Phillip Bowen: I wanted to personally thank you for walking with In Touch Ministries this year. Early in my Christian walk, I was shaped by Dr. Stanley’s teaching. I’m sure many of you remember the first time you heard Dr. Stanley when the Holy Spirit spoke directly to a need in your heart. Maybe you were hurting, maybe you were searching, but in that moment, God used His Word to bring hope, peace, or direction.
Today someone else is hearing for the first time, and God is using that moment to speak life, just like He did with you. Dr. Stanley was fond of saying, “The best is yet to come,” and as we look towards the future, we believe that promise still holds true. God is still speaking, people are still listening, and together we’ll keep sharing His truth quickly, clearly, and irresistibly.
We’re humbled to continue Dr. Stanley’s work and blessed to have you with us. Thank you for making In Touch Ministries possible. male announcer: “In Touch,” the teaching ministry of Dr. Charles Stanley. Next on “In Touch,” “The Reach of Our Thanksgiving.” Dr.
Charles Stanley: Have you noticed that oftentimes God in the scriptures will tell us something to do, but He doesn’t tell us how to do it? For example, when He says we’re to be filled with the Holy Spirit, period, no instruction. Or love your enemies. No instruction. Or to walk in the Spirit. In other words, you can just go through the Bible thinking about all the things He commands us to do, but doesn’t give us any instruction.
Now, it used to bother me when I’d think about, well, Lord, if that’s what You want us to do, why don’t You just say one, two, three points, one, two, three, like a message, and tell me how to do it? So I finally figured out why He wouldn’t. Because if He did that, here’s what we would do. We’d come up with some problem in our life, and we’d think, okay, where’s that passage? And then we read what it says, then we’d do the following three things.
We’d close our Bible, we’d say, “I got that one down.” The next thing we came up with, we’d find one with three, four, five points and we’d say, “I got that.” And what would happen is we would only read where we felt there was a need in our life and that there was some answer. And so I finally figured out why He didn’t do that.
