Thursday, March 31, 2011

Praise God for the opportunity...

Hello all,

I just wanted to share some exciting news with you and ask for your prayers for me as I have been given an opportunity to be a leader of Mission Possible One. Mission Possible is a 6 week local missions trip for youth and I received an email today offering me the position to be a co-leader this year. I am looking forward to being able to encourage, equip, mentor, and help the teens develop a deeper walk with the Lord this summer. I am posting this so that many of you can pray that God gives me the wisdom and ability to lead these young people in a mission that will impact their lives in a way that will effect how they live after this mission. I will begin to prepare for this mission in the next week and continue to fine tune these plans throughout the next few months leading up to "Mission Possible One". Mission Possible One, MP1, will begin on June 20th and continue through the month of July. The responsibility that goes along with this position humbles me and encourages me because God has granted me favor with those whom chose the leaders and they saw something in me that caused them to chose me. The thing they saw was Christ, not me, because if they would have seen me I do not believe I would have been chosen for this position. It is only because they saw Christ through me that I have this privilege to lead and mentor these youth for the summer. I ask as I close this post that many of you please pray that I am able to lead this team in a manner pleasing and glorifying to God and that I continue to allow Christ to shine through me in all I do for the glory of the Him who sits on the throne and unto the Lamb. Until you read again....

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Evangelism class outing...

As some of you may or may not know. I have been leading/teaching and Evangelism class at Cornerstone Assembly, which is my home church. The name of the class is Fishers of Men and it was held for 6 weeks. We learned and looked at many different ways to share your faith. We talked about the use of tracts, one 2 one evangelism, and using the "Way of the Master" techniques and many other ways to engage people in conversations about their faith or lack there of. We learned much in a short amount of time and my goal was to just give each person a taste, if I may, for the different ways to witness to individuals. So, last night was the final week the class was meeting and I decided to take them out onto the streets at local shopping plaza to let them practice some of the things they had learned in class. I feel practical application is very important, after all if you learn something and never use it what good is it.

Before I get to how the night actually went let me give you some background leading up to last night. I looked at the weather report on Tuesday in preparation for our witnessing outing and it was calling for rain Wednesday night. I had asked everyone the prior week to pray for good weather for Wednesday night so that we could have a good witnessing experience. Some of the individuals had never done anything like this before so I was honored to be able to help get them into the field to start planting seeds of the gospel into the lives of others. Hold on I am getting ahead of myself. So after I saw the weather report I began to think of a contingency plan in the event that we got rained out. The next day as I was driving into the office to meet with Tom, a friend and associate evangelist of mine, I hear on the radio that it is to start raining in the late afternoon and not stop until Thursday night. By the way as I type this it is now 5:34pm on Thursday night and it is still raining. By this time I am almost convinced that we are going to have to go witnessing another night and I have no other resources to share with the class and I do not want to just sit in class and stare at each other for an hour. I begin to think of some different things I can go over again so the night is productive class time spent. It is now 5:00 on Wednesday and it has been cloudy all day but, it still has not rained so I think maybe we still have a chance. 6:00 and it is time to drive to church. My son and I get in the car to drive to church and it is still very cloudy and overcast, I think those are basically the same thing, oh well. I hear other people say that all of the time. Cloudy and overcast, never really understood why it can not just be overcast or cloudy. Sorry, went on a tangent there. Ok, where was I, oh yes. We drove to church and it still did not rain. I am beginning to see why God allowed it to be cloudy for so long. Now trying to not belabor the point as if I haven't already. We arrived at church and I went to class after a few songs of praise in the sanctuary. (for anyone who is reading this who is not a Christian, sanctuary is the large room where everyone meets on Sunday for church service) I probably did not need to put that in but, you never know. We prayed as a group and I offered a few words of encouragement and then we got into our vehicles and headed over to Bowie Town Center. Abbey, another person in the class, had to drop his son off at the library so he told us he would meet us there. After we arrived our teams broke up and we headed off in groups of three to share with those that God brought into our paths. I walked with Jonas because, Abbey was not their yet. Jonas and I were able to hand out about 20 tracts between the two of us and had a good conversation with a young man named Cameron. Jonas was also able to have a conversation with a well dressed gentleman about his spiritual condition and asked him if he knew Jesus Christ as his Savior. The man stated he was Catholic and we could tell he had to go because he kept backing away as Jonas talked although, I know that God can use that conversation to stir this man's heart. We were limited on time due to the classes being over at 8:30 so we headed back to the church at 8:15 and just as we began walking to our cars to go back to the church it began to sprinkle on us. Praise the Lord! He held off the rain and everyone was able to experience the joy of sharing their faith with lost souls. As we arrived back at class everyone was excited and glad that they were able to go out and hand out tracts and share their faith. I told them all that I would be organizing another outing and would be sending an email to each of them if they wanted to go along. Everyone seemed interested and I just want to praise God for giving me the opportunity to teach and equip others through this class. One final note of praise is that I have the privilege of teaching this class again in two weeks to a new group of students. God is good and greatly to be praised. To Him be all honor and glory. Until you read again...