Friday, April 30, 2010

Jesus is Enough

The video below, which in the fullness of time I promise that you have 50 minutes to watch and that it will be worth your while, is of Matt Chandler, 35 year old pastor of Village Church in Dallas, Texas, speaking at the Together for the Gospel conference earlier this month in Louisville, and telling his story from the last four months in the context of a talk on "Preparing Your Church for Suffering".

"I woke up on Thanksgiving morning and poured myself a cup of coffee, just like I always do. I walked in to sit down, my wife asked me to feed our six-month old at the time, and so I grabbed her and a bottle and sat down on the couch and fed her. My kids were up, they were watching a little television; I fed my youngest her bottle, burped her, put her in her Johnny-jump-up, and that’s my last memory until I woke up in the hospital. I turned and as I headed back to my chair - apparently, I’m told by my wife - I had a Grand Mal seizure on the way to that chair in front of my two oldest children. Apparently, as they were restraining me and trying to take me to the hospital, I became combative. So they drugged me, I actually punched one of the EMTs, and that erased my memory until I wake up at the hospital. By the time I woke up in the hospital, they had already done the CT scan, and said there was some signaling they were concerned about, stuck me in the MRI, and then when I came out of the MRI they said I had a mass on my right frontal lobe."

Long story short, after initial optimism that the tumor was encapsulated, and despite a successful surgery only a week after his seizure, Matt Chandler has Stage 3 cancer and a malignant, un-encapsulated tumor in his brain.

Praying for his children at the end of the talk: "Whether your will for me is an extended period of suffering, or healing outright, or an early death, that you would guard their hearts against the lies of the enemy that would embitter and confuse them, but that they would love the God of their father, and that the wickedness that has been in the bloodline of the Chandlers for centuries would go into the ground with me, whenever that is, and that a legacy of faith might be left behind. I don't control that and I don't get to speak into that, but I do ask you as your servant to be merciful and to extend to them salvation."




T4G 2010 -- Session 8 -- Matt Chandler from Together for the Gospel (T4G) on Vimeo.

"What I always knew, I now know."

Jesus is better.

Jesus is enough.

The end of this video, after C.J Mahaney gives a short talk, shows John Piper and the other speakers at this event praying from Chandler. It is powerful and real. Please pray for healing for this unique, gifted, anointed, Godly man, not for his sake only, or his wife, or children, but for the Church and for the sake of the glorious name of Jesus Christ.

Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for fish, will give him a snake? He may not give us bread, and he may not give us fish, but what he does give, will be better yet. Only good is coming. Thank you Jesus.

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