The following is a synopsis of Evangelist Ronald E. Bailey’s message at the Community Lutheran/Voices of Worship “Praise without Walls” service on Saturday April 9 in Sterling Virginia. To obtain more information about Reverend Bailey, contact Felicia Kessel Crawley at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

The main idea of what I attempted to convey is that I believe vis-à-vis my own experiences and what I see going on around me in the Christian realm, is that God is changing the focus of our involvement with Him. This focus involves a shift in how we are fulfilled and sustained and the needs of the world around us. In fact it is not necessarily a new shift in as much as it is a call to return to what we should have always been about from the beginning. It is a return to the need to Go! “Go ye into all the world.” I am not attempting to brow beat the church into missions, but rather to focus on the true meaning of what we are really to be about. Across the body there is a weariness of business as usual, a hunger for greater ‘real’ things in our lives. I believe we arrive at this by abandoning our self-interests, even those that we say are being done for God. Rather we must fervently seek to find out what He is doing and join Him in it. (John Chapter 5…“My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working.”) We run… we get weary and thus empty. We have to ‘go back’, get over our spiritual itch to be ever doing something and learn to get in sync with what He is doing.

I sought to illustrate this in several ways. First I shared my own experience of being led in ministry to actually experience God healing someone of deafness, in totally the ‘Humpty Dumpty was pushed way’. Amazed at that reality I believed I knew where I was going. I ran until I ran out and eventually arrived at a place of great emptiness. At 50 years of age at the height of all my ‘doings’ I was disappointed in the sum of my life ministry endeavors and was led to go back to a place of no plans, titles, assumptions etc. When the page was blanked out, new things began.

For example, I moved into motivational speaking in the business realm, the educational realms etc. I moved in places that I would not have considered before. Little did I know or understand that I was being enlarged and moved into the place I knew not of but that I had thought I understood before. The good that I was doing was preventing me from doing the best that I could do. I was happier and more fulfilled and at odds with ‘the church’ which seems to ever oppose whatever new thing God wants to do!

I love the story of manna as described in Exodus 16 (Then the LORD said to Moses, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions”) and a parallel story of ‘food falling from the sky’ involving Elijah in 1 Kings 17. In both instances the food was meant only for the one who knows God within the limits of the familiar. One was not required to do anything but wait for it and gather it. However while this could become comfortable, it was never meant to be a way of life. It was only for a determined season. One day ‘Elijah’s brook dried up” and manna eventually ceased… all with divine planning and purpose. The change is marked by Jesus’ statement in the New Testament that there were many widows in Israel at the time of the famine but God did not send the prophet to a one of them’. Rather he was sent outside of the land of God’s promises to Zarephath, to a widow woman who had lost hope, whose only vision was to end her existence (Luke 4: Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon). When the prophet, now operating outside of Israel worked miraculously in her behalf, found that not only the problem of his brook having dried up was resolved, but this widow woman’s problem as well. The key is that this all had to happen ‘outside of Israel’.

It was always the heart of God to bless all the earth (not just our church on the corner). As early as Genesis 12 He says to Abram, I have blessed you, I have made you to be a blessing, and through you I will bless all the families of the earth. We must recapture the understanding that we do not live unto and for ourselves, but rather we are conduits of God’s blessing. In Isaiah 11:9, He says “They will neither harm nor destroy on my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.” This is like a ripple that propagates from what is said in Genesis through to the end of the whole of the revealed word of God. If we find ourselves out of sync with this overall working of God we will encounter emptiness and even lack. For there, He commanded the blessing. There is a ‘place’ of blessing and if we are not in it we cannot prosper.

When the children of Israel progressed as far as Jericho, beyond familiar territory, they ate the Passover and ate ‘manna no more’ they ate of the produce of the land. Manna ended. That way of life ended. What we have been about thus far is ending and has ended for many. We stagger in a fog and do not comprehend what is the matter. The cloud has moved and we must follow it. So we must face the reality of change. We must get out of our old church oriented mindsets, abandon ego-centric, ego driven leadership and go out there if we want to survive and grow! We must embrace our God given talents and desires for the building of the larger sense of God’s Kingdom rather than our own sense of church as an end in itself. It is not an end but rather it is a means. This calls for a great deal of breaking and a great deal of changing for God will not compromise His determined plans.

Reverend Bailey had a successful career with IBM spanning 11 years (1977-1988) during which he won recognition as a consistent top performer, excelling in all aspects of marketing. In 1991, Ron was called by the LORD to full-time ministry where he pastured in the US for a period of time. Then, in 1994, the LORD opened up the continent of Africa with successful missionary trips to conduct crusades in many African countries. Before leaving South Africa in 2004, Ron hosted and narrated a powerful evangelistic film, ‘The Lazarus Phenomenon’, dealing with questions of life after death and ultimately presents eyewitness account of the reality of the Gospel. The film, translated in most major languages, has since spanned the globe playing in theatres around the world. Photo is courtesy/VOW Ministries.