Last week we celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I remembered that in June of 1964 the Southern Baptist Convention met jointly in Atlantic City with several other Baptist Conventions. I attended with my Pastor\/Father as a college graduation present\/trip. One afternoon, I made a decision to slip away from the SBC meeting, and attend another convention meeting where I heard a sermon by Martin Luther King, Jr. I was so enamored with his oratory, that I bought a book of his sermons. \u201cStrength to Love,\u201d published in 1963, was Dr. Kings\u2019 first book of sermons, three of which were written from Georgia jails. Scanning the pages again, now closer to the end of my ministry than the beginning, my eyes came upon a highlighted paragraph that caused me to pause. I wondered how much these words helped shape this young want-to-be preacher boy that first read them: \u201cWe preachers have been tempted by the enticing cult of conformity. Seduced by the success symbols of the world, we have measured our success by the size of our parsonage. We have become showmen to please the whims and caprices of the people. . . Have we ministers of Jesus Christ sacrificed truth on the altar of self-interest and, like Pilate, yielded our convictions to the demands of the crowd?\u201d I sincerely hope not, and furthermore, I hope that some paragraph of words I have written might be used to help shape another along the way. Lord, let it be so!<\/p>\n
Join me in praying this week for these global concerns:
\n\u2022 Pray for Tommy and Beth as they prepare to teach the February session of the School of Cross-cultural Missions, in Lima, Peru.
\n\u2022 Give thanks with Lori that her country of Mali, has been declared to be Ebola free.
\n\u2022 Pray for the SEND City Coalition meeting in Vancouver this week, of which I am a part.
\n\u2022 Pray for the semi-annual meeting later this week of America\u2019s National Prayer Committee, of which I am also a part.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last week we celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I remembered that in June of 1964 the Southern Baptist Convention met jointly in Atlantic City with several other Baptist Conventions. I attended with my Pastor\/Father as a college graduation present\/trip. One afternoon, I made a decision to slip away from the SBC meeting, and attend…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-morning-manna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1499\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}