EDMOND-When life comes at you hard and breaks everything you know, you could spend the rest of your life in the corner of a dark room or you can let God wrap you in His arms, said Angela Thomas, speaking during the Women’s Session at the State Evangelism Conference.
Thomas, an author and speaker from Tennessee, said in the darkest period of her life when she was going through a divorce, she was looking for the heart of God, but all she felt was judgment.
Using Matthew 5 as her text, Thomas said she thought if you want the blessings of God, you had to be all the things in the beatitudes Jesus presented in the Sermon on the Mount.
“But as the Lord led me into the light, He began teaching a new meaning of Chapter 5,” she revealed. “Jesus, on that hillside, said ‘if you will bring your poor spirit, I will come and I will add the blessing.”
The Lord already knew we would need a Savior, she said. “He wants us to lay the truth of our humanity on the altar.”
The fact that we need God to fill us up with His love has little to do with how much we know about Him, Thomas pointed out.
“If you keep your empty cup on the altar, He will fill you up until you are spilling over,” she said.
Demonstrating with a cup and a bottle of water, Thomas filled the cup, then drank from it as she illustrated the times one needs God’s grace, as she explained the cup has to be filled over and over.
Thomas encouraged the women to use the testimony of their heartaches and brokenness.
“We need to tell the truth of how we didn’t do it right, but how God has made it right,” she said. “As long as you smile and say it is all right, there is no power. Let god take care of the judgment, and let’s share what has been given to us-mercy and grace.”
God is not shocked or mad, but waiting for us to lay it on the altar, she noted.
“What you lay on the altar as ordinary, God will come and cover it with His Glory, wrapping up your pain, embarrassment and heartache, and raise out of it the extraordinary.”
Page Hughes, author of Party with a Purpose, said she is a plain woman who discovered God can use any available vessel.
She said after she took a course in lifestyle evangelism, God showed her evangelism is not up to her.
“He goes ahead and prepares the way,” she said. “It’s not up to you to convict them of sin. The Holy Spirit does the work that saves. As long as the Holy Spirit does all the work, I can do evangelism.”
She said a lot of women are looking for their mission, but God revealed to her that her mission field is whatever she does that day.
“Every conversation can count for eternity,” she asserted.
She said being a pastor’s wife and raising four children, she didn’t have any more time, but God, in his still small voice, said “party with a purpose.”
“I said I could do that,” she revealed. “I went home and planned my first party.”
Hughes said parties are an opportunity to meet new people, talk to them and discover their needs.
“We’ve had people saved, start going to church and begin Bible studies, just because they attended a party,” she said. “I found my mission field was my house. It was my Jerusalem. My neighborhood became my Judea. God wants to use you. It doesn’t matter who you are or what situation you are in. God created you just like you are for a purpose.”
