“This is how I’m serving the church right now.”

 The comment came from my son-in-law Josh.  Our daughter Katie is on the worship team of a very large, multi-site church on the east side of Toronto.  Most Sundays she has to be at church long before service begins, as early as 6 am in some cases.  Then they attend service in the afternoon as a family at their own site.  But when Katie is leading there, Josh has to find something to do before service for a couple of hours with their two young boys, and in the winter the only places to go are Home Depot and Walmart.  And there he serves.

I How many times have you felt like just giving up?

 A great preacher called Bob Mumford once addressed a leadership conference with these words: “We’ve all thought of giving up.  The difference is some of us haven’t.”

 We look at what we’ve done, and often the results we expected just didn’t come.  Money, jobs, relationships, family, church - the list of disappointments goes on.

I sat with a psychiatrist friend this week who critiqued the western church from the standpoint of an African.  He said we compartmentalize our lives to the point where church fits into one part of life, but does not affect the rest of it.  For African Christians in general, church is at the heart of life. This is really just another way of saying they understand community better than we do. 

Recently I looked at the schedule set in front of me.  Taken as a whole, it was rather overwhelming and I was having a hard time figuring out how we would manage to get through it all.  So I made a decision.  Having read it through once, I would only look at it one day at a time.  And that worked for me. 

I believe in God’s provision.  I believe he is committed to looking after his all his people financially.

 I also believe we have a supernatural enemy who wants to rob us of truth, and that one of the most effective ways of accomplishing that is by distorting truth.  So if the enemy wants to rob us of the Biblical promise of God’s provision, he will produce a twisted version of it which will lead the weak astray and turn the rest of us off.  And this leads us into another form of error.  Reaction against distortion turns into a different kind of distortion.