If you know anything about me, you know that words aren’t really my strong suit. And adding using them in front of a church just makes it all worse. Well, this is the story about how my sermon was used to reach just one man… that I know of.
Last Thursday, I did my first sermon ever. I found out that I would be speaking on Sunday, and I was really nervous about it and I was nervous about trying to figure out what I was going to talk about. On Monday I was struggling with being able to hear God and discerning what was from Him and what was just me. I told the girls on my team about it and one of them suggested that maybe God was trying to teach me patience. So I started thinking about that in terms of maybe that was what God wanted me to talk about. Then Tuesday came around… D-Day…the day out home was broken into. When I woke up to my computer gone, I didn’t know what to think, I strangely wasn’t mad or distraught or anything; I was just another victim. I sat down to start working on my sermon on patience and I couldn’t find anything that really spoke to me and I began to feel like this wasn’t what God wanted me to speak about. I prayed about it all and decided to look at scripture about going through trials and tribulation, and almost everything I read stood out to me in the situation I was in; it was awesome!
That night God woke me up at 12:30 and said “come talk to me!” So I had a 4 hour quiet time with Him just talking about the theft and how awesome He is and how He protects us through everything and how He is always with us. He is so incredible that way! Through that quiet time God showed me so many awesome things about Him and about what He can do, and it shows me what He wanted me to talk about. On Wednesday I decided I would try to write something out, because that’s just how I am, I need what I am going to be planned out; but that wasn’t working. Since nothing was coming out right I decided I would just go with the flow and let God speak through me. Up until about the time we were leaving to go to church it was going great, and that’s when ideas of what to say just what to say just started coming to me.
Throughout the church service I was really nervous and worried that what I was about to preach on was not what God wanted me to say but what I wanted to say. Right before I got up to speak the pastor came up and started talking about trials and what to do in those times. And as soon as our translator told us what he was talking about I knew that this was exactly what God wanted me to speak about. I even had conformation from the people around me who know what I was going to talk about. So I got up, did my sermon, didn’t really stumble over my words like I normally do, and I wasn’t as nervous as I was before; it was great! The members were very receptive of it and it seemed to be just what they needed to hear.
Shortly before I went up to give my sermon I prayed that the words I was about to speak would really resonate with at least one person and that they would really hear God through what I was saying. The next day, we were helping with VBS at the same church and a guy came in asking a lot of questions. I came to find out he was walking by the church the night before, heard some of my sermon and decided to come back to learn more about God and His love.
This all to say, God works in crazy and mysterious ways! Even if my sermon was only used to reach one person it was all worth it and I know that it was what God wanted me to do and say. It was all for God’s glory!
