Reading for March 7-11
Acts 20
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Paul’s Farewell to His Friends
“You know how I spent all my time with you . . .20 I didn't avoid telling you anything that would help you, and I didn't avoid teaching you publicly and from house to house. 21 I encouraged you to turn to God and to believe in our Lord Jesus.
22 “I am determined to go to Jerusalem now. I don't know what will happen to me there. 23 However, the Holy Spirit warns me in every city that imprisonment and suffering are waiting for me. 24 But I don't place any value on my own life. I want to finish the race I'm running. I want to carry out the mission I received from the Lord Jesus—the mission of testifying to the Good News of God's kindness. 25 Now I know that none of you whom I told about the kingdom {of God} will see me again."
Acts 20:18-25
Do these words move you in any way? If so, how?
Pastor’s Reflection
Paul had spent three years in Ephesus. It is time for him to depart. His goal is to get back to Jerusalem for Pentecost and then travel to Rome and eventually to Spain to spread the Good News to the ends of the earth, but first he gives his farewell address to his friends knowing he will never see them again.
This August I will for the fifth time send a child off to college or the military. This time it will be my daughter. Ouch! Of course I fully expect to see her again, yet I want to say all the things that will a. show her how much I love her and b. be last minute words that will help her. I want my words to encourage her.
In Paul’s farewell address, the following things encourage me. I am impressed that he spent three years with them, “with” being the operative word. I am encouraged that he didn’t avoid tough subjects. I am encouraged that he was in their homes. And I am especially encouraged to listen to him stick by his passion to follow Jesus no matter what.
Especially I am impressed with the challenge of connecting personal encouragement to God, the ultimate source of all encouragement.
How can you and I encourage those around us in such a way that others feel like you are in their corner yet they also feel like they actually can and want to go to the Lord and trust Him? I would love to hear how you do this?
It would be helpful to have some share in this topic. I often feel I fall short in this area myself.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that did come to mind is this; to encourage someone effectively may depend on your relationship with that person or in the area/topic you are trying to encourage.
At seminar I attended, participants were asked to come forward to encourage teens who felt they were hurting in their parent relationships. We did so by standing in the gap of perhaps a parent missing in the relationship with that teen, i.e. single parent home, or by standing in for the parent who caused the teen to feel hurt. We were to encourage them by blessing them with words that were absent from that teen's life, i.e. acutally saying "I bless you and release you to become" an artist, or nurse, or muscian. It took listening to the teen as to where they hurt and why they thought they hurt. Then speak blessing and love over them to be all they can be in Christ Jesus. It was amazing, though tears flowed, how in such a short amount of time you got to know that teen and felt their pain and blessed them and loved them as Jesus would. Those words were powerful.
Guess it's that Biblical "hearing" that released them from the heart first.
And another time it only took me a moment to turn to an elderly woman sitting behind me (at a previous church I attended) to tell her that I saw the Holy Spirit gifting in their life by how she helped to get ladies to sign up to donate desserts for a church dinner, and we needed her to continue to do that if she could. I told her she was very effective and it was a great help to the success of the church dinner. She cried and so did I. We were not close nor the best of friends, but I don't think anyone ever told her that she had the Holy Spirit.
For me, its:" I want to finish the race I'm running. I want to carry out the mission I received from the Lord Jesus—the mission of testifying to the Good News of God's kindness."
ReplyDeletePaul had a very personal experience of God's kindness. It was the gentle way in which Christ asked him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?"
I am so thankful to God for the kindness of His Son, that His love for me does not depend on me but on Him.
Paul loved these believers with the love he felt from God. He knew his salvation in the most tender part of his being: his heart.