Always Ready

I never was one to do the annual New Year’s Eve thing and pick out a “year verse.”  I’ve never really done that for a “life verse” either but as I look back over 40 years of vocational Christian ministry I can see that the single verse of Scripture that has really been my “life verse” has been Romans 1:16.  “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes. . .”  Why should any of us be ashamed of the Gospel?  After all, don’t we all tend to be proud of something we have that really works well and does the job, whether it’s a new car, a classic car or a new lawnmower?  I surely wouldn’t be ashamed if I had a Ferrari in a Ford neighborhood!  Relax, it’ll never happen, but you get the point.  I learned early that the Gospel ONLY thing that really works.  So I’ve never been ashamed of it, never felt that I needed to.  It’s always worked.  I’ve been proud to associate myself with the only thing that will outlast myself.
    That has led to a life of ministry that my wife and others have urged me to write about.  For the past 11 years I have been involved with Nursing Home Ministries, Inc. based in Portland, Oregon as a chaplain.  One of my duties was to write a monthly letter letting my financial supporters know what God was doing during the previous month.  Those letters were thank-you notes, activity reports and prayer requests all in one package.  Over those years there have been many people who have prayed with me to receive God’s forgiveness as a gift and been born into His family, the Church.  These stories of new faith are always exciting.  They have been many but they weren’t the first.  This kind of thing has been happening to me ever since God called me to a vocation of Christian ministry.  This book will tell that story.  I hope it will be both an encouragement to you as a reader and a training tool to help you feel more comfortable following the nudges you get from God now and then to talk with someone about their spiritual needs.  
    "Always Ready" is an attempt to share those things in a way that I hope will be helpful to all.  I don’t want to make it seem to anyone that these stories are meant to make me look good or enhance my image.  I am ever mindful that the ministry of personal evangelism is always built on the efforts of all those who have gone before.  I’ll let the Apostle Paul speak for me as recorded in I Corinthians 3:5-9a:  “What, after all, is Apollos?  And what is Paul?  Only servants, through whom you came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task.  I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow.  So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.  We are all just following the Great Commission to make disciples of as many as possible.
    Writing this book as I have planned may be a bit confusing, but I intend to try to do three things at once.  First, because prayer is so essential for the work of bringing individuals to faith in Christ, I will be giving some instruction in helping our prayers be more effective as we pray for each other as Christians and for the five spiritual needs of pre-Christians.  Without prayer our ministries will tend to become more social work and less spiritual work so I’ll focus first on prayer.  Second, I will also give some instruction about the necessary truths pre-Christians need to understand in order to come to faith in Christ as well as bringing the confusions that many have to the light of Scriptural truths.  And third, I will intersperse examples of dozens of people who have come from confusion to understanding, from cynic to seeker and from seeker to saved through the whole process.