Prayer thanks for September 12,13, 2008
I just wanted to send a quick note to thank you for praying about the last weekend in Maxwell, Nebraska.
I am always asked the question, “So how did it go?” to which I normally respond, “I don’t really know. I think it went well.” I cannot help but answer that way because my ability to see, like yours, is not so good. I cannot see well into the hearts of people, though I think I am developing the ability to see pain and brokenness better than before. I am encouraged though by Paul’s words when he writes, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase.”
I had the privilege of giving two talks, the first one on the supremacy of Christ over all things (including sex) and the second one on strategies for fighting for sexual purity. I recorded them both and would be happy to send you a copy if you’d like.
If you could, please continue to pray for the men who came. I cannot help but think that whatever movement up the mountainside of God’s glory was experienced will be and is being challenged in the life of every guy who attended. If the glory of Christ is shining just a little more brightly in the hearts and minds of these men, illuminating the valleys of sexual darkness in their more “odious colors,” that is sure to be resisted and is being resisted. The flesh, the world and the devil wants us in the valleys where moss grows well in the absence of light. Christ will not have it so, and as His little brothers and sisters, we should not want it so. Pray that the fresh mountain air of Christ’s presence would so continue to put guy’s taste buds’ out of joint for the inferior pleasures of sexual adultery, whatever form and degree it takes.
Through this process I have come to think that so much of the freedom to really live comes from the continual fight against the entitlement mentality we all have and the general lack of a theology of suffering we Americans live with. In combination these two are deadly.
Finally, thank you to everyone who also contributed financially. We were blessed to have Desiring God www.desiringGOD.org come forward and give us two tremendous resources at a greatly reduced cost, and it was good to buy 5O books and 30 CDs and see them gone!
IN HIS GRIP,
Marty