Fresh wind, Fresh Fire

Sharing Jim Cymbala's words.....because we could all use a dose of what he shares from what God has spoken through him.

"God is attracted to weakness. He can't resist those who humbly and honestly admit how desperately they need Him. Our weakness, in fact, makes room for His power.

The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of prayer. Only when we are full of the Spirit do we feel the need for God everywhere we turn.

The apostles had this instinct: When in trouble, pray. When intimidated, pray. When challenged, pray. When persecuted, pray.

The British Bible translator J.B. Phillips, after completing his work on this section of Scripture, could not help reflecting on what he had observed. In the 1955 preface to his first edition of Acts, he wrote:
It is impossible to spend serveral months in close study of the remarkable short book... without being profoundly stirred and, to be honest disturbed. The reader is stirred because he is seeing Christianity, the real thing, in action for the first time in human history. The newborn Church, as vulnerable as any human child, having neither money, influence nor power in the ordinary sense, is setting forth joyfully and courageously to win the pagan world for God through Christ... Yet we cannot help feeling disturbed as well as moved, for this surely is the Church as it was meant to be. It is vigorous and flexible, for these are the days before it ever became fat and short of breath through prosperity, or muscle-bound by overorganization. These men did not make 'acts of faith,' they really prayed. They did not hold conferences on psychosomatic medicine, they simply healed the sick. But if they were uncomplicated and naive by modern standards, we have ruefully to admit that they were open on the God-ward side in a way that is almost unknown today.

.....doesn't that stir your spirit......the secret of power in the early church, a secret that hasn't changed one bit in twenty centuries.

If a meeting doesn't end with people touching God, what kind of a meeting is it? We haven't really encountered God. We haven't met with the only One powerful and loving enough to change our lives.

Wherever there is pain, suffering, and desperation, Jesus is. "

More to come....