What A Blessed Experience

Image by Denis Collette...!!! via Flickr

As most of you already know, during the P.M. service on Sunday 9/27/09, I was given the opportunity to share The Word of God with my church family here in my home town.   That’s exactly right…I preached for the Lord!

I had done this in the past.  Back when I was a teen, 20+ years ago, we were given the opportunity every so often to lead the evening services.  We being the youth group.  I had preached several times but my last sermon that I gave was horrific.  Horrific because I didn’t prepare…at ALL. I was only given a month to prepare too!  Ugh!

Talk about embarrassment.  My talk may..MAY have lasted 3 minutes and the subject that spoke about was “Not Being Prepared.”  I was able to throw that together in about 2 minutes.  The subject was appropriate considering.  I learned from that experience, no doubt.

I felt like such a failure after that and vowed that I wouldn’t preach or even head down that track, period.  How could I ever show my face in the pulpit there again?

Fast-Forward to a Wednesday at beginning of September, 2009 and I receive a phone call from our minister.  He left me a voice-mail which I promptly returned….on Friday.

When I returned his call,  it was then that he asked if I wanted to preach the following Sunday.  We both decided that I wouldn’t have enough time to prepare.  We did, however, set a date of the 27th for me to preach.

I don’t remember hesitating when he asked if I would want to.  See, I’ve been praying for this door to be opened and I didn’t miss it when it was!

I was nervous, but it was an excited nervous.  Not like nervous as a teen before presenting my lesson.

Needless to say,  I had 2 or 3 weeks to prepare and did I ever!  I had been thinking about fear for quite sometime and had even written a post, Faith and/or Fear, about my on-going thoughts on fear.  I was also able to talk about fear and experience fear at the same time, while I was speaking. 

I fulfilled one vow that I had made as a teen.  I didn’t show my face in the pulpit.  Nope.  I preached down on the floor, closer to the folks that were there.

While I was speaking, it didn’t take long for the nerves to settle and this feeling of the Spirit taking over enveloped me.  I had heard it talked about, this Spiritual takeover, but this was the first time I had experienced it to this degree.  It was so amazing, so awesome, so…there are no words to describe it.  Blessed is all I can say.

I felt as comfortable standing up there delivering my message as I have ever felt doing anything.  That was one of, if not the, most rewarding experience of my life.

Oh well.  If I think of anything else I’ll do another post on it.  But what a blessed experience that was!

I’ve included a link to the audio if you are interested.  Just take it easy on me.  Remember, it’s the first time I’d done this in 20 years.  It will take approx 20 minutes of your time.

I welcome comments questions on the post and also on the sermon I presented.

Because of HIM

SC

Fear