WELCOME TO NEMinistries

God Centred & Spirit- Inspired.

Thank you for visiting this site.Its my sincere desire that you will experience a life-transforming and enriching moment here. I pray that what you find here will not just excite you but challenge you to be more committed to the cause of our Lord Jesus Christ.Before you commence, I want to ask you a question.Are you a missionary christian? Or are you a nominal Christian.Friends, time is running out!!! The Church is living on borrowed time.Its time to reach people for Jesus.You are not saved to wait for heaven to come.You are saved to lead others to the saving knowledge of Jesus.As you keeping going through this site I pray that you will be captivated to be a Missionary Christian. I have included great articles from renowned ministers of God that will challenge you to re-evaluate the way you have lived your life. Thank you and God bless you. Evangelist Ndubuisi Eke

 

   

HANDLING DISAPPOINTMENT

 In MY life and ministry I have often time faced setbacks,difficulties and so on. Being a man of God doesn’t immune me from the challenges of life.They come to all of us.Unfortunately not everybody overcome their circumstances.

Tim Elmore once said,”You will either surrender to your circumstances, or you will surrender to the One Greater that the circumstance will mean nothing.” Therefore,in view of many casulties in life. I have endeavored to help many people whom the Lord will bring across this website to live as champions.

-Evangelist Ndubuisi Eke

 

Below is a Sermon Summary by

Rev. Richard P. Smith

First United Methodist Church Murray, Kentucky

February 12, 2006

SERMON SERIES: HANDLING LIFE’S CHALLENGES

“ON HANDLING DISAPPOINTMENT” (4th in Series)

Psalm 22:1-4; II Corinthians 4:7-9

I think you know that being Christian does not free you from experiencing life’s disappointments. There’s not a one of us here this morning who doesn’t know something about disappointment.

People can disappoint us.

The circumstances of life will most certainly and inevitably disappoint us.

We may disappoint ourselves with our own poor decisions or bad actions.

Sometimes we may feel disappointed with God, when He doesn’t respond to our prayers as we want or need.

Our theme this morning is “handling disappointment.”

But let me be clear. I’m not talking about life’s little disappointments – you know that the weather ruins your plans for the day or that a little slight came your way this past week or that everything this past week didn’t go exactly as you had hoped. No, I’m talking about the great disappointments of life.

A marriage falls apart.

Someone you trusted greatly betrays you.

The job you want or need doesn’t work out.

Your health or the health of a loved one begins to decline.

Promises made to you aren’t kept.

It’s these kinds of disappointments to which I’m speaking this morning.

Let me share four insights around the theme handling life’s great disappointments.

I. NO ONE HANDLES DISAPPOINTMENT PERFECTLY

 Perhaps the most telling example of this truth is Jesus himself. In the gospels of Matthewand Luke we find Jesus exclaiming, as he suffers on the cross, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani. These words in Aramaic, Jesus’ native language, mean, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Most of us are aware that Jesus shouts these words on the cross in the midst of his suffering.What we may not realize is that Jesus was quoting a psalm, the 22^{nd psalm. As a young boy growing up learning the Hebrew scriptures, Jesus was well aware of the many different psalms and the themes to which they spoke. Thus, Jesus could have repeated any number of Hebrew Scriptures while hanging there on that cross. He, for example, could have chosen to have repeated the 121st psalm…”I lift mine eyes unto the hills from whence comes my help,’ a great psalm of comfort and assurance before God. But he didn’t. Instead, he chose the one that most clearly expressed what he felt in his heart, his mind, his spirit. He chose the opening verses of the 22nd psalm. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He felt let down by God. He felt to some extent God had betrayed him. For a few brief moments he was truly disappointed with God.Now that scenario in the gospels of Matthew and Luke is an encouraging one for you and for me. This is Jesus, the Son of God, and yet in those moments he wasn’t handling disappointment well. If Jesus didn’t handle disappointment perfectly, then certainly God understands when disappointment gets to us. Listen, friends, God understands! God understands that we are human beings who have to work through our disappointments over time. Thus, you can be honest with God about your feelings.}

^{God can handle your honest thoughts and feelings.I have had countless persons come to me over my ministry and tell me about the guilt they feel at not being able to bounce back quickly from some great heartache and disappointment. What many of these persons do to themselves is let a second burden settle in – the burden of guilt; guilt at not handling things well, guilt at letting God down, guilt at not being as strong a Christian as they know they ought to be and want to be. It’s bad enough to carry the burden of disappointment; far too often we also carry unnecessarily the burden of guilt. Hey, accept it – no one handles great disappointment perfectly! You don’t; I don’t!}

Now, having said that, let me move, however, to our second point, an important follow-up thought.

II. MOVING BEYOND DISAPPOINTMENT IS A CHOICE

Many of you know the name James W. Moore. Jim Moore is Senior Pastor of St. Luke United

Methodist Church in Houston, Texas. I’ve known Jim Moore for forty years, ever since he was my youth director when I was in high school in Milan, Tennessee. He’s written many books, among them one titled, You Can Get Bitter or Better. What a great title! In that book he writes,

“When trouble comes, when disappointment breaks your heart, when sorrow grips your spirit, you have a choice…you can get bitter or you can get better.”

Let me follow-up on Dr. Moore’s thoughts with my own way of putting it:

You can wallow in your disappointment or you can do something about it and begin to get well, to experience the joy and peace of life once again. It’s your choice.Yes, you’re not going to handle disappointment perfectly. Yes, we struggle sometimes to find our way through the great disappointments of our lives. Yes, we have to watch letting extreme guilt become a second burden in the midst of our disappointment. But there also comes a time when we have to decide whether we’re going to wallow in our disappointment or move on and get better. Every one of us has a choice in the midst of our disappointment

We can wallow in self-pity or we can get up and get going

We can wallow in saying “if only” or we can move on to saying, “Now what?”

We can wallow in despair or we can reach out to God and others and receive the help that can move us onward and upward

We can wallow in sadness or we can eagerly look for the blessings and joy of life that remain in spite of our deep disappointment.

I remember some time ago in another church a man who came to me with a real heartache in his

life. The woman he loved and whom he planned to marry decided to back out of their relationship. He was shattered. More than once he literally wept in my office. I met with him weekly for quite a while, going into several month. After the first couple of sessions, I gave him some spiritual and emotional prescriptions for making it through this difficult time.

I had him write on 3 x 5 cards some key verses in the Bible that offer words of encouragement and hope and told him to keep them on his bathroom mirror and read them every morning and evening;

I gave him the titles of several books that could be helpful at times like this and told him to buy one and we could discuss it together;

I told him that he needed to talk with God even if all he could do was pour out his heart in agony;

I suggested he talk regularly with one of his professional colleagues who had also gone through that same kind of disappointment.

Well, after several weeks, it was clear that he wasn’t making much progress. I pressed him on whether he had done any of the things I had suggested. No, he wasn’t reading the scripture texts. While he had bought the books, he had not read them. No, he wasn’t talking with God. No, he wasn’t talking with anyone else who had been through this kind of difficulty. Finally, I said to him, “Look, I don’t think we need to meet anymore.” He was stunned. “You don’t mean that, do you?” I said, “I most certainly do.” He said, “Why?” And I said, “Because you’re not trying to get better. You’re just wallowing in your pain, your grief, and your misery. Not even God himself can help you get better if you don’t make the choice to do your part to move on. When you’re ready to do your part, let me know and we can begin to help you heal.”

You see, whether we wallow in self-pity and despair or move on toward healing, with God’s help, is our choice! It’s up to us!

III. DISAPPOINTMENT CAN MAKE US WISER AND STRONGER

I said in my sermon on failure that failure was one of the greatest teachers of our lives if we are

willing to learn the lessons failure teaches us. In my sermon on conflict, the second in this series, I said the same thing; there is a lot we can learn amidst the conflicts in our lives. Well, the same is true of disappointment. Disappointments in life, once we’ve worked through them and moved beyond them, have much to teach us about life, about ourselves, and about how we can handle other disappointments that will come our way in life.

The truth is that there’s not a one of us in this sanctuary this morning who would be who we are if it were not for disappointment. Why do we parents allow our children to face disappointment? Why do we let them risk and make certain decisions knowing they are at times definitely going to be disappointed, maybe even greatly hurt? Because we know it will make them stronger. Because we know in the end they will be more mature. Because we know that in the end they will be better persons.Some unknown poet summed this truth up quite well when he wrote:

“For every hill I’ve had to climb,

For every stone that bruised my feet,

For all the blood and sweat and grime,

For blinding storms and burning heat,

My heart sings but a grateful song…

These were the things that made me strong.

For all the heartaches and the tearsf,

For all the anguish and the pain,

And for the hopes that lived in vain,

I do give thanks, for now I know

These were the things that helped me grow.

‘Tis not the softer things of life,

Which stimulate one’s will to strive;

But bleak adversity and strife

Do most to keep one’s will alive.

O’er rose-strewn paths the weaklings creep,

But brave hearts dare to climb the steep.”

You and I certainly would not choose, if we had a choice, to face some of the great disappointments of our lives. But there is not a one of us who isn’t better, wiser, stronger, more mature because those disappointments came our way. As the poet puts it:

These are the things that make us strong

These are the things that help us grow

Look at your life. Isn’t that true? Haven’t you learned a lot about yourself, about others, about life, even about God in the midst of your disappointments? I think so!

A TRIUMPHANT FAITH IS POSSIBLE

Want to know what a triumphant faith is? Well, Paul describes it here in this passage from II

Corinthians.

It is feeling hard pressed but not letting your spirit get crushed

It is feeling perplexed about life’s difficulties and disappointments but not giving into despair

It is feeling persecuted but not letting oneself feel abandoned by God

It is feeling struck down but not letting it destroy our faith and hope.

That’s a triumphant faith and it’s possible for each and every one of us. Believe it or not, you can have a triumphant faith – a faith that stays strong and hopeful whatever life may bring.

How do you get a triumphant faith? Let me suggest some things you must believe, some things you must embrace if you’re going to have a faith that is truly triumphant amidst life’s great challenges and difficulties and disappointments. You give up expecting God to let life always go your way;You accept that disappointment and heartache will come your way;You prepare yourself through prayer, worship, and Bible study to be strong when the time comes;

You believe with all your heart that God can and will bring good out of the worst of circumstances;

You soak up the power of God that comes when you really spend time with Him and when you open your life up to His divine presence.

I wish for each of you that kind of faith!!!

2008 is ‘the year of breaking out’

“Breaking out of ordinary living to extra-ordinary living, out of self-comfort to total abandonement to His Will in reaching the lost.Opportunity will increase next year for the Church to affect the world.We must be set for the move of the Spirit this coming year”.

This will Change your Life

Zero Gravity Thinking.By Pastor Paul Scanlon

Genesis 1:1 records that, ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’. He then went on to create people in his ‘image and likeness’, passing on to them something of his creative nature1. How then is it, that the God of all creation has ended up with a church which is, by and large, non-creative? Sadly, much of the church today could actually be described as being anti-creative rather than creative; it is resolutely resistant to new ideas and change.

To remain relevant we must remain creative. Without creativity our churches will look, sound, feel and be the same ten years from now. And standing still in our twenty-first century world will show up much quicker than at any previous time in history. We live in a fast moving, technological world that makes anything which is not moving appear obsolete overnight.

Creativity Is Not A Gift
Creativity is not a gift just given to certain ‘arty’ types of people. Neither is it a personality type, a particular kind of event or a notable work of art. Creativity is our God given nature; the creator of the universe has downloaded himself into people. Creativity is within our special DNA code; we are all creative by divine nature. We may not all be expressing it, but we already have it. Often, the unsaved are far more expressive of their innate sense of creativity than the church. But when we were born again, our fallen nature was redeemed, and with it our creativity, which was restored back to usefulness for God.
The Church must hear this and accept her responsibility to build creative, innovative, relevant churches that connect with their communities. Innovation is vital to the success of our churches, businesses and ministries. New ideas are our future. Our problem, however, seems to be that the burden of what we know is so huge, it limits what we can imagine. Our greatest challenge isn’t what we don’t know, but what we do know, and that stifles our ability to receive new ideas. We form unhealthy emotional attachments to methods, customs, traditions and styles and see ourselves as custodians of these sacred things. We get confused between form and essence and go to war with each other over hymn books, pews, choir robes, the King James Version and the removal of the church organ. And just in case we in ‘newer’ churches are thanking God that this is not true of us, we also go to war over our newer equivalents of these things. When we confuse form with essence we fight for things God doesn’t even care about. Thousands of churches have split over disagreements about form while completely missing the essence of reaching lost people.

The Two Roadblocks To Innovation
Innovation is the application of a new idea that results in a valuable improvement. This definition protects us from people thinking that innovation is just lots of useless ideas. If it can’t be used to improve what we do, it’s not truly innovative.

There are two massive roadblocks to innovative thinking. They are so huge that most people, and even fewer churches, ever get past them. They are group-think and expert-think.

• Group-think is the power of what most people around us think. It’s the crowd or herd mentality. It was group-think that had Jesus figured as being either Elijah, an Old Testament prophet, or John the Baptist.2

• Expert-think is what the experts around us think. It is group-think on steroids!

These two innovation killers pin us down under the huge weight of what’s already known, thereby disabling us from thinking beyond what everyone already knows but which is not working. Democratically run churches can be paralysed by the power of group-think, as can policy run businesses that have forgotten that they exist to serve people rather than their policies. Certain airlines come to mind, but I won’t go there!

Group-Think
Our group can be many things: our nationality, age group, home group, church denomination, interest group, economic group etc. The point is that the weight of evidence suggests that we are all hardwired to conform, fit in and be accepted by the group; to maintain the status quo. And even more so if our jobs, salaries, opportunities and friendships depend on us fitting in with the group. In these cases we are even more likely to keep quiet when progress demands that someone speaks up.

In the Star Trek movies they once encountered the nearest life-form to the church you could ever meet. They were called the Borg; a mindless, group-think, collective consciousness. There was no individuality, no personal identity and no independent thought; ‘all must assimilate to the Borg’ was their mantra. Again, certain airline staff co me to mind here, but I must move on!

Following the collapse of the American company Enron in 2001, it was stated in the enquiry report that everyone became mindless conformists once inside the Enron boardroom. What’s really shocking about this is that Enron’s board consisted of highly successful business leaders, professors and former senior politicians. If people of that calibre could surrender to the power of clearly faulty group-think, we are all vulnerable. Group-think doesn’t just affect weak-minded, easily intimidated people. I think I’m a pretty strong-minded independent thinker, but group-think affected my life for years.

Expert-Think
Expert-think is seen in our overwhelming inclination to align ourselves with the boss or the expert or the best known way of doing things. It’s like group-think but on steroids, because experts don’t even need to be present to shut down new ideas. Someone we respect just quoting what the so-called experts say can immediately stifle creativity.

I’m not against expertise. I’d rather have an expert operating on me than a novice surgeon, and rather an expert lawyer than one fresh out of law school. The problem is that all experts approach life with certain fixed mindsets. The advantage of this is that they know how to react, almost without thinking, in complex situations. The disadvantage is that a fixed mindset is resistant to questioning, especially from non experts. I recently read a shocking statement that said the biggest killer currently in America is doctors. The point of the article being that doctors are experts and people don’t think to question either their diagnosis or the prescriptions they are given to take.

Zero Gravity Thinking
A zero gravity thinker is a person who has broken free from the weight and huge downward pull of group-think and expert-think. These innovative thinkers defy gravity by escaping from underneath the burden of what we already know. Zero gravity thinkers help us to reset the gravity levels in our team, church or business by helping us to attain a degree of weightlessness in our thinking. Whilst we welcome gravity in the physical world, we should not welcome it in our mental world. Gravity’s job is to keep everything and everyone down, but what if the idea you need is up?

‘Fix your mind on things above, not on earthly things’ exhorted the apostle Paul3. Because God wants to do ‘immeasurably more’ than we can imagine4. Isaiah tells us that ‘God’s thoughts are not our thoughts’ but far higher5. But the more stuff we accumulate mentally, the bigger the weight of gravity anchoring it down.

The Emperor’s New Clothes
Do you remember the story of the Emperor’s new clothes? Everyone was told that only the most loyal subjects would be able to see the king’s new clothes. As the king paraded through the streets everyone shouted how fine and grand he looked, until he passed a small boy. This little boy shouted out what everyone knew but dare not say: ‘The king is in the all together; he’s naked!’ The story goes that the king fled indoors because he also knew the truth, but had allowed the two ‘expert’ tailors, who were really swindlers, to deceive him.

This story carries a powerful insight about the nature of zero gravity thinkers. They are people with some psychological distance and mental separation from what everyone else is too close to. The boy in the story was outside of the social pressure to appear loyal to the king. He didn’t care what others thought and wasn’t part of any group he didn’t want to upset.

It’s very difficult to keep mental distance from things that we do everyday and it becomes more difficult the longer we do them. When Jesus said to the crowds in his sermon on the mount, ‘You have heard it said… but I say to you’ 6, he was resetting the gravity levels established generations ago on thinking about murder, adultery, divorce, keeping your word, treatment of your enemies, etc. Jesus spent most of his public life challenging old group-think and expert-think strongholds in order to make way for both his new wine and his new wineskin, the church.

The Jethro Factor
Jethro was Moses’ father-in-law and his visit to Moses, when camped at Sinai in the wilderness, is recorded in Exodus. We read, ‘The next day Moses took his seat to serve as judge for all the people and they stood around him from morning till evening. When his father-in-law Jethro saw all that Moses was doing for the people he said, “What is this you are doing for the people? Why do you alone sit as judge, while all these people stand around you from morning till evening?”’ 7

Apparently no one had ever asked the great Moses why he did it that way? Moses’ answer was a classic expert-think answer when he basically said, ‘I’m Moses; this is what I do. When people don’t know God’s will or have a dispute they come to me and I give them the answer’. Jethro basically said, ‘That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, this is gonna kill you and the people!’ Then he proceeded to give Moses a zero gravity thinking solution to his problem. Jethro had psychological separation from Moses’ world. He wasn’t a Hebrew, he wasn’t a leader under Moses and best of all, he wasn’t staying. We desperately need people like this in our world, people who can look at what we do and see with ease how it could be done better or smarter. These zero gravity thinkers are the key to keeping our churches, businesses and ministries innovative and relevant.
I thank God for every Jethro who has visited my church and had the confidence and gravity-free perspective to ask me ‘why?’ about various things in our ministry. Sadly, many pastors are too threatened and insecure to welcome a Jethro and so, like Moses, continue to wear both themselves and the people out.

Do you want your church, business and ministry to still be useful to God ten years from now? If so, you must commit to growing a creative life, and to sustain a creative life you must become a zero gravity thinker.

1 Genesis 1:26
2 Matthew 16:13-14
3 Colossians 3:2
4 Ephesians 3:20
5 Isaiah 55:9
6 Matthew 5:21-22
7 Exodus 18:13-14