Follow-Up on the Recent Heart Change (Glory to the Lord)

Almost a couple months ago, I posted about the Lord's humbling me and softening my heart toward my home church. It is time to follow up. I requested prayer before I returned home that I would love my home church. Now my time at home is over, and I sit it the cafeteria at Southern Seminary with good news.

I think I wrote before about how I was thankful for my home church for the first time in a long while. Everyone of Meadow Heights was gracious to me. I was moved when one of our pastors invited my sister and me to join them at the Global Leadership Summit, expenses paid and transportation provided. That same pastor took us to lunch at the nicest restaurant in town. I was able to sit down with our lead pastor as well. I was able to talk to brothers and sisters on Sundays and observe their enthusiasm for the Lord and His mission. I listened to the teachings and heard the gospel--no critical spirit to cover my ears.

When I think back to my attitude, thoughts, and words prior to humility, I am ashamed. I learned firsthand the deceitfulness and blindness of pride. C.J. Mahaney's Humility: True Greatness helped me better understand this heinous sin and to learn ways to cultivate humility and thus guard against my tendency to become proud.

Temptation did come. Opportunity to criticize and think loftily threatened my newly-established care for Meadow Heights. But because the Lord Jesus had worked a change in my heart, I resisted and focused more on MH's strengths (evidences of grace) than on weaknesses (needs of adjustment).

I experience freedom since the Lord's humbling me to pray for MH, to rejoice with their rejoicing, to weep with their weeping, to truly worship with them, and to enjoy their fellowship. I could not do these things before, at least not from pure heart. I've also missed them for the first time in a long while.

I want to take this opportunity now to commend their mission-mindedness and love for their communities (the Parkland). The Lord Jesus is using them to introduce the talking and walking gospel to thousands of people. They truly love those they serve, believers and unbelievers alike, being active in their love for Jesus. The leaders realize the responsibility and feel its weight and are earnestly seeking the Lord's will and desiring His presence. As Pastor Bryan has been referencing lately, Exodus 33:15-17 says,

"And [Moses] said to [the LORD], 'If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here. For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people? Is it not in your going with us, so that we are distinct, I and your people, from every other people on the face of the earth?'

"And the LORD said to Moses, 'This very thing that you have spoken I will do, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.'"

Thank God that He has humbled again, softened my heart again, and enabled me to love Meadow Heights. I am called elsewhere and cannot participate in the work, but I look forward to hearing about what the Lord does in them and through them.