Pastor's Corner - a message from Pastor Ross Kershaw

   “I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust in him.  Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit.”  [Romans 15:13]
   I was recently reading in my devotional that ‘God desires to fill us to the brim with joy and peace.  But to receive it, we need to have faith in the God who is trustworthy and who says anything is possible through him.  When you begin to fell discouraged, exhausted, and at the end of your rope, stop; go before the throne of grace and recall God’s faithfulness.’
   A good memory for the “good” is a powerful tool for living.  I keep a file of the good things that have happened to me.  It is filled with successes, “God-sightings”, kudos, and things like that.  The reason I keep it is because my mind will naturally get overwhelmed when things are difficult.  It seems like a natural human instinct to pull up the problems of the past, past failures, moments of defeat.  Whatever is going wrong today gets compounded by everything that has gone wrong in the past.  When I get into one of those times I reach for my file and remind myself of everything that has gone right.  It is one way that I help myself to ‘go before the throne of grace and recall the faithfulness of God.”
   Our joy and peace are multiplied when we trust God with every situation.  God wants us to see each difficult situation as yet another opportunity to allow our Great God to intervene with grace and strength, wisdom and hope. 
   Paul, in Romans 5:3-5, says, “And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” 
   In the midst of life may we find ourselves filled with hope and joy through the power of the Holy Spirit, so we can be a beacon of hope to those around us.
Blessings,
 
​Ross