Welcome to the In Touch podcast with Charles Stanley for Wednesday, February 12th.

Have you ever felt unqualified to serve God? The truth is, Christ works within us to accomplish through us what we could never do on our own.

There are some very basic principles that are absolutely essential to enjoying your relationship to God through Jesus Christ.

If you keep these, then things are going to go right. If you violate them, they're not going to right.

And so you just have to understand what these principles are.

Now, I want to give you five basic principles,

five keys here. Every single one of them is important. Here is the bottom line foundational one

of all of them, and that is, ministry or service is not something we do for God, but something God does

through us. So I want you to jot that down. True ministry, true service,

is not something we do for God, but rather something God does through us. That is the basic

foundational truth. It is probably the reason, misunderstanding here is the reason that so many people

fail or refuse to serve the Lord because they don't get this one down.

And that is that true ministry, true service is what God does through us, not what we do for God.

Now go back, if you will, to Philippians chapter 2, the second chapter and the 13th verse.

He says, herefore, it is God who is at work in you, both to will

and to work for his good pleasure. Now, here's the key. When you and I trust that Jesus Christ

is our personal savior, at that moment, the Holy Spirit came in us to indwell us and to abide

within us. He came for two specific primary reasons. There are others,

but number one, to enable us to become the person's God wants us to be. And secondly, to enable us

to do the work God has called us to do. That is to be the kind of servants that he would have us to be.

So this verse says, for it is God who is at work in you, both to will,

that is he's the one who calls us, he's the one who gives us the will and the desire, and to work

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