Revival, Women, Anger, India, & Dry Bones

The past several days have been quite busy. Thursday and Friday, I had several meetings, deadlines, and study assignments. On top of this, I had to preach a revival meeting on Thursday and Friday at the New Revelation Baptist Church in Pasadena. The Lord blessed the two meetings. But I was absolutely exhausted by Saturday morning. But there was still work to be done. I had work for Sunday to complete. But before I could get to that, I had to prepare myself to speak at the Women's Fellowship Meeting meeting at the church. It was the first time I had spoken in to our women's ministry group, which has been in for a little over a year. I did an exposition of Proverbs 4:20-27, which I entitled "Developing a Godly Heart." The message was a call to godliness based, primarily, on Proverbs 4:23. The women were very attentive. I pray that the message was helpful.

In my Sunday School class this morning, I taught on "Overcoming Anger." The Bible has a lot to say about anger. And I tried to introduce the class to some of the key texts and central principles on anger. At points, I got very personal. I don't usually do that. But for some reason, I began to share some things about my relationship to my father. I guard those things very closely, and very rarely talk about them publicly. I really can't explain what why I did that today. And I don't know why I felt comfortable about talking about these things in my Sunday School class. I just hope that the testimonies didn't distract from the message. I think I should be more careful in the future about what I choose to share.

We had a special guest in our worship service this morning. His name is Alex Matthai. He leads Hope International Ministries, a gospel outreach to India, which is the place of his birth. A resident of Oklahoma City, Alex has a wonderful testimony of salvation and is doing a great work in India, where he sponsors a school that trains young men to preach the gospel in the villages of India. He spoke to our congregation this morning, which was a great blessing. In the providence of God, today our congregation was asked to give a sacrificial offering for world missions. And his testimony in our service really was a great challenge to our church to prayerfully support the spread of the gospel around the world.

Alex took about 30 minutes in the service. And by the time I got up to preach, it was getting pretty close to noon. Our services start at 10:30 AM and are usually about two hours long. I was pretty nervous, knowing that I would not have enough time to do a full exposition. I was scheduled to preach Ezekiel 37:1-14. And I didn't sense that the Lord would let me off the hook, and save that message for another time. So I took a shot at it. I only preached about 30 minutes. But I think I got across the essence of what I wanted to say. I will have to take a another shot at it some time down the road. The audio of the message is on our website.