I love preaching. It is my passion. I get up in front of a group of people with a Bible and my “God-stories,” and I am good to go! I think about preaching a lot, and I am always getting new ideas for sermons from reading the Bible or my personal experiences with God. At times I would wrestle through what sermon I should share that night. One night in particular I found myself praying about which message to share. The Holy Spirit’s gentle whisper in my soul was, “Do the Hermit’s Rest talk.” Every time I prayed about which sermon to give, I heard that same whisper. In all honesty, I talked back to God, telling Him, “Seriously? But what about these ideas, these are so good, that Hermit’s Rest one is just mediocre…” But every time I heard: “Do the Hermit’s Rest.” Eventually, I threw up my hands and said, “Okay God. Have it your way. I’ll do it. I’ll do the Hermit’s Rest talk.”

And you know what happened? God used it in a way that I could not have with any of those other sermons on my own. Within the sermon I talk a lot about “Just Jesus” or “Jesus. Period.” In essence, “Jesus plus nothing equals life.”

You do not need to add anything, be it wealth, family, even health. Just Jesus = life.

That is the gist of the sermon. As soon as we ended the service after another worship song, a lady made a beeline for me, and told me, “I just have to tell you, and this is so crazy, the theme of this whole year/summer for me and my husband has been Jesus plus nothing.” Her husband had walked up by that point and nodded. He said, “Yeah, that was for us.” Here I was, trying to do what I thought was a “better” sermon when God knew this couple would be here on this night only and needed to hear this sermon. God is so amazing in how He works and because I obeyed, the Kingdom grew. I could have chosen any one of those other sermons, but thankfully, I did not. I chose to obey, and God chose to use me to be His hands and feet to work in the world.

What an honor to be used by the God who created the Grand Canyon and galaxies.

Melissa W., Grand Canyon National Park, 2015