Dear Family-

I pray that your Christmas season was a time of blessed refreshment and meditation upon Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. He has blessed us tremendously over the holidays. Many of you were praying for issues within our family. Praise!! The Lord has begun His work of restoration and healing between us and some other members of our immediate family. These particular relationships were the ones that were the most broken and seemed the hardest to reconcile. God has convicted us about our willingness to lay ourselves aside for the sake of unity and be restored to others. Only God’s grace and mercy could restore such brokenness! When we do things His way, He is faithful and most certainly honors us.

As we begin the New Year, we will be seeking our funding in earnest.
This whole aspect of ministry has been hard for me, Sarah, to accept. It has felt very ‘sales-like’ and detached from “real” ministry. I have also struggled with feeling unworthy of support and wanting to be able to support ourselves. Through much prayer, the Lord has revealed these feelings to be idolatry on my part. Instead of focusing on Him, I have been focusing on myself. Of course I am not worthy; of course I am not able…but He is! Giving to the Lord’s work is a completely vertical transaction. Being in full-time service to His work puts us in a place of receiving completely vertically. The Lord Jesus Christ, as part of his earthly ministry, put himself in a place of humility by being dependent on the support of others. (Luke 8:2-3) If our Lord has been obedient in this way, then most certainly, so should I.

Please pray this month that God will put a fire within us to love the Lord our God with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind. (Matthew 22:37-38) Pray that this love would spill over and be manifested to those around us as we seek to love our neighbor as ourselves. (Mt 22:39) We desire opportunities to witness to others and to disciple young believers in the faith. Ask that God would place those people into our path and that we would discern the voice of the Holy Spirit in knowing when and what to speak. For Scott, please pray that he would be focused enough to continue to be committed to his job while his heart is pulled elsewhere; for Sarah, that she would manage her time well in running the home, educating the children, and serving in many other ways outside the home. Please pray for protection for our family and particularly for those relationships that are beginning to heal. Of course, we also need to begin bringing in support. Please pray for God’s provision and that we would not take our eyes and hearts off of Him, but trust Him completely to equip us, as He has called us.

Thank you for your prayerful support. We are humbled by your willingness to lift us up day by day. We pray that you will grow in your love for God this year, and that you will come to know what is the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge and be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:18-19)

As always, please let us know how we can be praying for you. We are honored to remember you in our prayers: just another way that we can keep our eyes upon the Lord!

In His Service,