Let the Living Waters Flow

We had a wonderful weekend in the Lord! We began Sunday morning with a marvelous report of Saturday’s outreach. Brother Vitalis reported that they met at the church and after praying split up into two groups. He took one group and Brother Jude led the other. Their purpose was one-on-one evangelism. When they returned an hour and a half later they had prayed with twenty-one people to receive Jesus. I love it when God surprises us with a magnificent harvest. We faithfully sow seed week in and week out but it is only God who can bring life to a lifeless soul. God is so faithful and he had many appointments that day!!

I preached Sunday morning a sermon entitled “Hydrating your Soul”. My text was out of John 7 when Jesus stood up on the great day of the feast and declared “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.” The soul is much like the body in that it needs to be well hydrated by the living waters of God. Just like our physical bodies can become dehydrated, so can our soul. Many of us live with fear, anxiety, worry, stress, anger, resentment and guilt. We assume these things are a normal part of a walk with God, when in fact they are the soul’s ‘dehydration indicators’; Our soul’s way of crying out for the living waters of God.

We spend our time wrongly diagnosing these symptoms and searching for temporary solutions like the woman that Jesus met at the well in John 4. She knew something was wrong but didn’t know how to fix it. She had been playing a guessing game with all the medicine the world had to offer. When Jesus met her on that glorious day and offered her living waters, she instantly recognized her problem and said “sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst.”

Jesus invites us to drink of Him. John tells us that Jesus was referring to the Holy Spirit “whom those believing in Him would receive.” Max Lucado, when talking about this scripture says, “The spirit of Jesus threads down the throat of your soul, flushing fears, dislodging regrets. He does for your soul what water does for your body.” He goes on to talk about how we need not give directions to water for it knows where to go, such is with the Holy Spirit of Jesus. Many times we don’t even know what is wrong, but if we will drink deeply and often of the living waters of God, he will re-hydrate our soul.

One of my favorite songs that we sing here in Gabon goes something like this:

Let the living waters flow over my soul, Let the Holy Spirit come and take control,

In every situation that has troubled my mind, All my cares and burdens unto you I come…Jesus

If you will come to Jesus and give Him permission to flood your thirsty soul with His living waters, you will find yourself refreshed and re-hydrated for His glory. Every morning our prayer should be “God, flood my soul today with your living waters. Find the dry areas of my heart and refresh them by your Holy Spirit.”

Sunday evening we began our look into the book of Romans. One of my goals this year for the people in our church is that we would read through the entire New Testament. This is part of our goal to increase in the Word of God. Since we are a young church, we are not trying to look ‘deeply’ into each book with an exhaustive study as much as we are trying to just read through it.

We have already read through Matthew, mark, Luke, Acts, Philippians and Colossians. I usually will begin on Sunday night by giving a background of the book; author, audience, key words, key scriptures or teachings, maps, etc., so that as we read through it we have a better comprehension of what is written. After the teaching, I give out a reading plan for the week (or multiple weeks depending on the size of the book) that is basically a schedule to get us through the book by reading a chapter or two per day. I will generally preach out of the book we are reading as I’m inspired throughout the week.

This has been a very fruitful time for our church as many people are committing themselves to the Word of God outside of church as well, and that seed will always have a great effect on God’s people.

We thank God for the increase He is bringing to the life of our church.

Revival Report: My Pastor & My Dad

We were blessed last week to have Pastor Warner come to preach revival for us here in Gabon. As if having Pastor Warner wasn’t a big enough blessing, he decided to bring my Dad along with him!

We began on Saturday afternoon with Dad teaching a Parenting class. I was overwhelmed at the response of our church when more than thirty parents (and ‘wanabe’ parents) came to the class. Dad taught for an hour and then opened it up for what became a two hour question and answer session. We are praying that this is the beginning of capturing the next generation of Gabonese for Jesus.

Saturday evening, Pastor Warner preached a Mens Discipleship Class. While on the way to the church Pastor mentioned that he wasn’t sure which sermon to preach. I suggested he preach all of them–I was only half joking. He preached his first sermon, prayed and then went right into the next one. The men loved it!

Sunday morning we had our adult choir sing and Pastor preached on being born again. Sunday evening we had our Children’s Choir perform. The messages through the revival had a great flow, climaxing on the final night when Pastor preached his classic sermon, “Knowing the Father”. When people shared testimonies as part of Sunday night’s service (after the revival), the recurring theme was the impact of that particular sermon.

The week went by too quickly. I was blessed to spend lots of time with my father (though wrestling him away from the grand kids was difficult) and I was blessed to have coffee and fellowship every morning with my Pastor.

The people in my church kept telling me how lucky I was to have my “two fathers” come to visit me here in Gabon. I was really wrestling with that because I grew up in church and my father is both my physical father and my spiritual father. Without his influence and faithfulness in my life I would not be serving God today or doing the will of God. I guess when you look at it like that, I really had three fathers come to visit me. I was blessed that my father recognized an age and time in my life when I needed someone else to guide me and he handed me over to Pastor Warner (and others like Pastors Ed Gutierrez and Alvin Smith) for further guidance and discipleship. I think when we are young, we are too naïve to realize the value of our parents and what they have to offer us. My Dad had to give me up for a while so that he could get me back later.

When we were driving back from the airport, tears in our eyes from saying goodbye, I asked the kids what their favorite thing they did with Grandpa was. Zakary said he had fun fixing the computers. Nehemiah said his favorite was when Grandpa read Spiderman comics and they colored. Geoffrey then informed me that coloring was not Nehemiah’s favorite because it was his favorite and they couldn’t have the same one. Then he changed his mind and decided that his favorite was playing a new game called “foot-basket” (combination of basketball and soccer) that grandpa invented while he was here.

They may be gone from Gabon but the memories will remain, as will the impact they had on us and the church and for that we are most grateful.

Sunday Leftovers

Every Sunday, after a week of study on a certain subject, inevitably their are many things that must be cut from the sermon for the sake of time. I always tell myself, ‘I’ll use this some other time’ but never end up going back to it. So I thought it would be good just to collect the ‘leftovers’ on Monday morning and put them into a blog for whoever cares to read them. Here goes the first addition:

Yesterday morning I preached a sermon entitled “Ont es Ensemble” (I preach in a French nation so most of my titles are in French). This is bad/slang French (should be ‘Nous somme Ensemble’) that we use here in Gabon, it roughly translates “we are together”. In our church we use this saying quite frequently. When someone does something for you and you say “Merci” (thank you), the other person usually responds “ont es ensemble” implying that it is nothing because it was done out of the love that comes from our relationship.

A church should be a place of unity, where people come together with the same mind/head (Christ) and the same vision to reach the lost. This is what we see in the early church when the bible says in Acts 2:44, “all who believed were together and had all things in common”. Unity in a body of believers is not easy to achieve and is even harder to maintain as the church grows. God brings together people from all kinds of backgrounds and commands them to love one another. This is something that has to be contended for and defended against the attacks of the enemy.

In order to disrupt the unity of the church the devil deploys a “divide and conquer” strategy. It is the same strategy that has been used since the beginning of the world (the devil has no new tricks). In order to conquer Adam and Eve, he waited till they were no longer ‘together’. If they had been together when the serpent approached them, they would have most likely sent him to an early death by way of a crushed head. Once he ‘divided’ them, he was able to more easily ‘conquer’ them. (Side note: many children employ this same strategy against their parents. If one says 'no' they get the other one to say 'yes' and the unity of the family is broken.)

The devil attacked the New Testament church with the same strategy. The episode with Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5) was an attempt to destroy the unity of the church. They were all together, but what happens when someone comes in who lies to the church and the Holy Spirit? Now we begin to question every gift and every person who walks through the door. We become the judge of good and bad, right and wrong; division begins.

The problem with the Hellenistic widows threatened the unity of the church. Others are being taken better care of or given special treatment by the pastors. But I believe the attack climaxed when the church was almost split into two parts; a ‘Jewish Christian Church’ and a ‘Gentile Christian Church’. If you look very closely behind it all you will see the devil trying to ‘divide and conquer’ the church of Christ.

Division destroys progress in the life of relationships. Jesus spoke about this in Mark 3:24-25 when he said, “If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25 and if a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand.” If people are divided in their goals and vision they will not make progress. Imagine two people tied together at the waist by a rope. They must both decide to go in the same direction if they are going to go anywhere. Otherwise they will play a game of ‘tug-a-war’ till the rope breaks or one will drag the other helplessly around, or both will just give up and sit down.

I believe that at the root of the problem of division is the issue of pride. Pride causes us to look down on others which in turn brings division. Pride is what made Abraham think he could bring about the promise of God by his own ability and plan. The fruit of that decision (based in pride) is the greatest division of relationship known to mankind. The descendants of Ishmael (Arabs) are still fighting thousands of years later against the descendants of Isaac (Jews).

Pride also caused the division in heaven as the devil said to himself in Isaiah 14:13 “…I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God…”. This created a division in heaven and a third of the angels followed him in his prideful rebellion against the Most High God.

Pride causes us to think more highly of ourselves than we ought to. We have a tendency to come to a place where we begin to feel indispensable. “This church would be nothing without my contribution”, “My work needs me to survive”, etc. We begin to exalt ourselves and our needs and importance above the others around us and it causes division in our relationships. It was Charles de Gaulle who said, “The graveyards are full of indispensable men”.

The greatest solution to pride in our hearts is to stop thinking so highly of ourselves and start thinking highly of Christ. We need to learn to cherish Christ above all else. When you cherish something you draw other people’s attention to it. If we cherish Christ most in our lives, above all else, we will draw men to look unto Him.

In our churches we must learn to place the needs of others before our own needs. Heb 10:24-25 says, “…let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works 25 not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together.” When we consider (think about, pray for) one another, it stirs up our love for one another.

Our personal lives and our churches will be resisted by God when we don’t deal with the pride in our hearts. Peter tells us in 1 Peter 5:5 “…be clothed with humility, for ‘God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’” If there is one that I don’t want working against me in life, it is God. I need His grace more and more everyday to serve Him. In order to experience His grace on our lives and our churches, we must humble ourselves and cry out to Him. We must contend for unity in our relationships and churches. Don't let the devil "divide and conquer" your life.