I did attend an institute of ministry called Rhema Bible Training Center in Tulsa, Ok. but did not finish.  I got hired by a church after my first year and never returned to finish up my degree.  Because I don’t have a degree I have always felt like a less than and that I didn’t know enough.  The real problem with this thinking is that I have always felt like I have had to make up my inadequacies by outworking everyone else.  I told my pastor and mentor Randy Bezet one day that a lot of people are smarter, better looking, more educated and have more potential but it is really hard to beat someone in life who doesn’t sleep.  I have made it my mission to outwork anyone and by doing that I can beat anyone.  The thing that you don’t realize when you outwork everyone is that you truly sacrifice other areas of your life.

I would say that there have been times that I have had an affair on my wife.  It was never with a person but with my work.  There were times when I loved my job more than I loved her.  There were times that I would sacrifice for the church but would not budge for her.  All because of my insecurity in feeling less than I would hurt the one person who thought I was a more than.

I am totally not qualified by peoples standards to be a pastor of a church, but I am qualified by God’s.  That is the thing that I had to learn.  I had to learn that he was the one that called, qualified, and equipped not some person or institution.  I had to learn that my greatest and first ministry started first and foremost in my home with my wife, who is my partner.  I am so thankful for an amazing woman that I get to do life with everyday who I love more than life itself.

God doesn’t call the qualified, He qualifies the called.

Right now at Coastal Community Church we are in a series called UNWRITTEN, and in this series we are discovering the vision that God has for the different areas of our life.  I believe that it is going to be an incredible series of vision and revelation for people to discover what God still wants to do in their life.  One of the things that I have discovered in life is that God has a purpose for us, but there is a process to get to the purpose and the process is the point.

I am really enjoying the freedom that is coming from this confessions of a pastor series of blogs.  This is the process that God has me in to experience His freedom and presence.  I am falling in love with this verse in James 5:16

“Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.  The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.”

It seems like the more that I get things off my chest the easier it has been to communicate with God.  I can finally see why the prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.  That person is not trying to hide anything from God, isn’t dealing with the guilt of concealment, and does not feel the burden of their mistakes.  There is so much freedom in confession but yet we stray away from it, why?  Why would we want to live outside of God’s presence when we can live in it.