Years ago, I heard my friend Jim Wideman say in a conference workshop that God didn’t give us a brain to use for memory. Our brain was placed inside of our head for creativity. God gave us the tools to assist us with our memory. To that, I’ll say a great big, hearty amen!
I took what Jim said to heart. I was tired of reading a book and discovering powerful thoughts only to have them vanish from my brain within minutes of completing my reading. I would even highlight and make annotations in the book’s margins and not be able to tell you more than two or three thoughts the next day. (Don’t judge me with that high and mighty look of disgust on your face. If you are honest, you will admit that you constantly face the same dilemma.) And, to further add to my frustration, with the vast number of books in my library, it was almost impossible to locate which book might contain the quotation or story. Rather than to continue to bury these riches in the sea of forgetfulness, I came up with a great solution. I created Excel spreadsheets and Word documents with categories such as Divine Healing, Miracles, Faith, Joy, Holy Spirit, Book of Acts Norms, Prayer, etc. and entered these quotations and stories and their source (book title, author, publication information, and page number) so that I can document and later retrieve these rich nuggets. Doing so has been an enormous, invaluable blessing in my personal walk with Christ and a gigantic help for speaking and writing.
These riches are just too good to keep to myself. I want to make these nuggets from my files available to you. So, from time to time, I will publish a “From My Files” blog post with these quotation or powerful stories with full documentation. For example, the next post will be “From My Files – D.L. Moody” with a powerful story taken from The Wonderful Career of Moody and Sankey: In Great Britain and America written by Robert Boyd, D.D. back in 1875. It’s a story that I seriously doubt that you have read or heard before. A future post will be “From My Files – John Wesley”. In this post, I will share from Reflections from the Writings of the Rev. John Wesley and Advice to a People Called Methodist about Wesley’s distaste of religion and his hunger for the Holy Spirit. Later, I will share a powerful story that I read years ago in an early Assemblies of God Pentecostal Evangel about the Holy Spirit moving mightily in the early days of the Salvation Army. This should be enough to whet your appetite to read these future blog posts.
Until we connect again, remember “TODAY is the day of the Holy Ghost!”
I can’t wait to read them all.
Have to say that one of my favs was dressed in the fashions of heaven. Such a beautiful analogy and I actually used this as part of the teaching that the Lord and I did on Putting on the whole armor. I love love His Word and by His Spirit the young adults are doing a phenomenal job teaching through the consistent gatherings we have on Tuesday evenings. And on Mondays after school IMAGINE ME study, they never want to leave !!! It’s awesome what God is doing as we just speak His Word in love and truth. My son Matt and Heather did a message the other night on soul and spirit that was just fabulous. I will send it to you via WhatsApp. I love ya so much and Happy New Year and much love sent from me to Vicki.