Will You Pray For Me?

God has taken away our guilt. Hallelujah. We are all sinners. Guilty. No question. No excuses. Some who appear to be the most righteous could be hiding secret sins. Other sins are flaunted publicly. They are proudly put on display without shame or remorse. Lost people sin. Saved people sin. That includes everyone of us reading this.

God has made provision to take away our sin and guilty sentence through Jesus. We are undeserving. God displayed pure mercy and grace in the sacrifice of Jesus to pay the ransom sin held over us. An amazing truth that still grips my heart. Not just the guilt of the past. I praise Him for the removal of guilt of the present and the guilt that awaits me in the future.

This is the essence of what I preached. I prayed and preached with everything in me. I felt the truth down to my toes it seemed. I lost track of time. My heart, mind, and mouth were totally absorbed in the text from Is 6:1-8. When I finished the worship guys came back up and I went to the side to sit down and pray.

My prayers were interrupted by a gentle touch on my shoulder. The touch proved so gentle I nearly dismissed it but opened my eyes to see a teenaged girl on her knees in front of me. He request was simple,"Will you pray for me?' I could see her distraught condition. That was all she gave. I asked for her name and silently asked the Holy Spirit to show me how to pray for this young lady.

Suddenly the words came along with scriptures. As my prayer flowed so did her tears. When I finished I looked her in the eye and told her, "God has taken away your guilt." With that she brushed away her tears, smiled slightly and returned to her seat. I retuned to praying for her and the other students in the room.

After the service she found me and hugged me. She thanked me for praying for her and told me a little of the sins God had brought conviction to her today. Once again I reminded her God took away her guilt.

When I left that service I thanked God for using me. I thanked Him for opening the door for me to do this. At 50 I am not hip nor do I care to be. I preach as hard to students as to any other group and they keep listening. I get to keep hearing some of their stories. Heart wrenching stories of pain, sin, deception of the enemy, abuse, and on and on. There is a lot of pain out there. Much of sitting right before our eyes in worship services week after week. Ones floundering and drowning in pools of sin they feel like they can never get free from. I see the light of hope as God's truth penetrates them from camp to camp and church to church.I I renewed a vow a made to God many years ago at another camp. I vowed to God as long as He keeps opening the doors I will keep preaching to students.

 What an honor, a sacred privilege, and a weighty responsibility to preach truth. To still get to do it to students is a blessing. Most services, during the worship, I spend in prayer crying out to God to anoint me and use me again. The older I get the less worthy I feel to preach. There are so many others more gifted and qualified to do it than me. Yet, nobody preaches with anymore of their entire being, heart, soul, mind, and body, than I do. Maybe as much but not more. I put my whole life into those messages no matter the size of the crowd. They get no fluff. No comedy routine wrapped around a devotional thought. They get Jesus, the gospel, and the Bible. I have nothing else to offer but those. I never tire of telling students and adults God made a way for their guilt to be gone.