Knowing Him

The greatest pursuit in life is to know God. Having a knowledge of Him will result in us fulfilling His will. It is impossible to please Him if we do not know Him. The scripture says that Paul cried out, That I may know Him! With all of the great pursuits in Paul's life, the greatest was the knowledge of Him. One philospher has phrased this term, Knowledge is Power. In the spiritual realm, knowledge of God releases His power in your life. So, how do I know Him? Well, as I was reading the scriptures the other day something stood out to me very strongly. In 1 John 2:4 the Bible says, He that saith, I know him and keepeth not his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him. According to this scripture there is a correlation in the knowledge of Him and our obedience to His commandments. Also, when you read 1 John 4:7 the scripture says, Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. So, we also find that when we love, we know God. So, to know God requires several things, keeping His commandements as well as loving, for God is love. The two of these concepts were tied together by John in 1 John 5:2-3 By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous. So, we are commanded to love, but the first action of love is to keep his commandments. Therefore, the pursuit of knowledge begins with simple obedience motivated by Love. That is what Christ exampled for us on the cross. Obedience unto death, motivated properly by Love! To find the deep dimensions of God we must be motivated properly by Love and our pursuit begins with simple obedience to His Word! We can not go against the Word and find the depths of God! May our soul cry out as Paul's did, That I may Know Him!

The Most Important Ministry

I have now been an official "Missionary" now for about 3 months and I have discovered some interesting paradigms that exist throughout our culture. As is always the case with humans, we have a tendancy to put varying titles and levels into everything that we do. I think one reason we do this is because we like to feel that what we are doing is the most important thing that can be done. We designate callings into Foreign Missions, Home Missions, Pastors, Evangelists, and even within these designations you find different levels and degrees. When we study the scriptures we will find that the most important thing that anyone can do is to do what God has called them to do. If God has called us to be a pastor in a community of 1,000 people, that is the most important thing that we can do. If God has called you to be a pastor in a metropolitan area of 5 million, that is the most important thing you can do. We will be judged with what God has given us to do, not by what we think sounds important. The truth of the matter is, Foreign Missions and Metro Missions would not be possible without many people answering the call to Pastor in the communities that they have been called to. I have been refreshed to see the excitement in many of the Pastors that I have been around when they talk about reaching their communities! We are all called to be missionaries in the culture and context that God has called us to. The scripture says in Acts 1:8 that we will be witnesses after the Holy Ghost has come upon us. There are no designations or degrees, we just find that God has called us to be witnesses! I challenge you to approach your day today as a missionary with a calling to reach the world! The way that you win the world is one soul at a time. It makes no difference where that soul is from and what culture they are from, every soul counts with God!

Simple Math - We Need More Churches!

We left the state of New Hampshire this morning, and we arrived into the state of Connecticut. We are going to be basing out of the church in Waterbury Connecticut this week. We drove right through Hartford Connecticut on the way here, and I do have to say, my heart almost skipped a beat when I saw the beautiful skyline of this magnificent city. There are a few churches in Hartford, but I gaurantee they could use some more. There is such a hunger in me that wells us when I begin to think of the millions of people in our cities that are not being reached. There is a reason why McDonald's does not enter a city and build one mega McDonald's per city, but instead they choose to have numerous ones throughout a community. The more points of entrance there are, the better chance to reach people. I am not against large churches, because I believe Apostolic Churches should be the largest churches in a community, but I also believe that we have to become kingdom minded and begin to think about how effectively we are reaching our communities. What would happen if we could plant 100 churches per 1 million people. That would still leave us with having only 1 church per 10,000 people. The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few! If there has ever been a day to aggresively evangelize our world, it is today!

Hiding From God

I have been thinking about what the scriptures say in Genesis 3:8-11. There are so many things to contemplate in the story of Adam and Eve, but what I have considered interesting is how the scriptures say that Adam and Even would walk with God in the garden that He had created for them. There are places that God has created just for us that we can have perfect fellowship and communion with Him. The Bible says that Adam and Eve noticed after they had eaten of the fruit of the tree that God had commanded them against eating,that they realized that they were naked and they responded by trying to hide from God's presence. When we come in perfect communion with Him it begins to expose who we really are. One thing we realize is that if God is omniscient, He all ready knew that Adam and Eve had sinned, yet He still chose to come down to commune with them in the Garden. Not only did He come, but he called for them and searched for them. Man's natural response when they make a mistake is to go into hiding and that is exactly what Adam and Eve did. God did not excuse their sin, but the very thing that would bring forgiveness and healing to their situation would be to come into the presence of God, yet that is what they were trying to avoid. Let me encourage you today to tell you that if you need help, God has created a place of consecration for you. It is a place that He comes to visit with mankind, in spite of our fallacies. He is searching and calling for us,but many times we miss the healing that is needed because we hide from His presence. It would do us well to understand what even Jonah had to learn, you can not run from God, for His eyes are over all the earth seeking out the affairs of men. When we try to run from God, we must understanding that He is seeking for us to restore relationship with us! Hiding from His presence will only make things worse, but when we come to Him, forgiveness and restoration can be found!

An Enormous Burden

It is hard to estimate exactly what God can do through people. It is unthinkable that the God of the universe would entrust the most precious message to human beings, yet that is exactly what God has chosen to do. We are still in the beautiful state of Maine on deputation, and I have been very encouraged by the churches that we have visited while in Maine. I have discovered several things while in the state. We have 40 United Pentecostal Churches in the state and the state's population is about 1.9 million people. Obviously the state of Maine needs more churches, but it brings into perspective the burden that the Lord has placed in our hearts to plant a church in the Cleveland Metropolitan Area. The Cleveland Area has a population of 2.9 million people, that is more than 1 million more people than the whole state of Maine. In Acts 1:8 the scriptures say that we would receive the Holy Ghost and be endued with power from on high to be witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, and the uttermost parts of the earth! According to Bro. TF Tenney, the smallest thing that God has called us to reach is a city! We feel that the Lord is going to do strategic things to change the spiritual climate in the cleveland metropolitan area! We have a handful of churches for 2.9 million people! Pray that we speed through deputation to get to our city of calling! Every day longer it takes us, we are losing oppurtunities to reach people!

Fun on the Road

Well, this week has been quite an interesting week. We bought a brand new fifth wheel trailer to start our travels to raise funds for our church plant and we are all ready having a lot of fun with the trailer. We had to go 4 days without electricity last week because the converter blew on our trailer. It was a manufactuering issue evidently. We discovered what had went wrong, but could not get it fixed until yesterday due to last week being a holiday weekend. When we finally got the trailer fixed we were pulling out of the RV Service Center and our truck starting making some strange noise as well as it started spewing out black smoke. So, I called a ford diesel truck dealer and I am going to take it in to have it looked at today. I am going to have to rent a vehicle for a few days while they are figuring out what is going on with it. So, pray for us. We are under quite a bit of stress trying to get all of these issues resolved. Also, the financial stress is quite fun as well. We will be in service tonight in Portland, Maine. Pray that we have a great move of God. Portland is a beautiful city. I was very pleased when I found out we would be in service there.

An Adventure in Maine

We are in the beautiful state of Maine, and we have been having some wonderful services. I have not blogged in a while because unfortunately we had some issues with the converter in our fifth wheel, so we are Lord willing getting it fixed tomorrow. It has cost us $800 in diesel fuel this last week to get here from Ohio, so pray that fuel costs will go down, but we have been experiencing a great move of God. We were in Bar Harbor on Sunday morning in the beautiful Accadia National Park. There is a wonderful church Pastored by Bro. Cox, the Home Missions Director of Maine. They had over 100 people in service. It was a great time being with them. Sunday night we were with Bro. and Sis. Hurst in Bangor Maine. Our families have known each other for quite some time, so it was nice being with them. So far the support for planting a church in the city of Cleveland has been enormous. It is so exciting to see what God is doing in people's hearts as we together work to build the kingdom of God!