Ambers second service

God's grace and confirmation have been evident in the speaker's preparation for Wednesday nights. They discuss the importance of surrendering to God and having a humble heart condition. They highlight Mary's humility and obedience, as well as David's seeking after God's heart. They emphasize that God looks at the heart and wants a relationship built on love and worship. The speaker also reflects on the goodness of God during difficult times and the importance of recognizing His work in our lives. They discuss the story of Esther and how God has chosen each person for a specific purpose. The speaker encourages surrendering and allowing God to transform our hearts from stone to flesh. God is so good. He's been so gracious these last couple of times that I've been preparing for Wednesday nights because he's given me things that I needed before Wednesday. It's been amazing. The last week or so, he's really been laying on my heart a message that I had preached. It was the last message that I had preached before Todd got sick or was diagnosed. He was sick at that time, but before he got diagnosed. Today, it just so happened that I was clearing out a Facebook thing that I had done because I looked up a menu for a place in Wellsville. Of course, every menu is on Facebook now. You can't get out of it. When I did that, somebody had liked a video that was on the church Facebook page, brought me back, and it was that video. It showed me that it was two years ago on the 16th, so Saturday, that I had preached that message. I was like, well, thank you for the confirmation, Lord, because that's what I was feeling to talk about again today. That message was it's a heart condition. Jesus is worried about our heart condition and what our motives are in our prayers, what our motives are in the things that we do, where our heart lies. I was looking through some things. I found my old notes for that, found some other notes. I ended up looking through another journal that I hadn't looked through in quite a while. There was a statement written there. It had all been dog-eared and everything by somebody else. I read that statement, and it struck me because it was another way to look at fear. I want to let you guys know what that statement is and then get your thoughts on it and what you think. What was written at the top of this journal page was, fear is the result of unwillingness to surrender. Any thoughts on that? If we're not surrendered, what is surrender to you? Surrender to God, okay. Does it bring any other thoughts? Not worrying about the circumstances? Having total faith? Yes, yielding your own will to His for sure. When you are yielding your own will to God, being in total surrender, not worrying about the circumstances at all, does that bring your heart into more alignment with God, or does it take your heart further away from God? Exactly. When I read that statement, I was like, wow. Surrender really has to do with a lot because if you think about it, when our heart is surrendered, when our spirit is yielded to Jesus, when we have yielded everything we have to Him, and we're in total surrender, that's almost when our faith is the highest, too, because we've allowed Him to have complete and total control. We trust Him that whatever the outcome of this circumstance is, it's going to be good, and it builds us up and builds that relationship with Him up. There's a couple of things that I had wrote down quite a while ago, but when I read it, it struck me. I was reading Luke at the time when I wrote all these notes down for this part, and if you think about it, Mary's heart condition of loving the Lord allowed her to find favor. Imagine how humble she must have been and how much love for Jesus she must have had in order to be the chosen one to carry Him and birth Him into this world. She took what was said to her to heart, even though He was her son because she knew He was also her kingly Father. What an honor that must have been. So think about that for a minute, right? Mary knew she was carrying the Almighty, the Great I Am, the ultimate sacrifice, our Savior. Now think about that for a minute. What must have the condition of her heart been that she never carried pride in that? Knowing who she had been chosen to be and the significance of that pregnancy, to have a heart so humble to never carry pride in the process. Yeah. Extremely obedient. She was in full surrender. In Luke, when you're reading in Luke chapter 2, it struck me the day that I was reading it because it says that what came through as you read through is any time Mary learned something from Jesus, she pondered it in her heart. So she didn't just take it in as head knowledge. She pondered her in her heart. She wanted heart knowledge because of her love for Jesus. David is called a man after God's own heart, seeking after Jesus in the wilderness, being chased after to be killed, seeking after Jesus when he committed multiple sins. Sure did mess up a few times. Isn't it so wonderful that God looks on our heart? When we mess up, he doesn't hold that against us when we repent. We have to be repentant when we mess up, but he doesn't hold that against us. It's a heart condition. Even in the very first and second commandments that we were given, we were told and commanded to love thy God with all thy heart, with all thy mind, with all thy soul, with all thy strength, with all thy mind. Amen. Amen. I love the fact that Jesus' biggest thing with us, yes, we are to win souls. We are to worship him. But our worship and our love comes from our heart. And he cares about us enough that he is willing to do whatever it takes to help that relationship grow and help our love for him grow even more. Today, as I was looking through that journal, it was pretty awesome. Because, you know, we all have our days and have our moments and everything. And sometimes, you know, even though we know what we're going through is for the good, even though we know that the end is always going to be better than we thought it was going to be. And God's control and God's will is always what's best. Doesn't stop us from every once in a while being like, okay, like, God's like, what's really going on here? And like, why is this really what we have to go through right now? Or whatever, or, you know, just different things. And I was having a week or so where I was kind of struggling with a little bit of that. And today, as I was looking through the journal, there was an entire page of and it was Ted's journal, and it was an entire page of what has the Lord done since I had cancer. And it was amazing to look at and amazing to go back through. And he wrote dates next to Robin White getting baptized and his dad getting baptized and his sister getting baptized and witnessing to doctors and times that pictures or videos of him walking again or driving again was used as testimonies for coworkers and times of how good God is and how much of a healer God is and everything. And it's like, oh, yeah, that's right. You know, no matter what happens, he is so good, no matter what has gone on. He is so good. And he always uses whatever circumstance we're in for his glory, when we allow it, when our heart is open to him being able to use whatever situation we are in for his glory and his good, he will always do that. But if we shut ourselves down and we just look at everything that's negative and everything that's bad, we miss those things. It can be so easy to miss those little things. And I read all that and I was like, wow, God, that's right. That's what you were doing. Like, that's what you did. And that is just so awesome. And it reminded me and another thought that has been weighing on me a lot, especially these last couple of days, it just keeps coming to me and keeps coming to me and keeps coming to me is the story of Esther. And when she states, or when she is told, you were made for such a time as this. We are God's chosen people, a royal priesthood. And he has chosen each one of us for such a time as this. We are not here on accident. We are not in the circumstances of our lives on accident. Whatever your circumstance is, God knew you were going to be there before you even were born, before you were even an egg. He knew you were going to be in this exact situation, going through this exact time, going through this exact trial. And he hasn't left you alone in it. And he's using these times to work on our heart condition. In Ezekiel, it says, I will remove from you a heart of stone and give to you a heart of flesh. I was watching, because the video came up and everything, I was actually re-watching when I had preached that message. And it had been, at the time that I preached it, it was my favorite message that I had ever done up to that point still is. I feel very passionate about it. But when I was watching it, I used an example. And I'm going to use it again, because who here has ever held a rock in their hand? Right? And when you hold that rock in your hand, what do you feel? A rock. But what does a rock feel like? Hard? Cold? Heavy? If you get hit by it, it hurts. Yeah? Rough? Yep. Doesn't, it's awkward. Can be, depending on, yep, for sure. If it's not a smooth, like, skipping stone pebble, for sure. Some are smooth. Yep. Some are small. Some are big. What'd you say, bud? Some of them are sharp. Yep. Exactly. They can get the algae stuff that grows out of them and slippery and kind of feel slimy. Yep. If they're in the water, for sure. Now, with a rock, can you mold it at all? Can you make it into something that it's not already? It can get really hot. Right. But in general, in general, if it's in your hand. Sometimes, because it's so hard, if you throw it hard enough, you can get it to break. Right? Now, so that's rock. Touch your skin. Touch your arm. What's the skin on your arm feel like? It moves. It's warm. It's soft. Sometimes it's rough on some people, and yep, but yours is soft. That's good. But you can, it's almost moldable. Right? Yes. But it moves, and it melds, and it's living, and it sheds, and it regrows, and it more, it shapes with your body. Whatever, you know, if you're building muscle, your skin grows around it. If you are losing weight, your skin will, you know, flex with you. Those kinds of things. So, yes, God wants to remove from us a heart of stone. And not just from us, but the people in the world. That's what he has promised. That's what the Holy Ghost does for us. That heart of stone that is immovable, that is hard, can be rough, can be sharp, doesn't bend, doesn't mold, doesn't grow. He takes that out of us. When we let him, we have to let him. That is the amazing thing about Jesus, is he does not do anything we don't let him do. If we don't give him permission to shave off the sharp edges, to remove this part, and put in flesh, and, you know, take out the stone, and fix the broken piece here, and put some band-aid, new skin, flesh over top of it. If we don't give him permission to do that, he doesn't force himself on us. But that's what he wants to do. He wants us to have a heart that is warm, that is open, that is growing, that allows others in to see him. We don't just let others into our bubble, so to speak, just for our comfort level. When we let other people in, they get to see Jesus in us more. When we allow ourselves to be moldable, and shapeable, we allow others to see him inside of us. It's pretty awesome what happens when we allow God to be the author and the finisher of our faith. When we allow him to be the Alpha and the Omega in our lives. Absolutely. We all were. We all were, brother! I know for sure I was. David cried out. This is just an Amber thing. One of the reasons I believe that David is often called a man after God's own heart is because in Psalm 51 he cried out, Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew in me a right spirit. Remove any wicked way from me. Now, if that's not some repentance going on there, and how many times do you think, you know, I don't know exactly what order the Psalms are written in or anything like that, if they're chronological or anything, but if they are chronological, there's 150 of them. This is Psalm 51. You know, how many times in his life, and we don't know if this wasn't a prayer that he started to pray when he was a child. How many times in his life do you think that that was his prayer? How many times has it become our prayer? How many times have we quoted Psalm 51 in our walk with God in a prayer of repentance? Absolutely. When we ask God to do those things because we want to draw closer to Him, He's not going to withhold Himself from us. He cares about us. When we allow Him to do the heart-seeking, when we allow Him to do the changing, and we don't try to do it all on our own because we don't know everything that we need to fix. We think we do. We've got some good ideas of things that we're doing wrong and we should change. Exactly. Sometimes we do think we know how to change it and everything, but when we let Him do the seeking, when we let Him do the purifying, that is when that joy of our salvation comes in. That's when that hope and that future gets created in us because we stop looking with our own eyes and allow Jesus to do the looking with His eyes, and when we are allowing Him to look with His eyes, He will give us His eyes to see through. When we're seeing through the eyes of Jesus, what a different world we see. Good, bad, indifferent. It is a different world we see when we allow Jesus to be the one looking. He wants to be our friend. Brother Palmer has been teaching us on Jesus wanting to be our friend. How do you treat your friends? Do you keep them at that arm's length? Do you push them aside? Do you get afraid of them hurting you? Maybe sometimes, but when they're a really good friend, a really close friend, you let them in the closest, right? Well, if Jesus wants to be a friend that sticks closer than a brother, and He is our friend that sticks closer than a brother, don't you think He's the one we could let our guard down with the most, even more than a fleshly friend? He's been reminding me over and over and over again these last few weeks. I remembered a night that I had the revelation that Jesus is a gentleman, that He won't ever force us to do anything. And the purity that was in that, that revelation of knowing that He's never going to force us to do anything we don't let Him do, that's the purity He wants us to feel all the time. He wants us to know Him on that level all the time. It doesn't have to be just a once in a while thing. How awesome is it that we have a friend that wants us to know that all the time, and He actually does walk with us all the time. He goes before us. He stands beside us. He walks behind us. He lives in us. He gives you that strength. He just fills that in. We were all fine and dandy when we were doing the things that they were doing. Even when we were going crazier than they might have been. They were totally fine with that. But then all of a sudden you start coming to church. Then all of a sudden you start changing the way that you live. You start being different. It does get their attention. But all of a sudden they're like, whoa. What happened to you? How many times have we heard, there's been a couple of husbands in this church that have been like, I was just trying to get my wife out of the cult that she got herself into. Only to find out that it's the truth. That it's real. Our slogan, if you want to call it a slogan, is making Jesus real again. And that's exactly what Jesus wants. He wants to be real again. He wants to be real in this world. The things, you know, greater things shall ye do. Jesus wants the things that he did while he was walking this earth to be everyday occurrences again. And things that were even greater than what he did. They're not supposed to just be every once in a while. That's just for when it's overseas. That's just for when it's a thousand people in the church and faith is running extremely high and all that and everything. No, it can be even for right now, right here, when there's just a few people. Everyday, every service, we can have these things happening. He wants to be real again. This church has seen so many amazing things. We've watched people go from not being able to walk for months to being able to walk again, back and forth across the bedroom. We've watched holes in the bottoms of feet grow skin again. We've been there and watched hurting hearts be made whole. We've been there and watched fear leave. We've watched people receive the greatest miracle they could ever have and watch them start to begin to speak in tongues and be filled with joy as they receive the Holy Ghost. Those days aren't done. And those are just very, very few things that I can think of that have happened just in the last few months. That doesn't even go beyond anything that I know of from before I came in or anything that happened before the last year even. Those are things that are, we can have those every single day. We can go out on the street and we can pray with somebody and watch them get healed in front of our eyes. Maybe it hasn't happened yet, but that doesn't mean that it won't. Don't lose faith that you have the ability to lay your hand on somebody and watch their leg grow back. Don't lose faith that you have the authority and the power living inside of you by the Holy Ghost to lay your hand on somebody and have them be delivered of fear immediately on the spot. Things don't have to happen just over time. Things can happen immediately. They did for Jesus. And if we are to be making Jesus real again, that means that it can happen for us in the same way. Don't lose that faith that we have the power inside of us to do that. I was watching somebody, it was just a small clip of what they were preaching and man did it hit home. He said, you know, how many times do people not pray because they're afraid of what they'll look like if it doesn't get answered. Exactly, we are just the conduit. We are the ones that Jesus just trusts us to be able to pray. And if it doesn't happen, guess what? It's not on us. We're not the ones in the hot seat when we pray. We're not the ones in the hot seat when we witness or give a testimony. Whatever result comes from our witness, whatever result comes from our prayer, whatever result comes from our testimony, that is Jesus. I was watching something from Brother Jeff Cunningham and he said he was with his uncle Billy Cole and he had him preach a message that night. It was in front of over 150 some Protestant preachers. He ended up going and preaching in front of them. He was told to just preach straight Acts 238. Just preach straight Acts 238. He was not prepared for it. He did not know about it until 15 minutes before he was going to go and do it. But, you know, it was the will of God. Preach straight Acts 238. 51 Protestant preachers got filled with the Holy Ghost that night and yet Brother Jeff Cunningham turned around and looked at Billy Cole and said, I'm sorry I did a bad job. They were driving home and he said, Uncle, I'm sorry I did a bad job. He said his uncle whipped around in that car and looked at him and said, I rebuke you the spirit of ego in the name of Jesus. He said, the one that takes the credit for when it goes bad is the one that will take the credit for when it goes good. That's in our heart. That ego is a part of our heart. When we are feeling like we did not do a good job and 51 people got the Holy Ghost and yet he's like, I'm sorry I did a bad job. That wasn't him. That was Jesus. So we can't be getting down on ourselves when things don't go right. Just like when things go right, it's not us that made them go right either. We have to be able to know that it's Jesus that gives and it's Jesus that takes away. So when things go well, Jesus did it. When things didn't go so well, Jesus was still the one in charge of all of that. We might have some things to learn. I have written down here that faith is spelled R-I-S-K. You've got to take the risk to build the faith. Experience is spelled M-I-S-T-A-K-E-S. You don't get that experience without making the mistakes. That same brother that I was watching that talked about how there's a lot of people that don't pray because they're afraid of how they'll look. He said, now I wonder if you just started walking around and praying for everybody, what results would you see? Because there may be 10 people that don't get healed, but there might be 15 that do. The result's not on you, but we are the conduit of the Holy Ghost living inside of us. If we don't reach out to pray for somebody, how are they supposed to get healed? If we don't look around us and see the world through Jesus' eyes, how are we supposed to see the miracle happen? It is so easy to get caught up in everything that is going on and busy and man, there's this going on and there's this and I've got to go here and I've got to do this and I've got to make sure this happens and I've got to do this. You've got to remember to take a breath because you never know what might happen in that breath. Just today I was teaching a class and I happened to take a breath. Yesterday we got on the subject of a couple of things and got to talking about a couple of things and it's very obvious what I believe in. It's very obvious that I believe in God and I believe that dinosaurs and birds lived at the same time. I don't ever let any of that just hide. I'm an open book. What you see here is what you see there. It's just the way that it is. We started talking about a couple of things and one of the people that were in that class asked me what church I went to. So I told her. She's like, oh, I've been thinking about going back to church. This is the church I used to go to. I was like, oh, well if you went there at any time, you'd really like this church. You would get it. And she's like, huh. So today we got to talking about it and she might have a couple of kids come to the youth event on Saturday. She might let her younger kids come to church on Sunday. She's got to pause and take a breath once in a while. Those are moments. If I would have just pushed through and been like, well, this is what I got to do and I got to get this done and I got to do this and then I got to do this afterwards and I never paused to take that breath and I also never let it be known what I believe in, there's an opportunity that would have gotten missed. I know I've spent a lot of time repenting for opportunities that I omitted, that I missed and for opportunities that I committed sin by purposely not taking the time to talk because I was too busy to move on to the next thing. I've spent a lot of time in repentance over those things. Doesn't mean that I'm never going to end up spending some more time in repentance over those things for sure. I know I will. I'm human. That's what happens. But don't let the Holy Ghost inside of you be dormant. Don't quench that spirit. When somebody is sick around you, pray for them. I can't remember which brother it was that I was watching and who said what at this point, but they said don't ask if you can pray for him. Just reach your hand out and pray. It was Brother Cunningham because he was talking about a story where Brother Lee Stone King was his pastor and he would come around and everything and they hung out a lot and one time he took him to his favorite restaurant in town. The owner of the restaurant always came and sat with Brother Cunningham, often times picked up the tab and all that and everything and he goes, you know, then he made the mistake of letting Brother Stone King know he was sick. Next thing you know, Brother Stone King is reaching that long arm around across the table, laying it on his head and praying for him and speaking in tongues and man what an experience that was. Don't, now the Bible does say not to lay hands on those quickly or suddenly, so you have to use wisdom in it and some people you do have, as soon as you are feeling to go pray with somebody, you walk up to them and you feel that little, maybe I should ask this time. You need to have wisdom and discernment when you are doing this, but do not be afraid to pray in public. We have the Holy Ghost, we have Jesus inside of us, don't be afraid to let him loose. Right, exactly, Jesus' ministry was all public, he didn't do it in hiding, he didn't wait until somebody was at their house before they prayed with him. He didn't have a pillow to lay on, he didn't have a house so he didn't have a pillow to lay on. This is my opinion or this is why I believe this this way. Wisdom and discernment when doing these things, but don't be afraid. Surrender wholly your heart to Jesus and let him use you as the conduit he has chosen you to be. Because he chose you, he chose you for right here, for right now, knowing the conduit that you are and can be for him. Don't be afraid to let him use you, you never know what the result will be. Pretty exciting when you think about it though. And that's what I got. www.mooji.org