Happy Donut Day! Join us 10-12 at the Bread Ministry today, eat some donuts and hang out and fellowship and maybe even pray with those God is sending our way. All are welcome!
Tonight 6-7:30 is dinner huddle and a Tim Tebow teaching. All are welcome! Bring a friend.
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Good Morning Spirit-filled, Spirit-led, Gifted Followers of Christ! Amen! What an awesome night last evening as wee gathered to discuss and learn about our gifts and how they are custom tailored for who we are created to be in Christ. God does have some great things for all of us to discover and step into and He has gifted us for success as we learn who we are in Christ and how to do those custom made things He has for us. PTL!
Yesterday's Zoom Huddle discussed God's Word, our Bibles, and how to use them to pray, seek God and apply His teachings to our lives. We are more than hearers and are becoming doers of His Word. Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word of God. It sure was an active day of study and God encounters! Thanks Lord!
The Upper Room and Our Daily Bread (below) speak into some aspects of allowing God to use us to be His hands and feet and to do our parts in His Good News Delivery Co. Prayerfully engage with God through them and His Word. Ask Him to speak to your heart and guide your feet as you open His Word and abide in his love before entering this day fired up and ready for all He has for you. he does have some great things for you! rejoice! Seek and follow well today! I'm praying for you! Shalom! May we love as we have been loved! Amen. Really pray through and meditate on the connection blog at the end. It is our mandate! Live and love as Jesus loved us and like Him! Go! make disciples and do so with some friends! Amen
UR: Holy Tears (Have you ever sowed in tearful prayers? God hears your heart and collects your tears!)
Whatever you do, do it from the heart for the Lord and not for people. - Colossians 3:23 (CEB)
Due to our lead pastor’s absence one Sunday, the associate pastor asked several lay members to help with various roles during the worship service. I was asked to lead the congregational prayer time. Prayer is such an intimate and often emotional experience for me that I sometimes have difficulty holding back tears during prayer. Even so, I agreed.
At the appointed time, I stepped boldly to the podium, feeling confident I could keep my composure. I had uttered only a few words of humble praise, however, when my voice trembled and my chin quivered. Sure enough, tears escaped from my closed eyelids, and the tears flowed harder the more I prayed. Somehow I managed to finish with the Lord’s Prayer and make it back to my pew, but I felt remorseful and embarrassed by my public display.
Then I remembered that God doesn’t demand a performance from me. God wants me to serve with my whole heart.
Emotions are real and God-given, and tears can be a kind of holy water. Our Creator made me with a tender heart. It doesn’t matter what others think or say about my prayerful tears. Perhaps that day wasn’t my shining moment, but it was God’s.
Today's Prayer
Almighty God, we are thankful that we have constant access to you through the power of prayer. Amen.
ODB:
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Late one night, a Kenyan elephant sanctuary received a call that an elephant calf had fallen into a well. The rescue team arrived to cries of despair flooding the darkness and discovered that two-thirds of the baby’s trunk had been lost to hyenas. Transporting the calf to their safe haven, they named him Long’uro, which means “something that has been cut.” Though he possessed only one-third of his trunk, Long’uro healed and was embraced by the rest of the herd at the sanctuary. Elephants innately know they need each other, so they help each other.
In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul underscores our need to help each other within the body of Christ. He uses the metaphor of the human body and its individual parts to describe how God intends His people to welcome all gifts in all people because all are needed for His body to function (vv. 12-26). Then Paul explains how unity in diversity is accomplished. “God has put the body together,” he wrote, “giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other” (vv. 24-25).
Whether weak or strong, fancy or common, let’s help each other. Like the elephants, people need each other too.
By Elisa Morgan
REFLECT & PRAY
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When have you received help from the family of God? What will you do to help other believers today?
Dear God, please help me to understand the vital value of each member in the body of Christ and show me how to both receive and give help so that together we’re stronger.
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SCRIPTURE INSIGHT
The concept of unity that Paul highlights in 1 Corinthians 12 depends on two things. The first is its diversity. Each part of the body has a different function, yet every part is vital. Paul wrote to a society steeped in slavery, and the church brought together groups of people unaccustomed to equality with each other—slave and free, Jew and gentile (v. 13). How could such a diverse body experience unity? Because of God’s Holy Spirit, who unites us in one purpose. This kind of unity was unique in the world. Paul tells us, “We were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body . . . and we were all given the one Spirit to drink” (v. 13). Whether great or small, each member is important for the body to perform properly. As Paul said, “God has put the body together” (v. 24). Many members. One body. One Spirit.
Tim Gustafson |
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Harvest Connection blog:
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March 12 - By This All Men May Know
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A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another. (John 13:34–35)
This passage, along with the Great Commission, was part of Jesus’ parting instructions to His followers. It was the essence of what He came to teach. It is similar to the second part of the greatest commandment—that we love our neighbor as ourselves. God is love, and His disciples are to be so known for their love for one another that this has been called the badge of Christians.
People living outside the church see that love and they are drawn to Jesus. They want to get in on it. When we love, we let our light so shine before men that they see our good works and glorify our Father who is in heaven (Matthew 5:18).
Do you want to know how we are to love one another? Like Jesus loves us. Paul wrote, “Live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Ephesians 5:2). And in Colossians 3:12–14, he wrote, “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.” There can be no greater love. I think the phrase “bear with one another” is important. When someone hurts us or offends, we are not to try to get even. We are to bear it in love. That’s what Christ would do. And we are to forgive, as Christ has forgiven us.
There is a fellowship in the church that is like no other. We love to be together, for when we are together, Christ is in our midst. The fellowship is a precious experience, especially when we pray together, for Christ always lives to make intercession for us (see Hebrews 7:25). I feel He is right there among us praying with us and loving us. That fellowship, love, and acceptance is the promise that comes from following this command.
One of the members of our Four Flats Quartet (which became Barbershop Harmony Champions of the Pacific Northwest), became a student at our Christian college right out of World War II, not because he wanted to be a Christian, but because he wanted to be with a girl who was attending there. For a long time he resisted the Christian gospel. When we sang in churches and an altar call was given, he said his knuckles got white because he was hanging on so tightly to the seat in front of him. One day, during spiritual emphasis week, I gave him a list of all the reasons I thought he should give his heart to Christ and asked him to turn the paper over and list the reasons he should not accept Christ. He fumbled with the paper for a while, then he said, “I guess there aren’t any.”
That night he practically dove to the altar and gave his heart to Jesus and later became an effective preacher of the gospel. I believe that was a situation where we virtually loved him to Christ. He couldn’t resist the love he saw in the believers on campus.
Lord, this command to love one another has to be so close to Your heart since it so closely reflects Your own nature and practice. Help me to love as You love. Pour Your love into my heart through Your Holy Spirit. Forgive me when I make excuses for not loving someone. Break through hard hearts that have resisted Your love, even as they have proclaimed Your name. Lord, please make the congregation I am a part of to become known as Your followers because of the depth of the love we have for one another.
--Adapted from Encountering Jesus: Praying the Commands of Christ into Your Life by Norval Hadley. This book is available at prayershop.org. Use the code CONPSP3 at checkout to receive an additional 10% discount.
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