Lazy summer days were interrupted when my father announced to my brothers and me that our house needed a fresh coat of paint, and we would be the ones to meet that need. He had come home on a lunchbreak with several buckets of paint, three brushes, and a roller. Since our house was old and we were painting outside, his painting lesson lasted about fifteen minutes before he left again for work. We managed, over the next week, to cover every inch of the exterior—and plenty of grass and sidewalk—with paint.
A few years later, I signed on with the custodian of our church who was making extra money as a painter in the evenings. He was a skilled painter. The skills he passed along to me were significantly more advanced than dad’s tutorial. In fact, my mentor eventually handed me his business. Keeping it in the family, I recruited my old painting partners, my brothers, and we literally “painted the town,” that is, many of the houses and buildings in the small town we called home.
No matter how confident we become in ministry and sharing the gospel, we must always maintain a dependence on Him through prayer.”
As we learn a new skill, we get progressively more self-reliant the more we hone that skill. That’s a good thing in every area but one: we should never lose our dependence on God in any area of our lives. No matter how confident we become in ministry and sharing the gospel, we must always maintain a dependence on Him through prayer. Jesus’s followers model that for us in Acts 4.
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