I Thank You For Your Support

Wow….what a Sunday! Central I commend you for receiving my friend Coach Rock Knapp and I commend you for treating him so well. Thanks for the response to the Curing Kids Cancer cause and I really appreciate that so many of you will be coming along to help at Rock’s Run. There are many things that I am grateful for that occurred this past Sunday.
I appreciate the men who showed up to pray before the service and I want to extend the invitation to any who want to join us. We will pray at 9:30 each Sunday morning in the sanctuary. No one is asked to pray aloud but to pray for our services, against distractions and for God’s power.
Speaking of prayer, we are over due to get the prayer ministry of this church going. We should have people praying during the services on a rotation basis. We should be building toward a strong intercessory prayer ministry. We will never have the power until we first become people of prayer.
Also, I want to thank so many of you for serving and being so gracious when a service goes longer than usual. My first thanks is to the people who serve in the nursery and in children’s church. I am thanking you each and every one because I am grateful.
I wish that we could all be grateful. I hope we can come to a place where we: “can scarce take it in…” how beautiful God’s love is to those who have seen His love through the eyes of a repentant sinner saved by grace.
What do I have to say for why a service goes longer than some would like? Well I guess we could have told the two adults and one child that were coming for baptism that they were not important and that would have saved 15 minutes. We could have cut out some songs that praised God and told God we didn’t have time to praise Him. That would have saved another 15 minutes depending on how many songs we cut.
Also, I could have spoken less than what God had given to me to speak and thereby told God we didn’t have time to listen to His message, for a 10 minute gain. I believe the response to the message validates that it came from Him. We could have told those who came forward in response to the message that they do not matter and their desire to honor God with their life is not important.
We could have told Coach Rock that curing kid’s cancer is not a worthy cause and we are not willing to help and saved 15 minutes. That would be telling my friend Coach Rock who may not be healed of two terminal cancers that we could care less and that his testimony of what God has shown him didn’t matter to us and we would also be saying to God once again that we only care about ourselves.
If we add up all the saved time that would be 15+15+10+15, we could have had a service 55 minutes shorter than we had yesterday. This means if we started at our normal time of 10:55 we would have finished at 11:35.
That would be a service only 40 minutes long and a church with no baptisms, little praise, a short message and no regard for God or anyone other than one’s own self. NO THANKS! I would rather God correct me for keeping people too long than have God rebuke me for shallow, self-centered and unwilling to worship Him.
To be fair, Justin, Daniel and I will always seek not to keep you any longer than God intends. However, when honoring God requires more, I will not be the one dismissing people before it is time. Allow me to say this because I have preached in many churches where they wanted 3 points and a poem in a 15 minute message after they sang one hymn standing and two sitting down, read off the birthday list, the gossip column and wasted as much time as possible to edge the preacher out from being able to deliver the Word of God; those churches are either dead or dying and we are neither one. We are a resurrected church serving the Resurrected Savior Jesus Christ.
I will gladly receive anyone wanting to complain about the length of yesterday’s service and I will not be offended. After you are finished with your compliant, I hope you will not be offended if I share with you the Gospel of Jesus Christ and how you can be saved and begin an abundant life walking in victory over sin and sorrow. Then you can lay down your idols and your bitterness. : )

I love you each and every one; I love Jesus more!
Andy Goode
Acts 20:24