Last week was one of the most difficult weeks I’ve experienced in some time. We’re in the middle of our Kickstarter fundraising campaign for Leap 3 at the moment (and not doing too well either) so Satan has already been coming after me and trying to get me down. Bringing up issues from my past that I thought had long been burried, telling me that it’s useless to make a movie like this, that I need to make the normal Christian drama if I want success, and hammering on the fact that I really want the companionship of a wife and eventually a family. Last week, it was all the above, but times ten.
I believe the reason was that I was finally asked to preach at church yesterday, so last week was spent preparing. So now, I’m not only making a movie the devil hates, but I’m preaching the Great Controversy theme which exposes how he works. I spent most of the week feeling inadequate and unqualified to be taking the pulpit on Sabbath. The spiritual battle was intense. At one point, I even considered stepping down. I mean, who am I to preach to a congregation? But, I knew that God had called me and opened the doors for me, so I needed to do it regardless.
Nerves and stage fright had nothing to do with it, I’m quite comfortable speaking in front of people and I rather enjoy it. It literally wasn’t until five minutes before I walked up front Sabbath morning that I finally felt God’s Spirit and I knew it would all work out. Not only did it work out, but went better than I imagined it could.
I had a few technical issues with my clicker but the presentation went smooth and afterwards people told me how much they got out of it. When this started to happen, I remembered something that Christian Berdahl had told me over the summer: When people praise him for his singing or preaching, he always redirects the glory to God. So I did the same. I had nothing to do with the preaching, I just asked God to use me. So when people told me what they thought, I’d say, “Praise God”, or “Praise the Lord”. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge adrenaline junkie, I love getting the juice going. Let me tell you, I have had some good rushes in my life but few come close to the rush of preaching the Gospel. It was incredible and I’m hooked. I pray that God opens up more opportunities for me to preach. Even if I’m under spiritual attack the whole time, it’s worth it.
I had set up one of my video cameras in the corner and recorded the sermon with the intent of adding the nice audio recording and the exported PowerPoint slides to the final video to upload to my site. It took just a few hours, rendered last night and uploaded this morning. Since I had stolen the message from Pastor Ivor, I tagged him in the video on facebook. He then shared it on his wall and I had two more shares come from there. On top of that, one guy started messaging me and we got to talking. Turns out that he has a dropbox account full of presentations he’s collected from speakers or put together himself. I sent him my version of “The Blueprint”, as well as “The Beast and the Mark”. I had a few new youtube subscribers come through too.
Overall, this experience was fantastic and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Here’s the sermon that’s going around on facebook now.
