Father, thank you for the opportunity to spend these moments

with these brothers and sisters in Christ.

Thank you for these testimonies.

Thank you for the way at which you're at work

at the U of M and surrounding campuses here,

and among young adults, especially college students.

Father, would you pour fuel on the flame?

I pray that your Holy Spirit would descend in great power on the campus

and burn with the flame of your word and be fed by prayer and the fellowship of bodies like this.

Thank you for salt. Thank you for this church. And would you bless our few moments here tonight?

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

While I was at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina,

may be one of the most significant passages for me in orienting my approach to God and to the Bible and to prayer and to church

and Christian fellowship was Isaiah chapter 55 and I would love to just linger in the whole chapter

chapter but I just want to start with the first few verses of Isaiah 55.

And what I hope here is to talk about a way that we would approach God's word

and a way that we would approach prayer that has the mood or the tone of Isaiah 55.

So Isaiah 55 starts like this. At this point, it is an amazing thing.

God is playing street vendor in Isaiah 55. You've ever seen a street vendor? They've got to

have them at the U of M, right? Somebody's calling out like, you know, get your Coke Kola, get your

cookies, get your water, whatever. They're calling out. I remember this one guy outside the fair, Minnesota State Fair a few years ago. He said, you got a thirst. Come to me first. I'm your water guy. I said, I like that. He rhymes. If I'm going to buy water outside the State Fair for a dollar, I'm going to buy it from a guy who's a poet and knows how to rhyme. And Isaiah is also a poet.

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