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Weekly Words of Life (2007)

May 29, 2007

Words of Life:

Confined within the ‘mega-church mentality,’ modern Christianity has settled for safety in numbers— call it a comfortable and kindly anonymous distance.  “You don’t get too close to me and I won’t get too close to you.  Then we’ll smile and wave at one another in passing.”  Christian author John Eldredge writes, we’re like “an army that meets for intelligence briefings, but never breaks into platoons and goes to war!”  {WTD, p. 198}  You could say we are an Army warehoused around the world on Sunday morning, but rarely engaged in the fight for humanity Monday through Saturday.  Understand this: A true Band of Brothers, a Fellowship of the saints, is something you have to fight for!  We have to fight to get it, and keep fighting to secure it.  But that is precisely why we’re here: to fight for freedom in the hearts of one another.  And that is my deepest desire as a shepherd: I want my own heart back, as well as the hearts of everyone I know!  It’s what I long to see right here in our midst.  Love and Freedom and Life.  These can only come as we learn to live with passion, with purity, and with power, that is, with a holy desire to see our Lord’s Life unleashed within us.  These three things will mark our Way as a Body of believers when {and only when} we choose to live and believe in the blinding Light of our Father’s love, to see the world and one another through the eternal eyes of Christ, and to walk in step with the consuming fire of the mighty Holy Spirit, whose compassion for the hurting and the heartbroken knows no bounds.

Prayer Promise:

“If you abide in Me [‘if you live in Me, dwell in a place of intimacy and openness with Me’], and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.  My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit [divine production from a life consecrated to Christ], and {so} prove to be My disciples [the world’s knowledge of our discipleship comes from the love, sacrificial and selfless, that we have for each other; the proof of that discipleship is seen in the faithful, loving service we offer to the world].  Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you.  Abide in My love [‘make yourself at Home in my heart, and never leave there’],” John 15:7-9.

June 11, 2007

Words of Life: 

What the disciples did in Acts 4:23-31 was precisely what the prophets of old down through the centuries had commanded them to do: when under an insidious attack, when you face the challenge of our common enemy, in every season, at any time, cry out to your Deliverer, call upon the name of the Lord and He will be “an ever present Help in times of trouble,” Psalm 46:1.  Here is the Brotherhood of believers living by faith and walking with their God, a Body militant and on the move, aggressive and undeterred.  So, what’s it going to take to recapture the fire and flame of our first love for Christ?  What kind of crisis must come crashing onto the shell of our self-protective lives before we open ourselves fully to the Spirit of the Living God?  I wonder what will it take for some of us before we give over to God what He’s given to us?  And that’s everything: we were, we are, and we ever will be.

Do you know what the Divine response to their prayers and pleas was?  It says in v. 31, “when they had prayed, the place where they had gathered together was shaken [saleuo- ‘shake down’ to the foundations; the place where they had assembled themselves in prayer was ‘shaken’ by the mighty Presence of God], and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and {began} to speak the Word of God with boldness,” that is, with freedom and fearlessness.  Now that, my friends, is an answered prayer.  Not all prayer is answered in such a dramatic fashion, nor does all prayer require it.  But when we pray in the strength of the Spirit, with the “mind of Christ” on the tips of our tongues, and a trust of the Father deep in our hearts, we can rest assured that an answer of some form or fashion is on its way.  The Father loves to listen and respond to the prayers of His children offered in faith… because that’s who He is: a faithful, prayer-answering, self-glorifying God!  

Prayer Promise: 

In John 16:23 Jesus said, “Truly, …I say to you, if you ask the Father for anything in My name [by My authority and in accordance with My will], He will give it to you [consider John’s words concerning the ‘assurance we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.  And if we know that He hears us… we know that we have what we have asked of Him,’ 1 Jn. 5:14-15].  Until now you have asked for nothing in My name; ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be made full,” John 16:23b-24.  Don’t let the epitaph of your life read like the words of James in 4:2c, “You do not have, because you do not ask.”  

Critical to our understanding of prayer is our understanding of the Father; if we get that down, we can enter into prayer with boldness and with joy.  When we realize, as George Mueller said, that “prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance.  It is laying hold of God’s willingness,” it changes everything.  This mighty word on prayer was uttered by a man who ran several orphanages in 19^th century England with hundreds and hundreds of children under his care without so much as an ounce of British sterling provided by the crown.  He knew that man was impotent to meet his needs; and that government run by man was no better.  Only God would do.  Thus, he taught those around him {including his wife} about trust in a faithful Father by a lifestyle of passionate prayer.

June 18, 2007

Words of Life:

We live in a Tale of Two Christianities: Emotion run astray with no Truth to guard or guide on one hand; and Information run amok, knowledge beyond knowledge with very little love to show for it, on the other.  Just wave upon wave of information without transformation.  And that, my friends, is as dangerously self-defeating as the former to life in the Spirit of Christ.  In some ways even more so, because it has all the earmarks of a ‘balanced spirituality,’ a ‘conservative approach;’ it has the appearance of wisdom and the authority of the Word.  For us and many of those we know and love, it may in fact be the much greater danger.  You see, nowhere in Scripture do we find an ‘information-only Christianity.’  It’s just not there.  Wayfaring in a fallen world, warfaring against the powers of darkness, a deep and passionate love for Jesus that mesmerizes our hearts and minds, engagement with the weary and the wounded, the healing of broken souls and the healing of broken bodies, lives restored, pasts redeemed, hope renewed… but no mere worship of facts and formulas.  Nowhere in the first five centuries of our present Age do we see an information-only Christianity {and probably nowhere in the first eighteen}.  It simply doesn’t exist.  The influence of Rome brings in ritual substituting for reality, yet still no worship of information-only.  Why?  Because the Call of Christ is a call to action, to engagement, for intimate involvement in the Purpose of God, a Family of Faith becoming a Community of Christ’s Followers who live and love fiercely and freely, the joy of the Father and the strength of His Spirit flowing through our souls like a mighty rushing river!  These are the hallmarks of the Holy Spirit.  Where He is active and alive— welcomed and invited to clear away the accumulated debris which has kept us from Christ, to breathe fresh Life into the deadness of our lives— we will be also.  

Prayer Promise:

Proverbs 3:5-6 says, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding [i.e., what you think you know].  In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your paths straight.”  To “trust,” from the Hebrew batach, means- ‘to have a bold and secure confidence in.’  Notice it is with “all your heart” that you are to trust Him and in “all your ways” that you are to acknowledge Him.  That means every path of life in which you walk.  Only when we live by faith in the Father and in honesty about the hidden realms of our lives can we rest in the knowledge that it is God who directs our every step.  

June 25, 2007

Words of Life:

Life in the Spirit of Christ is to be lived out in the well-defined domain of a deeply relational God, in the Community of the Trinity.  Christianity is nothing if not relational to the core.  When we remove Christianity from its relational context— and our Christian lives from their relational context, first with Abba, then with others— we are left with little more than a set of rules and regulations to govern our morality {or lack thereof}.  We might as well go back to the Law of Moses, because at least in the Law we have a set of moral guidelines that are defined for us in painstakingly exquisite detail.  As opposed to the NT images of Life, eternal and abundant, which require the inbreathing and interaction of the mighty Spirit of God in every single step we take and at every twist and turn of the Way.  It is a tragedy of epic proportions to take the Life and Faith given us by an immensely personal God, the Lord Jesus Christ, who set aside His heavenly glory to enter the arena of human existence and redeem us, rescue us, and restore us to Himself, and turn it into mediocre descriptions about a divine being who operates with all the tenderness and compassion of a computer mainframe.  "Just punch in the right code and get out the right results.  If we do A, B, and C, God is obligated to always do D."  That formulaic approach to God has all the intimacy of an accounting spreadsheet; rather than being relational, it is emphatically irrelational.  And this is what we must let go of, turn loose of entirely, this formulaic approach to the Father.  It's the only way for our understanding of Him as Abba to awaken, and our intimacy with Him as the Perfect Father to intensify in its beauty.  We need divine relationship, and we need it desperately.

Consider this analogy.  It’s like a man trying to orient to his wife as a sophisticated snack machine: just figure out the right combination, how to speak the right words and manipulate the female mind, give her the right gold bracelet or the right diamond necklace, and get the sex he wants in return.  With no thought of her as a unique human being, a soul of incredible value beloved by God, with thoughts, ideas, feelings, beliefs, relationships all her own… and with a worth in the Father’s eyes equal to his own.  There is no real relationship there, in approaching her as an object to be used, a problem to be fixed, or a puzzle to be solved.  Lest you’re unsure of this, I can promise you: she doesn’t want to be fixed, she wants to be known.  And so does God.  We’re back, once again, to the realm of relationship.  What we need as a Body of believers, a Family of Faith {here at Heart’s Journey or anywhere else we might gather on the globe} in the post-Christian world of the 21^st century, is language, ideas, images of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as distinct members of the Trinity with which we have distinct relational connections.  And we must embrace these terms, ideas, and images in every area of our lives, keeping them intact and in front of our hearts at all times.  We must not— must not— remove Christianity from its relational context.  Period.  What happens when we do is that we have very little left which resembles the Freedom and Life Christ came to offer, with little or none of the passion and the power of the early Church.  If our lives are lacking anything in this day and age, it is pure passion and holy power.  It is the Love that flows from a relationship with the Trinity which provides us both in abundance.

Prayer Promise:

“While Jesus was praying in a certain place, after He had finished [a separate occasion from the Sermon on the Mount— Matt. 5-7], one of His disciples said to Him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray [not, interestingly enough, ‘Lord, teach us to preach,’ but ‘Lord, teach us how to commune with the Father like You, how to pray with passion and with power, that’s what we need’] just as John also taught his disciples [it was customary for ancient rabbis to teach their disciples a specific style of prayer; Jesus gave them, and us, a model of brevity and brilliance].’  And He said to them, ‘When you pray, say: “Father [Abba is our orientation to reality and the foundation for all effective prayer: a child-like trust in the heart of the Father], hallowed be Your name [‘let it be held in holy reverence, let the name of Abba be sanctified in our souls,’ {RR}].  Your Kingdom come [which includes the ‘rule of God’ over us, around us, and within us].  Give us each day our daily bread [that which we need to survive right here, right now: grace for this moment].  And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves also forgive everyone who is indebted to us [illustrates the necessity of dealing with unresolved emotional issues so as to insure we are walking in step with the Spirit of God].  And lead us not into temptation [Jms. 1:13 tells us, ‘God cannot be tempted and does not Himself tempt anyone;’ so, the concept may be better expressed as: ‘lead us far away from temptation and even testing’],”’” Luke 11:1-4.   What we have above is a model for prayer, an outline to follow as we pursue intimacy with the Almighty, beginning with His glory and His Kingdom {which is always the proper perspective}, then moving on to our needs, which are summarized beautifully as the physical {daily bread}, the relational {forgiveness}, and the spiritual {temptation and testing}.  It’s phenomenal how much of life is covered under the daily provision of grace to meet the needs of the moment, forgiveness on two counts: with God and toward others, and a wide berth around temptation and victory over testing trials.

If you’ve ever prayed, “Lord, teach me to pray like the Son of God Himself,” then this is the first part of your answer.  According to Romans 8:34, Christ is “at the right hand” of the Father “interceding for us” this very moment.  That is present tense, meaning ‘constantly and continually.’  If we want to learn how to prayer and what to pray, we should look to Him directly.  Because whatever it is He’s praying, we want to be in on that!  May we learn the lessons our Lord is teaching, and has promised to, as we humble ourselves in His School of Prayer.

July 3, 2007

Words of Life:

In answering the objection of why God chose to enter enemy-occupied territory in disguise rather than invading it in force, C.S. Lewis said: “Christians” believe “He is going to land in force; we do not know when.  But we can guess why He is delaying.  He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely.  …I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realize what it will be like when He does.  When that happens, it is the end of the world.  When the Author walks on to the stage the play is over.  God is going to invade, all right [see Isaiah 42 below]: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural Universe melting away like a dream and something else— something it never entered your head to conceive— comes crashing in, something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left?  For this time it will be God without disguise, something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature.  It will be too late then to choose your side.  …That will not be the time for choosing; it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chose, whether we realized it before or not.  Now, today, this moment is our chance to choose the Right Side.  God is holding back to give us that chance.  It will not last forever.  We must take it or leave it.”  Mere Christianity, p. 65  {Italics and Capitals mine.}

Prayer Promise:

Isaiah 42:1, 3-8: “Here is My Servant, whom I uphold, My Chosen One in whom I delight; I will put My Spirit upon Him and He will bring justice to the nations.  …A bruised reed He will not break, and a smoldering wick He will not extinguish [which shows the compassion of the King, for how often have we each felt like a ‘bruised reed’ about to break, the fire in our souls like a flickering candle with water slowly dripping on it?].  In faithfulness He will bring forth justice; He will not falter or be discouraged till He establishes justice on the Earth.  In His Law the islands will put their hope.  This is what God the LORD says— He who created the Heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the Earth and all that comes out of it, who gives breath to its people and life to those who walk on it: ‘I, the LORD, have called You in righteousness; I will take hold of Your hand.  I will keep You and will make You to be a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles [Lk. 2:30-32], to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.  [For] I am the LORD; that is My name!  I will not give My glory to another or My praise to idols,’” {NIV}.

I chose this particular passage this week because it pictures the Son of God in His 2^nd Advent, His return to rule in righteousness and Truth, what we call the Millennium, Latin for the “thousand years” set out in Revelation 20:2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.  It is a glorious image of a God who cares deeply for the hearts of humanity, the lives of those whom He Himself created— Colossians 1:16.  I love the latter section where the Father speaks to the Son and say’s, “I will make You a Covenant for the people [Israel] and a Light for the Gentiles [quoted by Simeon of Jerusalem, that old and faithful worshipper of God, as he held the baby Messiah in his arms; he said, ‘Lord, now You are letting your servant depart in peace, according to Your Word; for my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel,’ Lk. 2:29-32], to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.  For I am the LORD….”  Every man has been blind {and most still are}, every woman has been captive, every child born into this world is under the bondage and darkness of spiritual death until set free by faith in the Lord of Glory.

July 9, 2007

Words of Life:

I believe that critical to our understanding of prayer is our understanding of the Father.  If we can get that down, we may find ourselves entering into prayer in a completely unexpected way… with boldness and with joy.  Imagine prayer not as a duty, but as a delight.  Prayer not as something rigid, but as something relaxed, entering into the Father’s presence not with clenched fists but with open hands ready to receive, with a boldness, a joy, and an open-hearted trust in all that He is and all He’s capable of being to us.  When we realize, as George Mueller once said, that “prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance.  It is laying hold of God’s willingness,” that changes everything.  This statement was made by a man who ran several orphanages in 19^th century England with hundreds of children under his care {hundreds} and without so much as an ounce of British sterling provided by the crown.  He knew that man was impotent to meet his needs; and that government run by man was no better.  Only God would do.  So, he taught those around him— his wife included— how to trust in a faithful Father by a lifestyle of passionate prayer.  God doesn’t ask {and even command: 1 Thes. 5:18} us to pray, just to impose some sort of spiritual discipline on us.  When it comes to the passion for prayer, we’re not talking about Law, we’re talking about Love.  E.M. Bounds wrote:

“Prayer ought to enter into the spiritual habits, but it ceases to be prayer when it is carried on by habit only.  …Desire gives fervor to prayer.  The soul cannot be listless when some great desire fixes and inflames it….  Strong desires make strong prayers.  The neglect of prayer is the fearful token of dead spiritual desires.  The soul has turned away from God when desire after Him no longer presses it into the closet.  There can be no true praying without desire.”  {Italics Mine}

Amen. 

Prayer Promise:

“Admit your faults to one another and pray for each other so that you may be healed [we have to see this in light of the larger context: of faith-filled prayer delivering sinners and healing the sick; as Peterson puts it in v. 15, ‘Believing-prayer will heal you, and Jesus will put you on your feet.  And if you’ve sinned, you'll be forgiven— healed inside and out,’ {The Message}].  The earnest prayer of a righteous man [any man or woman, any believer in tune with the heart of God and in step with Spirit of God] has great power and wonderful results.  Elijah was as completely human as we are, and yet when he prayed earnestly that no rain would fall, none fell for the next three and a half years!  Then he prayed again, this time that it would rain, and down it poured, and the grass turned green and the gardens began to grow again,” James 5:16-18 {TLB}.

I chose the Living Bible, an obvious paraphrase, as the version for our prayer promise this week because of the ease with which it expresses the essence of this passage.  I want to share with you a key point concerning the latter half of v. 16 and ‘the prayers of the righteous.’  The last verb is sometimes translated “as it is working.”  The verb energeo here can be either a present middle participle or a present passive participle.  If it is passive, then the idea would be “the prayer of the righteous has incredible power when it is active, when it is operative, when it is exercised!”  You know what happens when the sons of God neglect the privilege and priority of prayer and all of its profound power?  Nothing …absolutely nothing.  As James said earlier in this letter, “You do not have because you do not ask,” James 4:2c.  “Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full,” John 16:24b.

I’ve included Eugene Peterson’s powerful paraphrase of James 5:16: “Make this your common practice: Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed.  The prayer of a person living right with God is something powerful to be reckoned with,” {The Message}.   “The prayer of a person living right with God….”  Beautiful.

July 16, 2007

Words of Life:

The phrase “our Father always near us, our Abba within and around us,” from Matthew 6:9 {my personal paraphrase} puts us at the very center of what Christ came to reveal: His Father is our Father.  And we are to call Him Abba because His heart is one of tenderness toward His children, of forgiveness for our sins and affection for our souls, a heart of Light to dispel the shadow of our shame.  What does this revolutionary statement signify in the spiritual realm?  [1] It is the essential reality of redemption: Christ delivers us from the Curse so that we may become the children of God— John 1:12; and Galatians 3:13.  And [2] it explains the miracle of regeneration in Titus 3:5: the Spirit in the new Birth gives us new Life in a new Family forever— the Family of the Father, which is the Family of Faith.  In John 3:5 “Jesus answered” Nicodemus, “Truly… I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit [first physically, then spiritually], he cannot enter the Kingdom of God [‘unless one is born again he cannot see the Kingdom of God,’ v. 3].”  “Our Father, everywhere and always.”  The opening phrase of the Model Prayer in Matthew 6 is the key to all prayer.  That child-like trust in the Father’s heart which carries us through to the experience of His everlasting love is at once the simplest and yet most profound lesson in the School of Prayer.  It is only in the experience of God’s heart as a Father that the power of prayer takes root and begins to grow.  A prayer-powered life finds its joy in the uncompromising care, concern, and compassion of a perfect Father who is always ready to hear and to help.

“Our Father in Heaven and on Earth” is not a phrase borrowed from earthly life— transposed from the temporal to the eternal.  It’s not an idea or an image bound to the circles of this world, for God Himself is the Author of fatherhood.  He alone is the perfect image of fatherhood, of what it truly means to be a Father.  The ideal of fatherhood doesn’t proceed from us to Him, from our realm upward; it comes down from God to us.  It is He who gives meaning to the human concept of Father; not the other way around.  One of our greatest fears as believers seems to be embracing God as a tender-hearted Father.  We’re okay with a harsh taskmaster in the labor of our lives, an intense inspector of our moral inventory {rifling through the suitcase of our shame}, or an angry accountant adding up our sins, but the Abba of Love reigning over and within us is a little too much for most.

Open the eyes and ears of your heart, O’ fearful sons and daughters of the Father and relish your role as His chosen ones!  God loves you, infinitely and unerringly, not because you’re bold, beautiful, or brilliant, but because He is your Father, the Abba of Eternity!  The Cross of Christ did not make God love us, nor does it make us loveable.  It is the outpouring of His love to us.  His love lies beneath everything that is; it is the foundation of our faith, our present, and our future.  We must get this.  We must grasp it by faith and get it down in the soul as the rock-solid Foundation of Life.  Not growing and maturing up into that love {as if it were something we had to earn}, but moving and maturing up out of that love, stretching our roots down deep to spread out in the fertile soil of His everlasting love, so that His love becomes the motivation for everything we are and everything we do.  The all embracing Love of the Lord is what fully and finally sets us free to live without fear and love the same way.  

Life in a fallen world demands that we reach above and beyond ourselves for the kind of serious inner strength, genuine lasting joy, uncompromising conviction, abiding hope and lasting love which sets both us— and the real people around us— free from the fear of living.  We find these glimpses of grace when {and only when} our divine relationship begins and ends with, “our Abba always near us.”

Prayer Promise:

Isaiah 40:29-31 says, the LORD “gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength.  Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength [they will exchange the human for the divine], they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint,” {RSV}.  To “wait for the LORD” is a beautiful picture of faith in the Hebrew.  It means to ‘look for with eager expectation, to hope in.’  It was originally used for someone taking frail strands of cord, breakable by themselves, and twisting them together into a strong and resilient rope.  Qavah speaks of a child of the King who takes the promises, provisions and rock-solid realities of the Sacred Word and weaves them into an unbreakable rope of faith.

July 25, 2007

Words of Life:

Being a lover of famous quotes, especially those which bring us back to the realm of reality, I couldn’t help but notice how accurate {and ironic} one of D.L. Moody’s is to where we are in the Church today.  One of the things you notice early on as a pastor— which anyone can see if their eyes are open— is the enormous number of believers who love to complain just to hear themselves complain, who will seek out opportunities to vent their frustration with their faith, their anger at themselves, and their disappointment with God.  And yet never desire to move beyond this simple stage of life.  What I’m saying to you is that everybody has moments like this… everybody.  But the Few, the humble {as opposed to proud}, the Lovers of God, refuse to stay there.  They will not wallow on the field of their defeat; they grab hold of the grace extended in the hands of the Master and find themselves once more standing on faith-full feet.  At the height of his evangelistic ministry, when the eternal wisdom of the Word and the mighty power of the Spirit were working hand in hand to bring the souls of multitudes into the glorious Life of the Lord Jesus Christ, along comes a man to one of Moody’s crusades who can only be described as a 19^th century version of those we encounter so often today.  When he said to Moody, “I don’t like the way you do this,” Moody asked him, “How do you do it?”  The man said, “Well, I don’t,” to which Moody replied, “I like the way I do it better than the way you don’t do it.”  He refused to get suckered in by the arrogance of the enemy’s mouthpiece.  Here’s the point.  It takes no character or courage, no sense of destiny or desire whatsoever, to denigrate and demean the lives, loves, and labors of others.  But it takes a real man or real woman {one “after His own heart …who will do all His will,” 1 Sam. 13:14; Acts 13:22} to get down in the mud and the blood and the bones of another’s existence and say, “I will live with you in strength and honor, I will offer love to you— just as you are— and I will labor beside you in the Cause of our King.”  That is what Life in the Spirit of Christ is made of.  That, and nothing less.

Prayer Promise:

Paul say’s we can “know” {not think, guess, or speculate but know} without a shadow of doubt, “that God causes all things [pain, sorrow, rejection, loss, abuse, abandonment, betrayal, you name it] to work together for the ultimate good of those who love Him, those who are called according to His perfect purpose and perfect plan.  …What, then, shall we say in response to this?  If God is for us, who can be against us?,” Romans 8:28 and 31.

July 29, 2007

Yesterday was our first ever Searching the Scriptures service, a very open Q & A session covering Life in the Spirit of Christ, reality, relationships, prayer, the way God works in the world, and any other topic of Truth which has struck us as crucial here of late.  I want to thank all of you who prayed faithfully and fervently for this service; it worked very well, flowed beautifully, and came off without a hitch.  There was a sincerity of seeking in the questions asked, and Spirit-lead responses offered in return.  Our praise is given to the God of all grace who came through for us once again… as He always does.