Week of September 25

Waiting on God

Sowing our Prayer… Reaping the Spirit

The greatest lesson a soul has to learn is that God, and God alone, is enough for all its needs. This is the lesson that all God’s dealings with us are meant to teach, and this is the crowing discovery of our entire Christian life.  God IS ENOUGH!

No soul can really be at rest until it has given up dependence on everything else and has been forced to depend on the Lord alone. As long as our expectation is from other things, nothing but disappointment awaits us. Everything that we have believed in or depended on may seem to be swept away and only God is left – just God, the bare God, simply and only God.

If God is what He would seem to be from his revealing; if He is indeed the God of all comfort; if He is our Shepherd; if He is really and truly our Father; if all the many aspects he has told us of His character and His ways are actually true, then we must come to the positive conviction that He is, in himself alone, enough for all our needs and that we may safely rest in him absolutely and forever

-Hannah Whitall Smith

Monday	Psalm 23
Tuesday	Matthew 6:25-34
Wednesday	Philippians 4:19-20
Thursday	Psalm 146
Friday	Jeremiah 29:11-13
Saturday	Isaiah 25:1-9

There are many voices speaking into each one of our lives: radio, news reports, friends, family, commercials, etc.  The list can go on forever.  What I’ve been hearing from many of these voices includes some of the same phrases: unemployment, jobs, economy, money, hard times.  We are hearing a message of discouragement from the culture around us.  But what is God telling us in the midst of these hard times?   

God provides.  Not only does God provide, but we as Christians should have no worries about the future.  God will provide all we need now and forever.  In fact, when we are able to live with him in the ‘life everlasting’, HE will be all we need, and we will be completely satisfied with his love and grace.

Remember to pray for the Spirit to clarify the mission for Oak Chapel and for the Spirit to give us the power to work in this mission.

Week of September 18

Waiting on God

Sowing our Prayer… Reaping the Spirit

 

When Jesus visits the home of Lazarus, whom he has raised from the dead, death becomes a reality for Jesus.  It is there Mary anoints him for his own burial. His death is inevitable, which is the chief terror of the gospel. Here is the best man God ever made, who has done nothing but right all his life, and what is his reward? Not ripe old age with grandchildren hanging on his sleeve but early violent death on a cross. This death ruins all our efforts to turn the Bible into a manual for The Good Life. No one who has heard the story of Jesus Christ can mistake where following him will lead, which makes the gospel itself a text of terror for all who wish to avoid suffering and death. The Good News of God in Christ is heard loudest and best by those who stand on the far side of their own fresh graves.

-Bill Wylie Kellermann

Monday	John 15:18-27
Tuesday	Romans 5:1-5
Wednesday	1 Peter 4:12-19
Thursday	Matthew 5:10-16
Friday	James 1:2-12
Saturday	Philippians 1:21-30

In the country we live in, there isn’t much opportunity for Christian suffering… or is there?  Perhaps we don’t know what it means to suffer for Christ because we don’t look enough like Christ.  He says in our first passage this week that the world will hate all who follow him.  How close are you following him?  How much are you working for his mission?

Some questions to ask yourself this week:  Why is suffering important?  What are the benefits of suffering for Christ?  How can I follow Jesus more closely so that the world will know that I belong to him?

Remember to pray for the Spirit to clarify the mission for Oak Chapel and for the Spirit to give us the power to work in this mission.

Week of September 12

Waiting on God

Sowing our Prayer… Reaping the Spirit

 

God’s Faithfulness

In the cadence of the Psalm

the people remember

the creation, the exodus

battles, the provision of God

God’s faithfulness, God’s power

In the life of Christ, the lives of the apostles

the people find hope

the gift of his birth, his sacrifice

trials, the provision of God

God’s faithfulness, God’s love

-          Raymond A. Foss

Monday	Exodus 15:1-18
Tuesday	Psalm 136
Wednesday	Psalm 13
Thursday	Psalm 89
Friday	Psalm 145
Saturday	Psalm 90

When the Israelites crossed the Red Sea, they saw firsthand the faithfulness of the LORD.  In fact, the entire story they were living from the first plague to their establishment as a nation in the Promised Land shows the LORD’s faithfulness. 

In response for the LORD’s faithfulness that has been seen in history and can be seen now in how he is leading us and how he has saved us from our sins, read these Songs of Praise aloud as a prayer to God, thanking him for his faithfulness

Remember to pray for the Spirit to clarify the mission for Oak Chapel and for the Spirit to give us the power to work in this mission.

Week of September 4

Waiting on God

Sowing our Prayer… Reaping the Spirit

‘As the Father has sent me, I am sending you’ (John 20:21).  What that one command Jesus announced 2,000 years of direction for the church.  He proclaimed that we are sent.  The church is, and you are individually, God’s missionary to the world.  Your church is God’s instrument to reach the world, and it includes reaching your community.  We are sent on mission by God.  We are to be a mission-church.  We are called to be on mission in our community.  We have been sent on mission where God placed us – not five, fifty, or five hundred years ago and not thirty, three hundred, or three thousand miles away.  We are on mission where God has placed us now.

-Ed Stetzer, career church planter and pastor.

Monday	Isaiah 6:1-10
Tuesday	John 21:15-17
Wednesday	Genesis 12:2&3
Thursday	Matthew 13:24-30
Friday	John 15:1-17
Saturday	Matthew 25:31-46

This week, your application is to DO.  Act in response to the grace given to you through communion this week.  Remember Christ’s actions and life, and respond by DOING.  Read the commissions and live them out because they were written to us just as much as they were written for the patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and early Christians. 

This Wednesday is our Harvest meeting.  Remember what we have been looking at all these last 3 months (for reminder, you may want to look at the archived devotionals on the website below).  If the Spirit has been speaking to you about Oak Chapel, please come.  If you feel empowered by the Spirit to be involved, please come.  If you are ready to be involved in God’s mission to the world, please come!

Remember to pray for the Spirit to clarify the mission for Oak Chapel and for the Spirit to give us the power to work in this mission.