Wednesday 6/18/14 Heading Home

Dear Father in Heaven:  Please forgive me of my sins.  I love You, dear Lord.  Lord, please be with Vicki's mother today as she has surgery.  Please be with the Walkers as they travel.  Be also with our grandchildren who are or will be traveling over the next weeks and protect them, Lord.  Lord, thanks again for healing Ken, even before the doctors got to him.  Lord, be with Patsy, Burt, and their children.  Be with the Saylor family and with Dan Saylor's wife and children.  Lord, so many requests today and I cannot remember them all.  Please help me now with the message You have planted on my mind and thanks for resting me.  Then, Lord, keep my computers running and help me get the message dispatched.  Be also with Nicole and her girls as they are coming our way to help.  In Jesus' Name, I pray.  Amen.

Dear sisters and brothers in Christ.  I have been very tired and God set me down from the computer for a few days as He did not plant a message on my mind (what little is there).  I thought I would say that before you folks.  I have a ton of prayer requests.  Please cover our grandchildren in your prayers.  We have a lot of them and there is a lot going on in their lives right now.  Some are traveling for summer, one is taking a school trip overseas, one is moving and they are really busy.  Please do the same with our friends Grant and Wanda, just please cover them and their family with prayers for they also have senior parents, children and grandchildren and all of them need prayers, so please just pray for the Crockett family.  Also please, please pray for our president, like him or not, he is our president and he needs covered in prayer.  Please pray for salvation above all else.  Pray also for our nation.  You remember my writing, Wake Up America.  We Christians need to be on our knees, even if they hurt, and we need to be praying a lot for our nation.  I asked you to pray for Dolores and also me, as we are aging and we have decisions to make in our lives.  We know we need to cut back, but we do not want to.  So pray for God to give us wisdom and guidance as to where to cut back.  Please pray for me to be able to read better and understand what I read.  I read on about a fifth or sixth grade level and never have I read a complete book, except some of the books in the Bible.  God opens that to me, but when He gives me a message, He helps me but He does not do it all for me.  I need to look up scriptures on what fits, etc.  Praise God for He will work with all of us, all we need to do is reach out for Him, and He will help us.

I made up some words for a worship chorus and when I get moving around I sing it over and over and over out loud.  It goes like this.

"God's gonna heal my knee, God's gonna heal my knee, God's gonna heal my knee, so I can walk again."  Now I just keep singing it over and over again and again.  I have many other words to it.  Someone want to write the tune?  Look, I must get to the message.  Please remember it is Salvation Wednesday, and the day we all should pray for the lost.

Salvation Wednesday:  June 18, 2014, Heading Home (Day One)

Psalm 84:3 - Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may have young, a place near Your alter, O Lord Almighty, my King,and my God.  (NIV)

Brothers and sisters, it seems the older I get the more I look back in life.  One thing I try and do is always remember the good things and try not to remember the bad.  I know it is hard to block some things from your memory and not others.  Yesterday afternoon I was meeting with a few of my classmates planning for our 55th class reunion coming up this August  (John Harris High School class of 1959).  Of course we always greet each other with how are you, and it seems of late one of my sayings has become, "I can still  find my way home."  Now while I am somewhat joking on that,  it does seem of late I must really think about where I am heading, even when I am heading home.  So in the next three days I want to talk with you about making plans for "finding your way home" when you need to do it.

As you leave your home each day, have a handful of corn and drop a seed out the window as you travel so you can follow the seeds back home.  Yes, I am kidding, for those sparrows and swallows and other birds would eat them.  In our scripture today the psalmist seems to have trouble writing about this one.  I will come back to that.  Back when I was growing up in Harrisburg (streets dirt, Dead Sea sick) we had a fancy design along the edge of the roof.  Mamma would get upset because when the sparrows would come each spring and build the nest, then the side of our house which was red brick, would be painted with some of this "white stuff" or "blue stuff" or some other color depending on their food choice of the day.  My mamma would say to my daddy, "Webster," you must do something about those birds.  At the end of their season and it was time to fly south again the nests would blow down, and God's rain would wash the red brick.  However, each year those sparrows would "find their way home" back to our house and things would be repeated.  God built all of this into the sparrow, so you just know He will do even better for us.  One of the most hit places in our country by those birds are the churches. It seems to me that those sparrows and other birds want to be near to God's place of worship so they "head home" back to church so to speak.  Now the Bible tells us that "even the sparrow has found a home."  And it also tells of the swallow building a nest near the altar to have their young.

So God is pointing out to me on this scripture that when our children are young we should be taking them to church, so that as they grow to be out on their own, they also will "know their way home" and in this case I am talking about the younger kids getting back to church.  And in church they should be able to learn about Salvation and Jesus and how we need to be heading home.  Well, we who believe in Jesus, we who are "Born Again" should already know our way home, but maybe you forgot, or maybe you just need to know where the scripture are found that point it out.  The instructions are very clear in the Bible, very clear.  But who really needs salvation through Jesus?  Only those who want to get to Heaven, that's who.  If you do not have salvation through Jesus, let me tell you that the only other place to go is hell.  God laid out the plan of Salvation and where it can be found in the Bible.  So for right now that is it.

Again I ask you to please, please pray for President Obama, for he really needs our prayer support.  Pray first for him to be saved, and then for his safety, and pray for our military warriors as they protect our nation.

Go forth now and share your blessings.  Share a hug, show some love to others, pray for our country, and tell everyone you see that Jesus loves them and so do I.  Love ya.  Pass it on.

Pastor Dan