How about a fast preview of where we are heading on Sunday? Who knows? This may be better than what comes out during church. Don't remember if I mentioned our working through the book of Isaiah on Sunday mornings. This is part of my trying to stretch my thought process beyond the usual material. Creativity does not come easy for me. Many pastors far better than me are able to create all manner of intriguing themes or titles for their studies. My brain usually just wants to wrap around the biblical material which is fine but the catchy names for these studies become second thoughts. The best that I can do is let you know that my main idea is to talk about ways to get the new year started off right. My approach is to do this by looking through Isaiah at how his listeners got it all wrong.

Two out of the three studies were somewhat easy to outline. One took more thinking to reach a point where the message cleared up some. When you add our recent awful weather on Sundays then you can see how hard it can be. Like I said recently, you would think that God would be sure that Texas has decent weather on church days. We got past the dreariness and tried to relate my discoveries the best we can. This week will be one of those weeks where my mind is having to work out a new study for me. One can only hope that it will be relatively easy to follow or apply. My saying all of this is not meant to give you pause as far as the message goes. It is just my telling you that I am involved in the topic as well.

My week of preparation began with a sense that we needed one more look at the root problems of the people of God in Isaiah. It just seemed to me that my work so far did not fully connect with why this group got so far off track. So my study got underway with Bibles open to read and reflect on what was going on and why. I knew that the second chapter spoke to God's people in that time so it seemed natural that it would speak to ours. Reading the words gave way to thinking about the message. No one would really be surprised to discover that the main issue was pride or arrogance. This is one of the constant themes in scripture. You can find human beings falling out of line with God's best simply because they believe they know better than God. Here is the one train of thought that runs from Genesis to Revelation. We resist God because we just don't think we need Him.

Sunday will hopefully lead us to deal with this very real problem we have with pride. I also plan to talk about how we move past it. Relationships often become fractured due to pride. Maturity will never become a reality until we see our arrogance as genuine sin. God's best can not ever become a pattern of living while we think we know best how to live. What amazes me is how much God does want to help us with this evil to bring us nearer to Him. He invites us to lay down our self imposed limits so we can find wholeness with Him. I know just how much my heart needs this assistance. Maybe we can all uncover the greater presence of God each day.

Bro. Trey