October 28, 2019 – Click here to listen
Friday I was the keynote speaker at a prayer breakfast down in New Orleans, (Jefferson Parrish LA to be precise.) Thank you for the prayers; by all accounts it was a tremendous success. My good friend Michael Phillips, the new CEO of The Jesus Alliance, came to the event and afterwards we had some time to catch up and spend some time planning the next steps for the ministry.
The Jesus Alliance is in the process of merging with another ministry named: “Need Serve.” Michael is serving as our new CEO and it is a marriage made in heaven. The Jesus Alliance will greatly enrich the lives of many people and as a bonus give practically anyone who desires an opportunity to serve the Lord in ways not restricted to merely offering prayer or funding or both. Basically, we try our utmost to find people with needs and then match them with those in the Christian community who can serve those needs and then do so.
I was reading from Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis this morning and he said something that makes a lot of sense to me and hopefully to you regarding this concept and a semi-hidden benefit of joining a movement like this.
Though Christian charity sounds a very cold thing to people whose heads are full of sentimentality, and though it is quite distinct from affection, yet it leads to affection. The difference between a Christian and a worldly man is not that the worldly man has only affections or ‘likings’ and the Christian has only ‘charity’. The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he ‘likes’ them: the Christian, trying to treat everyone kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on—including people he could not even have imagined him- self liking at the beginning.
This same spiritual law works terribly in the opposite direction. The Germans, perhaps, at first ill-treated the Jews because they hated them: afterwards they hated them much more because they had ill-treated them. The more cruel you are, the more you will hate; and the more you hate, the more cruel you will become — and so on in a vicious circle forever.
Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.
We hope to be able to announce this exciting program in the next few months. Michael and his team are working very hard on it weekly and making solid progress.
Romans 2:10
but glory and honor and peace to everyone who does good . . .