Another way that GOD speaks to us…

Another way that GOD speaks to us is through gifted teachers.

Have you ever sat in a church service and felt that nobody else in the audience mattered, that GOD was speaking directly to your heart?  HE was.  At that very moment GOD was speaking through a gifted teacher to tell you what HE wants to say to you.  GOD often uses other people to share HIS word.

1 Thessalonians 2.13 (NLT), “When we preached HIS message to you, you didn’t think of the words we spoke as being just our own. You accepted what we said as the very Word of GOD – which, of course, it was. And this word continues to work in you who believe.”

GOD speaks through teachers, preachers, pastors and it changes our lives when we listen to them.

Back when I was 37, I was the Minister of Youth and Music in a church in Portsmouth, Ohio.  On one Sunday morning, we had a Missionary speaking in our morning service.  I don’t remember what he spoke on that particular morning but I do remember a story that he told that changed my life.  

He told about his experience of going to some town on the mission field and planting a new church in the front room of his house.  He told of how he went for months with just his family in the service, of how very difficult it was but something in that story stopped me.

At the end of the service, he opened the altar and I went to one end of the altar and I didn’t know it, but Margaret was at the other end.  That one service changed the direction of our lives because GOD was calling us to leave the security of staff ministry to go out and plant new churches.  We have never been the same from that service on.  GOD spoke to us through that missionary.

Now what if I would have missed that message?  Do you think I would have been a church planter?  No way.  That message was a defining moment in my life.  That’s why I hate to miss church.  I don’t ever want to miss GOD talking to me.  I want to show up where I can.

Just a thought from the front porch…