I read the message and could hardly contain my excitement. I had to tell somebody. Anybody! So at supper I told Uncle Jim and Aunt Julie the exciting news, “I get to be the captain of my soccer team this fall!”
After finishing my third season of soccer, I had a lot of reflecting to do. After being a starter for the first 10 games of the season due to a pre-season injury to one of my teammates, I once again returned to the bench where I had spent most of my first two seasons.
Trailing Calvary Bible College 0-1 late in the game, we sat on the sidelines hoping for something, anything good to happen. Our guys had fought hard in the Saturday afternoon heat, but still we had little go our way.
All of a sudden, defender Aaron Nilius cleared a ball from midfield, and from 35 yards out midfielder Jay Nihart barely managed to deflect the ball off his head toward Calvary’s goal. Fortunately for us, their goalkeeper was standing too far out and the ball cleared his reach and bounced into the net. We erupted on the sideline, and in that moment we had tied the game at one apiece. We were back in the game.
In the last couple weeks I have received about a dozen prayer letters via email from missionaries that I know. As a result of reading a wide assortment of these missionary updates, and after writing one myself yesterday, I came to the conclusion that there are specific ways to make a prayer letter more effective.
On Sunday morning Pastor Eric preached from Luke 5:1-11. In this Scripture, Jesus preaches to the multitudes from a boat before telling Peter to push out into the deeper water to go fishing.
Having just washed his nets after a fruitless (or should I say, fishless) night of work, Peter replies, “Master, we have toiled all night and caught nothing; nevertheless at Your word I will let down the net” (Luke 5:5).
For those of you out there interested in preaching, here’s a book I would highly recommend: Expositional Preaching by David Helm. At only 100-some pages, it’s an easy read with sound practical advice for preparing messages.
Part of the 9Marks book series born out of Mark Dever’s “nine marks of a healthy church,” this book promotes expositional preaching as essential for today’s churches.
What should I write about next? Are there issues that you are facing or that the church is facing today that need to be addressed? Take 15 seconds to let me know!
