If you know me, you know I love to listen to preachers talk, teach, preach, whatever. I love asking questions of them and trying to apply it to my life. As I have gotten older, the list has narrowed quite a bit, as to who I listen to. The reason being, I want my thinking challenged. Comfortable thinking gets us no where, and unless that is challenged, we remain the same.
Recently I was able to attend a mentoring session with 4 great men; Scott Graham, Bryan Parkey, Art Wilson, and Aaron Bounds. In this session we were allowed to ask them questions about their ministries and their backgrounds. These men are definitely used by God. There is no denying that, and the answer to every question involved some variation of this answer, “through lots of prayer and fasting and a love for the Word of God.”
As I watch my Pastor, as he leads us into growth spiritually as well as numerically, I notice, he prays a lot, and fasts, and reads the Word a lot. I look at the lives of other people that I truly admire; Chester Wright, Mark Morgan, Jeff Morgan, Scott Shelton, Michael Burk, Gerald Jeffers, David Shatwell, GA and Vesta Mangun, Bug and Nona Freeman, Janice Sjostrand, Lee Stoneking, Billy and Shirley Cole, Faye Doran, Jeff Arnold, Doug Klinedinst, Murrell Ewing, TW Barnes, CP and Jame Kilgore, and Robert Tisdale just to name a few, they were/are people who gave and have given themselves to MUCH prayer and fasting and studying of the Word. They study to know more about Jesus. to get closer to Him. To be in deeper relationship with Him. They do not do it out of some religious tradition, or because they have to, to be saved. They do it because they love Jesus and they want to know as much about Him as they can.
That challenges me!
So, what does it take? We already know the answer to that, we just try to make it complicated. But its easy really.
Prayer
Fasting
The Bible
These birth a relationship with Jesus, and everything flows out of our relationship with Him. Everything.
jareddoran 