Inspirations from Church

Today was a good day. I woke up and went to church and got a lot done. Today in church the sermon was about "The Stewardship of Time". I love the church I go to because the pastor really takes the time to break down the bible so that we can take the word and apply it to our lives. But the sermon basically was talking about how we make plans without including God. We started out first by discussing how to seek God prayerfully or through prayer. The Bible says ask and you shall receive. The story we were reading from was from James 4:13-17, and was about how these people had this perfect plan about going to a city and making a great profit. They understood who, what, when, where, and why, which are all very important factors in making a plan. However, they forgot to include God into those plans, my pastor called this pretentious planning, when you leave God out. He also told us about presumptuous planning, where we can't handle the events of today but we want to worry about tomorrow. Take care of today first, you must live in the now and the today and not tomorrow, for the Word says that tomorrow is not promised, that our lives are like a fog, here one minute and gone the next. The purpose of the sermon was really to get us to understand that life is too short to worry about tomorrow, not to say that planning is not good, but what good is it without God. My pastor gave us a few notes of advice saying that we should go to God first with our plans and ask him what his will is for ourselves. Secondly he said that we should write our plans out in pencil and not in ink so that God can erase anything that He does not want in our lives. He finally gave us the option of sitting down and evaluating how we spend our time. He told us that there are 3 things you can do with time: you can spend time, waste time, or invest time. The thing to consider seriously is how much time do you waste. You could be spending more time with God, rather than worrying about something that God will take care of in the end anyway. You could invest more time in your daily devotion to God, instead of investing time in watching TV. My pastor said that "if you know better than do better" meaning that if you know that you could do all of these things that you may not do, you should do them and not waste time.
The service was really good and it really touched on what is going on in my life right now. Dealing with my whole graduation issue is something that I have to just wait out and let God handle cause I have done all that I have in my power to do. My cousin told me at the end of church that if it be in God's will for me to graduate in May then I will and not to worry about it now. Also at the service today a women who gave her life to Christ today as a candidate for baptism gave us her testimony. Her story really touched me and I was emotional about it cause it was not just only sad and tragic but it was also a prophecy of what was just taught to us by our pastor that life is too short. Her and her fiance were in church one Sunday and he had rode his motorcycle to church ten minutes down the road on the highway he was in a fatal accident. The week that his funeral took place was the week that they were to be married. She got up there and she told us how she had just came straight from the airport to church to tell us about this man she had met and how she had left her phone in another city. The significance of this was that the man had given her reassurance that everything was going to be OK. In light of all of this, her flight had been extended and she had no way of contacting the person who was to pick her up from the airport. But something told her not to worry about it and that her friend was going to be there to get her, and when she arrived her friend was there, and she told her that she almost left but something told her to stay. And the women from church said that was the Holy Spirit. God knows what you need before you even have a need for it, he will take care of you before the storm even hits. It is so good to know that someone has my back, when I can't see it myself.