Our friends at Lifeway are hosting another online Bible study this Summer! Will you join us?
Watch this quick video from Beth to catch the details.
7 week Bible study
Begins June 9 – July 21
Register online at: www.LifewayWomen.com/OBS
Let’s stay in the Word together this Summer. See you online!!
Good morning! This weekend Living Proof Live comes for the first time to Norfolk, VA!
Beth and the entire Lifeway team are looking forward to serving you in worship and the Word. Pray for all, and for Beth as she prepares her teachings, would you? We prepare to gather in unity for one distinct purpose: Taste and see that the LORD is good!
We would like to help you go if you are in the local Norfolk area.
This year, our scholarship tickets are set aside especially for first-timers!
We have fifteen (15) tickets to share with you for Norfolk: first come, first served.
If you have never attended an LPL, or if the cost would keep you from coming, one of these tickets is for you! Newbies, just give Kimberly a call at our office and she will set you up. Toll-free 1-888-700-1999 (NOT 800).
We sure hope to see you this weekend! To purchase tickets, or for detailed information about this weekend, visit Lifeway.com here.
NEBRASKA! This weekend Living Proof LIVE is headed to Omaha! Who is coming?
If you are new to Living Proof LIVE, we want you to know that you can count on a fresh word this weekend. Our teacher is diligently seeking God (as she does for each event) to know what message He would have her share with you. We have a good Father, and He sees and cares for each of you.
This year, our scholarship tickets are set aside especially for first-timers!
We have fifteen (15) tickets to share with you for Omaha: first come, first served. If you have never attended an LPL, or if the cost would keep you from coming, one of these tickets is for you! Newbies, just give Kimberly Meyer a call at our office and she will set you up. Toll-free 1-888-700-1999 (NOT 800).
We sure hope to see you this weekend! To purchase tickets, or for detailed information about this weekend, visit Lifeway.com here.
Come, as Beth opens up the Scriptures, taste and see that the LORD is good!
What a grace privilege from the Lord that we have the opportunity to minister within the culturally diverse community that is Miami. The last time the feet of Living Proof Live were in the S. Florida sand was 18 years ago at the first LPL in Ft. Lauderdale!
We will gather in unity for one distinct purpose:
“Prueben y vean que el Señor es bueno!”
“Taste and see that the LORD is good!”
We would like to help you go if you are in the local Miami area.
This year, our scholarship tickets are set aside especially for first-timers!
We have fifteen (15) tickets to share with you for Miami: first come, first served.
If you have never attended an LPL, or if the cost would keep you from coming, one of these tickets is for you! Newbies, just give Kimberly a call at our office and she will set you up. Toll-free 1-888-700-1999 (NOT 800).
We sure hope to see you this weekend! To purchase tickets, or for detailed information about this weekend, visit Lifeway.com here.
I have one main job. It is to encourage people to come to know and feverishly love Jesus Christ through the study of the Bible. God called me at 18 between my freshman and sophomore year of college, started teaching me how to get up in front of a group and communicate between that time and my mid-twenties then, at 27, He set a torch in my chest for His Word. That fire has burned in me for 30 years. It is my whole ministry life. I love those pages more than I love a sizzling skillet of great food. I love the One who breathed those words on the page, taking His own sweet time, over centuries strewn mysteriously with periods of divine silence. From the very beginning, God called me to serve interdenominationally. I have been part of one denomination since the cradle roll but I have had the privilege and clear insistence of the Holy Spirit to serve all over the Christian spectrum where people would have me. I will serve any group of people anywhere my schedule allows as long as I don’t have to compromise the message of salvation through faith in Christ Jesus alone and the exhortation for people to come to love and know Him and serve Him through the ongoing study of Scripture.
I serve Baptists, Lutherans, Assembly of God and everything around them and in between. I serve both cessationists and charismatics. I serve people who raise their hands and people who sit on their hands. Doesn’t matter to me. I’ll serve anybody. It’s not everybody’s calling but it’s mine. I may feel less comfortable some places than others as Jesus opens gates to new fields but I cannot find a single place Jesus commanded us in Scripture to go where we feel most comfortable or where people already agree with everything we have to say. I love the Body of Christ in all its diversity. I am not blind to our flaws and sins and imbalances but I still believe in the power of Jesus Christ to save and deliver through the gospel invading this globe.
Here’s why I’m writing today. We are in colossal need of a collective uprising of faith even amid our differences of opinions on other matters. Faith is still the paramount response God requires from His people. We want so much for it to be our righteousness because it feels more secure and reliable and tame and God knows it looks better out there in front of people. You will get no argument from me on that one. Make no mistake, our pursuit of righteousness is crucial. Carnality kills our witness and quenches the Holy Spirit. It destroys our relationships and unravels our effectiveness. But God has a greater priority even than our righteousness. He wants our FAITH. We don’t get to make the rules. We don’t get a vote. God is sovereign and this is the way He’s chosen to do it: Our faith is counted to us as righteousness. Of Abraham, Paul wrote in Romans 5…
20 No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, 21 fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. 22 That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness.” 23 But the words “it was counted to him” were not written for his sake alone, 24 but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, 25 who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.
Without faith, it is still impossible to please Him. (Hebrews 11:6) Jesus can do anything He pleases but He is still the same Savior who worked few wonders where He saw little faith. (Mark 5:5-6) He is still the same Son of God who stated unwaveringly, “According to your faith be it done to you.” (Matthew 9:29)
We need God’s intervention in our day. Our nation needs His help. Our globe is quaking with oppression and darkness. People are lost, suffering, starving and dying. People in nearby cubicles at work feel despair and hopelessness. Many within a few miles of each of our front doors are contemplating suicide. We need doors open for the gospel that are shut so tight, the best evangelical strategies will not budge them. We need God’s wonders to be renewed in our day. (Habakkuk 3:2) Even if you believe wonders largely ceased with the completion of the New Testament canon, I’m wondering if perhaps you might be willing to cry out for the sake of this broken world and ask God to have mercy on us and intervene miraculously in our midst.
The common bond for all of us truly in Christ is our faith in what He has already done through the power of His cross and resurrection. That is nonnegotiable. But is He not also calling us to faith in what He has yet to do in fulfillment of His own prophetic word? What He might currently do if enough of us were willing to lay down our differences and our comforts to fall on our faces and ask? This is not about spiritual gifts if that is an issue that makes you resistant to believing God for wonders in our day. This is about supernatural power. And we are desperate for it. We need wonders of salvation, deliverance, freedom, rescue, repentance, revival, reconciliation, forgiveness. We need healing from bitterness and offense. We need miracles of unity in a fractured church. We need holiness and wholeness. We need mighty servants of God raised up all over the world to serve Him, to teach and preach His Word. We need boldness and fearlessness. We need supernatural strength to suffer well when suffering is imperative to His glory. We need to love people we hate. We need miracles.
To those of us who are willing to keep believing Him, God has promised the immeasurable greatness of the very power He exercised to raise Jesus from the dead. (Ephesians 1:19-20) He is able to do immeasurably more than we could ask or think but He commands us to both ask and think, and to pray and believe, to seek and beat the door down.
We are here such a short time. You and I will stand in that great cloud of witnesses in the blink of an eye. We want to be among the generations of whom Jesus can say, “I got to do great and mighty things in that era right there. Those people had some kind of fiery faith.” Oh, make it so, Lord Jesus. Let it be. Revive us again.
“Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on earth?” Luke 18:8
We have a dream that our gloriously faithful God is bringing to pass. All of us on the Living Proof-LifeWay team involved in Living Proof Live would give anything if we could just throw open the doors to our events and do them free of charge. You cannot imagine how thrilling that would be for all of us. Event costs are grossly prohibitive and the only way to cover a non-ticketed event is to take up offerings perhaps even multiple times during the gathering. If you’ve been to large events, that’s why you’ve seen one of two practices: they are either ticketed or supported by offerings. Neither way is ideal and, with God’s leadership and with right hearts and motives and godly stewardship, neither way is wrong. In our structuring, we’ve met costs through ticketing then given away as many scholarships as possible – primarily behind the scenes – so that ticket costs would not prohibit women who so desired to attend from coming.
At the same time we’ve had this deep wish to do a throw-open-the-door event, God placed a dream on another woman’s heart – one woman’s heart – who leads Bible study and ministers to Native American women in Arizona. Her great desire was to bring Living Proof Live to Chinle to sow wider seed of God’s Word into that fertile soil in order that many more would be saved, transformed by the power of the Spirit, informed about discipleship opportunities then discipled in ongoing Bible studies from that point forward. THAT, my friends, is some kind of vision! Keep in mind, all of what I’m about to share with you was placed by God on ONE FAITHFUL WOMAN’S HEART who was willing to pray with feverish faith and believe Him wildly for the people she dearly loves. As she presented this deep desire to the LifeWay team and the LifeWay team shared it with me, our eyes grew wide and our hearts leapt in our chests. We cried out, “YES!!!!!! Our answer is yes! We don’t know how we’ll do this but Jesus will show us!”
And this is the unfolding result:
LPL Chinle, AZ is a unique one-day ministry event that will serve the Native American women among the Navajo, Apache, Hopi, Ute, and Zuni tribes. It will be funded entirely by a scholarship program in which women from all over the country can provide a scholarship ticket on behalf of a Native American woman. Women sowing into women. It doesn’t get better than that.
Who is invited to attend this event?
Native American women living and/or working and serving on a Native American Reservation. We want so much to serve these beautiful women and sow into a great harvest of God among them that could have effects for every generation of their descendants until Christ’s kingdom comes.
Here are two ways to participate:
We will gather together in the worship of our worthy and living God and in the study of His Word on Saturday, October 8, 2016 in the Chinle High School Wildcat Den. We are believing God to do something WAY BEYOND what we could plan or ask or accomplish. Something none of us at the event will ever forget, ever get over and ever cease to see the effects of. We are powerless to make this happen. Jesus alone can do what we’re seeking. Please pray that He will. Please pray that He will show tremendous favor to this event. We want to please Him so much. No, we want to do more than that. We want to DELIGHT Him. THANK YOU, SISTERS!!!
Visit lifeway.com/chinle for more information.
I emerged from my prayer time and Scripture reading this morning with a burden on my heart for our ranks. I see and hear of truly astonishing works of God in our day. The ink in my pen flows warm with affection this morning and free of pessimism and hopelessness. I don’t have the luxury today of writing an overly-involved article. I will jump straight to what’s on my heart.
We are warned in the Scriptures that darkness will increasingly rage as time hastens toward Christ’s return. We are not date-setters but this we know. His return is closer today than it was yesterday. And the enemy is angrier today than he was yesterday. (Rev.12:12) And he wants us. He wants our testimonies. He wants to render us ineffective and make us a laughingstock. He wants to come between us and distract us with ridiculous things, showy things, boastful things, petty things, divisive things so that we’ll miss the tidal wave of temptation and seduction begging to engulf us. Jesus told us to be prepared. And we’re not. If we were, we’d be poring over our Bibles and flat on our faces in prayer. We’d come to our feet in the power of the Holy Spirit and preach and teach the Gospel with love and holy fire.
Instead, many believers – leaders and followers alike – will fall. Even servants who have had sincere and pure devotion to Jesus. 2 Corinthians 11:2-3 warns us this can happen.
And those many believers – leaders and followers alike – must be helped back to their feet. Biblically, compassionately, gently, diligently and completely. Churches must train mature men and women in the faith who walk in the Spirit to actively minister Galatians 6:1. You’ve got to know I’m not casting stones here. I well know what it’s like to be in the grips of bondage and in heaps of defeat and sin. I also know for a fact that, by the grace and mercy of Jesus, we can be transformed and old tendencies and repetitive cycles utterly broken.
We must hang on for dear life to the word repentance. Watch carefully as that word becomes less and less popular in our churches and on our Christian platforms. Do not think for a second there is no scheme of the darkness to see to it. I will not waste words here. I just ask you to go to the Scriptures and see all that hinges on repentance and start picturing the terrifying ramifications of its absence. In a Christian climate where we call less and less sin, we will call fewer and fewer to repentance. That’s not rocket science. Repentance is one of the most glorious rights hailed by the cry of Christ’s finished work on the cross. We get to repent. This is not our self-condemnation. This is not our self-loathing. This is our liberty. Our restoration. Our cleansing, whiter than snow. God delights to show us mercy and cast our sins into the depths of the sea. (Micah 7)
No one wants to fall grievously and no one has to. Sin is not our master. We all sin and grieve and quench the Holy Spirit. We all long for the day when faith will become sight and that which is incomplete will be made perfect. But we do not have to fall headlong into a ditch and, if we do, not one of us has to remain there. Each person has the right to get up by the grace of Jesus. The one who refuses the fallen the right to get up – and on the same level ground – is in far graver sin than he or she. God forbid that we would be a stumbling block to someone’s restoration.
We are not victims of the darkness. We are children of light, children of the Day, 1 Thessalonians 5:5 says. The difference between stumbling and falling is often the simple timing of our repentance. We don’t jump into a deep pit of sin. We take steps there. But, if we were to realize with that first or second step that we were already in trouble, we could repent right then. And we will have stumbled. But we will not have fallen.
Still, many will. And, by the power of Christ’s Cross and resurrection, each gets to grab hold of the hand of God and stand back up.
“The steps of a man are established by the Lord, when He delights in his way; though he fall, he shall not be cast headlong, for the Lord upholds his hand.” Psalm 37:23-24
I’ll end this with a cry to my sisters and brothers in Christ who are full of faith, believing voraciously in the power of the Word of God and for great works and wonders of the Holy Spirit in our day. Let’s tighten up our sanctification. Not our legalism, for the love of God. Our sanctification. Sanctification is a work of the Spirit and Truth, not of the law and the flesh. Let’s do some courageous self-examination and ask God to show us where we’re vulnerable to attack and where our feet are on the path toward a deep hole. Let’s shut illicit relationships down or they’ll shut us down. Let’s repent of our pride because it is the one guarantee of a pending fall. Let’s repent of our pretense. Let’s have the courage to face the brokenness in our lives and bring it without shame to Jesus. We can either deal with our stuff or I promise you our stuff will deal with us.
The enemy knows where we’re vulnerable. After thousands of years, he’s perfected his aim. He will not bother shooting many fiery darts where we are covered. He’s going for the bull’s eye, that glaring bald-spot where we refuse to come under the authority of Christ. We keep calling it a blind spot. Oh, we have blind spots alright but I don’t think they’re the biggest problem. We’re not blind to most of our disobedience and sin. We hope others are but we’re usually wide-eyed and well aware. It’s not a blind spot. It’s a bald-spot, uncovered because we so badly don’t want to give Jesus authority over it.
Here’s the thing. We who believe so much in the work of the Spirit in our day will be the biggest targets because the enemy knows the gates of hell cannot prevail against the church. He can’t make it go away. He can only scheme to make it ineffective. And all that takes is to ridicule us into quenching the Spirit. Without the Spirit, the body of Christ is a corpse.
There is refinement and revival on the horizon according to the Scriptures. I want to see it with my own eyes. I want to be part of it. I know you do, too. And we can. The burgeoning unpopularity of Christianity will prove over time to be purifying for us but God help us in the meantime. My plea this morning is that we open our eyes to the darkness coming for us. A tidal wave of seduction looms over us. We are being taken down behind the scenes by the thousands, feeling alone and isolated and having no idea how many are enduring the same kinds of suffering and defeat. Let’s come back together and get brushed off, cleaned up and educated in the Scriptures and fortified by the Spirit. Let’s own our brokenness, our enormous temptations and weaknesses and go back to the practice of true repentance and commit ourselves to the pursuit of sanctification. Let’s learn how to restore. Let’s learn how to recognize fruit of repentance. Let’s help each other back to our feet and learn how to stay on our feet.
Let’s be the Church, bruised but beautiful. Innocent as a dove. Wise as a serpent. Smart and humble.
