Partners in Prayer:

“Everything We Need!” Looking for the ‘Son’ in 2021! January 17, 2021 Dear Partners in Prayer Team,

“For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” Philippians 1:21 (NKJV)

“His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and goodness.” 2 Peter 1:3 (NIV)

Have you ever wondered, “What does it mean to have Jesus be our ‘everything’?” I believe the answer to be this: “To have a real, living, precious, growing, active and alive faith in Him!” Our church verse for the year proclaims: “For to me to live is Christ!” And our second verse reminds us that to live Christ, we have “everything we need” to attain that life which changes us and leads to godly living, and knowing all of His glory and goodness. To have Jesus be our everything means we have a saving faith. What does that look like? What does that mean in a world like ours today, where everyone can believe whatever they want about anything they want? If you didn’t know where you were going, who would you want to show you the way? A visually-impaired man had been waiting a while at a busy crossing along a street in a city. He was praying for someone to offer to guide him across, when he felt a tap on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” said the tapper, “I’m blind- would you mind guiding me across the road?” You would think that first blind man

would admit that he was in the same boat, but apparently, he wouldn’t do it. The first blind man took the arm of the second blind man, and said, “Follow me, I’ll get you across.” The amazing thing is that they both stepped out into traffic, and cars stopped and they both crossed the road. Apparently this is a true story. The first blind man was the famous jazz pianist George Shearing. He was quoted as saying after the event, “What could I do? I took him across

and it was the biggest thrill of my life.” Neither believed that he could

accomplish that goal on his own. But the matter of crossing into eternity won’t work out so well for those who are blinded by their sins. Jesus even said of the religious leaders, “Will the blind lead the blind and not fall into a ditch” to remind us that the best way to find ourselves going to heaven when we die, is to have someone lead us who isn’t blind, and knows where he is going! When we trust Jesus as our Savior, we have His leading that is not being led by someone else who is blinded. We can trust Him for where we are going. That is why we can begin to say, “Jesus is our everything.” As I look back at the life of Jesus and those who followed Him such as Peter, who wrote our manual for surviving end times (book of 2 Peter), I have been comforted by the fact that Jesus through His earthly ministry, knew exactly where He was going and what He was doing. When we look at the life of that old salty fisherman, Peter, and his writing of this last letter of his life, I take comfort in knowing nothing has changed. In a time when it seems everything is out of control, we have a God who is in full control. You’ve probably heard that recently as it is a great truth to hold on to considering recent events. I remember being asked, “Do you know where you’re going when you die?” It was a frightening question then because it concerned my eternal existence, but now it takes on a different meaning. I find it interesting that many have taken solace that because 2020 is over, things will be better. “Do you know where you’re going?” The path ahead is probably more turbulent than the one behind. The truth of the Gospel is “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28). Again, a familiar verse but it seems these verses are needed now more than ever. Our life in Christ is likened to a walk or a path, one that has many twists and turns. The trials of this life can sometimes make our way foggy and hard to follow. But we have ears to hear and eyes to see; these are spiritual senses that take over when our earthly vision is skewed. “Do you know where you’re going” is a positional term that should bring comfort to our daily walk. “Being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ” also confirms that our path, although not safe is secure. Walking through the trials of life with the certainty of destination brings peace and joy. These are the attributes that true Christianity can deliver when we are certain of our journey. We are living in a time where Covid-19 has shut down and closed churches which are essential for people to spiritually know the way to God. I believe that even through this shutdown, we as a church are wondering if we are doing the basics Christ needs us to be doing, or should we be trusting in the programs, traditions, or even the ways we’ve always done things? This is a fresh chance for us as a church to get ourselves back to doing the things a church should. We are not about things seen, like buildings or large programs, or outreaches- we are about saving and discipling people to grow in our faith for Christ. I hope and pray that today

finds you on track and headed in the right direction. So, do you know what is one of the essential things that gets us in the right direction? Praying together! A few years ago at the Seattle Special Olympics, nine contestants, all physically or mentally disabled, assembled at the starting line for the 100-yard dash. At the gun, they all started out, not exactly in a dash, but with a relish to run the race to the finish and be the first to win. All, that is, except one boy who stumbled on the asphalt, tumbled over a couple of times, scraped his knee and began to cry. The other eight heard the boy. They slowed down and looked back. They all stopped, turned around and went back- every one of them. The cheering of the crowd and families kept yelling, “No, turn around to the finish line!” One girl with Down Syndrome bent down and kissed him and said, “This will make it better.” All nine linked arms and walked across the finish line together. Everyone in the stadium stood, and the cheering went on for several minutes. People who were there are still telling the story. Why? Because deep down we know one thing. What matters most in this life is more than winning for us. What truly matters in this life is helping others win, even if it means slowing down and praying, and changing course. As a church we are not alone! We are praying for great things. I want to share with you several things that made my heart tear up with joy. At the end of last weeks’ service, if you noticed I was a bit weepy because I was seeing God answer prayer right in front of my eyes. 1. First, we started our new members’ class, and we had eight people attend. I didn’t expect that. I rejoice because God is working. 2. We had folks move from our prayer group to cover the nursery so parents could take this class. That is a great praise and answer to prayer! 3. Those meeting in my office continued to pray for great things. 4. We had the fullest and most attended service since our church was shut down in March. It felt overwhelmingly like God is answering prayer and bringing people back. 5. During our State of the Ministry, I asked people to remember to invite visitors and pray for families with children and kids to attend. As we were ending the service, we had a host of new faces at church. 6. As I introduced myself to one of the families, someone said right boldly in front of them and me, “Pastor, you said to ask for families with more kids to come to our church, and here they are!” 7. We were getting ready to pray for Tim and Helen Van Sumeren and someone said, “God must have something great for them in Thailand, because look at how God keeps opening doors for them!” In the last month, they received their

visas, their plane tickets, all their support, and even when they were told their flight to Thailand was canceled, within eight hours, they had a new flight. When they get to Thailand, they must quarantine for 14 days in a very expensive hotel provided and approved by the government. It will cost thousands of dollars, and God has provided all the funds. Then when they leave the hotel, they will travel from a “red zone” city with the pandemic, and travel northwest to Chiang Mai, which is two hours away from Steve and Kelly going to the northeastern border of Chiang Rai. There are missionaries who have given them a home to stay, fully furnished, with a car and motorcycle, and Tim happens to have a driver’s license which will never expire from previous years in Thailand. He was told that currently no driver’s licenses are being granted and everything is shut down. They will be joining their daughter’s family who arrived earlier in the year as missionaries. While there, they are going to be missionary helpers to support and help new missionaries. Tim and Helen asked us to pray for them to first spend time learning to re-read the Thai language. Like our missionaries in Cambodia, Thai is one of the most difficult languages to learn. There are three different “T’s”. It’s a language of 44 consonants, and 25 vowels. So that is their biggest prayer request for now. Let’s turn around and pray them into their ministry. I enjoyed and was moved with tears on Tuesday, when my four pastor friends and myself all gathered around Tim and prayed for his going. We’ve prayed together as pastors for two years now, and it was a special blessing to witness that going. Very much like our goodbye to the Marks family last year. Note: I have prayer cards if you want to pick them up at front. 8. Speaking of which, Steve and Kelly are giving us updates every week as they too have all the funding for their quarantine when they leave and enter the capital city of Bangkok. They also will need to travel northeast to Chiang Rai and quarantine when they get back to their home. They will need prayer as they return, not knowing the condition of everything. Prayerfully, they will not have suffered any damage or break-ins while they were back in the States. So pray, pray, pray, pray for them as they fly out next week on the 20th. Pray for Anna and Joe to return and be caught up in Christian school there at CRICS and pray for Kelly as she needs to take over the classes she was supposed to teach but couldn’t because they were delayed in returning for four months. 9. We need to pray for souls to come to saving faith! That is our purpose. That is what it means to be a church without walls! We are not the building or a denomination, we are a family of called-out, blood-bought, people who were blinded. Jesus is our everything to live this life until He comes for us! The evangelist D. L. Moody once said: “So if you turn one to Christ, that one may turn a hundred; they may turn a thousand, and so the stream, small at the first, goes on a broadening and deepening as it rolls toward eternity.” 10. Come and gather together in prayer and team with us to see God work here at PCBC! Just like those young children at the special Olympics, our prayers will help us win together. We need to be together to pray! God is answering “everything” and more in our prayers! I found this quote from

E. M. Bounds and it reminded me about the importance of our prayers: “Prayer is a keynote. The more praying there is in the world the better the world will be, the mightier the forces against evil everywhere. Prayer is a voice which goes into God’s ear, and it lives as long as God’s ear is open to holy pleas, as long as God’s heart is alive to holy things. God shapes the world by our prayers.” (E. M. Bounds, Purpose in Prayer. Pg. 11). I want to close with a true story about Mark Kellnor who played our old, out-of-tune piano. I’m not sure where my parents got the old upright, but it was most certainly given to them. There was lattice work on the face of the upright

piano, but after years of neglect, you could see where small fingers poked through the decayed fabric- allowing you to see the inside of the piano. The once white keys were certainly a “toe-fungus” ivory now. Some of the keys didn’t even have the top polish on them, leaving a

broken chewed fingernail look on middle ‘C’. But this old piano still had grit. It was my mother’s desire to get us four older children to learn to play. I actually didn’t want to learn. It felt too hard a discipline, and it was more like punishment to have my mother set a timer for thirty minutes to have to practice those Thompson red books. It was shortly around that time that our pastor’s son Robert and his wife Thelma returned to the States, coming off the mission field of the ABC Islands of Netherland Antilles. They served on Bonaire with Trans World Radio. They were gifted musicians. Well, Mark, their oldest son, would come up to the house and play with me. My mother would often ask Mark to play on the old piano. Understand, he later in life followed God’s calling to be a music major at Moody Bible Institute, and afterwards was destined to teach music. But at the time Mark would visit my house, music was the furthest thing on our minds. Playing tag or climbing in the barn seemed more important. So, I will never forget the first time Mark was asked to play a song for me. It was Mark’s own version of the Billy Graham chorus “He’s Everything to Me.” The chorus was known at that time during the 70’s as a sappy little tune. This was the favorite and most popular song during our singing time at summer camp. We never got tired of singing it. The words go like this: “In the stars His handiwork I see, On the wind He speaks with majesty, ‘Though He ruleth over land and sea, What is that to me? I will celebrate Nativity, For it has a place in history, Sure, He came to set His people free, What is that to me?

Till by faith I met Him face to face, ah-ah-ahhh! and I felt the wonder of His grace, Then I knew that He was more than just A God who didn’t care, That lived a way out there and (now) Now He walks beside me day by day, Ever watching o’er me lest I stray, Helping me to find that narrow way, He’s Everything to me!” Notice the words “Till by faith I met Him face to face, and I felt the wonder of His grace.” Those words describe someone who changed from looking and knowing about who Jesus was, to understanding that God’s saving grace really is what made Jesus real. Well, Mark Kellnor’s playing of that song on our old piano did the exact same thing for me. When Mark, who was a year and a foot taller than I, would sit down to play this song, suddenly the piano came alive! The piano shook! The tune wasn’t in a sappy camp-song style. He had learned and transposed the melody into a moving classical style that moved powerfully and majestically up and down the keyboard. I still feel the pounding. He had to slide back and forth up and down the key board to play this song! The vibrations filled and tickled my chest. I wish I could truly play a video of Mark doing this. Trying to explain this truly falls short of the experience. The piano sounded like it never did before. It was alive! It was magnificent! It filled one with awe, because one didn’t know a piano could sound like that! And that was the day I stopped just looking at the piano and knowing things about it. That was the day I really wanted to learn how to play the piano. And from then on, practice wasn’t an enslaving bore. I went from only being able to play “chops sticks” to being able to later play fairly well for a beginner. It was a passionate real growing joy to learn the piano. I wanted to spend time with the music. I wanted to learn the melodies. The piano didn’t change. It was still a ruin to look at and play. But because of the “one” who played the piano, something changed. That is what Jesus does in saving faith with our lives. We are all out-of-sorts and mostly out-of-tune, broken down souls, and then a New Man, Master touches our lives and makes a New Song and Melody across the broken keys of our lives. It’s nothing we do, but it’s all something He does. Everything of our salvation is from Jesus! I can just about hear you all say, “But, Pastor, this sounds like the story ‘The Touch of The Master’s Hand.’” Yes, it really is a lot like that. I will leave you a copy of that well-known tale as my closing quote for those who don’t know the story, though I bet that it’s just a few. But what Mark did to enliven and draw me to want to learn to play, is exactly what Jesus does in our lives to make a

melody in our hearts and new joy of saving faith in our lives. Saving faith brings us to understand why Jesus is "everything” to you and me. And there are more “exceedingly abundant” things that God has done in our lives, but this is the one that I felt impressed to share with you today. All that I really feel that God has asked of me is expressed in His word in Isaiah 43:10-13: “‘But you are My witnesses, O Israel!’ says the LORD. ‘And you are My servant. You have been chosen to know Me, believe in Me, and understand that I alone am God. There is no other God; there never has been and never will be. I am the LORD, and there is no other Savior. First I predicted your deliverance; I declared what I would do, and then I did it—I saved you. No foreign god has ever done this before. You are witnesses that I am the only God, says the LORD. From eternity to eternity I am God. No one can oppose what I do. No one can reverse My actions.’” I am simply His witness; His servant, chosen to know Him, believe in Him and understand that He alone is God! He is the only Savior and He has given me new life to replace the bondage of sin to which I was once a slave. There is no one who can oppose what He does and no one who can reverse His actions. He declared to me what He would do through my life, by His Spirit not my own ability, when He called me into His ministry. His word to me was: Zechariah 4:6: “...'Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,' says the LORD of hosts.” To God be the glory! I am so blessed to be His witness; His servant, proclaiming the way of the Lord to those that I come into contact with. I love Him and am privileged to be His child! What about you? Can you look back through your life and see the “exceedingly abundant” things that He has done for you? I'm sure they are there, for God is no respecter of persons. What He has done for one He will do for another. Let’s pray, “Precious Father, we thank You for doing exceedingly abundant above all we could ask or think in our lives. Thank You that Jesus is our everything! Thank You for blessing us with Your great salvation! Thank You for calling us to be Your servants and to share You with the world around us. Thank You, Father, for those who listen to the teaching of Your word, very much like my old friend Mark’s ability to play the piano, and it causes many to receive You by faith. Thank You that we are simply a vessel that You have chosen to flow through. Father, I pray that we all at PCBC may be as much of a blessing to those who need you as Mark was to me to want to learn the piano. I pray that the worship and song from our changed lives will draw friends, loved ones, and strangers to You for true salvation. Shape and touch our own broken lives to become lives of real and “living faith!” Thank You for all those You have brought into our lives. Thank You for answered prayers and for people visiting our church. Thank You for the definite teamwork of prayer

warriors we have in our church. Thank You for allowing us to know and share Your love. Holy Spirit, we pray that You continue to move in us, changing us, and molding us into Your very own likeness, conforming us to the image of Your Son. Make us a blessing to the world today, Father! In Jesus’ Name I pray. Amen.” Touched by the real Master’s hands, Pastor Corvin < Quote: The Touch of the Master's Hand by Myra Welch 'Twas battered and scarred, and the auctioneer Thought it scarcely worth his while To waste much time on the old violin, But held it up with a smile. "What am I bidden, good folks," he cried, "Who'll start the bidding for me?" "A dollar, a dollar. Then two! Only two? Two dollars, and who'll make it three?" "Three dollars, once; three dollars, twice; Going for three…" But no, From the room, far back, a grey-haired man Came forward and picked up the bow; Then wiping the dust from the old violin, And tightening the loosened strings, He played a melody pure and sweet, As a caroling angel sings. The music ceased, and the auctioneer, With a voice that was quiet and low, Said: "What am I bid for the old violin?" And he held it up with the bow. "A thousand dollars, and who'll make it two? Two thousand! And who'll make it three? Three thousand, once; three thousand, twice, And going and gone," said he. The people cheered, but some of them cried, "We do not quite understand. What changed its worth?" Swift came the reply: "The touch of the Master's hand." And many a man with life out of tune, And battered and scarred with sin,

Is auctioned cheap to the thoughtless crowd Much like the old violin. A "mess of pottage," a glass of wine, A game — and he travels on. He is "going" once, and "going" twice, He's "going" and almost "gone." But the Master comes, and the foolish crowd Never can quite understand The worth of a soul and the change that is wrought By the touch of the Master's hand. Note: Myra Welch would say that she heard a speaker address a group of students on the power of God to bring out the best in people. She said she herself became filled with light and that “Touch of the Master’s Hand” was written in 30 minutes! The finished poem was sent anonymously to the editor of her local church news bulletin. She felt it was a gift from God and didn’t need her name on it.