Awaken The Dawn

A Vessel of Honor

fession—these and all other situations find their best solutions through prayer. Our fuzzy lives sharpen into clear focus when we pray. Let me illustrate this principle from my own life. Prayer does more to prepare a person for ministry than anything else he or she can do. Naturally, a minister should know how to speak and have basic knowledge of life, history, etc. Unfortunately, however, we have hundreds of reli- gious leaders who are in this profession by choice rather than by calling. I remember how concerned I was as a junior and senior in college. At the age of fourteen, God had called me to be a full-time minister of the Gospel. By the time I was finish- ing my college work, however, I had a wife, a baby, household bills—and the pressure of all my friends who were ministerial students going off to the seminary. I had talked to one of the students when I was a freshman in the dormitory at Whitworth College Spokane. I spoke enthu- siastically about the power of the Holy Spirit and he turned flippantly to me and said, “I don’t need to worry about that now, they will explain that to me when I get to Princeton.” Sometimes I think our awe of academic insti- tutions borders on deifying learning. I watched my friends go off to Princeton, Dallas, and Fuller Seminaries. I found myself praying a great deal in those days. I asked the Lord directly if He wanted me to go to the seminary. The voice of the Lord sounded in my mind so clearly, “You will go to the seminary.” But during the three years I should have been in the seminary, the Lord opened up a small church building in Spokane, and there I began to pastor a handful of people.

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