Pastor Mickey

Zanzibar is an old city in East Africa. A city with an unfortunate past. It is filled with ornate architecture, and it is the home of the Swahili Institute, the official guardians of the Kiswahili language. But, for nearly 300 years it was the home of something else. It was the home of one of East Africa’s largest slave markets. But, something happened in Zanzibar. About 150 years ago a single man walked out of the interior of Africa with a message of liberation and a determination to announce that message to those who were bound by slavery. That man’s name was David Livingstone. Even today, the name of David Livingstone commands deep respect in East Africa. Today, in Zanzibar, a Christian Church rises on the very site of the former slave market, and the platform holding up the high altar of the church is the very same platform that for 300 years displayed slaves as they were being auctioned off to Arab slave traders. This is a picture of how God wants to redeem your life. He will meet...

Approximately 250 years after Jesus was born in Bethlehem, there was a priest by the name of Valentine who lived in Rome. At that time, Claudius was the Emperor of Rome. Some people called him Claudius the Cruel. St. Valentine didn’t like Emperor Claudius, and he wasn’t the only one! Claudius wanted a large army, and tried to get men to volunteer to join. Many men just did not want to leave home and go off to fight in wars. They did not want to leave their girlfriends and wives, so, not many men volunteered for the Roman army. This made Emperor Claudius very angry. He had a crazy idea that if men were not married, they would be more inclined to join his army. So Claudius decreed that there would be no more marriages. Young people thought his new law was really cruel. Valentine thought it was ridiculous! One of his favorite duties as a priest was to marry people. After Emperor Claudius passed his law, Valentine kept on performing marriage ceremonies in secret. He would whisper the wor...

I. Is God only good when the outcome is? When the cancer is in remission, we say “God is good.” When the pay raise comes, we say “God is good.” When our team wins, we believe “God is good.” When the bank account is in the black…we say, “God is good”. But what about when the circumstances are different? Is God still good when you’re in the cemetery? The ICU? In the unemployment line as well as the grocery line? In days of recession as much as in days of provision? Is God always good? II. God is always good. Joseph, our Old Testament character study in this series was an interpreter of dreams. God gave him dreams as just a child, and from the Prison, he was summoned to tell the meaning of Pharaohs’ dreams…Maybe Joseph’s words to Pharaoh will offer some help here . “But afterward there will be seven years of famine so great that all the prosperity will be forgotten and wiped out. Famine will destroy the land. The famine will be so terrible that even the memory of the good years w...

Life on the bottom… We go through most of life at mid-altitude. Occasionally, we hit a high peak- a wedding, a graduation, the birth of a grandchild, but most of life is at mid level..carpools, recipes, and expense reports… But sometimes the world bottoms out. The housing market crashes, test results comeback positive, or a close friend turns out to be not so close. We all know what the bottom looks like. It’s smelly, cold, lonely. Painful. In Joseph’s case, he discovered what the auction block of Egypt felt like. He had been thrown into a pit, sold into slavery, transported 750 miles from home, and then was poked, examined for fleas, and pushed like an animal onto the auction block.. then an Egyptian officer, Potiphar (head of security for Pharoah) bought him. He didn’t speak the language, couldn’t eat the food, was forced to work hard in a foreign culture. Surely he would turn to addictive behavior, anger or depression, right? WRONG! I. God was with Joseph. "The...

I. The Pit Gen. 37:23-25 NIV “So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe—the ornate robe he was wearing— and they took him and threw him into the cistern. The cistern was empty; there was no water in it. As they sat down to eat their meal, they looked up and saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead. Their camels were loaded with spices, balm and myrrh, and they were on their way to take them down to Egypt.” Joseph’s pit came in the form of a cistern. Yours came in the form of a diagnosis, a foster home or a traumatic injury. Joseph was thrown into a hole and despised, through no fault of his own. Maybe you were thrown into an unemployment line & forgotten…a divorce & betrayed, or into a bed & abused. In the pit, life is reduced to one goal- to get out and never get hurt again. But that’s easier said than done. The Pit doesn’t have an easy way out! Maybe like Joseph, you have taken “An Unexpected Tumble”. Then this series is for you! ...