There Are No Volunteers by Pastor Melissa Scott
There are no “volunteers” in the Kingdom. On every level, this is the commitment. It is morally wrong to subject any child in Sunday school to a teacher who thinks he is doing God a favor to teach. There is no such thing as “your work” and “His work.” You are either His 100 percent or you are not His, and it is all His. You have no family: you raise your family for His glory. You don’t have a business: you are a steward managing your business for Him. You don’t have a career or a future: you are His to command! There is no church that is mine or yours; it is His.
God will have nothing less than all of you. And that God would take such stuff on which to build His Kingdom as typified in the Adullamites and illustrated in the disciples tells me that it means a lot to Him to have 100 percent. He will start over with such as these, like the parable Jesus told of a certain man who made a great supper and sent invitations. And all those invited made excuses. One had a wife, another had a yoke of oxen to look at, another had a piece of ground. The man said to his servant, “Bring in the lame and the halt.” (Luke 14:16-24) When God calls, He wants all of you; that is a serious side of this message.
In Christ Jesus by Pastor Melissa Scott
Can you be a Christian and not be in Christ? No. It doesn’t work that way, and it sounds very fundamental to you because you’ve been taught. But if you are not in Christ, if Christ is not in you, you’re not a Christian. You may be believing. There may be other religions that have good founders and good prophets, but there’s only one Person on the stage of history in all the eons of time who said He’d do what He was going to do. He was going to come, He was going to lay down His life, and He would raise up. He did just that for you and for me, made good on it.
There’s only one that made that promise and did it and actually, by many infallible proofs, appeared, so that’s the One I’m choosing, “in whom.” It’s not, by the way, a choice – He chose me – but in my human mind, “In whom, in Christ Jesus.” Let me do the Spanish first. I like the Spanish because it doesn’t mess around. En el cual tenemos, “we have,” la redención por su sangre, “by His blood,” la remisión de los pecados, según las riquezas de su gracia. I like it. I really like it more than all the Latin languages because it is very simplistic. It gets to the point. It does even more so than the English because we have the tendency with the King James English Anglicized deliverance of the words. The Spanish just gets right to the point, and I want to look at the Greek for a minute. “In whom we have….” You know why I like the Greek. This is the only real verb in the whole sentence.