Hello, thank you so much for joining me today for Give Him 15.

And the title of today's post is,

seize the opportunity, seize the opportunity.

1st Corinthians 16, 8 and 9,

but I will remain in Ephesus until Pentecost, Paul said,

for a wide door for effective service has opened to me. And there are many adversaries.

Holy Spirit has been drawing me to this verse a good bit lately. I've actually

quoted it in a couple of posts. It came as still another confirmation when my spiritual dad and

apostolic leader of the fellowship I'm aligned with, Jim Hodges, used it in his recent newsletter.

Here is Jim's exhortation, with a few slight additions to make it more applicable to a broader

audience. He says, the Apostle Paul's ministry often demonstrated that opportunities to advance the

gospel of Christ were accompanied by opposition. He stated this, Paul did, stated this in our

opening verse, 1 Corinthians 169.

Count on it, he says.

Opportunity is accompanied by opposition.

This is amply illustrated throughout Paul's ministry.

Perhaps the most dramatic one is his dangerous trip to Rome, recorded in Acts 27,

in Acts 28. The open door at that time was for Paul, a Roman citizen, to stand before the Roman

Emperor and personally declared to him and his palace guards the gospel of the kingdom.

In this Corinthian's verse, Paul describes an opportunity to advance the gospel as being great and effectual.

Great is megas, meaning exceedingly large, wide, grand, great.

We get our English word mega from this Greek word.

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