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

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.

Thank you for all for being here tonight.

You know, we were told to do a testimony, a prayer testimony, and the title that I asked Dan to give was The Lord's High Ways.

So it's a play on highways and his ways that are higher than ours.

It's gonna revolve around that text in Isaiah 55.

But before we get into it, I'd like to invite you to say another little word of prayer.

Let's invite the Holy Spirit to be with us.

Lord, please fill us up with your Spirit.

So I thought about what testimony I could, you know, what can I share with you this evening to, I don't know, give a little portrayal of prayer in my life?

And the story that I've come upon really was how I got here, how I'm here with you all at the Granite Bay Church.

And so this story, it could begin in many different places of life, but maybe let me draw a little thing with you before we get into it.

Have you ever prayed for God to show you his will for your life?

I think that's a prayer that all of us have prayed in 1 moment or another.

Lord, please show me what you want for me, right?

I think that every good Christian, every person that has a relationship with the Lord, you want to live out God's plans, God's dreams for you.

And That's what I found myself doing when I was becoming a pastor, graduating.

This was in 2012 that I graduated from seminary in order to become a pastor.

And God took me in those initial 5 years, you know, I went to different places.

I was a youth pastor, I was a chaplain, I was a senior pastor for a church, and I found myself in 2017 in a district with 7 churches in Brazil.

So I was 26 years old, I wasn't even 1 year into my marriage, and we found ourselves in a district, in a church district, with 7 churches.

4 of those churches were under construction.

I knew nothing about construction at all.

And they gave me the district, you know, the young man, so much so that when we got, when we were introduced or presented to our first churches, in 1 of the churches, 1 of our elders stood up and asked the pastor that was there, the ministerial director that was introducing me, he says, are you giving us these 2 children to raise?

So that was the church that I was there to lead.

It was a district with about, I'd say about 1, 500 to 2, 000 members if you put all the churches together.

My first Sabbath there, actually no, it was my birthday, literally my birthday, it was a Friday, it was our first Friday there and the church treasurer, the central church treasurer called me and he said, Pastor Lucas, we haven't met yet, but our church is being rebuilt, reformed.

And someone came into my house this night and stole all the money, 50, 000 Reais, which was the money, to do the church.

And so I found myself multiple times that year praying and saying, Lord, what am I doing here?

You know, I'm young, I'm inexperienced, I'm here, it's just Danny and myself.

I mean, you know, nothing's worse than me being discouraged and then discouraging her, that wouldn't do.

Luckily, God gave me a wife with very, made a very strong stuff.

And so she was a blessing to me that year, but it was a very difficult year.

So by the end of the year I found myself quite burnt out of several things that had happened throughout that year.

I had grown a lot but I was about to be done and I prayed Lord.

Additionally I had always wanted to come back to the states.

Since we moved away when I was a child, I'd always wanted to come back.

I had tried looking for, you know, interviews with different conferences.

I did what no 1 should do, what no theology major, pastor, whatever should do.

I got the institutional emails of the presidents, the executive secretaries, and the ministerial directors of most of the conferences in North America, and I just emailed them.

And I said, look, this is who I am, no 1 knew me, you know.

I think I got maybe 2 or 3 interviews nothing happened and I had been trying that since maybe 2015 2014 nothing happened and so I got to that point at the end of 2017 and I said Lord Either you do something.

I want you know, I want to be called there.

It's going to kill me Or I'm giving up on my ministry.

I said that and Lord so Lord if you want me in ministry You have to rescue it at this point.

It's gonna be a rescue And I started applying for Danny's visa at that time.

I was a dual citizen, but Danny was not, so you know, I was applying for the marriage status green card.

And I had started that at the beginning of at the middle of 2016 and You know, it took a long time.

It takes a very long time So we were still in the middle of that when I did that prayer.

I said that prayer around October of 2017 and I'm I really we don't have that much time.

But what ended up happening is that throughout a series of events that the Lord guided us, by the time that I delivered, I turned in the district, right?

I went to the president and I said, look, I'm, you know, I'm going, my plan was to study at Andrews.

I was going to go do a master's degree at Andrews and I was approved.

Everything was ready for me to start working or studying, sorry, at Andrews in the month of April.

Danny, I have learned, I have since learned that she is always right.

So, I turned in the district and in January, Danny's visa came out, right?

The timing was very, you know, it was a God send, right?

The timing was God's because If the time came for me to go study and her visa wasn't ready, well, either I'd have to go by myself initially, or we wouldn't go.

So in addition to that, at that time, the conference president, he was very gracious with us because He allowed me to stay kind of like on payroll as an employee, even though I had turned into the district, so that I could do a whole bunch of health stuff, right?

Health insurance in America is very expensive, right, as you may know.

And so they kept me as an employee so that I could still have the health insurance.

So Danny and I, we went and we did a bunch of checkups.

I did a nose surgery, a sinus surgery and all that.

We were ready to come to the States in April.

We were going to come in April to then go to Andrews and study later on.

And then 1 or 2 weeks before we were set to come to the States, I get a call from the Texas, at the time, the executive secretary of the Texas conference.

I'd never heard of him, I'd never talked to him, I have no family members in Texas at all, no 1 that I knew lived in Texas.

And I had sent in that broad, you know, sending of resumes, I had sent it, including to Texas.

But that had been about a year and a half before.

And so this man, he calls me, he doesn't know me, and he says, Lucas, I found here your resume on top of my desk.

Series

10 Days of Prayer

The High Ways of God

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

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