingdom. I do not want to pretend that I have all of the answers to questions regarding Theology( The Study of God) because I am still learning and trying to discover for myself the many different truths revealed in the Bible. I also will occasionally ask a question and hope that much enlightening discussions will occur. The first question I would like to purpose is why do you think you exist?