Showing Up and Seeing The Impossible Dream Come True Purity 936

To see today's photo, go to mt4christ.org or follow me, M.t. Clark, on Facebook or Twitter. Good morning. Today's photo of the view from my driveway down by the river comes to us from yours truly, as my arrival there yesterday seemed to be a divine appointment, as the twilight-time colors in the sky and reflected on the Skodak Creek and Hudson River seemed to cry out to give God glory. I've told the tale of God bringing me to 1788 State Route 9J many times and will gladly tell it to anyone who would want to listen. But no matter where your relationship with God may be, with a view like this, you may have to allow for my enthusiastic declaration that God brought me to this place. River House, as my wife calls it, is— was something that I worked hard to get. But as much as I was giving it my all by working two jobs from October of 2019 to September of 2020, before and during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, uh, I know that God was moving in my life continuously during those times to help me to obtain what, what to me seemed to be the impossible dream. Well, it's Monday, and in spite of my electronic personal assistant being unplugged, causing me to oversleep, and thus making me deviate a little from my normal morning practices, I still made first things first by making the— making the quick executive decision to skip my physical exercise and immediately jump to my morning prayers, where I let go of the frustration of running late, and just gave everyone and everything to God in the practice of benevolent detachment, a form of prayer that the One Minute Pause app has been leading me through as I decided last week to give more space in my life to God by doing the app's 30 Days to Resilient program for morning and evening sessions of prayer and meditation, and have used the individual sessions the app provides for pauses at work. Uh, the app's pauses last 10 minutes and are perfectly sized for my— for the 15-minute breaks I am allowed at work. So I am using that time and time in the morning and evenings to draw closer to God and receive his resilience in prayer. One of the things that Christians on the path of Christian discipleship that leads to sanctification come to understand as we seek to surrender our lives to God is that even though our participation in the process is necessary, God is the one who transforms us. God is the one who gives us wisdom. God is the one who makes our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh. God is the one who will prune us and guide us to maturity and the purpose that he has He has for us. Besides documenting God's continuous work in my life, the reason I blog is to encourage other Christians to follow the Lord with the way they live their lives because I have discovered this truth of impartation. God imparts the Holy Spirit to all who put their faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and when we live by faith, God works in and through us to do what we would have thought to be impossible things. Now, before you run out, run over to the nearest mountain and try to literally pick it up and hurl it into the sea, or skip down to the nearest mulberry tree and try to uproot it and toss that into the ocean, remember that Jesus taught in parables that the heavy mountains and well-established mulberry trees in our lives may represent the burdens we choose to carry, or patterns of behavior or thinking that are deeply rooted in our lives that the Lord wants us to be free of. Instead of thinking of being free of our mountains and mulberry trees as being a process of having to work hard physically, although that may be required, we may have— we may have to let go and let God do work in us and allow him to renew our minds to think his thoughts and to open our blind eyes to see his way. Reading the Bible and talking and listening to God in our spirit through prayer and meeting him with an attitude of surrender and a willingness to do his will is the Christian disciple's stance and can be used by the Lord to direct us up and over and possibly straight through those mountains and mulberry trees. As I have stated in previous blogs, in our walk with the Lord, we will— he will present us with opportunities, invitations to walk by faith, and it is up to us to decide whether or not we will walk into where he is leading us. Tonight and each day this week, my local church is partnering with 3 other churches in the area to come together to pray together. Our pastor and the other churches' pastors are inviting their congregations to come together for unity and prayer. So here's an opportunity, an invitation to see what the Lord may have for me. The Lord may use these evenings of prayer to use, use me for his kingdom purposes. He may want to give me something, or may just want me to be one of the many Christians who will come together and encourage one another through their participation and presence. I could meet new friends, other brothers and sisters in the body of Christ who I don't know yet. I could be blessed by something I hear or see at these corporate prayer gatherings at one of these other churches. Or I could just grow from the experience of these prayer sessions. There's no telling what I may get or give in these prayer sessions, but I will never know them if I stay home. So I am going. I am going to step out in faith to receive what the Lord has for me or to give what I have to give. What that will be, I do not know, but even if nothing mighty and miraculous happens, I know that going to these prayer meetings will bless me because I will be in the fellowship of the saints and coming to our Heavenly Father to ask, seek, and listen for His will for our lives. If you are local to the Capital District, I'm sharing the link to this, this week's prayer, Pray Together prayer event, and you can consider it my invitation to you to come and see what the Lord may do in you at this event. Uh, in the wake of Christ's crucifixion and death, the apostles and other disciples met together for prayer. I'm sure that there probably wasn't as many followers of Christ in attendance as there could have been. Surely after Christ's death, some disciples were heartbroken and discouraged and failed to keep the faith and walked away and decided to go back to their normal lives. So they weren't present on the day of Pentecost. They didn't go to the prayer meeting, and because they didn't go, they didn't witness or receive the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. God may have many things which he wants to impart to the faithful few that choose to follow him. Sometimes our faith is just about showing up. So as someone who has dreamed the impossible dream and who has seen God do the impossible in my life, let me encourage you to keep showing up, to take those invitations, and to keep on walking and talking with God. Today's Bible verses come to us from the New Living Translation Bible Promise Book for Men. This morning's meditation verses are James 4:1-3. 4 through 6, and they say, you adulterers, don't you realize that friendship with the world makes you an enemy of God? I say it again, if you want to be a friend of the world, you make yourself an enemy of God. What do you think the scriptures mean when they say that the spirit God has placed within us is filled with envy, but he gives us even more grace to stand against such evil desires. As the scriptures say, God opposes the proud but favors the humble. Today's verses remind us that giving our allegiance to worldly things makes us an enemy of God, and that God calls us to resist worldly— he says evil— uh, desires and to humbly follow him. God is jealous for us. He loves us and wants our hearts to follow him, not the world. He asks that we see the truth of his sovereignty and to reject any feelings of pride and to humbly acknowledge his preeminence in all things. Thus, we, we put our thoughts on God and things above, not earthly things, because he is the one who is eternal and has given us literally everything. As always, I invite all to go to mt4christ.org, where I always share insights from prominent Christian theologians and counselors to assist my brothers and sisters in Christ with their walk. Today we continue to share from A.W. Pink's The Sovereignty of God, and today we begin chapter 3, Sovereignty of God in His Administration. And so if you want to read the first few paragraphs of that chapter where it concludes, basically to show that God does rule, he actually rules, and that his government extends to and is exercised over all things and all creatures in the world. Uh, if you want to hear what A.W. Pink has to say that leads up to that statement, uh, go to mt4christ.org and you'll see that resource at the end of today's blog post. As always, we invite, uh, everyone to go to our, our, our blog and to our podcast and our YouTube channel, M.t. Clark 247, um, to check out, to be encouraged, to be built up in your faith by these daily messages of the Purity Series, or by our Bible studies that we do with Arthur and Susanna Zinkati. Yesterday we did a brand new study called Hypocrisy: The Curse of the Church. And if you want to hear what we had to say and draw from Christ's teachings about hypocrisy, um, go to the podcast or the website for the YouTube channel and check out that study. And you can check out all of the studies we've ever done, or ever recorded, I should say, as we began recording our, our Bible studies back in 2021, first on audio, and then with the transition of 2022, we started to do video via Zoom. So you can listen or, or hear— well, you can listen or see our Bible studies for yourself and to be encouraged to hear what we have to say about what God's Word says and about living the Christian life. And as always, we stress the importance of our freedom in Christ, and I would point out that our audio teachings on Neil Anderson's works of Victory Over the Darkness, The Bondage Breaker, and Freedom in Christ are all available on the podcast and the YouTube channel. Those are all audio sessions that I recorded at my local church back in 2021. Um, and, uh, we also did a series last fall, which is not too long ago, um, on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Cost of Discipleship. That's available on YouTube and the audio podcast, although that was Zoom recording, so it's video where I did PowerPoint presentations of the entire book of Bonhoeffer's Discipleship. So if nothing else, you get the good teaching of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and some cool images on the PowerPoint presentations that I made. You know, we do all of this to encourage people to live a life of faith because we discovered for ourselves that God is, God is alive and well. And, um, we are truly blessed when we decide to follow him. So keep walking and talking with God, as I say. Well, it is Monday. Uh, I was shaken up by the fact that I unplugged my Alexa. I have to pause so she doesn't say anything anyway. Um, but, uh, so I skipped my physical, physical exercise exercise, but, uh, kept first things first, getting that prayer done and, uh, getting this done. And then I'll have to do my Bible study. I sort of did things backwards, but I have enough time as long as I pray now, which we'll do. Lord God, Heavenly Father, thank you for another day in your kingdom. Lord, you know, we can adapt when things change. We can adapt to do the things that are most important, and that's always drawing close to you. We'd sacrifice anything worldly or fleshly um, to be closer to you, Lord. We certainly— that's our intention anyway. So Lord, we just ask for you to help us and guide us to do that. Lord, we pray for anyone who might be listening or reading our today's message. We pray for you to come alongside them, to encourage them in their walk and guide them in the way they should go. And Lord, as always, we pray for you to go before all of us today, lead us into the things you want us to do We'll take those divine appointments whenever you want to schedule them, and, um, we want, want to just represent you here on the earth. So we pray, Lord, that you go before us, open our eyes to the things you want us to see, and lead our steps into the things you want us to walk into. And Lord, we pray for the prayer sessions tonight, that Holy Spirit would anoint them and encourage the participants who come and who You know, Lord, we, we come together in prayer for you to use us or to tell us what you want us to hear. Uh, so I'm pursuing you all week in prayer, and Friday we're going to be worshiping you and praying for you. So this is going to be an awesome week, Lord. We just thank you for this— the mighty men of God who got together and decided to have this event. Um, and we pray for you to bless it. And, uh, as always, Lord, we just thank you, we praise you, we love you, and we pray all these things in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen.