Everyday I pray this prayer, and everyday it comes to pass:

God, I open up my heart to you today. I’ll do what you want me to do, say what you want me to say, go where you want me to go. Let the right people come across my path today so I can point them to you and lift them with your word and your love . . .

Smith Wigglesworth would not go to bed unless he had led someone to the Lord that day. That is awesome, and I’m not there yet, but I don’t want to go to bed until I have pointed someone to God. I don’t want to go to bed until I know I’ve been used by God to lift at least one life.

In his brilliant work, “Spiritual Leadership“, J. Oswald Sanders talks about interruptions he would receive during the day:

‘People would walk into my office and say: “Well, I just had two hours to kill here in between trains, and I thought I would come and see you.’ That used to bother me… Then the Lord convinced me that He sends people our way…So now I take interruptions as from the Lord. They belong in my schedule, because the schedule is God’s to arrange at His pleasure.”

Pray this prayer today – view every interaction you have today as an opportunity to point people to God. I promise you, if you’ll do this, you’ll have more opportunities than you can imagine to be a witness.

Serve Your Way to the Top – 7 Lessons I Learned While Serving My Way onto a Church Staff

Lesson 6 – It’s the Changed Life, Not the Crowd that Makes the Difference

^19-20My dear friends, if you know people who have wandered off from God’s truth, don’t write them off. Go after them. Get them back and you will have rescued precious lives from destruction and prevented an epidemic of wandering away from God.                                                      James 5:19-20

Something I’ve been recognizing lately is that whenever Jesus would heal someone or impact one person’s life, often the crowd would be wowed by the actual event other times the crowd would be upset and in disbelief. However, Jesus never really cared what the crowd thought. He cared about the person He was ministering to. Jesus didn’t care about attracting crowds, He cared about impacting individuals.

Too often – we focus on drawing a crowd and forget about the individual. While crowds are great because it means more people are hearing the Word, we forget that it’s each of those individuals being changed by God that truly makes the difference. A marriage restored, an addiction broken, someone with no purpose grabbing hold of God’s purpose for their lives – it’s a beautiful thing. It’s a compilation of changed lives that makes a move of God and a crowd an amazing thing, not a crowd of people just there for an event or experience.

Some Thoughts on this:

1.) The Crowd will Never Be Big Enough – Unless we recognize the power of one changed life and value it for what it’s worth, we’ll never think there are enough people in our ministries.

2.) When the Crowd Comes, It’s not a Big Deal - We often think if we’re able to minister to a large crowd, we’ll be satisfied. That is not true at all. We have to find our worth in Christ, so when God does bless us with more influence, we won’t be disappointed that it doesn’t provide the feelings of success we thought it would. A big deal in life is when we’re free from worrying about attracting a crowd and worrying more about impacting one life.

3.) Nothing is More Fulfilling than Touching One Life – There isn’t anything more fulfilling than knowing you’ve made a difference in one person’s life because you were obedient to God.

4.) Be Faithful with One, God will bring Many - The bottom line is that if we’ll be faithful with the one person in front of us, God will continue to bring people in front of our path so we can minister to them. In time, you’ll be impacting more people than you could have dreamed of, and it’s not because you’re so awesome, it’s because God knows you’ll be faithful with the one.

Focus on ministering to one person today – make a difference in their life!

This weekend at our Church we’ll be giving away free Steelers Tickets at every service. All you have to do to have a shot at winning them is simply show up! This is a great weekend to bring your friends to church, think about it, the more people you bring, the better your chances are of winning! Don’t forget to wear your Steelers gear – it’s a black a gold weekend at Victory!

Here is a video promo for Steelers Weekend staring our senior pastor! Hilarious!

See you Sunday!