Power in Weakness

I am attending a discipleship school part time right now. I've been through 2 years of this program under the leadership of Tim and June Ainley, but now I'm back again. Actually, I think I am on staff, but in my case that doesn't mean more than me showing up to school each morning for about 2 or 3 hours, or until I get too tired to listen or sit up anymore. However long I stay, it is an immense blessing just to be there. We're reading through the book of Mark now in our devotional times. Like a good staff member and scout, I have been reading it through ahead of time. I love this Gospel. And I'm falling in love with Jesus Christ again...the Man, Jesus Christ. He walked around Galilee, Jerusalem, and some surrounding Gentile regions for 3 1/2 years with power resting on His frame. He taught the the Word of God, and people were amazed. His simple stories about the Kingdom were easy to hear but contained vast depths of understanding. His standards of fie...

Let us...run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Hebrews 12:1-1 A passing comment spoken tonight, one not even worth repeating, caused me to question the course my life has taken the past few years. Specifically, the way my life has gone since I have begun to really follow Jesus. I suddenly began to feel that I was very irrelevant to the world, boring amidst my friends, and even a spiritual failure in certain ways. What have I got to show for seven years of prayer, striving to live New Testament Christianity, and looking to the Word of God rather than the passions and trends of the people my age around me? Don't get me wrong, friends, I've made some pretty big mistakes the past few years, and I've done the above things poorly and inconsistently. But I know that I have giv...