Jonathan’s Leadership

I will hope to update this post later with more thoughts, but for now, here are the sermon notes from the Father’s Day sermon. I was very excited about this message, and God greatly blessed it. I am so grateful to the Lord for his patience and kindness toward me. Anna really liked the sermon also, and she thinks I should write it down in paragraph form. Perhaps I will do that soon.

[Update] I have begun writing this sermon into an article. I will try to post it when it is completed, though it is going to be long. It’s a message about Saul and Jonathan. 1 Samuel 13 and 14 are my passages. It was amazing to see the contrast in the two leaders. Saul really failed in his leadership of the people. However, Jonathan was inspiring with his firm faith in God, his confidence in God’s power, and his willingness to stand alone. He was a great man of God, despite his bad father. (Which should be an encouragement to those of us Dads that make mistakes. God is bigger than our mistakes, and can guide our children to him even if we are as bad a father as Saul was.)

I came away wanting to be the kind of man Jonathan was. I hope you men will read this and be encouraged and inspired as I was. God certainly honored Jonathan’s faith. What a great story! Akin to the story of Gideon in my mind.

A Leader God Honors

Here also are the notes from the week before:

Pure in Heart

This was a message which was very personal because God has been dealing with me about my impure heart and my doublemindedness. When I say “impure” I don’t necessarily mean sexually impure. I mean a heart mixed with other loves besides the love I should have for the Lord. All the things I love, even my wife, should be a reflection of the love I have for Christ. His love should beam out of my heart for all around me, even family. But I struggle with idols in my heart.

So I’m doubleminded. I have such a hard time laying aside what I want for what I know is best. I want to do right, and yet I want to do selfish things, both at the same time. I am not very disciplined, and when I asked God about it He said it’s because I don’t really, down deep, want to be disciplined. I want to do what I want to do. I don’t want other things besides my own selfishness controlling my life. So I looked at Scripture to discover how a person becomes pure in heart, and the notes above are what I discovered. (Or maybe I should say, reaffirmed what I knew already.)