Speaking @ Mount Calvary BC, Jersey City, NJ

Last night I had the expressed privilege of preaching for the 20th Anniversary Celebration of Preaching for one of my good friends in the ministry, Pastor Barron O. Wilson, who leads the Mount Calvary Church where his father Pastored for many years before him. Pastor Wilson is somebody's preacher! He has a heart for people that allows him to reach into the very consciousness of people, to help them see where they truly belong in the Kingdom of God.

There have been many times when I have gone to him for counsel and he has never failed to provide for me the right information and methods that I needed at that time. It was during my first year of preaching and the invitations were few and far between, when Pastor Wilson invited me to stand in his pulpit and present to the people God put him over, my convictions about Jesus Christ. And ever since that day, he has been a big part of my life and my ministry.

I wanted to deal with something that was not a common text for a Pastor's Anniversary. I lifted a great text from Exodus 3:13-14, which I tagged the Remedy For Our Inadequacies. The reality is that no matter who you are, all of us have experienced a real sense of being inadequate on this journey. It matters not if you have been in ministry for 50 years or 5 minutes, there comes a time in our lives where we feel like we just don't measure up to this awesome task that God has presented for us. Moses, that great emancipator, felt the same way while on the backside of a Midianite desert, he hears a voice crying out from a burning bush, telling him to go into Egypt and tell Pharaoh to let God's people go. Moses replied who is he to go and tell this deified being anything, God replied to him, five of the greatest words ever recorded in verse 14, I AM WHO I AM (ESV). Here is the sermon skeleton:

Thesis: our sucess as servants of God rest totally in our complete trust that during moments of inadequacies God will make up the difference

I. Trust in the Evidence of His Existence

-I AM...this phrase literally is defined to mean God is self-existent
-Pharaoh considered himself to be the direct descendent of the Egyptian sun god Rah...in which he feels that he exists because the sun god exists
-God tells Moses to tell Pharaoh that while he needs the sun to exists, the sun needs God to exist
-how do we know God exists:

a. scripture states it
b. scenery suggests it
c. spirit senses it

II. Trust in the Presence of His Personality

-I AM WHO
-God's personality is expressed to many different people in different ways

III. Trust in the Awesomeness of his Authority

-I AM WHO I AM
-God's has the power to accomplish any and everything

Please pray for the family of my Pastor, Joe A. Carter, who are dealing with the loss of their beloved mother Wynona Hutchinson, who went home to be with Jesus on last night. She was an extraordiarily strong woman who survived plenty of heartache in her life, to exemplify what it means to be a wife, mother and a woman of God.