Join us for our 10 Days of Prayer where you hear powerful testimonies and answered prayers from the Granite Bay Pastors.

<p>Join us for our 10 Days of Prayer where you hear powerful testimonies and answered prayers from the Granite Bay Pastors.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Granite Bay SDA Church

10 Days of Prayer

Aron Crews

The Animal Game

Shawn Brummund

The Power of the Holy Spirit

Jean Ross

God Will Take Care of You

Jeff Walper

Jesus is So Good to Me

Luccas Rodor

The High Ways of God

Carlos Muñoz

Exceedingly Abundant

This was recorded at the Granite Bay Hilltop SDA Church, located in Granite Bay, California.

Hope you are blessed by the message and that it draws you closer to God.

I stand before you, most of you know me as a reluctant pastor, as a reluctant, I guess, leader.

I'm a younger brother, and they say that natural leaders are oldest siblings, and younger siblings are usually more naturally defiant.

And so I'm a younger sibling, and so I always had an extra parent.

I had a mom and a dad and an older brother.

And so when you have all these people telling you what to do, you have a tendency to like, hey, you know, I have a voice of my own.

And so having said that, I want to share with you a story.

It's a story about basically how the Lord has been working on my heart for since 1998.

The Lord got ahold of me in a bar in Atlanta with a piece of literature.

And it was about people had given their life to Jesus and become missionaries.

I was very poor and I was having to buy poor beer and but I could still get a buzz and there I was in my apartment on my third tall boy reading this missionary magazine and I said I knelt down and I I want this and to the chase I surrendered my life to Jesus about a week later, and I went and I signed up to be a missionary in training in the back of that magazine.

And I went up to Bedford, Kentucky from Atlanta, Georgia, and they trained me to be a missionary.

I had my internal frame backpack from my backpack days, living in Alaska and Oregon and a snowboard bum and a homeless shelter and working on fishing boats and logging camps in Alaska and just searching and having a great time and yet empty.

And so I remember I showed up at missionary training there in Bedford, Kentucky, an old tobacco farm.

And then they said, we're going to give you your assignment.

And everyone was getting their assignment.

Me and my friend are gonna go to the Philippines.

They're getting their visa, they're getting their assignment, and they're going.

And my grandparents lived up in Louisville, Kentucky, about an hour away from Bedford, Kentucky.

And so I went and stayed with Grandma and Grandpa.

And the call didn't come for another month.

And then another 2 months, and I'm like, wait a second.

And everyone's gone now to the mission field.

I'm like, Lord, what about, I thought you called me to be a missionary.

Have you ever noticed how the Lord allows us to come to trials?

James 1 says, consider it pure joy when you experience these trials because the testing of your faith produces what?

And let patience have its perfect work that you're complete, lacking nothing.

And so the Lord was teaching me, right there from the start, hey Jeff, number 1, you need to learn how to wait on me.

I know you have all these plans and how you're going to do this, now you're going to do that and this and that.

You ever notice how the Lord leads oftentimes in directions that we wouldn't have chosen ourselves?

And we're thinking, but I mean, here I am a missionary.

Just like 3, 4 months earlier, I was rolling joints and making drinks.

And so I mean, it wasn't, you understand, I wasn't dead set on the Philippines I just that's where I thought I should go it was out in the countryside and I wanted to be in the country and now I get the assignment Hiroshima Japan.

I'm going to skip through several things here, but 1 of the things early in my ministry in 1998, I was so excited number 1 that God hears prayer.

My first promise that I really laid hold of or it laid hold on me was 1st John 5, 14 and 15.

And I think opening night was Pastor Sean and I think he read that or maybe it's Pastor Aaron.

And it says this is the confidence that we have in him that if we ask anything, according to his will, he hears us.

And then verse 15 says, and if we know that he hears us, We know that we have the petitions we've made of him.

And so early on in my ministry, I was claiming that promise all the time, and I was getting so much mileage off of that promise.

I mean, The Lord was doing just what he said he would do.

And you want to know what was happening to that measure of faith that Paul says God gives to every man in Romans 12 3 that measure of faith in this and this sinful man who the Lord has been redeeming and growing and transforming, that measure of faith grew and grew and grew.

And now I became more bold to ask more bold things as I determined, learned more of what God's will was.

You know, Oftentimes Jesus would tell people, according to your faith, be it unto you.

So if you have that measure of faith that God has given you and you leave it on the shelf and you never really rely on the Lord because we're all so averse to weakness and vulnerability that we don't like daily bread.

We like silos and we like self-sufficiency and we like expectations that are expected and planned on and five-year plans and And we like control.

And the Lord's like, is there any room for me in that?

And oftentimes the Lord brings us to a place where we're disappointed in our plans.

But in that process, I've learned to become more and more bold as I learn more about the Lord, more about his promises, more about who he is.

I used to think God was hard, exacting, kind of a distant father that wasn't really that fair.

He was loving, the Bible said, but I hadn't really experienced a whole lot of that.

Mom was 15 when she had Chris, 16 when she had Greg, and 17 when she had me.

So we were like, you know, mom gave me her youth, or she was a baby, raising babies.

And their marriage didn't last, mom and dad.

Mom was 20, had 3 kids and 1 had already died from a vaccine injury.

Got the DPT bundle and then the next night he died and they called it SIDS.

It's interesting, I found out later, I was studying this in 1973, Japan of all countries found out that the diphtheria pertussis tetanus bundle was causing SIDS.

And so they delayed it from the age of 3 months to 3 years, something like that.

And they've almost eradicated SIDS in Japan.

And so My parents divorced when I was 3 years old, and mom was, I ended up going with mom.

And so, my mom, You know, I feel like I'm raising my mom right now in little Elan.

Those of you who know Elan, she's a spitting image of my mom.

I mean, looks, personality, like determination, like just quirky, like that's my mom.

And I'm like, wow, this is crazy, Lord, what you're doing.

But my mom left when I was 3 and eventually, mom, I was too high strong.

They didn't know about the health message.

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Series

10 Days of Prayer

Jesus is So Good to Me

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

The Animal Game

25m

The Power of the Holy Spirit

20m

God Will Take Care of You

21m

Jesus is So Good to Me

21m

The High Ways of God

22m

Exceedingly Abundant

34m

Sound Doctrine