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In three months I will be on a plane heading to Moshi, Tanzania, Africa! Wow! If God says it is going to happen you can count on it. I can’t wait!!!

We pray a lot of prayers and I am sure that as Moses led the children of Israel he prayed many and many kinds of prayers as well. But this prayer of Moses that we read here stands entirely alone – a category to itself. No other request can be compared to it. God’s glory is the sum total of who he is. It is God’s power plus his wisdom plus his justice plus his plus his holiness plus his love plus every other attribute of his character. God’s glory is the shining forth of who God is.

Moses had just spent 40 days on Mount Sinai communing with the Lord. During those days on the mountain, God revealed to Moses his law and wrote the Ten Commandments on the tablets of stone with his finger. While Moses was with the Lord, the children of Israel grew restless so Aaron gathered gold earrings from the people and constructed a golden calf and the people offered sacrifices to the golden calf. The Lord knew all about it and told Moses that he was going to destroy Israel and start over with a new nation that would worship Him and not turn to idols. But Moses interceded with the Lord for his people and reminded God of the promise he made to Abraham. So the Lord relented.

Then Moses came down from the mountain. When he saw the people and what they were doing, he threw down the stone tablets in anger. He burned the golden calf, ground it to power, mixed it with water, and made the Israelites drink it. Then he called for those who were still loyal to God. The Levites stood with him, and at his instruction, they went through the camp killing the idolaters. Three thousand died that day. The next day Moses pled with God for forgiveness for his people. He even asked God to blot his own name out of his book in order to save the people of Israel. God told him to lead the people away from Mt. Sinai and toward the Promised Land, but with one significant condition: “I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people and I might destroy you on the way”

Isn’t that our greatest fear too? —that when we go, the Lord will not go with us. So Moses intercedes again and says, “If you don’t go with us, we’re aren’t going to go.” Leaving God behind wasn’t an option for Moses. If the Lord has led you out of Egypt…you’d better not leave him behind at any point along the way and especially at your Mt. Sinai. You need Him & definitely are going to need his help to make it thru the wilderness.

Be encouraged today. In a time of crisis and probably feeling very weak as a leader, Moses dared to pray a magnificent prayer to the Lord. He asked for more than any man had asked for before, and he received more than any man had ever received.  Isn’t it powerful that the prayer and also the answer came in a time of crisis through a revelation of Moses’ own weakness?

Your trials are not meant to destroy you. God intends that you should use the hard times to draw near to him. Today whatever trial you face or struggle you are feeling…if you are willing to be made weak, you will learn things about the Lord that you never could know in strength and success. This is always God’s way. The strong think they have no need of God. But the weak are hidden in the cleft of the rock—and they are the ones who truly see God. Amen.

Hebrews 13:3 – Remember that that are in bonds as bound with them, and them which suffer adversity as being yourselves also in the body.

Prayer points

• Protect them and deliver them Lord
• give them the right words and help them to know how to share the Gospel; give them wisdom and understanding Lord; help them live the joy of the Lord before their persecutors
• help them to make Christ known
• that they will see your grace as sufficient and your power perfected in their weakness
• keep them safe and strengthen them Lord; help them to endure
• when necessary Lord help their praises to You to fall on deaf ears; when for Your glory – help their praises to draw all men unto YOU.
• Increase their faith Lord and we pray that they would know the hope You alone give.
• Help them to rejoice in sharing in Your sufferings Jesus and to love YOU more than life itself; bring to remembrance Your promise of their unbelievable future glory
• Help them to trust You completely
• Help them to love their enemies
• Help them to have real manifestations of Your love for them

• make a way for them to have Your Word; give the access to a Bible
• give them the courage to remain in their homelands for the sake of the Gospel
• keep their families safe and focused also on You; provide for their needs Lord
• for those that have been rejected by family and friends, surround them with a new Christian family to loves and supports them
• give them jobs and safe places to live
• for those that can’t feed their families today Lord, provide for their needs
• we ask for deliverance and mercy for those who are being persecuted for Your Name’s sake
• for those facing death today give them grace to finish well
• let your light shine through into the darkness as you shine through Your servants today
• make them brave and courageous; bold and fearless and full of unspeakable JOY!

• Help us to not forget them Lord; help them to know they are not forgotten
• Help us to remember that each persecuted Christian is a person just like us. Help us to remember to pray for them.
• Let the persecution of Christians weigh heavily on our leaders both in our country and our churches and that they might lead the fight in prayer
• Help us to see that persecution against any Christian anywhere is persecution of the entire body of Christ.
• Help us to wake up to the needs of our brothers and sisters here and across the world and to speak out and pray as one. Unify us Lord.

1 John 2:6: He that saith he abideth in Him ought himself also so to walk, even as He walked.

Some see salvation as a gift that enables us to barely make it through life and into heaven, but Scripture tells us over and over that there is so much more. It tells us that in Christ we are empowered to live as Jesus did.

How did He live? Jesus lived in extraordinary holiness, godliness,  and power. He walked in wisdom and creativity and He influenced His society. In His earthly life, there were many things He did but the one way He lived that I want to focus on today is that: He met the needs of the world around Him.

Throughout His time on the earth, Jesus healed the sick, cleansed the diseased, delivered people from bondages, opened blind eyes and deaf ears, make the mute to speak and the crippled to walk. He multiplied food to feed the hungry and He even raised the dead.

Says in John 10:10b, “…I am come that they might have life and that they might have it more abundantly.”

Jesus was sent to bring abundant life and while He was here, anywhere He went that He saw that lack or devastation threatened, He brought restoration. We may know this and we may hear the teaching of it and celebrate it even but we often miss or we ignore the charge to believers that follows those teachings.  One of these is in John 20:21 says: Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you.

We are empowered and commissioned to carry the miraculous power of God into our world. There are so many who hurt and who are suffering around us and there are many people praying for healing and deliverance or a breakthrough to meet their needs. Many, many times the Lord answers those prayers through us. WE are the response to their prayers and WE are God’s response to their needs.

How are we supposed to do this? The first step is obedience to do what He tells you or you feel He is leading you to do. But the outcome is all on Him and whatever outcomes they are they are through the free gift of God’s grace!

The Bible records of the early church in Acts 4:33 says: and with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: and great grace was upon them all.

They did what God asked them to do BUT it wasn’t in their own strength or power or provision…it was God’s grace that was given to them to carry out and walk in obedience. It is the same with us. He might ask us to step out and do some things but He supplies to us too with the strength, the power, the provision and even the FAITH to believe!!!

All throughout the New Testament, we read of God’s people walking in His power to bring wholeness to the broken. This same power is available to you if you are a believer and it is available to me. Whether those we meet along the way face physical sickness, bondages, an addiction, mind battles or spiritual distress, God wants us to see ourselves as the carriers of HIS redemption…and to walk even as He walked, by His grace.

What would our world, our communities, our churches, our homes look like today if every believer acted on His promises that go along with this commission? What would our own lives look like if we took the commands of scripture seriously? Such Scriptures as

Matthew 10:7-8: And as ye go, preach, saying, The Kingdome of heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give.

• Has it grown increasingly convenient to stay home from the church even though the Word tells us directly not to forsake assembling together?
• Has your personal prayer life and your Bible study and your worship started to disappear?
• Have things crept back into your life…attitudes, habits, sins?
• Do you keep silent at things in our country that are wholly against the Word of our God?
• When you see someone in need can you turn away or cross the street?
• Have your soul-winning efforts become confined only to times, places, people …when, where and to whom it is convenient for you to share the Gospel?
• Have you heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ and turned away from Him or said not today?

• My Trust
• My Lord
• My goodness
• My delight
• My cup
• My inheritance
• My Lot
• My glory

• We see that He will direct our paths. He will guide us if we need guidance. He will put us on the path to seeing His perfect Will accomplished in our lives. He will show us how to walk this walk so that we look like Him; so that we have LIFE.
• We see that He will counsel and preserve us; we can trust Him.
• That when Jesus Christ is your Savior, your REFUGE, Your Lord…that you will experience God’s GOODNESS even in the midst of trials.
• That with the Lord beside us we can STAND. That we can find not just JOY but FULLNESS of JOY in His Presence.

• Then said Jesus unto them, When ye have lifted up the Son of man, then shall ye know that I am he, and that I do nothing of myself; but as my Father hath taught me, I speak these things. ~ John 8:28
• And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me. This he said, signifying what death he should die. The people answered him, We have heard out of the law that Christ abideth for ever: and how sayest thou, The Son of man must be lifted up? who is this Son of man? ~ John 12: 32-34

• And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified. ~ John 12:23

• Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear.~ Acts 2:33

On January 6, 1850, a snowstorm shut down much of the city of Colchester, England. A teenage boy was unable to get to the church he usually attended so he when instead to a nearby Primitive Methodist chapel. There a seemingly unprepared layman was substituting for the absent preacher. His text was Isaiah 45:22.

For many months the young teenager had been miserable and under deep conviction, but though both his father and grandfather were preachers and so he had been reared in church, he did not have the assurance of salvation.

The substitute minister did not have much to say, so he kept repeating the text. “A man need not go to college to learn to look,” he shouted. “Anyone can look – a child can look!” About that time, he turned to the visitor sitting to one side, and he pointed at him and said, “Young man, you look very miserable. Young man, look to Jesus Christ!”

The young man did look by faith, and that was how the great preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon was converted.