The Message...

I want to share with you what is on my heart for Mauritius, for South Africa, for the youth, for everyone really. This is what I feel called to preach, and it is the message I will be giving as often as I can, wherever I can.

God wants to bless you.

That's a bit short, and even with an interpreter that won't take up the whole speaking time... so let's go into detail.

What do I mean, that God wants to bless you? I mean that just like it says in Jeremiah, God has plans to bless you with a future and a hope, not to curse you. His plans for you are of peace. If anyone ever tells you that God gave you a disease to teach you a lesson, if they tell you that God made you live in poverty, or that God let your loved one die so you could grow from it, I am here to tell you that they are wrong.

You are his child, you are his beloved son, his wonderful daughter, why would he do horrible things to you? Jesus tells us a parable, one of the shorter ones in fact, in which he asks the crowd around him "which of you are fathers?" When the fathers in the crowd raise their hands to answer, he asks them if your son asked you for some bread, would you give him a rock; if he asked for a fish, would you give him a snake; if he asked for an egg, would you give him a scorpion?

The obvious answer to those questions is no. A loving father would not treat his child that way. Sure, he might tease or joke, but he would not earnestly give such horribly things to a child who wanted something to eat.

Jesus follows that up by saying "if you being evil know how to give good things to your children, how much more so your Heavenly Father?"

Now, Jesus wasn't calling those men that day particularly evil. They weren't major sinners about to be condemned. These men were just everyday, average men who had come to listen to the teacher. The "evil" Jesus is calling out is simply that they, like all of us, are born into the world and have grown up in it. We are not pure and good, like God. We have sin, have sinned, and will sin again. But even though we are sinful creatures, we still know how to give good things to our children.

How much more so, our Heavenly Father?

It's a big question. God is pure, he is good, he is love, he is light, he is that he is, he is the alpha and omega... and he is our Father. If we ask him for a blessing, he isn't going to curse us. If we ask for food, and have faith that he will give it, we will receive it. If we ask for Healing and have faith that we will be made whole, we will be Healed.

God's plans for us are plans of a future, of peace, and of hope. If the path you're on right now doesn't lead to hope, doesn't have a future sitting at the end of it, and isn't a plan that points towards peace, then it's not God's path for your life.

That said, you can find God wherever you are. If you're living a hopeless life full of violence and pain, God is there waiting to help you and bless you. If you're lying in a hospital bed, hurting more with every breath, God is there. If you're living your life, stuck in a rut never growing nor changing, just living each day the same as the day that came before it, God is there.

I am not a father, myself, but I do have little siblings who are 16 and 18 years younger than me. I was there when my little sister took her first steps, said her first words, and fell that first time. I sat there watching as my little brother learned how to leap from one piece of furniture to another. For both of them, I had to learn how to sit back and let them try, let them fail, and wait for them to ask me for help.

God is sitting there, watching us learn to walk, talk, run and jump on our own. He's waiting for us to need his help, waiting for us to call out to him. Just like when a toddler is learning to walk, he lets us try to lift ourselves up. He lets us push our limits and grow for ourselves. If he set us on our feet, held our hands, and kept us from ever falling or bruising ourselves, we would never learn to do it on our own.

One of my mother's favorite stories to tell is about my older sister. When she was a toddler, she had so many loving adults around her that all she had to do was pout and someone would pick her up and take her to whatever it was she wanted. Eventually, my sister had to learn to walk on her own, to get herself to the things she wanted, but because of all the people who did it for her, she took much longer to learn that lesson than other children.

We could sit here and pout, asking God to take care of every little detail of our lives, but that would be limiting ourselves to an eternal infancy. We would never learn to walk on our own, and we would never make it to the future that God has planned for us.

The first step is calling out to our Father, just like the baby learning to crawl. We call out to God, and thank him for sending Jesus as the final sacrifice for our sins; thank him that we don't need to pay for our own sins anymore, and that all sins past, present, and future are now paid. We have to ask him to come into our lives as our lord and savior, and help us to live the way God wants us to, help us to learn to walk in his ways, and help us to become the people God has destined us to be.

That first step, becoming a Christian by accepting Christ as your savior, as your lord, is like a baby levering themselves onto their feet and reaching for their parent's hand to steady themselves. Those first steps are guided, protected, cherished. Have you ever watched a parent helping their baby learn to walk? That is God in those moments when you call out to him.

As you dig deeper, learning and growing, reading your bible, going to church, meeting more Christians, you learn to take steps on your own. You learn about your faith, you learn about how God intended you to live, and you begin living that way, taking steps down the path God has planned for you. Once you're walking on your own, you're still checking in with God, still coming to him with the details of your life, still relying on him for all those things only a father can do.

Eventually, you will help other new Christians learn to walk. You'll raise your own children as Christians, you'll teach a Bible Study at church, or you'll become a Pastor, and it will be your job to help baby Christians learn those first steps with God.