Moving the Needle

 

 

 

 

Moving the Needle

 

Our Pastor at Oakwood has been conducting a series on Moving the Needle in your spiritual life, and a wise person would have listened and taken notes. Today was the final sermon in the series, and I want to share some good truths with each of you.  

 

Pastor Still, began today with a quote from A.W. Tozer, “The Lord cannot fully bless a person until He has first conquered them.  The degree of blessing enjoyed by a person will correspond exactly with the completeness of God’s victory over them.”

 

I did not have room on the worship guide to list all that our pastor said, so I might leave out a few very important points.  This is my recall; Ray began with Jacob, who could deceive others, and one day he sought to have God’s blessing and wrestled with an angel, and would not let him go till he received a blessing, the angel touched the hip sock and for the rest of Jacob life he walk with a limp, but God change his name to Israel.  You can read the account in Genesis 35.  Ray gave many men in the Scripture that God had to break before they could be used like the apostle Peter and Paul.

 

His first point was many who go by the title of Christian or under the illusion that they are in control.  They take credit for wealth and success that was a gift from God.  I wrote this; “If you and I are not careful we will forget who gave us everything, including redemption, Jesus blood covering our sins.”  One must learn it is not about you, it is about Jesus.

 

The second point was to Embrace God's sufficiency.  The culture we live in has one theme; it is all about me first.  As a follower of Christ, I was blessed to have Bill and Anabel Gillham who mentor Jan and me through a study they developed called “The Life” and God used them and that study to change my life.  One of the first things was to make us understand what kind of flesh we came into the family of God with.  As I explore my life it is flesh that likes to be first, to be noticed, and to get my needs met outside of Christ.  How if you have that kind of flesh, you have a choice, let it have control or ask the Lord to take control of your thoughts and actions.  2 Corinthians 13:5, tells each of us the following;  ^“Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you fail to meet the test!”

 

And the third point was to Enjoy an intense relationship with the Lord.  It has not been that for me for many of the years, I did not understand that I needed to not just read a Psalm and Proverbs as I was taught in the early years of my life with Christ.  That was not a bad thing to do but it was not studying to show myself a workman of the Lord.  For a time now, and I wish I could say a long time, but since 2006, I spent time in the morning asking God to teach me and to direct my day to meet His will.  

 

Let me close this with thanks to each of the men who were used by God to teach and preach His word.  My first mentor was Jack Archer, he was known in his industry as Dry Hole Jack, in that the first 19 holes he drilled were that, but number 20 made Jack a millionaire.  He and eleven other men from Corpus Christi were invited to Laity Lodge, and they all were saved that weekend, Jack saw in me a young believer in Jesus with a lot of zeal, that needed to know that God loved me.

 

He had this sign at his Ranch in Johnson City, and I copied it and put it on a log on my Back Porch.  “Smile you, Rascal, God knows all about you and He loves you anyway.”  I now understand that Truth, and if you do not have an intense relationship with Jesus, I would enjoy sharing more with you.

 

From the Back Porch,

 

Bob Rice