Recently I had someone tell me, “Garrett, I feel in love with God because of how my life has changed here.” The here that was mentioned was our church. This person then went on to explain how life has changed, and I was able to witness how the Gospel of Jesus the Christ changes lives!
We talk about praying to become God’s hope and joy. Have you ever really thought about that? Have you considered how crazy that is? Have we really any idea how much our lives are going to change when God begins to answer those prayers? Many of us probably have some idea, because we have already seen the power of the Gospel at work in our lives. Many of us have discovered God changing us. Perhaps we discovered it when we woke up one morning and from some place out of the blue said, “Thank you Jesus for another morning.” I know that happened once because someone told me. Maybe we discovered it gradually, taking inventory of our lives as we sometimes do and realizing, “Wait a second, I am not the same person I was and that is a good thing.”
Or maybe some of us are thinking, “Nothing has changed about me.” It might be that those of us who say that nothing has changed haven’t begun to pray to become God’s hope and joy. Perhaps prayer is a scary thing to some of us, as though it is something we do only when we are in danger. Danger of losing our jobs, health, vitality, security, or whatever else often causes prayers to be raised by those who haven’t prayed in years. And since we only know how to pray when dangers surround us, we do not know how to pray when things seem okay or even good. What if we actually believed that no matter how good life is it could be better?
The thing is it can be better! Prayer is a relationship with God, and when we pray to become God’s hope and joy in this world, when we pray that the power of the Spirit overtake us, that the Gospel Truth might change us, we pray for a better life no matter how good life is. Why pray for a better life when life seems good? Because with Jesus it can always get better! When those dangers surround us that cause the majority of our prayer lives now, we will still pray with our concern and grief, but we will also pray to a God we know is for us and is with us, because we have been praying to that God for so long anyhow.
Our church has grown quickly, and recently the growth has slowed down and I believe that was necessary to ensure that we caught up to the growth we had. In praying to become God’s hope and joy the growth had to slow down so we could figure out how to take care of each other. In these last six months I have seen people begin to take care of each other in a way that did not happen when I first arrived, and did not happen for the first two years I was here. That is this church becoming God’s hope and joy!
We must never forget the power of the prayer we call our vision, and we must never cease praying it. There is much more that God has planned for us, I can feel it, and if you sit for a moment with your thoughts and with your God I know you can too. We must soon begin growing again. Why you might ask? Because there are others in our community who do not have a church, who do not know about God’s hope and joy as found in Jesus the Christ, who do not know that their lives can get better too! Some will never believe it, thinking that they can discover joy in the world alone, but we believe it. If you have discovered yourself changing it is time to get people into church who need changing too! If you know the love of Christ and the peace of God that surpasses all understanding do not keep it to yourself. There are thousands of people in Albany that need this church and we have to bring it to them and bring them in. God is counting on it. How will you help make our prayer of becoming God’s hope and joy a reality?
Riding the Wave of the Holy Spirit,
Garrett
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