We depart briefly from our current book of the Bible because we want to honour God. Let me explain. We at Aftershock aim to live our lives just as Paul did in this passage. We want to proclaim Gods glorious generosity to the world so that people would come to know Jesus and live their lives in line with Gods perfect plan. God has blessed us beyond what we deserve and we want to manage what time, money and skills he has given us to the very best of our ability. We want the same for you at school and college. We want you to use your skills, time and money to Gods glory in the life you lead for him. This is why at times in our lives we must take stock and ask ourselves are we doing what God wants with His resources. Aftershock is at the point now. Whilst we are blessed beyond what we deserve the opportunities to do Gods work are everywhere and we can not do everything. So we need your help, and it won’t cost you a penny. Two things. Firstly please pray and ask God for wisdom in the direction of Aftershock, and when he speaks to you lets us know, through the second thing which we need your help with. That second thing is to go to Aftershock.org.uk and complete the Urgent Survey. You won’t miss it, as it is linked to from the front page.If you have never responded before, respond now, it could change the very direction of Aftershock. We have ten questions we need you to answer, and if you want to you only have to answer five. Ask yourselves is Aftershock worth five minutes of your time? We believe that God will use both you and us to spread his word, what we need to understand now is how best we can do that.

The following is a transcript of a personal message from Max.

Hi Guys it’s Max Cross here. You don’t get to hear me speak the devotional very often Suzy does that most of the time. But today’s devotional is a little different. I need to give you some background. I earn my living by being an IT consultant, and God has been good to us over the last fifteen years. We have had some dry times, but we have always managed to get through them with God, and we have learnt lessons from them. Well right now we are in the middle of a dry time, and it has been that way for over four months. Basically Aftershock as you can imagine doesn’t bring in nay income. It is something that we as a family support, and we are happy to support, and we are happy that God is using us to give out these Aftershock devs everyday. But we do now need your prayers, because not only can we not support Aftershock without an income ourselves, but it also makes it interesting to pay the mortgage and such. So I come to you humberley today and ask that you a) will forgive me for this personal appeal. And b) that you will also pray for myself and Suzy, that God will reveal to us his plan in our life’s. That he will bring forward a new contract or source of income that will enable us to do basic things like eat and pay the mortgage. We don’t seek to have big fast cars, what we do want more then anything in our life is to run the race. We want to run the race to get the prize that can only come from God. That is why I read the verse today, because that is a verse that I love to live my life by. So please guys I do ask that you would pray for us. That you would pray specifically for revelation in our life’s as to why this has been going on for so long, what we can do to help, and for an income to appear in the very very near future.

Hi Max here. Three hundred, yep this is the three hundredth Aftershock dev. So we thought we would give Suzy a break as we issue an extra message this week, to ask for your help. Yep we want you help. But the good news we don’t want your money. We don’t even want much of your time. What we want is your commitment to help us spread Gods word and encourage other young Christians. We at aftershock really want to take this passage we have just heard to heart we want to run the race of life, for Jesus; we want to run as through we can win for Jesus. We know that we can not do anything without Jesus so we would love your help. When you read this, or hear the dev would you commit to praying for us? We would love you to pray to God for Aftershock. Pray asking for His blessing. Pray asking Him to open doors for more people to hear aftershock devs, and take actions in their lives. Pray that we would know His wisdom and His will as we write the devotionals. Pray for those of us involved in Aftershock and for our families. Pray for whatever Gods holy spirit guides you to pray for, but please do pray.