A Note from Pastor Bruce - August 6, 2026

Dear Church Family:

In the fall of my senior year of High School, I returned to Christ after several years of pursuing my own interests.  This change of my life’s direction came suddenly and unexpectedly.   Accompanying my prayer for God to forgive my sins was a newfound desire to fulfill God’s purpose for my life.  Having experienced personally and powerfully Christ’s merciful forgiveness and reconciling love, my deepest desire was to know the will of my Savior and Lord for my life and to follow the Holy Spirit’s leading wherever that would take me.

I would like to say that my path forward thereafter was straight and that I never wavered from it.  Not true.  The old hymn, “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” reflects the painful truth and our deepest yearning: “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love; here’s my heart, O take and seal it...for thy courts above.” (UMH 400).  To be a Christian is to be transformed from a wandering sinner to a Christ-centered saint, and this transformation takes a lifetime.  But God knows well our weaknesses and our wanderings and shows us “steadfast love” as we learn to travel on His holy way.  Methodists call this process sanctification, the lifelong work of the Holy Spirit in us to remake us in the image of God, to make us to be like Christ, the Father’s image of perfect love.  

To follow in the way of Christ the Lord involves both inward transformation and outward obedience.  Even as the Holy Spirit transforms our will and desires to conform to God’s loving purposes, the same Spirit teaches us to listen and discern the sometimes-mysterious ways of God.  Following faithfully in the way of Christ requires cultivated sensitivity to the voice of the Holy Spirit.  Sometimes the Spirit’s voice is “still and small,” like a dove, and can be discerned only through the Christlike disciplines of silence, prayer, study, and meditation, a heart and mind fully open and available to the Spirit.  But at other times, the Spirit may be more like fire of Pentecost, that interrupts our plans with cleansing purpose and energizing power.  

In our weekly study of Acts, we are being introduced to the many ways the Holy Spirit worked in and through the early Christians to make possible the taking of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the world.  And we are recognizing the need to give devoted attention to the gracious but mysterious ways of the Spirit that are not ours.  On Paul’s second missionary journey, Luke records how Paul and his companions intended to go west into Asia, but the Holy Spirit refused them.  After traveling a little further, it seemed good to them to turn north to Bithynia, but once again “the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them” (Acts 16:6ff).  What is going on here?  How did these earnest missionaries know that the Holy Spirit was in no uncertain terms saying “no” to their considered plans?  As we keep reading, Luke reveals what these faithful followers of Jesus could not yet see, for in a dream, Paul has a vision of a man from Macedonia “pleading with him, “Come over and help us” (16:9).  At that point, Paul and his companions immediately reroute their plans to Macedonia being “convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them” (vs.10).  The Spirit’s vision-led call and the disciples’ obedient recalculating of their plans would take them to Philippi, the conversion of Lydia, and new gospel fruit that would produce Paul’s beloved letter to the Philippians and open whole new visitas for the mission of Christ to reconcile the world to the triune God.    

Still today, sometimes Christians give testimony to dramatic changes the Holy Spirit brings in their disciples’ path, the necessary “No” that redirects them to the Spirit’s “Yes,” the unexpected place where they are more needed in the mission of the risen Lord Jesus.  The Spirit’s “No” is not the last word, but more like, “Not here...but there.”  As our discussion this week reminded us, those who would respond in faith to the Spirit’s leading must learn also to seek and recognize the Spirit’s voice.  Only the mind and heart fully open to God’s grace will hear the Spirit’s gentle voice or discern the Spirit’s dramatic No and Yes.  Only the church that is committed to seeking the leading of the Spirit of Jesus above all else will find its true purpose in the Lord’s service.

Have you ever felt like the Holy Spirit was blocking your preferred way of serving the Lord?  Or maybe speaking to you through a vision or dream?  Do you recognize the Lord’s “No” and “Yes” in your life?  And what about the church?  Do you, like me, suspect that in this post-Christian age, the church’s first priority is not a new program or rebranding, even less an effort to make ourselves more comfortable or appealing to the world, but rather the need to cultivate among us the practices of silence, prayer, study, meditation, and worship that will better enable us to discern God’s will for our fellowship and mission in outward service to Christ the Lord?  The good news is that such commitment doesn’t require money or consultants or Billy Graham in the pulpit, but only Jesus’ disciples who hunger above all else to know the Lord’s will and to follow the Spirit’s leading.  Many of us began there.  By the sanctifying grace of the Spirit, we can be again.  And no matter how we may have wandered, the Lord is only a humble prayer away from beginning again the process of renewing us in inward faith and outward obedience.       

The world is crying out for the help that only the triune God can give, and we are all called to Christ’s ambassadors.  Let us all pray to heed and obey the Spirit’s divine No and Yes that we may become ever more fruitful in the spread of the gospel here and now.  

From This Week at Pender, August 6, 2026

Pastor Bruce

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