Archbishop Gregory Holley

Two Blogs and a Wife!

Since February blogging has become a "big" part of our lives. Looking for the right name, the right format, the right content trail and seeking to say positive things were the goals. Gayla started first with GaylasMagazine and has wonderfully thrilled her readers with everything from what we eat , where we travel to things that relate to her work with New Life and Role Models of America! It has been a dream to be able to daily speak to our friends and supporters around the world through such a simple system!

Thanks to all of you who are so loyal bringing a challenge to us to bring quality thinking and reporting to these formats. We have such a diverse group of readers it is always intriguing to see the countries we enjoy hearing from. This brings me to the purpose of this blog. We are adding some different names to our sites so that the addresses will be easier to rememember.

Gayla will be always found on www.gaylasmagazine.typepad.com but in a day or so she can be found at a much simpler address, www.gaylasmagazine.com .  We will use the easire one for her business cards and in all advertisements.  And when you try to tell your friends where to find her you will find it easier as well.

This blog will split into to two blogs!  Yes, two daily blogs.  You see I have a passion for Marketplace Ministry, which affects all Christians in their workplace.  Success motivations, quotes, humor, strategies and how to witness Christ on the job have always intrigued me. For 35 years of public ministry I have been bi-vocational and have had to learn to go back and forth between the Church and the Marketplace. I love thinking big!

The offering pan has been wonderful and all donor dollars have been earnestly accounted for and appreciated. However the passion and vision that we have had for Missions, around the corner or around the world, has demanded millions more. God, in His Grace and Mercy, has anointed us to be bi-vocational with businesses that strengthen our ability to meet His call on our lives.  There have been many lonely moments, many moments of distress and my friends became books that my Father left me along with approximately 40,000 on shelves and in boxes.  The printed page has encouraged me, enlightened me and given me hope as I read of other men and women in their struggle for the Kingdom!

Why Obispo?  It is my nickname in Spanish. This blog you are reading will always be found on www.obispo.typepad.com. Because of the search results it has been decided  to also have this found at www.gregoryholley.com for simplicity sake.  This will be the address used on business cards and advertisements. It seems easier to remember.

The new one? Well it is not quite up yet but it will be focused on that quick shot needed during the day in the Marketplace.  This new site will have a spot of humor, a quote of the day, a marketplace strategy and a daily way to witness Christ .  It is destined to be a quick read and highly inspirational!  it will be found at www.marketplacefaith.biz .  You can even take a peek now although it has not begun to be published.  I am very excited to have this outlet for the pent up faith that is stored.  God has been so good to me that I want to share it with all my brothers and sisters in the Marketplace.  I trust that my Pastors, Prophets, Evangelist and Teacher friends will enjoy and contribute!

For those of you in and around Houston ---- Don't miss Sunday 8:30 and 10 am.  It is going to be one of those kinda days when your feet hardly touch the ground!!!!!

The Daily Grind of the Car Dealer

Many of life's good friends have been car dealers.  These men and women are people of ultimate faith because of the daily grind of believing for their daily bread. To go to a building stuffed with cars of all prices and put the coffee on to wait for the public to come in and browse to buy is a faith process.  A dead day can turn exciting every time someone turns into the parking lot, even those who are just turning around.  Even the buzz of the phone can denote a good day ahead!

Long hours. Fast Food lunches. Endless small talk. But always ready for the 'kicker' that boosts them into the the "Think Big" mode!

The blogger called Dub Phillips of Dub Phillips Chevrolet fame and asked him to  give a young man a few tips on his new job at one of the big lots.  Out of all the tips given that day one struck the blogger as the greatest was this. "Son, get their 30 minutes before they open, get into the service lane and make yourself familiar with the service manager.  Help those who are dropping off their car to fill out the service form and drop their keys into the slot all the time offering a cup of coffee and your card.  While they are gone figure a deal based on their car and watch for their return. Put the deal into a card and seal the envelope with your phone number in your handwriting and sign it. Then believe!"

The young man quit a few days later. When asked why he replied that the business was dead.  When asked about the service lane idea he replied it didn't work. When asked if he had made variations on the suggestion he replied, "what do you mean?"  The lack of  imagination to allow big thoughts is not a matter of education, position, longevity or status in the business. It is a matter of effort and quiet thinking time which many do not take time for.

Yesterday morning one of Houston's great car men, Chuck Bell, sent this link of a training he received. It is about service.  The impact of its message stunned the thinking and jumpstarted the mental juices! Take a few minutes and move into Thinking Big!

www.stservicemovie.com/

Think Big 3

When we look at these words of Jesus, we immediately find them to be the most revolutionary that human ears have ever heard. “… seek first the

kingdom

of

God

… .” Even the most spiritually-minded of us argue the exact opposite, saying, “But I must live; I must make a certain amount of money; I must be clothed; I must be fed.” The great concern of our lives is not the

kingdom

of

God

but how we are going to take care of ourselves to live. Jesus reversed the order by telling us to get the right relationship with God’s will and focus first, maintaining it as the primary concern of our lives, and never to place our concern on taking care of the other things of life.

  “… do not worry about your life …” . Our Lord pointed out that from His standpoint it is absolutely unreasonable for us to be anxious, worrying about how we will live. Jesus did not say that the person who takes no thought for anything in his life is blessed—no, that person is a fool. But Jesus did teach that His disciple must make his relationship with God’s will and focus the dominating focus of his life, and to be cautiously carefree about everything else in comparison to that. In essence, Jesus was saying, “Don’t make food and drink the controlling factor of your life, but be focused absolutely on God.” Some people are careless about what they eat and drink, and they suffer for it; they are careless about what they wear, having no business looking the way they do; they are careless with their earthly matters, and God holds them responsible. Jesus is saying that the greatest concern of life is to place our relationship with God’s will and focus first, and everything else second.

It is one of the most difficult, yet critical, disciplines of the Christian life to allow the Holy Spirit to bring us into absolute harmony with the teaching of Jesus in these verses.  The Apostle Paul voices an explanation of the faith world by reminding the believers that we walk by faith and not by  what we see in the natural.  We are conditioned by natural faith to believe in the telephone system, medical science, the internet, digital deliveries of all types yet when the mind summons faith to assist in its efforts skepticism immediately sets up a programmable path of defeat turning down the belief thermostat.  The most important and unnoticed quality in the world lies within our power to adjust the thermostat of belief in crisis.  We live in a world built on the unseen faithful actions of man’s creativity not believing that God is the source of all pure, faith-driven production.

The world around you, full of success motivators, seem to have lost the connection between the will of God and the will of man. There is within the soul a thermostat that regulates the faith factor of mental conditioning.  There is a secret of the adjusting of that thermostat that brings one to term with life according to your personal innermost being.  God wants you to be yourself and feel honestly about who and what you are.  You are His child and you have a special purpose of destiny! You are an individual expression, an original creation and should not be boiled down, stirred up and molded into a stereotypical Christianized form of faith.  Adjust the thermostat!

So now what?  Mountains loom in front of you and you must become a ‘mountain mover’!  If you believe, do not worry about how it is going to happen, you can really move the mountain!  Not many people really believe this so the disease of failure robs their will to believe that it is going to happen so they surrender to the inevitable.  It is nonsense to think you can cross your arms, stand tall and command a mountain to move, open up your eyes and ‘poof’ it’s gone.  But it is possible if you adjust your thermostat, turn up the faith and turn your daily walk into a belief system of mountain moving faith.  You are not a blueprint or a carbon copy of anyone past or future so you must act if you are to be a ‘mountain mover’.  Today, attention must be turned to the needs you have and a mental factory must be constructed so that you will produce the connectivity of your will to the will of God, then you will begin to generate power, skill and energy need to succeed!

Think Big 2

How will we connect to God’s great big thoughts? Is there a blending of the will of God and the will of Man? God is so big, so strong, and so mighty, there’s nothing God cannot do.  The mountains are His, the valleys are His, the stars are His handiwork too. Let’s look at the word infinity again.  Again, we gladly affirm that God is infinite in relation to time, space, knowledge, and power. When we say God is infinite, we mean that God is not only unlimited but illimitable and humanity is able to connect to all of this?

God is eternal, without beginning or end, present everywhere with all of His being, He knows everything and He never adds to His knowledge, and there is literally nothing that God cannot do, except sin.  When we say that these attributes are incommunicable, we mean that they cannot be imparted to any other being, they are unique to God.  And this makes the next statement even more astounding when it is affirmed that one Man possesses all these qualities. As Christians we believe that Man is Jesus and as the Son of God reflects the glory of God and shows exactly what God is like. 

The Book of Books speaks the express will of God. The word that created the worlds became human and lived among us to demonstrate the orchestration of the divine concert between God and man. It’s one thing to consider an unimaginable Spirit who fills the universe and acts upon that universe (to be quite honest this can almost seem like theory), but it’s another thing to consider a powerful person whom people have seen and touched and heard. So, it’s important to see how this Person, Jesus, interacted with the people and things of His world. 

The recognition by other humans that this Jesus had power to heal and deliver other human beings from pain and disorder created an atmosphere of Big Thinking!  It was now possible to lead a better life and people crowded to align with His thinking. He healed them all. At a wedding the Host ran out of refreshments and Jesus called for empty pots to be brought.  Six stone water pots were standing there; they were used for Jewish ceremonial purposes and held twenty to thirty gallons each. Jesus told the servants, “Fill the jars with water.” When the jars had been filled to the brim, He said, “Dip some out and take it to the master of ceremonies.” So they followed his instructions. It’s fair to say that Jesus always gives us more than we really need, and it’s always the best.

There is a bigger thought as to how you will progress in your occupation. Jesus, coming upon the disciples at their workplace, offered a thought that would align their efforts with the will of God.  As we look at Biblical record we see Peter’s response, alignment and reward for that alignment of his will thoughts.  He was awestruck by the results!   Oh, dear friends, we need to know that generosity is a part of God’s nature.  He likes to do things in a BIG way. He doesn’t enjoy just getting by, just enough.  That was clear when He fed 5000 people. There were baskets left over.  When we go to the Word of God for Big Thinking from the  Word of Life, God ALWAYS gives us MORE than we really need. 

If we’re not thinking big, if our faith is not being stretched, if our vision isn’t growing, if we’re not growing in our Christian lives, if we’re not experiencing an abundant life, if we’re just lukewarm in our love for the Lord, if we’re a slave to some kind of weight or sin, WHOSE FAULT IS IT?  Our key to Big Thinking begins with the acknowledge that we are aligned with the Almighty and while we exhibit our wills to believe in all things we can see the power lies in the unseen. If this eternal, omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent God is for us, who can be against us?

The Will to THINK BIG!

     Much effort is sought to ask of the Apostles of the New Testament what is that they derived from their relationship with Jesus Christ.  The question is what they possessed that the modern day Christian does not have.  The answer will always be the same.  They found a desire to bring their personal will into alignment with the will of Jesus Christ. It is the will to believe all things are possible as Paul reiterates, “If God be for us, then who can be against us.  This great big God who dwells in a great big universe call us to be His partners in believing and thinking BIG!  In

Africa

we sang the song, Great and Mighty is the Lord, our God, Great and Mighty is He!  Later years someone wrote the song and we sing, Our God is an awesome God He reigns in Heaven and Earth.  All Christians know,”We serve a GREAT BIG GOD!”

     The great thinker Martin Luther asserted, “God’s actual divine essence and his will, administration and works—are absolutely beyond all human thought, human understanding or wisdom; in short, that they are and ever will be incomprehensible, inscrutable, and altogether hidden to human reason.” The second century theologian, Novatian pondered that, “God is greater than mind itself. His greatness cannot be conceived. Nay, could we conceive of his greatness he would be less than the human mind, which could form the conception? He is greater than all language, and no statement can express him.” Job penned the question, “Can you solve the mysteries of God? Can you discover everything there is to know about the Almighty?”  The Psalmist David sings, “Great is the LORD! He is most worthy of praise! His greatness is beyond discovery!” Paul writes in the New Testament, “Oh, what a wonderful God we have! How great are his riches and wisdom and knowledge! How impossible it is for us to understand his decisions and his methods! “

3] So, then if God is incomprehensible, hidden to human reasoning, greater than our mind in so much that He cannot be conceived, a mystery, beyond discovery and impossible to understand how do we as mere mortals become the great thinker that He is?  It begins in education that produces knowledge whose fruit is wisdom, which evolves into proper action! Words like infinity, eternal, immensity, omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent become more than vocabulary opening doors of future faith inventory only available to the Big Thinker! We gladly affirm that God is infinite in relation to time, space, knowledge, and power. When we say God is infinite, we mean that God is not only unlimited but also illimitable. God is eternal, and His existence is not measured by time. This does not mean that God is timeless but rather that He is above time or over time. We must acknowledge that He is aware of what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen at each point in time. Yet there is no time in His action or willing. He has from all eternity known what He is doing and will do. The Psalmist writes, “Before the mountains were created, before you made the earth and the world, you are God, without beginning or end.” 

     Jesus cried out, “Not my will…” and therefore committed His will to the will of the Father who has immensity.  Immensity may be defined as “that perfection of the Divine Being by which He transcends all spatial limitations, and yet is present in every point of space with His whole Being. With our most powerful Hubble telescope, we have seen 12 billion light years away, and it’s impossible to describe how far 12 billion light years are.  Even more mind-boggling, astronomers almost without exception speak of the infinity of space, i.e., that space has no end.  Now that’s scary, but if it had an end, what would come after the end.  Yet God can stand outside of space and look at it.  He would not have any trouble creating one hundred universes as big as or bigger than ours! 

     Here’s what Jeremiah had to say, “Am I a God who is only in one place?” asks the LORD. “Do they think I cannot see what they are doing? Can anyone hide from me? Am I not everywhere in all the heavens and earth?” asks the LORD.”

Unlike human bodies that are bounded and limited to space, God in His immensity is not limited or localized. So, how big are our thoughts unconnected to the will of the Father?  Again the Psalmist writes, “I can never escape from your spirit!  I can never get away from your presence! If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I go down to the place of the dead, you are there. If I ride the wings of the morning, if I dwell by the farthest oceans, even there your hand will guide me and your strength will support me.”

     God always acts with all the facts. His knowledge is all inclusive (past, present, and future) and complete. He does not grow in knowledge. Now, how do we connect to the will of the Father so that His omniscient power is at work with us? God can do all things consistent with His nature. God’s energy is constant and never will be diminished. Where the Bible maintains that all things are possible (Matt 19:6), it is primarily a confession about God’s relation to people, although it also has reference to God’s power over nature. Jeremiah penned, “O Sovereign LORD! You have made the heavens and earth by your great power. Nothing is too hard for you…. You are the great and powerful God, the LORD Almighty. You have all wisdom and do great and mighty miracles.” 

Nothing is too hard for His Mind or Power. THINK BIG!!   Thomas Benton Brooks said it this way, “God has in himself all power to defend you, all wisdom to direct you, all mercy to pardon you, all grace to enrich you, all righteousness to clothe you, all goodness to supply you, and all happiness to crown you.”