Running the Race God’s Way

by Tom Adleta

Rev. Tom Adleta, BBA MA, is the  founder and executive director of Global Christian Network, Inc., also now Minister-at-Large with Mission to Unreached Peoples, and recently has joined the staff of SVM2. From a diverse foundation of military experience and entrepreneurial business enterprises, Tom and his wife ministered in their local churches and eventually 30 years in missions from Central America, across Asia, now through Africa, Europe and Latin America, as he and his wife homeschooled their 8 children. 

I was drawn toward God even from my earliest childhood but didn’t come to know Jesus personally until I was in my late 30’s. A persistent real estate agent finally dragged me to lunch and managed to share the Four Spiritual Laws with me afterwards. God moved in my heart and I yielded to Him. I can still remember the feeling of warm oil flowing over my head down into my body as He came into my life.

My addictions to alcohol and gambling fell away without effort under His control, though other areas of my life required greater seeking of God and His power over time to set me free. Yet, as I discovered the joy of yielding my life to Him, I longed to grow closer and to know Him more and more. He provided opportunity to pray for greater filling of His Spirit and yet again I experienced an even greater overflow of His presence and power in my life as I asked for this gift.

I discovered that the more I yielded and asked of Him, the greater His outpouring and empowerment would become. Early on, my efforts seemed a great struggle of my own will; later, His Spirit seemed to enable me to soar forward, almost effortlessly as I yielded and learned to obey. Gradually, He’s been teaching me how to be set ablaze by God, how to run the race His way. Let me share more….

God often employs the ignorant and unlearned to confound the wise. “Now as they observed the confidence of Peter and John and understood that they were uneducated and untrained men, they were amazed, and began to recognize them as having been with Jesus.” (Acts 4:13) And, again in Acts 5: 38-39, it was not the ignorance of Peter and John that convinced the Sanhedrin. It was done in spite of their ignorance. It was their boldness and their honest conviction of truth.

Besides, though not learned in the schools of the Jews, they had been under a far more important training – under the personal direction of Christ himself – for three years. Now they were directly endowed by the Holy Spirit with the power of speaking the truth and the truth will set the captives free.

We can also see Paul’s reliance upon the Spirit in 1 Corinthians 2: 1-5 “And when I came to you, brethren, I did not come with superiority of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the testimony of God. For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling, and my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God.”

God is able to use you and me, not because of our skills or great wisdom, but simply to show forth His glory and power through frail human vessels.