The Excellent Way!: content

Thursday, February 15, 2018

A Thanksgiving Meditation

Here's an excerpt from Pastor Rick on Thanksgiving and Praise Sunday:

All the time, like a patient Father, He stands waiting for us to realize and remember that it is not solely our story to write. He is the Master of all things in all of time and He is writing a grand story across history that will resound into eternity. He is the Master Creator and Artist Who is painting a masterpiece. It has always been HIS Story. He is waiting for us to realize it and let go of the writing pen. He is waiting for us to surrender the illustrator’s brush. He is waiting for us to stop Instagramming our life and let Him accomplish His will in and through us no matter what we are going through.

Sunday, January 8, 2017

PLEASING

Oswald Chambers said, “I have to learn to relate everything to the master ambition, and to maintain it without any cessation. My worth to God in public is what I am in private. Is my master ambition to please Him and be acceptable to Him, or is it something less, no matter how noble?”

What does it mean to please God? Pastor Rick tackles this question in an effort to help us align our perspective with God's reality instead of many of the misperceptions we may have about the answer.

Favorite Quotes!

"I stand vigilantly on the precipice of eternity speaking to people who this week could go over the edge whether they are ready to or not."
- John Piper

Careless seems the great Avenger;
History's pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness
'Twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne,--
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow,
Keeping watch above his own.
- James Russell Lowell

"Some wish to live within the sound of Church or Chapel bell; I want to run a Rescue Shop within a yard of hell."
- C. T. Studd

"I preached as never sure to preach again and as a dying man to dying men."
- Richard Baxter

"Would ministers preach for eternity! They would then act the part of true Christian orators, and not only calmly and coolly inform the understanding, but, by persuasive, pathetic address, endeavor to move the affections and warm the heart."
- George Whitefield

"I set myself on fire and people come to watch me burn."
- John Wesley

"It is a poor sermon that gives no offense; that neither makes the hearer displeased with himself nor with the preacher"
- George Whitefield

"We are too busy to pray, and so we are too busy to have power. We have a great deal of activity, but we accomplish little; many services but few conversions; much machinery but few results."
- R.A. Torrey

"Nothing is more needed among preachers today than that we should have the courage to shake ourselves free from the thousand and one trivialities in which we are asked to waste our time and strength, and resolutely return to the apostolic ideal which made necessary the office of the diaconate. We must resolve that we will continue stedfastly in prayer, and in the ministry of the Word."
- G. Campbell Morgan

"The heart makes the preacher. Men of great hearts are great preachers. . .
We have emphasized sermon-preparation until we have lost sight of the important thing to be prepared -- the heart. A prepared heart is much better than a prepared sermon. A prepared heart will make a prepared sermon...It would not do to say that preachers study too much. Some of them do not study at all; others do not study enough. Numbers do not study the right way to show themselves workmen approved of God. But our great lack is not in head culture, but in heart culture; not lack of knowledge but lack of holiness is our sad and telling defect -- not that we know too much, but that we do not meditate on God and his word and watch and fast and pray enough. The heart is the great hindrance to our preaching. . . "
- E.M. Bounds

"God is looking for broken men who have judged themselves in the light of the cross of Christ. When He wants anything done, He takes up men who have come to the end of themselves, whose confidence is not in themselves, but in God."
- H.A. Ironside

"Science is a window through which we may view the spectacular and glimpse the hand of God."
- Rick Alexander

"Never forget: things are not as they seem to have always been nor will they remain always as they are." - Rick Alexander

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Thursday, February 15, 2018

A Thanksgiving Meditation

Sunday, January 8, 2017

PLEASING