As we read today’s key passage, we see Joshua is the commander- in-chief and leader of the nation of Israel. He has led the people into the Promised Land that God has promised them, but he wants to make sure they keep that land and prosper in that land. He wants them to live happily ever after. But on this day, he is not talking as the commander-in-chief or as a political leader; he is talking as a dad who has a family. He makes this momentous statement: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (v.15). In effect, he drew a line in the sand. He said, “Even if no one else comes to stand on this side of the line, my family and I will.” He chose to lead his family to do three things that I am going to ask you to do as well.

In today’s key passage, God tells Moses to do something very important. In a nutshell, He says, “Make sure that your children and your grandchildren love God with all their heart.” The fact was that at that time in history, people didn’t associate love and God. All of their experiences with gods had been about making sacrifices and focusing on works. But the God of Israel changed all of that. And the truth is, seeing God as loving and also choosing to love God are truths we want each and every generation to embrace. We need to teach the next generation to know the truth of God's Word so that they will know the God of that truth. So in this message, we’re going to look at the four ways we are to do just that in our homes.

There's a letter in the New Testament called First Timothy. It was written by the Apostle Paul to his young protégé who was going to take over pastoring the church in Ephesus. Timothy was young, barely 30 years old, and quite inexperienced. But Paul lets him know that though you may be lacking in education or experience, the one thing you can always be is a role model. The main lesson I want us to take away from this message is our role for the next generation is to be a role model. We can do that in four ways, and we’re going to discuss each of those in detail.

The psalmist who wrote today’s key passage of Scripture is encouraging the people not to let history repeat itself, to learn from the mistakes of the past, and to defeat them in the present. In these eight verses, we are going to learn three things that we must do to make disciples of every generation. Simply put, we must always touch the next generation by teaching them andreaching them with biblical truth.

It is the start of a new year, and we are all in the same boat. It is called “social jetlag” but I call it a “holiday hangover.” Maybe you’ve slept late, taken time off of work, partied it up, ditched your diet, enjoyed the new gadgets, and swapped your gifts. But now it is time to re-enter the real world of traffic, alarm clocks, school, and making a living. You have neither the will nor the energy to do it, but the new year is coming one way or another. So what kind of year are you going to have in 2024? I hope and pray it’s a holy new year! But how can we make that happen? That’s exactly what we’re going to discuss in this message.

As we wrap up this Christmas series, we are going to learn about what happens when we follow Jesus wherever He wants us to go. When you surrender to God’s call you are under God’s care. We already know that Joseph never had it easy. God didn’t promise Joseph a rose garden. There was a high price he paid to be the father of Jesus. We learn three things that were true of Joseph all of his life that are true about you and me when we simply surrender to the will of God in our lives.

In today’s most familiar passage of the Christmas story, we are going learn some unbelievably valuable life lessons that I pray we will never forget. If we can remember these truths when we face the difficulties of life, we will step up and be what God wants us to be and do what God wants us to do. Here is the principle to remember: No matter what is in front of you, God is always ahead of you. Let’s look at how this truth plays out in the life of Joseph.

We are embarking on a three-week study of an unsung hero in Scripture: Joseph, the father of Jesus. Even though only sixteen verses in the Bible mention Joseph by name, you are going to see his influence was much stronger and much greater than what is implied, because he truly is an unsung hero who is going to teach us what it really means to follow the Jesus of Christmas. We are going learn from Joseph that commitment to the will of God will bring clarity about the will of God.

Today’s key passage of Scripture contains a very famous verse. It says, “But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15). Can you imagine what could happen in this country if every family made that decision? Do you think the crime rate would go down? Do you think our jails would be emptier? Do you think our marriages might be stronger? Do you think schools would be safer? Joshua shares with his people that he is going to lead his family to do three things with all his might and power. I would encourage every family and every household head to give this same direction, make this same decision, and have this same determination for your family.

Being thankful is so important to God that He actually commands us to be thankful. A man in the New Testament by the name of Paul went through a tremendous amount of suffering and heartache that would cause anybody to be bitter and ungrateful and maybe even mad at God. He wrote these words, “Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” (I Thessalonians 5:18) You may not feel very thankful right now because of where you are in your life. Even though you may not feel thankful you can be thankful. This great man tells us how to be thankful and why to be thankful.

I want to ask you a question. When people are around you, do they know who you have been with? I want people to know that when they are around me there is one person I have been with, that I walk with, that I live with, that I stay with every day and His name is Jesus. That raises the big question, “How can people know that I have been with Jesus? What will be true of me and true of you if we have been with Jesus? What are the marks of a person who has been with Jesus?” You are going to see in this message that what was true of these men in Acts chapter 4 can be, should be, and will be true of us if we have been with Jesus.

Today’s key verse amazes me coming from a man who had a lot to brag about. When he was alive, he was the greatest preacher in the world, the greatest missionary in the church, the greatest teacher of the faith, the greatest theologian, and the greatest religious author. He wrote more books than anyone else in the New Testament. He had a lot to brag about. Yet, Paul said, “There is only one thing I’ll brag about. There is only one thing I will ever show pride in. There is only one thing that will make my heart swell, and it is the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Paul is saying that, as believers, our lives should be lived in the shadow of the cross of Jesus Christ. In this message, we’re going to see exactly what it means to live in the shadow of the cross. Let’s dive in together.

So often in our society today, the concept of “truth” is up for debate. What is right? What is wrong? What or who determines right from wrong? These are questions that people are constantly trying to answer. But the truth is, if you try to make right and wrong a matter of human choice, human reason, or human decision, you are out on a limb that will break every time. One of two things is true. Either what is right is right in our eyes or what is right is right in God’s eyes. With this in mind, I want to give you three reasons why only with God can you have morality. Only with God can you know what is right and what is wrong, and only with God can you tell the difference.

One of the greatest problems we have in the church is that we have too many people who have made decisions, but too few people who have become disciples. What we have in the church more often than not are not disciples; we have cultural Christians. These are people who proudly bear the label of Christian, but they don’t truly live the life of a disciple. The only cure for cultural Christianity is discipleship. In Luke chapter nine, Jesus tells us what it takes to become a disciple in just one sentence. I am going to reverse engineer what Jesus said and show you four marks of a cultural Christian. As I do, I want you to decide whether or not you are a true disciple or a cultural Christian. 

I truly believe that the best life, the greatest life and the only life to live is the cross-shaped life. That is a life where we worship, we are discipled, we serve and then we are sent. Now, please understand that this is not an idea I made up. It actually comes from a vision that a prophet named Isaiah had 2800 years ago. Isaiah had a front-row seat to see who God really is and it changed his life forever. From that moment on, he became a “sent” person. The reasons he was sent are the same reasons that we should want to be sent as well. Let’s look at those reasons right now. 

If you are a follower of Christ, you have been called to be a minister for Christ, to serve others with the gifts and talents you’ve been given. What’s more, you will maximize your fulfillment in life, your enjoyment of life, and your impact in life when you find the sweet spot of serving other people. A disciple called Peter wrote a book called I Peter in which there are several reasons why we should not look at serving as something we have to do, but something we should want to do. Let’s look at those reasons right now. 

If I were to ask ten people in this room to write down their definition of worship you would get ten different answers. Amazingly, though the Bible talks very much about worship and describes what worship looks like, worship is really only defined in one place that I can find in the Bible, and that is in Romans 12. In this passage, Paul tells us that worship is giving all that I am to all that God is. That means you can come to church. You can lift your hands. You can sing at the top of your lungs. You can listen to every word that is preached and take copious notes. You can even drop a dime or a dollar in the offering, but you have not worshipped until you have given all that you are to all that God is. 

Whether your last graduation was from college, high school, or pre-school, there is another graduation day that awaits all of us and for some of us it will be the greatest graduation day of all. It will mean no more death, no more disease, no more sin, no more sorrow, and no more suffering. For others, it will be a day of dread and disappointment, discouragement and defeat that no mind can even conceive. I am talking about that time when we are all physically raised from the dead. Today’s key text, 1 Corinthians 15, is what you could call Paul’s doctoral thesis on the subject of the resurrection. Specifically, he talks about the resurrection of the Christians. So as we study this text, let’s consider what the resurrection is and why it is so important.

We are talking about hell today, because we are in a series that we are calling, “From Here To Eternity.” We are going through what the Word of God says about when we die, where we are after we die, and at the end of time when no one else will ever die physically. Though everybody dies, not everybody goes to spend eternity in the same place. There is a real heaven and a real hell, and we need to know what each of these final destinations entails so that we might have a sense of urgency to share the message of Jesus with those who have not secured their eternity in heaven.

Have you ever heard somebody say something like this, “I don’t know what the future holds, but I know who holds the future.” That sounds good, but it is not completely true, because if what we read in Revelation 21 is true, we do know what the future holds. Around 95 A.D. on an island called “Patmos,” the one who holds the future revealed what the future holds. The resurrected Jesus pulls back the curtains of eternity and reveals to a disciple named John our brand new, never to be destroyed, beautiful beyond words home called “heaven.”

As we continue in our series called “From Here To Eternity,” we are going to talk about the time we will all stand before God to give an account for our life. This is when we will have our day in court. As we learn about this text, keep in mind that when it comes time for you to have your day in court, make sure you know the judge. Let’s dive into Scripture and learn more about this judge and all that we are going to experience in His courtroom one day.

There are three days that we believe are the most important days on the calendar of any believer. There is what I call our “birthday.” By that I mean you come to the realization that you are a sinner and you need a Savior. So you repent of your sins, place your faith in Jesus, and surrender to Him as the Lord of your life. You are “born-again.” The second day is what I call “moving day.” That is the day we die, the day that we transition from this earth to be with the Lord. And then the third day is what I call “resurrection day.” That is when our bodies are raised from the dead and we receive a brand-new body, an eternal body. With all of that in mind, we must consider this question, “What happens in the meantime between moving day and resurrection day?” That’s exactly what we’re going to look at today.

Unless Jesus comes back before you die, one day one of your breaths will be your last. Your chest will rise and fall one last time. You will take in oxygen and breath out carbon dioxide one last time. You need to be ready for that moment, because today may be the day that moment comes. In Hebrews chapter 9, there are several verses that give us an encyclopedia of truth about our last breath. That’s what we’re going to dive into today.

Today, we are dealing with the phenomenon of transgenderism. The percentage of people that identify as transgender in the United States varies somewhere between 0.3 and 0.6%. To deal with this issue, in my study, I’ve determined as a follower of Jesus that there are three things we have to consider as we talk about this issue: feelings, fact, and faith. Or to put it another way, you have to talk about transgender and psychology, transgender and biology, and transgender and theology. We’re going to look at all three of these in today’s message, so let’s dive in.

When you read the phrase, “pro-life” you think about two things – right? Abortion and politics. Well in this message, I am going to leave the politics out of it. I want to make the case today that the pro-life position is truly the only logical, biological, and theological position that you can take if you are willing to face the truth. The thing I want you to keep in mind today is this – the right to life is the right side for life.

There is a line that is clear when it comes to where you stand on marriage, and you will either be on one side or the other. You will either be on the side of celebration by accepting what culture says or condemnation by affirming what God says. So here is my simple message today. Model marriage is what God has designed and what God has defined. In order to get this right, we are going to go back to the first wedding that resulted in the first marriage in history. As you are going to see, I got this idea from Jesus, because the only time Jesus was asked specifically regarding divorce, He went back to the first book of the Bible and so will we. When we do this, we will see what a true model marriage is.

As much as it pains me to say it, in our culture today, there is no such thing as committed sex; it is casual sex. Since 1960, the rate of marriage has been declining steadily and here now in what is best described as a low-commitment culture of “sex without strings and relationship without rings.” To go a step further, by the age of 18, over 75 percent of those who never attend church and almost 53 percent of those who do attend church weekly are no longer virgins. So as we look at our text in I Thessalonians 4, keep one thing in mind. The sex drive is God-given and there is nothing wrong with sex. It is just that God-given sex should be God-guided sex. God has a plan, a place, and a purpose for sex. When that plan is followed and that purpose is fulfilled, that is when sex is best. You’ve got to remember – It is God’s will that you don’t say, “I will” until you say, “I do.” God not only wants what is best for you, but He wants it when it is best for you, and when you get it, He wants it to be the best it can be. This can be true for you if you align yourself with the following three statements.

What we are about to read is about an event that is coming that nobody likes to talk about, and a lot of people want to deny and that is the judgment of God. What you will see is that the passage isn’t really about the judge, or the sentence, or evidence that the judge uses to determine which sentence is appropriate. Do you remember the last time you were walking through a parking lot and a car alarm goes off? It is annoying and it is irritating, but if you are like me do you know what you do about it? Nothing, you keep walking. Do you know why? We have heard so many car alarms go off that now car alarms have lost their purpose. We don’t pay attention anymore. Think about what we are about to read as an alarm. You had best not ignore it, because we are all in this story. It reveals what is coming to us when life is over. There are facts we should face and be ready for what faces us.

In the third chapter of the Gospel of Mark, we see very clearly one of the things that gave Jesus heartburn, that made Jesus angry, and caused him to give his arch-enemies, the Pharisees that “look.” I particularly want those of us who are religious, church- going, heard about God, and dotting religious “i’s” and crossing religious “t’s” to listen very carefully to this story, because you are going to see a group of religious people that thought they were close to God and yet didn’t even know God. And then based on this story, I want to give you three practices to avoid that not only make Jesus angry but hurt his heart.

If you ever go into a job interview, headhunters and personnel experts will tell you there is one question you will always be asked and you had better be prepared to answer correctly and it is this one, “How do you measure success?” On one occasion, the disciples came to Jesus, and they asked him this question, “At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, ‘Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’” (Matthew 18:1). The disciples thought the ultimate success would be to be chosen as the greatest in the kingdom. In fact, two of the disciples even asked if they could sit on either side of Jesus in the kingdom. The disciples were waiting with bated breath, but Jesus as he was very capable of doing, did something totally unexpected. He bypassed their question, and he did this. “He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them” (Matthew 18:2). He said to these twelve disciples, these battle-tested harden veterans who had been with him for three years and thought they had it all together and thought they were ready for primetime, “If you want to catch up to me, you’ve got to first catch up to them.”

In the last public sermon that Jesus ever preached, He was calling out hypocritical holiness and counterfeit Christianity. Frankly, this is not a seeker-friendly topic. This is not a feel-good topic. This is not your best life now topic, but it is a topic that everyone and anyone who claims to be a follower of Jesus and every church needs to hear about, think about, and talk about. In this sermon we’re going to look at, Jesus says there are three things that we need to do as we call out counterfeits, including the times we may be counterfeit ourselves.

Today, we are going to look at probably the most angry that Jesus ever got. In fact, he not only expressed his anger verbally; he expressed it physically. Probably the most shocking picture of Jesus in the New Testament is when he cleaned house literally. He cleansed the temple. In fact, he did it twice. We are going to be looking at two passages of scripture – the second chapter of John and the twenty-first chapter of Matthew. In John, he cleansed the temple at the beginning of his ministry and in Matthew he did it at the end of his ministry. This story answers the two questions, “What made him angry?” and “Who was his anger directed toward?”

I love what President Franklin Roosevelt said: “We may not be able to prepare the future for our children, but we can at least prepare our children for the future.” In the book of Ephesians, the Apostle Paul gives fathers the best advice and wisdom on how to be the father your children need you to be. In a simple but sublime sentence, Paul shares with us four things we need to give our children to be the parents we ought to be. 

The church in Laodicea and the Christians in it were stuck in a spiritual no man’s land. They weren’t hot and they weren’t cold; they were just lukewarm. I believe remaining lukewarm is one of the greatest sins that goes unconfessed, unnoticed, and unrealized in the church today. The average lukewarm Christian is either too proud to admit they are lukewarm or too ignorant to realize they are. My prayer is that you will listen to this message with an open heart and sensitive ears to what God has to say in order to avoid getting stuck in no man’s land. The sermon in a sentence is this – in the Christian life, sitting on the fence is the wrong side of the fence.

Of all the letters that Jesus wrote, I believe this is the one he enjoyed the most. Of all the seven churches, I could have joined back in that day I could have easily moved to Philadelphia and joined this church. They probably heard of some of the other letters that Jesus had written and they were probably nervous when they opened up their envelope, but they had no reason to be. Jesus had absolutely nothing negative to say about this church. It wasn’t a perfect church, but it was a blameless church. So as we take a closer look at the church in Philadelphia, we are going to learn this lesson: when you stand true to God, God will come through for you. When we stand true to God, three things happen. Let’s look at those three things together.

The church at Sardis was not a weak church that needed restoration. It was not a sick church that need rejuvenation. It was a dead church that needed resurrection. It was in a sense the church of the walking dead. I can tell you as a pastor my greatest fear is both pastoring a dead church and being a dead Christian. I want all of us today to perform our own self-examination and let’s see what steps we must take first of all to determine just how alive our Christian faith is and what we must do to be resurrected. Death may be fatal, but it is never final if we turn back to Jesus. As we examine ourselves, notice the fourfold prescription Jesus gives to get a church (or your faith) off the machine and alive again.

So far in this series, we have talked to husbands, wives, and fathers. Today, we are going to talk to and about mothers. I know from both having one and being married to one that the dad may be the head of the home, but the mother is the heart of the home. I read one time where someone said, “A mother is she who can take the place of all others, but whose place no one else can take.” That being said, it’s a tough task to be a mom, but thankfully Scripture gives us a great picture of what it looks like to be a model mom. In this message, we’re going to look at this example and learn from this model mom how to navigate through the tough times of life in such a way that the peace of God will comfort you, the joy of God will bless you, and the power of God will strengthen you.

In today’s message, we are going to look at the church in Thyatira, or as I like to call them, the church that failed the tolerance test. The way you fail the tolerance test is by tolerating what should not be tolerated. This church was tolerating something that it should not tolerate. It was putting up with something that it should have put out and put down. They thought they were broadening their thinking, but what they were really doing was stretching their conscience. They were choosing compromise over conviction. They were choosing comfort over confrontation. They were choosing peace over principle. In light of this, we are going to learn that when you tolerate what is wrong, you will always contaminate what is right. So in order to help us not fail the tolerance test, the Lord does three things that we need to know how to respond to correctly.

The church of Pergamum was located right in the middle of Hell’s headquarters. Living in the shadow of Satan himself, the smell of satanic influence was everywhere. Satan may have visited other towns, but he made his home in Pergamum and this was his neighborhood. Just like Pergamum, the Church today is always going to be dealing with the devil. The lesson we need to learn from this church today is how to deal with the devil and not succumb to his tactics and schemes. So as we dive into this section of Scripture, we’ll learn that lesson by looking at three specific things Jesus addressed in His letter to the church in Pergamum. 

In Revelation chapter 2, there was a church in a place called “Smyrna” that was under tremendous pressure. This church was under pressure to deny Christ, compromise their faith, bow down to Caesar, and join the cult of conformity. But they showed grace under pressure. Like the men in the fiery furnace, they didn’t bend, bow, or budge, all because of one thing this church was taught and this church remembered. It is this sermon in a sentence - Whatever you are going through, remember who you are coming to. I don’t know what you are going through right now, but whatever it is, I want to give you four things to remember and to live by in the midst of whatever pressure you’re currently facing. 

The church in Ephesus was a great church, an awesome church, a tremendous church, but it had one humongous problem that dealt with loving Jesus. What we are going to learn from this church is this – the only way to love Jesus right is to love Jesus best. We need to hear what Jesus says to this first church, to our church, and to us if we want to learn from the mistakes of the church in Ephesus. 

Today, we are going to look at the seventeenth chapter of the book of Acts. In our key passage, the Apostle Paul is in one of the greatest cities of the world at that time, Athens, and while he was there, he had the same challenge of sharing the truth of the resurrection that we have today. He wanted to bring the sunshine of Easter into the darkness of a lost city that is so much like the lost one we live in today. As we study his words, are going to learn why that empty tomb has such grave significance and how we can most effectively present the gospel to the world. 

As we wrap up this series, we are going to look at what I believe is probably the most misunderstood, misused, and misapplied verse in the entire Bible. By the way, it is not just unbelievers who misapply it and misunderstand it, but sadly many believers make the same mistake. This verse is in regard to judgmentalism. People equate the church today with a holier-than-thou attitude that screams what they are against and whispers what they are for. They hear the criticism, but they don’t see the compassion. They hear the condemnation; they don’t feel the care. And I humbly admit for a good bit of this we are guilty as charged. So, we are going to dive into what Jesus said and what Jesus didn’t say about this whole matter of judging so that we can make sure we’re not only interpreting Scripture correctly but that we’re also living out Scripture correctly so as not to turn others away from the church. 

Bigotry and prejudice is both an attitude and an action. You either see yourself as superior to someone else or someone else is inferior to you, and this mindset is going to lead you to treat them in a bigoted, prejudicial fashion. Everybody likes to say for the most part, “I’m not a bigot” and pretend that we are always totally objective, but the truth of the matter is we are not, even though we want to be. This is not a problem just for the modern church. The early church dealt with the problem of prejudice and the bias of bigotry a thousand years ago. James, the brother of Jesus, actually dealt with this problem in a book he wrote by his name. Today, when we think of bigotry we think primarily in terms of race, but in this particular case this was the prejudice of affluence and achievement, not of ancestry, but as you are going to see what James said to the church applies perfectly to any kind of bigotry including racial prejudice and racism. James does us a huge favor. He shares with us, not just what a bigot is, but what a bigot does and why any form of bigotry is not a misdemeanor, but it is a felony in the eyes of God. 

When it comes to understanding how Scripture and science are connected, many people simply say that the Bible is not a scientific textbook (which is true), and the Bible was not written primarily to teach us about science (which is also true). So, even if the Bible may be completely wrong when it comes to science, we can trust it when it comes to the more important questions of life and death and eternity. That sounds good in theory, but it is completely wrong. When Jesus was talking to Nicodemus about the physical process of birth, He makes this incredible statement, “If you won’t believe what I say about earthly matters, why would I expect you to believe what I say about heavenly matters?” It is a fair question. If I cannot rely on the Bible when it touches on any subject like history, science, morality, or philosophy then how can I trust it when it comes to theology? Those are the questions I want us to consider as we dive into this message. 

It is by consensus the number one reason people don’t come to church, criticize the church, and have no use for the church. Every church has hypocrites. Frankly, that shouldn’t really be surprising. The movement that Jesus started produced many hypocrites. As a matter of fact, being the largest religion in the world, Christianity has probably produced more hypocrites than any other movement in history. The word “hypocrites” is used seventeen times in the New Testament and every time it is used by Jesus. Nobody used it or talked about it as much as he did, who first critiqued religious hypocrisy in a way that shaped the way we look at it and made it such a negative term. In the Sermon on the Mount, He dealt with this issue of hypocrisy head-on and shared with his disciples then and his followers now how to avoid holy hypocrisy. If we are going to break down barriers and build bridges to unbelievers and especially the next generation, Jesus tells us three things we have to do. 

Have you ever asked the question, “If God is good, why does He allow evil and suffering to happen in the world?” It’s a question many have asked, and sadly, many don’t know how to answer it. But in this message, I want us to take a look at the story of a man named Asaph as we try to find a way to answer this question that haunts humankind, Christian or not. Asaph was playing by the rules, doing life by the numbers, went to church, paid his taxes, didn’t cheat on his business deals, was a good dad and husband, and always tried to do the right thing and yet he said, he was “Afflicted, and every morning brought new punishments.” We don’t know whether he struggled with physical disease, financial ruin, or family problems. His thinking was, “What is the use of living right if God is not going to do right and I’m going in the wrong direction?” When we find ourselves in a similar situation, wondering the same things, there are three things we must do. 

When we get to heaven and we stand before the Lord, I am convinced that one question he is going to ask us individually and as a church is this one simple question, “You only had one job. Did you do it?” We don’t have to wonder what that one job is because Jesus clearly spelled it out. What he is about to say is not just to pastors, preachers, professors, priests or professionals. He is talking to people of all stripes, all colors, all ethnicities, men, women, rich and poor. We all have the same job. As a follower of Jesus, you are going to understand why we only have one job and why we should always be doing it. 

We are in a series we have been calling “Lost in Translation.” We have been dealing with some big biblical words that even many Christians don’t really understand the meaning of; they get lost in translation. Sanctification is one of the most important biblical words, but we don’t hear much about it anymore. However, even though this word is not talked about nearly enough, it is so important that we understand what it means to be sanctified or we are going to be out of the will of God. The word literally means to be set apart. But how does God set us apart? Well, that’s what we’re going to look at in this message – three ways God is working to accomplish our sanctification while we are still here on this earth. 

There is no greater illustration in the Bible of a complete and total conversion than of a man by the name of Paul. In fact, it may be the most famous conversion in history. His conversion is well documented. It is talked about in detail three times in the Book of Acts. In fact, the story of Paul’s conversion occupies more space in the New Testament than any other event except the crucifixion of Jesus. It may be the most intense, in-your-face, radical encounter with Jesus in all of the New Testament. But even though Paul has one of the most talked about conversion stories of all time, that doesn’t mean our own stories of conversion are any less miraculous. With that in mind, I want us in today’s message to look at three things that happen anytime someone experiences conversion. 

As we continue our series entitled “Lost In Translation,” we are going to answer the question, “What is repentance?” It is imperative that we understand this concept because the word is mentioned nine hundred sixty-nine times in the Bible. When God talks about something once it is a big deal, but if He talks about it almost a thousand times it had better get our attention! Sadly, the word “repentance” seems like a forbidden word within the church and outside the church because the word implies that people have something they need to repent of, and of course, that sounds like you are judging others. Regardless, it is a word we cannot forget nor forsake, but rather one we need to zoom in on. That being said, in this message, I am going to share with you three ways to relate to this important principle of repentance. 

Today, we’re going to kick this series off by talking about where salvation begins, and that is with regeneration. Regeneration is where God gives a person who is spiritually dead spiritual life so they can truly see the truth with their eyes, hear the truth with their ears, and respond to the truth with their heart. Simply put, without this new birth, no matter what else you do, no matter what else happens you will never enter the Kingdom of God and you will never know the God of the kingdom. So in this message, we are going to look at how that “new birth” happens and what takes place in our lives when we are born again. 

Fasting is something we honestly know very little about and we don’t practice it very much. We know a lot about feasting, but we don’t know a lot about fasting, which, in a way, I get. On any given day, I would choose a feast over a fast anytime. Yet, if we want to be on the right side of history, we need to learn about fasting and we need to understand why it is a discipline we should experience. Fasting is just as much a part of the Christian life as other spiritual disciplines like praying and giving. So in this message, I am going to tell you two things we should do with fasting and one thing we shouldn’t. 

In today’s key passage of Scripture, we see a picture of a defendant in God’s courtroom. This courtroom has everything you would imagine. There is a judge. There is a defendant (that’s you). There is a prosecuting attorney. And as the defendant, you’re facing the question: will the verdict be “guilty” or “not guilty?” The answer to this question all depends on who you are and where you stand with the judge (God) before you enter that courtroom. Standing before the judge, we learn who our prosecuting attorney is going to be (Satan) and who our defense attorney will be (Jesus). So as we dive into this message and study this passage of Scripture, we are going to see how you can make sure when you stand before the supreme judge, you will hear the words, “Not guilty! Case dismissed.” Specifically, three things must happen for that to be the case. 

Have you ever been in a difficult situation and found yourself saying, “I can’t do this anymore”? Have you ever wondered how you were going to handle the circumstances you’ve been dealt? Have you ever worried about how you were going to fix the problems in front of you that seemed impossible to solve? Well, the good news is, you are not without hope. There is nothing too difficult for the God of the Bible. He is the can-do God. His Word reminds us that all things are possible with Him. I want to give you four practical applications that you can take from this message and apply to your everyday life as you follow Christ. These four things will give you the confidence to face anything life throws at you and be victorious. 

Today we are going to look at one of the parables Jesus tells to His followers that is recorded in the gospel of Luke. There are three specific elements to this parable: the sower, the seed, and the soil. The sower represents the follower of Jesus. The seed represents the message of the gospel. And the soil represents the heart of the non-believer. What we will learn from this parable is simple: it is our responsibility to sow the seed, and the rest is up to God. We can’t change other people’s hearts, just like the sower can’t change the soil he’s planting in. But God is more than capable of changing someone’s heart and opening their mind to receive the gospel. So with that in mind, let’s dive in. 

As we wrap up this series, I want to talk about the last gift I want for Christmas, which is a real love, not an “I love you now but tomorrow is negotiable,” kind of love. Not an “I love you as long as things go my way but when they don't...” kind of love. Certainly not the Hollywood kind of love that really is more lust than love. I want you to see today that real love comes from above. I want to use this message as a way to show us what real love is all about. If you think you really are a really loving person - a loving husband, wife, father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, or friend - get ready for a love checkup. Let’s see how your love measures up to the real love that comes from above. 

The biblical word “hope” means “certainty.” It doesn’t mean possibly or probably, but surely. It is a certainty based not on a feeling, nor an optimistic intuition, but it is based on God's Word. Having biblical hope means having a sound assurance in your heart that because of what God has promised, His plan for you will come to fruition and will not disappoint. With that in mind, in this message, I want to show you three things you can put your hope in knowing the seed of that hope will bear fruit and you'll be glad that it did. 

Do you know what a day trader is? These are high-risk investors who jump in and out of the stock markets often many times a day and they try to capitalize on price changes in the market. They have no interest in the companies of the stocks they are buying. They are just simply trying to make a buck. There are a lot of people in the church today who are day traders. They don’t know very much about God. They claim to have made some sort of a decision about Jesus, but they have never really surrendered their life to Him. They jump into church when they feel like they need to and jump back out when they don’t. They just want a God who will give them dividends in the form of blessings and leave them alone. That is exactly the kind of faith that is as worthless as a Christmas gift you got twenty years ago that no longer fits. I don’t want that kind of faith. And I’m sure you don’t either. Instead, I want us to have a redeeming faith, a renewing faith, a reviving faith. And I want to show you today the marks of a redeeming faith that we should all want for Christmas. 

As we wrap up this series on the family, I want to speak directly to the children. Whether you’re still living at home with your parents, or if you’ve moved out and started your own life but still have your parents around, this message is for you. If you are a child of God, then your goal should be to be a godly child. And while that is a responsibility you should take seriously, it’s also a responsibility your parents share with you to an extent. It takes godly parents to do their best to have godly children. Godly parents must provide leadership, and godly children should give followship. Again, if you are a child of God, your goal should be to be a godly child. So with that in mind, I’m going to give you three things you need to do to be a godly child.

So far in this series, we have talked to husbands, wives, and fathers. Today, we are going to talk to and about mothers. I know from both having one and being married to one that the dad may be the head of the home, but the mother is the heart of the home. I read one time where someone said, “A mother is she who can take the place of all others, but whose place no one else can take.” That being said, it’s a tough task to be a mom, but thankfully Scripture gives us a great picture of what it looks like to be a model mom. In this message, we’re going to look at this example and learn from this model mom how to navigate through the tough times of life in such a way that the peace of God will comfort you, the joy of God will bless you, and the power of God will strengthen you.

I love what President Franklin Roosevelt said: “We may not be able to prepare the future for our children, but we can at least prepare our children for the future.” In the book of Ephesians, the Apostle Paul gives fathers the best advice and wisdom on how to be the father your children need you to be. In a simple but sublime sentence, Paul shares with us four things we need to give our children to be the parents we ought to be.

Last week we talked about how husbands should give their wives leadership, love, and loyalty. We have already noted that Paul had a lot of strong things to say to the husband, even more so than he did to the wife. But now let’s now turn our attention to the wife. Paul lays out two principles for a godly wife to follow to be the wife that God wants her to be and to be the wife that her husband needs her to be.

I don’t believe there has ever been a marriage in the history of the world that did not end up happily ever after when the wife was the wife God wanted her to be and the husband was the husband that God wanted him to be. This week and next week, we are going to see what Scripture has to say about what it looks like exactly to be the kind of husband and the kind of wife God wants. In Ephesians 5, we begin with the husband. It is extremely important to note that Paul takes more time and gives more space to what he says to the husband than he does to the wife. In fact, he says three times as much to the husband as he does to the wife. So let’s look at what exactly a good, godly husband is to do for his wife.

Marriage is tough. Marriage is hard work. Dating reveals the best in you; marriage can reveal the worst of you. But that doesn’t mean marriage isn’t worth pursuing. Marriage was God’s ideal idea. It was His creation, and therefore it is meant for good. Does that mean it doesn’t come with challenges? Absolutely not. But it does mean that marriage can be an incredible tool of sanctification and a beautiful model of God’s relationship with us if we will lean into learning how God intended marriage to be. So with this in mind, let’s take a look at three principles of love and marriage we need to recapture in the present day.

As we wrap up this series, I’m going to share with you a one-on- one encounter that happened two thousand years ago that gives us the perfect example of how to engage people one-on-one with the gospel. God did not allow you to hear about what Jesus did for you, believe what Jesus did for you, and move you to accept what Jesus did for you just so you could just keep it to yourself. Salvation is not to be stored; it is to be shared. Not only is every Christian commanded to do evangelism, to share the Gospel, to tell other people about Christ, but God has also equipped every one of us to do it and given us the tools that we need. Let’s look at three steps we can take to share the gospel with others.

In today’s key passage of Scripture, Jesus is talking to two groups of people – sinners and Pharisees (people who were banned from going to church and people who never missed it.) One group was so bad they didn’t think God would ever accept them. The other group was so good that they thought God had already accepted them, but they were wrong, so He told this parable. Another misnomer is that the story is about either son. It really isn’t. The main character of the story is the father. The father is mentioned twelve times in twenty verses. He is the real hero of the story. The story is not so much about a sinning son or a bitter brother, but a forgiving father. Of course, the father represents God. The whole point of the parable is very simple. The Father’s door is always open and the Father’s message is always “Welcome.” The parable actually falls neatly into three different parts that tell us about the heart of our wonderful God. Let’s look at each of those parts now.

In probably the most famous parable Jesus ever told he shows us why if we have the heart of God, we will have a heart for one - for that one person who doesn’t know God, for that one person who needs to hear the gospel, for that one person who is lost and needs to be found. The problem was that the religious crowd only cared about the people who were in the temple while on the other hand, Jesus cared about the one that was outside the temple. The religious crowd built walls; Jesus built bridges. The religious crowd locked the doors to the church. Jesus took the doors out because Jesus was looking out for number one, except number one was not Himself. Number one was others. I want to challenge you today to begin looking out for number one like Jesus did, and we’ll learn from today’s key passage why we should, how we can, and what happens when we do.

Every day of your life is just like money – you spend it. You can’t save it and you can’t store it. You have to spend it and you either spend it wisely or foolishly and the way we spend the days of our life will determine the legacy that we leave. So how would you like to leave a legacy? You want to be able to look back on your life and say at the end of the day, you have no remorse, no regret, no retreat, right? You want to hear one day from the God that created you, “Well done good and faithful servant.” Well, for those things to happen, we must determine to do three things.

What did Jesus mean by “the abundant life” in today’s key verse? I know what He didn’t mean. It is not a life that is found in stuff, money, possessions, or financial security. When Jesus called the disciples to follow Him, every one of them left everything behind. Even though He promised them an abundant life, He never offered them financial security, physical comfort, a retirement plan, health insurance, and certainly no health and wealth gospel. He didn’t even promise them a long life because many of them died early. Here is what He meant. The abundant life (the only life worth living) is a life lived in, through, and for Jesus. In this message, we are going to learn from these disciples as we think about how to live the only life worth living.

The first question we are going to tackle in this series is, “What Lord am I going to love?” I freely admit that this question carries an assumption that I believe is true. We all worship and love something or someone above everything else. Whoever or wherever that is, is your lord. That lord may be your ego, your money, your family, your job, power, influence, pleasure, happiness, and even your own life. This first question I believe is the fundamental question that determines the answer to the other two questions. So let’s dive in.

Bitterness is harbored hurt hidden in the heart. Of all the emotions I will cover, I believe this one may be the most dangerous. I fear bitterness in my life more than anything else. Do you know why? Because bitterness is an acid that destroys its own container. In a New Testament book called Hebrews 12 there is some strong warning about the danger of bitterness, but also some great wisdom on how to deal with bitterness. If you are bitter now, you will be better later.

As we continue our series on feelings and emotions, today we are going to look at anxiety. I would define anxiety as a lethal combination of worry and fear that dominate your mind, saturate your heart, and devastate your soul. We are abiding in fear. It is that feeling that continues to linger long after the actual threat or fear has dissipated. It is a far greater intensity than just worried. People use worry and anxiety interchangeably. However, they are very different psychological states. According to Psychology Today, “Worry tends to be more focused on thoughts in our heads, while anxiety is more visceral, in that we feel it throughout our bodies.” The good news is a man with flesh and blood, sitting in a Roman prison, facing certain death, knowing he probably wouldn’t get out of that prison alive and not knowing what day he would die understood anxiety. In a book called Philippians, he gives us a four-step process on how to calm your nerves.

God’s word has a lot to say about our feelings and our emotions. One of the things I love about Scripture is that when God paints the portraits of his men and women, they are not photoshopped. You see warts and wrinkles. You see flaws and faults. Today, we are going to look at one of the most famous men in the Bible – a prophet named Elijah. If God had a Hall of Fame, Elijah would easily be elected on the first ballot. He had so much of the power and presence of God in his life. He is the first person in the Bible to raise a person from the dead. But Elijah also had some troubles in life. As we are about to see, he was so depressed that he was suicidal. But in today’s message, we are going to look at how Elijah managed to get out of that valley, and with God’s help so can you. Elijah found in God a bridge over the troubled waters of depression that is still available to us today.

Being thankful is so important to God that He actually commands us to be thankful. A man in the New Testament by the name of Paul went through a tremendous amount of suffering and heartache that would cause anybody to be bitter and ungrateful and maybe even mad at God. He wrote these words, “Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” (I Thessalonians 5:18) You may not feel very thankful right now because of where you are in your life. Even though you may not feel thankful you can be thankful. This great man tells us how to be thankful and why to be thankful.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the greatest writers and poets in American history said, “Every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty-seconds of peace of mind.” Not only do I agree with that statement, but I will candidly admit I have given up a lot of time of peace of mind. I can get angry, and I know I am not the only one. Thankfully, God’s Word has a lot to say about anger. In the book of Ephesians, Paul gives a prescription for those of us who are temper challenged to practice divine anger management. For many of us, by the grace of God, it can be done, it should be done, and it will be done if we will take three steps.

Jesus came to give us joy, peace, satisfaction, and contentment. Paul understood that probably better than anyone, even as he was writing from a Roman prison, when he wasn’t going anywhere and was stuck where he was. He wasn’t going to have any more than what he had, and he certainly had no computer and no cellphone. He pens this letter by talking about how he had found the secret of satisfaction. If Paul had died with his last words he would have been totally satisfied. There are three things we can do to live a life of total satisfaction according to Paul, and my prayer is that we all learn to implement these things in our lives so we can be totally satisfied as well.

The question now before us in today’s message is this: How can you bear the fruit of joy that you have to handle, with all the problems that you have to solve, with all the people that you have to deal with? A man who is in prison, under the threat of death every day, not knowing whether he would live or die, from one day to the next, wrote the perfect prescription for how to get stress out when you are stressed out. Paul gives us four steps to follow if we want to experience stress relief, and I can guarantee that your life will be richer, better, and sweeter if you practice these steps on a daily basis.

Life is exactly like a race. From the time you are born until the time you die you are running a race. The one goal in every race is to cross the finish line. No matter what else you do in a race it doesn’t matter how hard you run or how fast you run. If you don’t cross the finish line you won’t win. One sure-fire way to get joy and ultimately win in the life you are living is to set God-given goals and then to give your life every day to reaching those goals. A man by the name of Paul gives us the formula on how to do that. He gives us three simple steps that you can use at the beginning of every year, every month, every week, and every day to make that year, that month, that week, and that day the best year, best month, best week and best day of your life.

I believe that two things will determine what difference you made and to the degree that you made a difference - what you know and who you know. Nobody got a bigger bang for the buck of their life, outside of Jesus, than a man named Paul. Besides him, I don’t believe anyone who has ever lived had a more productive life, got more out of his potential, or had a greater long-term impact than this man who took a seed called the gospel, planted it as far as he could go, and the result has been the explosion of Christianity that we see all over the world two-thousand years later. How did he do it? What was the secret to his unbelievable influence and impact? Well, we have discovered the secret of who we should know and what we should know that will help us to get where we need to go in life and where God wants us to be when it is over. We should be determined to know three things on a daily basis, and they made all the difference.

We only get to take the ride of life once. Shouldn’t it be a joyride? Even with the bumps in the road, the sharp curves, the steep cliffs, and the deep valleys, don’t you want every hour of every day, of every week, of every year, to be filled with joy? In the coming days, would you like to be less stressed out? Would you like to maximize your pleasure and minimize your pain? Would you like to face life every day with a smile on your face, a bounce to your step, and joy in your heart regardless of your circumstances? In the second chapter of Philippians, Paul gives a three-step formula on how to do that. So, if you want to enjoy the ride of life, I guarantee that you will if you take these three steps.

There are two things that every human being has to face from the moment they are born. That is life and death. I don’t believe you are ready to live until you are ready to die. I also don’t believe you are ready to die until you are ready to live. I believe that Jesus is the only one who can truly get you ready for both. When Paul was in prison, he had to go to sleep every night ready to die the next morning. But even in this terrible set of circumstances, he continued to rejoice because he recognized that his life was in Christ, and to die was gain. In this message, I want to walk through the different things we gain when we die so that we can live our lives unafraid of death.

The Apostle Paul wrote thirteen books of the New Testament. All of them were letters. Of the thirteen letters, eleven of them were written to seven different churches. Philippians is the only letter that we have in the New Testament where Paul never one time corrects bad teaching, rebukes bad behavior, or handled a bad situation. We see only a completely positive letter to a church he wrote. This was a church that was full of joy. It was a church that gave joy to the pastor that founded it and gave joy to the people who attended it. Nineteen times you will find in this book the words “rejoice, joy, and gladness.” When you read this book you realize this is what a church should look like on the inside to the people who attend it, but it is also what a church ought to look like from the outside to people who don’t attend it. I want to share with you today the three things that are true about that church that I want to be true about the church today, both to insiders and to outsiders. I want to be a church wanted.

The God we have been talking about throughout this entire series knows you better than anyone or anything. Just like He knew Moses, and He knew the Israelites, He knows you too. But the question of the day is this, “Do you know God?” Now the question is not, “Do you know about God?” The question is not even, “Do you believe in God?” The question I am asking is, “Do you know God personally?” Then I would follow up that question with this one, “How well do you know God?” I can answer that question for all of us. You know God as well as you want to. As we wrap up this series with today’s message, we are going to take a look at how we can come to know God deeply and personally.

The people of Israel had been treating God like a heavenly bellhop expecting Him to be at their every beck and call and give them everything they wanted when they wanted it. When Moses had lingered on that mountaintop meeting with God, they decide they would just take matters into their own hands. They would make a god more to their liking. The truth is, we all have “idol hands” that tend to either make the God we worship the God we want or make the god that we want the god that we worship. We’re going to learn today that if you are for God, you won’t put anything before God. You may not think that you have an idolatry problem. You may not even understand why we even have to discuss this issue, but when we see how we do choose false idols and what happens when we do, my prayer is it will cause all of us to give our total loyalty, complete love, and full life to the only true God there is.

In this message, we are going to study the story of when God had a word for His people and wanted to meet with them. But before the people met with God, God wanted to meet with Moses. Every meeting was a mountaintop meeting and though you might get the idea from the movies that Moses only went up the mountain one time, he actually went up seven times. God wanted to show both Moses and the people that there is no bigger deal in life than meeting with God. What’s also great about this story is that we learn that the same God who met with Moses wants to meet with you. The same God that spoke to Moses wants to speak to you. We can learn from this mountaintop meeting how we can meet with the God of this universe every day, and not only do we not have to make an appointment or wait in line, but when we meet with Him, He will give us His undivided attention.

We have been studying a man by the name of Moses in a series we are calling, “Red Sea Moments.” This great man of God was facing a Red Sea moment when he came to his own level of stress. He is leading two million of his people through wilderness and desert and they are burning up at times at the way he is doing it, and he is burning out trying. In the 18th chapter of Exodus, Moses had a moment and a meeting that didn’t just change his life, but it literally saved his life and helped him complete his tasks. It is not only very practical, but it is very spiritual. If you feel overworked and overwhelmed, now’s the time to admit it, because you will never be the father, the mother, the husband, the wife, the employee, or even the Christian that you should be as long as you stay there. Moses took three simple steps that kept him from burning out that you can take as well.

One of the things that you will see throughout the books of Exodus and Numbers is how much complaining and griping the Israelites did. At different times in Exodus and Numbers, Moses and the Lord had to listen to their complaints. Every one of them had to do with food, drink, and living conditions. You have to wonder why God let his people get thirsty and then in this chapter he lets them get hungry. Why does God let us go through times of need, hardship, and difficulty? Because God is trying to teach us what He is trying to teach them and that is every single day of your life you live from His hand to your mouth. In this message, we are going to learn five things about God and about our daily life that I pray will lead us to be people not of griping, but gratitude, not of complaining, but celebrating.

As we look today in the book of Exodus in chapter 14, we are going to read about the most celebrated event in Jewish history. Two movies have been made concerning this event and two words are all you need to know – The Exodus. If you had been standing where Moses was standing, you would have said, “This is the end of the line. We need to get our affairs in order. It’s over.” Normally, I wouldn’t spoil the ending by telling you what happens, but most of you already know it. God parts the Red Sea. The children of Israel pass through. He then closes the waters back on the Egyptian army, drowns them, and saves the day. The same God that came through for Moses and the nation of Israel is alive and well and wants to come through for you. In this message, we are going to learn what we need to do when our back is against the wall, just like Moses’ was.

You may be asking, “What does a burning bush or a Red Sea or a man named Moses have to do with me?” You will learn the answer to this question throughout this series as we discover that we all have Red Sea moments. We all come face-to-face at times with burning bushes. Moses is a lot like all of us and the God of Moses is still alive today and wants to move in your life the same way He moved in his. You are going to learn three lessons today that will teach you don’t ever beat around a bush that calls your name. If you feel like you are living on the backside of the desert and nobody knows about your life or cares about it, and you even feel like God has forgotten you, take these three lessons to heart.

When Moses was born, Israel had become slaves in the land of Egypt, but that wasn’t always the case. Because of a great man named Joseph, the Egyptian pharaoh had basically adopted them into the nation, giving them favored status and the full rights of citizenship. Four hundred years had passed and now Israel had two big problems. There was a pharaoh that had forgotten who Joseph was, but even more importantly, the nation of Israel had forgotten who God was. It was in that situation that a baby was born that changed everything. Israel needed a miracle, and that miracle came in the form of a baby, a baby named Moses. And as we read his story, we will see that three things were true of Moses that are true of you.

I hear so many Christians today express concern about the way our culture is increasingly rejecting biblical Christianity. I share the same concern, but honestly, I am a lot more concerned about evangelical Christians rejecting the Bible. I don’t mean that Christians reject the truth of the Bible, but they reject time in the Bible. It’s like when you try to give a baby a bottle, but they refuse to drink it. You know it’s what they need to grow stronger, but for some reason, they don’t want it. We’ve got milk (in the Word of God). We are just not drinking it. And because we are not, we are starving ourselves of direction in how to walk, wisdom in how to think, and guidance in how to live. I want to share with you today three habits we need to develop if our relationship with God is going to be as rich, as powerful, and as meaningful as it should be.

Good Friday was the day Jesus died, but Sunday was the day that death died. Some women came to the tomb that day to anoint Jesus’ dead body with spices, which was a Jewish custom. Little did they know they wouldn’t need spices that day. Even though they found the tomb, they didn’t find the body. Nothing has ever fascinated humanity more deeply than the question of whether there is life after death. If it interests you at all, and you have never done your homework, then the subject is not finished until you read what happened on that Sunday morning. As we go back and study the account of the resurrection of Jesus, we are going to see one way we can respond (in fact the way most people respond), but then we are going to see the two ways we should respond.

When God created the universe, there were no leftovers. There are no excess stars or planets. There is not too much water in the oceans and not too much land on the earth. Everything fits perfectly. Just as God doesn’t waste anything, He doesn’t want us to waste any experience we have in life, whether it is a good one or a bad one. He wants us to use it for the good of others and for His glory. The question is, “How do you do that?” A man by the name of Paul had a Ph.D. in sorrow, suffering, trials, and tribulations. Paul was an expert on what it meant to be comforted, and he had plenty of experience in needing to be. He experienced everything from emotional suffering, to physical sickness, to spiritual sorrow. Out of it, God taught him one of the most valuable lessons we can ever learn. God wants to use your misery for ministry. So if you currently find yourself in a place full of hurt and heartache, here is what you need to do.

In today’s key passage of Scripture, we read about a boy named Daniel and the predicament he found himself in as he shared a meal with the Babylonian king. He was offered food and wine from the king, but something deep in his soul told him not to accept the offerings. Why would he draw a line at eating the king’s food and drinking the king’s wine? There have been all kinds of speculation and reasons given, but we are not specifically told. One thing we do know is that in Middle Eastern culture, when you sat down to eat a meal, particularly with a ruler or a king, you were pledging loyalty to the king, but there was only one King and that was God. It appears as if Daniel is out of options. Yet here we learn a lesson about lines we find in the dirt of our own lives. As you go through life, you will find God-drawn lines that the world will tempt you to cross. When you stay on the God side, you will stay on the good side. If that’s the side you want to stay on, then pay close attention and follow where Daniel put his foot down.

Do your thoughts of God glorify Him or grieve Him? Do your prayers to God bless Him or insult Him? Does your giving show you trust God enough to give Him your tithe and believe He will meet all your needs? A. W. Tozer said: “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” How would you answer that question? If you need help or a starting point in coming up with your answer, a king named David wrote a song that gives us the most exhaustive description of the greatness of God found in the Bible. As we study this passage of Scripture today, we are going to learn why the greatest knowledge we can ever have is the knowledge of just how great God is. And as we do, we’re going to be able to get a little closer to answering the question, “How great is our God?”

Big things come in little packages. For instance, even though today’s key passage is only one verse, in three sentences it answers the big question of how God wants us to live in the meantime. In order to properly understand this verse, we need to remember something as believers. A follower of Jesus is someone who has responded to the gospel. The gospel is that Jesus died for our sin and was physically raised from the dead. If we repent of our sins and place our faith in him, we will be saved, forgiven, receive eternal life, and have a relationship with God. What a lot of Christians fail to understand is that is where the gospel starts, not where the gospel ends. The gospel not only tells us how we are to relate to God; it then tells us how we are to relate to others. In other words, there is a vertical appropriation of the gospel that is to be followed by a horizontal application of the gospel. Jesus set a great example of what this looks like during His time on earth. He literally came to seek and to save that which was lost, but when they were hungry, He fed them. When they were thirsty, He gave them water to drink. When they were sick, He healed them. When they were hurting, He touched them. With that in mind, what are we to do in the meantime?

You may be living with guilt today, but you don’t have to live with guilt tomorrow. Let me say upfront there is no human cure for the problem of guilt, because the cause of all guilt is sin and only God can deal with sin. Sin is the wound. Guilt is the infection. There is only one cure for guilt and the best doctors, surgeons, psychiatrists, counselors, psychologists and advisors and medicines in the entire world cannot cure this illness. There is only one cure for guilt and that is forgiveness. There is only one source of true forgiveness and that is God. We are going to learn more about that truth as we study Psalm 51 in this message and learn how we can say goodbye to guilt and have a clean slate.

The crisis of loneliness is as grave a threat to public health as obesity or substance abuse. Research tells us that lonely people are more likely to become ill, experience cognitive decline, and died early. Feeling lonely results in a sixty-percent increased risk of functional decline and a forty-five percent greater risk of death. If you battle loneliness, you are in company with the man who wrote these words in a book in the Bible called “Psalms.” Imagine you are a counselor, and you hear him say this, “I am like a desert owl, like an owl among the ruins. I lie awake; I have become like a bird alone on a roof” (Psalm 102:6-7). What is his problem? Loneliness. He felt like an isolated owl wondering out loud, “Who gives a hoot?” Hearing those words, you might be saying, “That is exactly how I feel.” If it is, I have good news. There is a way up, and there is a way out of your loneliness. Let’s find it together.

It is very, very difficult to stand up straight against the blast of jealousy. We all have read how the Pharisees made sure Jesus was crucified, but do you know what the primary motive was? Matthew 27:18 says, “For he knew that it was out of envy that they had delivered him up.” That word there for “envy” is the word that literally means “jealousy.” What drove the nails through the body of Jesus was the hammer of jealousy. Jealousy does kill. It kills marriages, friendships, and families. It is said that jealousy is the ace up Satan’s sleeve. This green-eyed monster is a giant, but God specializes in slaying giants. So let’s take a look at how we can slay this green-eyed monster.

Stress is the gap between what we face and what we think we can face. It is the difference in what we believe we must do versus what we believe we can do. You can call it the “stress factor.” It is the canyon between the “ought to” and the belief we “can’t do.” Basically, a medical doctor put it simply, “A person’s stress level has to do with what a person believes.” There is ancient advice that was given almost three millennia ago by a prophet named Isaiah who was facing along with his nation an unbelievable time of stress. Isaiah gives us a divine prescription for stress that comes from the heart of God. So when life becomes unbearable, the storm gets too strong, your rope of hope has been cut in half and you feel like throwing in the towel, here is how to have stress success.

If I asked you, “What are you worried about right now?” you could tell me something very quickly. We’re all worried about something. Worry never seems to go away. Fortunately, Jesus had a lot to say about worry. A big portion of the greatest sermon ever preached in the history of the world was geared toward worry. So as we look at that sermon, Jesus is going to tell us how to conquer our worries by making sure we take care of just three days in our lives – yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Forty percent of the people who make New Year’s resolutions break them by the end of January. Seventy-five percent will have broken them by Valentine’s Day. That is why I want to propose that what we need is not a New Year’s resolution, but a New Year’s revolution - real change that can mean a happy new you for this happy New Year. A man by the name of Paul sitting in a Roman prison of all places gives us a perfect way to do that. In Philippians chapter 3, he gives us three simple things that if we do them on a daily basis every day can bring a happy new you. They are doable, all achievable and all possible. What is really great is if you will do these things, they will not necessarily take you where you think you need to go, but they will take you farther than that. They will take you where God wants you to go.

If you are like me, you have had moments in your life when you can’t help but ask, “God, where are you?” Even worse, is when you find yourself asking, “God, what good are you?” or “God, are you really good?” After all, we think “If you are a good God and I’m trying to be a good person, why do these bad things happen to me?” Then to make things worse, a pastor like me steps up to a platform and looks at people like you and says, “Don’t worry. Things that are breaking bad will eventually be breaking good.” My late dad used to say to me all the time, “Son, I’ve learned it all works out for the good in the end.” Honestly, that sounds cold, calloused, and even somewhat condescending when it is actually meant to be comforting. But what if it is true? What if things that are breaking bad will ultimately break good? That’s what we’re going to look at in today’s message as dive into Romans 8:28-29.

In the first chapter of his gospel, John makes it plain that this baby that was born was none other than God in the flesh. That is the “So what?” of Christmas. We answered that “So What?” question in the first two messages. Today, we deal with the “Now What?” and the answer to the first question gives us the answer to the second question. Jesus was born into a human family so that we might be born into heaven’s family. Jesus was born as the Son of God so that we might be born again as children of God. Our birthright is going to tell us because of who Jesus is, what we are to do if we have or if we would like to receive that birth right.

Christmas is not just a day that we celebrate. It is not even just a date that we commemorate; Christmas is about a deity that we coronate. Unless the Gospel writers were liars, unless the disciples who spent three years with him and ran from him before he died but died for him after he came back from the grave, were either all on drugs or hallucinating, then as someone well said, “If Jesus was not God, he certainly deserved an Academy Award, for he put on the best act in history.” Those eyewitnesses in one majestic sentence tell us how to truly respond to this baby born in Bethlehem years ago.

There is no question that Covid-19 has had a tremendous effect on our nation financially, economically, physically, spiritually, and emotionally. From the very beginning when we were asked to isolate, stay at home, and put ourselves under quarantine for the foreseeable future, sociologists, mental health experts, and others predicted that we would see a tremendous strain in the home, particularly within marriages and the family as a whole. I’m sure you and I can agree that these experts were right. We’re all dealing with plenty of tension, conflict, and uneasiness with those closest to us, particularly our children. But how can we view this season as a chance to influence and impact our kids, rather than grow impatient with them? How can we leverage this time with them for the Kingdom of God? That’s exactly what we’re going to look at in this message.

The book of Colossians focuses like a laser beam on the one who created the universe and the one who controls the universe – Jesus Christ. Paul has been laying out the Jesus that Christians believe in and the Jesus that Christians belong to. Now, Paul is going to show us how Christians are to behave like the Jesus they believe in and the Jesus they belong to. In Colossians chapter 4 he shares with us in five verses how we should behave toward others so that others might believe in Jesus. We have a responsibility once we give our lives to Jesus Christ. Once the guardian of the galaxy becomes the God of our hearts, we are to behave toward others like a magnet draws iron so that we will draw people to Jesus.

In the third chapter of the Book of Colossians, in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul lays out the house rules for the church as we come together corporately as a body, but then as we leave the church individually as members of that body. When I was growing up my mom and dad had certain house rules for how we were to conduct ourselves in our home, but some of those same rules applied for when we left the home because when we left the home we were actually taking the home with us. The way we lived our lives outside the house reflected the kind of house that we lived in. The same goes for how we live our lives as believers. As we begin this week’s study, I want you to take to heart this thought. The best argument for Christianity and the best argument against Christianity is the life of a Christian. Not only are we to be his witnesses, but we ought to be a part of the evidence. This is the way we are to do it.

One of the most popular presidents in history, Theodore Roosevelt, said this, “The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.” I find that hard to argue with because at the end of the day, every single part of your life and mine is all about relationships. Just think about it. Your spiritual life is determined by your relationship with God. Your vocational life is determined by your relationship with your employees, your boss, and your fellow workers. Your social life is determined by your relationship with your friends. Your marital life is determined by your relationship with your spouse and on and on it goes... At the end of the day, what life is all about is making those relationships work. In the third chapter of Colossians, Paul shares with us three things we must do daily, continuously, and personally to get along with each other and have great relationships.

Every life should have a target, a bullseye, a goal, an aim and any healthy individual I think would want the following for his life: You want to live the best life you can. Be the best person you can be. Have the best influence you can have. Leave the best legacy you can. In order to do that, you’ve got to aim high. I am convinced the reason most people will live a life of little consequence, little influence, and little impact is because they aimed too low. We should all aim high with the life that God has given us. Where should our aim be and how high should it go? What your heart loves the most and what your mind thinks about the most will determine the life that you live. So, every day where should we be aiming? You aim at what you look at, so how can we know that we are looking at the right target and we are looking at the right altitude?

No other book in the Bible focuses more on Jesus, who he was, what he did, and why it is so important than the book of Colossians. In Colossians chapter 2, we are going to see exactly why Jesus was nailed to the cross that day because it was more than just the body of a man and everything that needed to be nailed along with Him. In fact, what was nailed that day took care of my past, my present, and my future, and the same is true for you. So let’s look specifically at what was nailed to the cross with Jesus so that we can understand all that had to die so that we could have a relationship with God and be reconciled to Him.

The Bible elevates Jesus more, exalts Jesus more, and extols Jesus more than anything ever created. The walk of a lifetime should be centered around Him. A Christian is someone who has walked to Jesus and now walks with Jesus and always walks for Jesus. Therein lies a big problem that we as Christians and as a church face greatly today. Too many people who call themselves Christians have either never truly walked to Jesus or they have quit walking with Jesus and for Jesus, and now they are walking in the wrong direction. Thankfully we have the words of Paul in the book of Colossians to help make sure we keep walking with and for Jesus, even when we’re tempted to stray off the path. Paul reminds us of what a true Christian looks like and what a Christian does with their lives. They take the walk of a lifetime, and this walk always involves three steps.

At the beginning of the book of Colossians, there is a prayer that Paul prayed for a people whom he had never even seen. It is one of the greatest prayers ever prayed, and it is a perfect model on how you and I can pray for people we don’t even know. If we were to write a book called “Prayer for Dummies” you could write the entire book based on this one prayer. Many times you are praying to God because you really don’t know what you should be saying to God. But this is a one-size-fits-all prayer. It is a prayer you can pray for anybody, anytime, under any circumstances, for family members, friends, and employees. I would ask you to pray this prayer for me and it is a prayer we need to pray for our church. Let’s look at the components Paul includes in this prayer specifically.

People tend to go to two extremes with their body. Some people don’t think their body is as important as God does. Other people think their body is more important than God does. Whichever group we happen to be in, I want us to see our body in a completely different way than maybe we ever have before. How you see your body will determine how you treat your body. Whether you ignore your body, adore your body, or abhor your body is not a physical issue, but a spiritual issue. So as we conclude our series called “Otherwise” we’re going to learn that living healthy is part of living holy, and we’re going to look at the words of Paul to see how we can live a healthy and holy life.

There are two sides to everyone’s life: the visible side and the invisible side, the side that everybody sees and the side that nobody sees. And what happens on one side can determine the success or failure of the other side. More specifically, how you deal with temptation on one side determines the success or failure of the other side. But we’re going to learn in this message is that temptation can be tamed. To do that, let’s look at what Paul has to tell us about temptation and see what we need to keep in mind so that we’re not overtaken by temptation.

There is only one of two ways you can use time: wisely or foolishly. Thankfully, God has not left us on our own to sort out how we ought to spend our time and how we ought to live our days out on this earth. He has given us specific advice on the best way to use every day and there is an encyclopedia full of wisdom on how to manage time wisely in a simple statement of Scripture. We’re going to take a look at that Scripture today, and as we do, we’re going to see that the most important use of your time is spending most of your time on what is most important. To make sure we do that, let’s discuss three steps we can take.

The challenge we all face every day is confronting the things in life we can change and making the right decisions about those changes. Life really comes down to making decisions. You are who you are today, what you are today, and where you are today because of the decisions you have made in the past. Nobody understands the importance of being able to make wise decisions more than a king. As one of the greatest kings who ever lived, he clearly understood the value of decision-making and made a decision that, in turn, made him the great king that he was. God did something for this king that He will do for us, and if we will follow this king’s example, we can make decisions fit for a king.

Forgiveness must always be the rule of the day between two followers of Jesus Christ. Both the offended party and the offending party have a biblical responsibility to heal the relationship and to restore what has been ruptured. Now we are going to get into the nitty-gritty of the process of forgiveness itself. It is one thing to know that you need to forgive. It is one thing to know that you want to forgive, but it is an entirely different thing to get to the point where you do forgive. I will warn you though the steps are simple the steps are difficult. But this is the one thing to remember: I must choose to forgive others just as God has forgiven me.

How do you repair a relationship when you are not the one who ruptured it? It is not me. It is you that broke this. It is not us. It is them that caused the problem. In other words, we are going to answer the tough question, “What do you do when you are not the one that needs to get forgiveness, but the one who needs to give forgiveness.” For many of us, that is going to be a much tougher thing to do, because it is easier to seek forgiveness than it is to show forgiveness. It is easier to ask for it than it is to give it. C.S. Lewis wisely said, “Everybody thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.” When someone has offended us, someone has hurt us, someone has sinned against us, and it is their fault, we are going to see what God has to say about why we are the ones that should take the first step and how we are to do it.

In Psalm 32, David wrote a song that talks about how he found the way back to redemption, restoration, and reconciliation. At this point in his life, David would have been a prime candidate for the series that we are in, because we’ve said that the first step you must take in order to make things right when you are in the wrong is to confess your sin. David had done that. We said the second thing you must do is repent of your sin and with God’s grace turn away from it. David had done that. Now, in this song, David tells us how to plant your feet on the solid rock of forgiveness and turn the sadness of a fault into the gladness of forgiveness. There is a reason why some of you in this room have confessed things you have done wrong and repented of them and have truly asked for forgiveness, but you still don’t feel forgiven. You struggle with guilt and I know why. I hear it all the time, “I still can’t forgive myself.” I am going to show you how to do that today once and for all.

Last week, we talked about confession. We said that the first person we must ask forgiveness from whenever we do wrong is God. The good news is we found out last week that God has a perfect record. Every time we sincerely confess our sins to God, God surely forgives us. The problem is too many people stop at confession and they think that all they have to do is just confess and all is well. But there is a second step that must be taken. I call it the seismic shift. A seismic shift is when there is a shifting in rocks so great that it causes another earthquake. There is a seismic shift that must take place with us and our sin if we are going to truly maintain our fellowship with God and that is found in the word “repentance.”

As we begin this new series called “Faults,” we are going to begin with the place where every relationship must begin if it is going to be fixed and fixed right and that is in our relationship with God. We are going to start at the epicenter. Do you know what the epicenter is? The epicenter is the location directly above the surface of the earth where an earthquake begins. The epicenter of every fault that causes every earthquake in our relationships is this: Sin is always against God first. You can sin against God and not sin against others, but every sin against others is first a sin against God. The first step that must always be taken to restore relationships, fix friendships, and mend marriages is confession. Confession in most cases always has two dimensions: vertical and horizontal. When our sin or our thought has hurt someone else, we must confess that sin first to God and then to others. So today, we are going to show you, in one verse of scripture, the most important step anyone can ever take that want to solve the problem caused by our fault.

There is not a greater teacher in life than trouble. Quite honestly, you learn a lot more about yourself and about life in the hard times than you ever will in the good times. Not to mention we can always count on when hard times hit, people of faith and no faith, religion and no religion, church and no church, come out of the woodwork and they ask the big question, “Where is God?” There is a man in the Bible who was probably outside of Jesus, the best known, and his name was Paul. If anybody had a right to be asking that question it was him. He blazed a trail for the Christian faith that no one else has come close to doing. He became the greatest missionary, the greatest apologist, the greatest church planter, the greatest evangelist and the greatest theologian that the world has ever known. What did he get for all of this? The words we are going to study today are in a letter he wrote to a young pastor named Timothy. He wrote sitting in a Roman dungeon, from which he would never escape, facing imminent death, and yet he answers this question: Where is God?

An unknown person once said, “There are two great moments in a person’s life. The first is when you were born; the second is when you discover why you were born.” That leads me to make one of the most arrogant statements any pastor could ever make to anybody. If there is a God and if that God has revealed himself in the Bible, and if the Bible is God’s word and true, then I can confidently, though it may sound arrogantly say, “I know the purpose for which every person was born.” Now we may not carry that purpose out the same way throughout our lives, but nevertheless we were all born for the same purpose. Paul in one simple sentence gives us the one purpose for which we were created. It is the purpose of the church. In fact, in the grand scheme of things it is the purpose of everything. The reason we exist individually, why do we exist as a church, why did God create anything or anyone? Here is the purpose, “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” (1 Corinthians 10:31) Now here is the kicker. We will never understand our purpose, or accept our purpose, or practice our purpose unless we understand one thing about our lives – it is not about me.

When we get to heaven and we stand before the Lord, I am convinced that one question he is going to ask us individually and as a church is this one simple question, “You only had one job. Did you do it?” We don’t have to wonder what that one job is because Jesus clearly spelled it out. What he is about to say is not just to pastors, preachers, professors, priests or professionals. He is talking to people of all stripes, all colors, all ethnicities, men, women, rich and poor. We all have the same job. As a follower of Jesus, you are going to understand why we only have one job and why we should always be doing it.

I can say without deliberation, hesitation or equivocation that there has never been a greater time to celebrate Easter, nor has there ever been a greater Easter to celebrate. Why? Because if Easter is true, if Jesus is alive, if He was raised from the dead, then not only do we have hope, not only do we have the best hope, but we have the only hope for our past, our present, and our future. Only a risen Lord can take care of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Therefore, we can have hope even in the darkest, most depressing circumstances. Those of us who believe in a risen Lord may feel helpless at times, but we are never hopeless. So with that in mind, let’s take a look at three truths about the Lord from which we can derive our hope.

As we wrap up this series, we are going to deal with the third area where not only certain people need help, but frankly we all need help, and that is in the area of temptation. I want to challenge you to think about something. If you think about every regret you have in life, every do-over, or as we golfers would say, “every mulligan you wish you could take,” everything you wished you hadn’t done, words you wished you had not said, places you wished you had not gone, or people you wish you had not hurt, I would say without exception it is because you failed to handle temptation. The great playwright, Oscar Wilde, once said, “I can handle anything except temptation.” The good news is everyone who knows Jesus, loves Jesus, and follows Jesus can overcome any temptation because of Jesus. Jesus, himself, has shown us how to do that.

There is a difference between worry and concern. You should be concerned about your children getting a good education, coming to know Jesus as Lord and Savior, and concerned about the relationships they have and the friends that they make. If those things don’t concern you, you are a bad parent. You should be concerned about saving money for a rainy day and planning for retirement. Otherwise, you are foolish. There are certain things every day that call for legitimate concern. There is a difference between being care-free and care-less. But worry is a different matter and in the greatest sermon ever preached in the history of this planet, by the greatest preacher who ever lived, Jesus Christ, He took this issue of worry head on. He addressed it with the greatest advice any counselor could ever give. In this message, we’re going to take a look at what Jesus has to say about worry and how we can overcome the temptation to worry in the circumstances we face each day.

It’s a very common goal to want to be the best version of yourself. Go into any bookstore and bookshelf after bookshelf is lined with writings that will help you address your self-image and your self-worth and give you all kinds of techniques to help you feel better about yourself. But here is the problem. At the end of the day, whether it is losing weight, or gaining financial success, or becoming famous, or getting plastic surgery, or photo-shopping, it doesn’t solve the problem of low self-esteem. Here is why. The problem is not on the outside; it is on the inside. You will never see who you truly are on the inside until you know who you should be on the inside. Only God can help you see that.

If you have ever felt like shaking your fist in God’s face or gone ahead and done it, you aren’t the first person and you won’t be the last. There is an entire book of the Bible built around a man who did just that. His name was Habakkuk, and he was a prophet. When he sees his people suffer and his nation on the verge of collapse, he can’t help but wrestle with this question, “If God is good and God is in control, why are these things happening?” If you are like Habakkuk and the ship of your faith is being overwhelmed by the tsunami of doubt, and your hand is slowly being raised to God in the shape of a fist, because you don’t understand why God is allowing you to lose your job, why God has allowed your mother or father or brother or sister or son or daughter to die, and why doesn’t God do something and do it now? The prophet tells us the answer to the “Why?” and the “Why not?” question.

When David wrote Psalm 23, we don’t know how many more days, weeks, or years he had left in his life. But he definitely closes on a high note of what his life will be like for however long it lasts and what his life will be like after his life ends. He is looking at both now and forever. In this last stanza of this beautiful song, David shares with us what is true of us or can be true of us if the Lord is our shepherd, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever” (Psalm 23:6). David basically says two things: one about life and one about death or life after death. These two things will be true of you if the Lord is your shepherd.

In studying through Psalm 23, it is amazing to see how this psalm addresses practically all of our greatest needs from the cradle to the grave. In today’s key verse, David is describing how he realized that his greatest need and our greatest need is God. I believe that God is the only one that can address our greatest problems. Our greatest need will always be God, because only God can meet our greatest needs. The philosopher was right who said, “There is a god-shaped vacuum in every life that only God fill.” Listen to what David writes, “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows” (Psalm 23:5). When you understand this from a shepherd’s perspective, you will understand that God will always be just what you need. God meets our needs, but it is how he meets our needs that make this such a beautiful verse.

I love what Jerry Seinfeld said, “According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking and number two is death. This means to the average person if you have to go to a funeral you are better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.” Whether or not you fear death you do have to cope with it. Basically, you will cope with it in one of two ways: with hope or without hope. Two things have to be true, either this life is all there is or there is more to life than this life. This is one reason why I wish everyone would consider Christianity because I don’t know of any faith, or any religion, or any spiritual concept that gives more hope for death than Christianity. If just this one statement that David wrote is true, to rephrase Winston Churchill, “Death is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. It is just the end of the beginning.” The last walk we will ever take is the walk with death. We don’t know when, where or how we are going to take that walk, but we will. Let’s do what David did and let’s look ahead to what that walk could be like and where that walk could lead. If you know the God of life and death, it will be the best walk you will ever take.

In the third stanza of Psalm 23, David shares with us that this shepherd loves us so much he will correct us when we make the wrong decisions and he will lead us to make the right decisions. If you are on the wrong road because of a wrong decision you’ve made, there is hope for you. If you are at a crossroads and you don’t know which way to go, there is help for you. In the third stanza, we find that there is healing for our past, help for our present, and hope for our future. David writes, “He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his namesake” (Psalm 23:3). We are all God’s restoration projects at times in our lives. This beautiful sentence tells us how God carries out that project perfectly.

Stress is robbing us of our rest and the lack of rest is increasing our stress and we are caught in this vicious cycle of physical, emotional and spiritual fatigue that never seems to end. But the good news is, the Lord is your shepherd, and He promises to give you rest. Close your eyes and get that imagery in your mind. You are a sheep. You have been walking all day. You are tired, thirsty and hungry. All of a sudden, you are lying in thick green grass, under the shade of a tree, beside the still waters of a stream that is flowing right beside you, resting easy. No matter where you are, and no matter what you are going through, that green grass, those still waters are right in front of you. You can enjoy them every day and rest easy. In the beautiful stanza of this beautiful psalm, we are told that if we follow the shepherd, we will find the rest we are looking for in these green pastures and still waters.

As we begin this study, we’re going to start witt the first verse. Anybody who has ever heard this psalm before knows that it is actually not just the first verse, but it is the foundational verse of this passage. Everything else David is going to say in this psalm is built upon the first line in the first stanza, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” (Psalm 23:1). David gives us three reasons why, no matter what happens going forward, faith ought to be in, and fear ought to be out. Worship ought to be in, worrying ought to be out. Prayer to be in, and panic ought to be out. Let’s take a look at those reasons together.

As believers, we have a fire burning in us that is the Holy Spirit. As we live the Spirit-filled life, we are to be shining the light of Jesus to other people. There are things that we can do individually, as believers and together as a church, that will put out the Spirit’s fire and turn out the Spirit’s light. That is why we should not grieve the Holy Spirit by hurting His feelings nor should we quench the Holy Spirit smothering the fire. There is a difference between grieving the Spirit and quenching the Spirit. Here is the difference. We grieve the Holy Spirit by what we do to Him. We quench the Holy Spirit by what we refuse to let Him do through us. To put it another way, we grieve the Holy Spirit by doing what He tells us not to do. We quench the Holy Spirit by not doing what He tells us to do. So in this message, I want to share with you some things we must do, that the Spirit wants us to do, that to fail to do, would quench the Holy Spirit.

God the Holy Spirit loves you and wants what is best for you. He wants to take you only places where you should go. He wants to lead you to do things that only you should do. So the question is, “What are those things that a believer or an unbeliever can do that grieves the Holy Spirit, that breaks the heart of the Holy Spirit? Because, if we love God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit like we should, then we should never want to do anything that would bring them hurt to their heart. In today’s key passage, Paul tells us several things that we must do if we do not want to grieve the Holy Spirit and bring holy hurt to the One that loves us.

Have you ever been in the presence of a Christian that you just immediately knew there was something different about them from the vast majority of other Christians you are with? You could just sense their closeness to God. You could just sense they were filled with God’s presence and God’s power. Maybe you have even found yourself wishing that you could be like them. Maybe somebody has come to your mind right now. The good news is that level of Christian living is not just for the so-called spiritual superstars. You are going to see in this message that it is for everyone. We know that because of something that was written 2000 years ago and who have brought to Jesus through the Spirit of God and lived His life filled with the Spirit of God.

What happened in that upper room to them was a low blow. Their dreams were going up in smoke. Their hopes were being dashed and the world was being turned upside-down. Everything was going wrong. Judas had just left to betray Jesus. Peter had just been told he would soon deny Jesus. Worst of all, Jesus tells them not only that He is going to die, but He is going to leave them. You name it, these disciples felt it. They were depressed, afraid, discouraged, and confused. But Jesus said that the Holy Spirit was so important that it would be to their advantage for Him to physically leave them, so the Spirit could come live inside them. Jesus said we would be better off having the Holy Spirit inside of us than to have Jesus beside us. You read that correctly. We are better off today with the Spirit inside of us than the disciples were with Jesus beside them, and in this message, we are going to learn why that is.

Have you ever thought about the fact that any religion, any spiritual belief that talks about any heaven or hell always talks about heaven being “up” and hell being “down.” You find it all over the Bible. For example, Psalm 14:2 says, “The Lord looks down from heaven on all mankind...” You see, Christmas is really just the beginning of a round trip that Jesus took from heaven down to earth and then took back up to heaven. In the second chapter of a letter that Paul wrote called Philippians, Paul describes this round trip. He tells us in this passage that if we do three things, we too can take the way up to heaven.

Unfortunately, we are living in a world where lying is common, practically expected, and seemingly just the way we do business. But at the end of the day, character is still important, and it still matters. It matters not just morally, ethically, and spiritually, but practically. We began by saying that the foundation of character is integrity. In this message, we are going to learn that the first fruit of integrity is honesty. Integrity is more than just honesty, but there can be no integrity without honesty. There is a man in the Bible who exemplified this trait in an incredible way, and that is Samuel. What elevated Samuel, both in the eyes of God and in the eyes of his people was his absolute, unfailing, uncompromising honesty. What distinguished him was not the high positions that he held, but the honest person that he was.

In our first message of this series, we are going to help those of us who need God to show up in a strong way in our lives, but for whatever the reason He hasn’t yet. We all have those times when we wonder, “Is God asleep? Has He taken a leave of absence? I need God to do something, and I need God to do something now.” In the fourth chapter of a book called Galatians, a man by the name of Paul takes us all the way back, not just to the Christmas story, but what happened before the Christmas story. There are three things we can always know is true about God that should give you, not just peace about your present situation, but patience knowing that God will show up. If you are wondering where God is, what God is doing, and when God will act, let the Christmas story remind you of three things that are always true.

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Have you ever wondered why life is so hard? Why it is such a struggle? Why there is so much suffering, pain, and agony in the world? Have you ever wondered why it is sometimes so hard to maintain a good marriage? Raise good children? Please your boss? Get your act together financially? Have you ever wondered why somebody is always fighting somebody else? It is because there is a war going on. It is a war between two rulers: Jesus and Satan. There are two kingdoms light and darkness. There are two armies – Jesus’ and the devil’s. The reason why everywhere you look there are struggles, suffering, and strife. We have a theological term for that. It is called spiritual warfare. Spiritual warfare is the battle that is being fought in the invisible spiritual world that has visible physical consequences. Every problem that you have outside of you is really a problem either on the inside of you or the inside of the person causing you the problem. So in this war manual that Paul gives us, he is going to share with us how to win the war of daily life and how to handle the struggles, the suffering and the strive that comes in the battle of life and how to win that war on a daily basis.

Interestingly, work was not a human invention, it was actually God’s idea from the beginning. The very first command that God ever gave a human being was to work. Adam and Eve had barely taken their first breath when God said to them, “Your job is to be fruitful, to multiply and you are to subdue the earth. You are to rule over it and make it productive.” In fact, the very first time the word “work” is ever used in the Bible is used at the beginning of the biblical story, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it” (Genesis 2:15). Nobody is exempt if they are able from work. Even the Son of God came to do the work that God had given him to do. At the end of his life, Jesus said this, “I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do” (John 17:4). So it shouldn’t surprise us that the Word of God has something to tell us about work and how we should work. With that in mind, Paul showed people then how to live within that economic system and gave principles that apply to us today for those of us who work.

What would happen if every day of our lives every Christian experienced a power surge? What might happen in the church and what might happen outside the church? I believe our problem is not a power surge; it is surge protectors. There are many things that keep up from really experiencing God’s power. We are too busy. We are too uncommitted. We are too apathetic. We are too bothered if out of our comfort zone. More than anything else we need the one thing a daily basis that Paul talks about and it is, “We need a power surge of the Holy Spirit.” Here is the good news. The Spirit-filled life is not for super-star Christians, pastors or seminary graduates; it is for everyone who claims to know the Lord Jesus Christ. In this passage, Paul tells us three simple things.

There are only two dimensions where we can serve God: time and space. You live for God here and you live for God now. When you die, you go to a place where there no time and there is no space. That is why when it comes to our life, the time is always now. Our life is made up of time. When time is up, life is over. That is why the most important use of your time is spending most of your time on what is most important. Thankfully, God has not left us on our own to sort out how we ought to spend our time and how we ought to live our days on this earth. He has given us specific advice on the best way to use every day and get the best of every moment. You only have a certain amount of time and when time is up life is gone. So, how do we live so we understand that for us the time is now?

Let’s be honest. Forgiveness doesn’t come naturally, and it very rarely comes easily. It may be because of what the word means. The word “forgiveness” literally means “to let go” or “to send away.” It is a financial term that refers to the cancellation of a debt. When someone hurts you or does you wrong, they are in your debt. Forgiveness is your willingness on your own to simply write off cancel the debt. It is the willingness to simply say to a person who has done you wrong and really does owe you, “You don’t owe me anymore.” Sin is a debt that is owed. When you sin against someone you owe them. When they sin against you, they owe you. The only thing that pays the debt off is forgiveness, but when somebody is forgiven somebody has paid. Many of you need to become debt free today. If you will take three simple steps, you can become just that.

One reason I am always concerned about the unity of our church or any church is that the devil is in every church. Another word for “devil” is “diabolos” which gives us the word “diabolic” and it literally means “to split”. The devil is a splitter; a divider or a wedge driver. The first thing he ever did was to split Adam and Eve from God, which is still his number one goal and hobby which is to separate unbelievers from God and keep them separated and to separate us from each other. On the contrary, the very first thing Paul wants to do is to keep us together, but how do you do that? Because we are different; we are diverse. How do you keep diversity and differences from leading to discord and division? I am going to tell you from experience. Nothing is more harmful to the cause of Christ, to the witness of the Gospel, and the influence of the church than a church divided. Thankfully, there is a way to keep it together, and here’s how.

You can tell a lot about your spiritual maturity with God by what you pray for and how you pray for it. But let’s be honest, we don’t always handle prayer the right way. In fact, there are two problems when it comes to prayer: we don’t know how to pray, and we don’t know what to pray for. At times our prayers are like throwing stuff against the wall and hoping it sticks. We are going to learn today that the greatest prayer you will ever pray and the prayer that you will know always makes a direct connect with God is the prayer that comes from God. God always answers every prayer that is according to His will, and any prayer that God tells you to pray reflects His will. We don’t always get what we pray for, but we always get what God wants us to pray for. From Ephesians 3, we get a one size fits all prayer that you can pray for anybody, anywhere, anytime, under any circumstances. Once you read it, you’ll realize you can’t pray a better prayer than this one.

Since the beginning of time, God has had an agenda for the human race. He has an endgame for all of us. In fact, you could really give the Bible a one-word title and just call it “endgame”, but of course even the word “endgame” begs a beginning and a middle because every story has those three components – a beginning, a middle and an end. The story of the Bible and in fact God’s story for you has the same three components.

Psychologists refer to them as “defining moments,” those events in your life that shape the person you have become. We all have them. But there is no defining moment like the moment when someone accepts Jesus and becomes a follower of Christ. So in this message, we are going to study all that happens at the defining moment when someone realizes they need a savior, that Jesus is that savior, and they trust Jesus as their savior.

If you would like to know what the real God looks like, the God who is great and glorious, who is magnificent and majestic, who is supreme and sovereign, you need to look no further than a letter that was written two thousand years ago by a man named Paul who had met this God personally on the Damascus Road. When you read who he says this God is and what this God has done, and what this God is doing and wants to do, the only word you’ll be thinking is, “unbelievable.” It may sound contradictory, but we really do believe in a God who is unbelievable. And in the book of Ephesians, Paul tells us that what God has done for his people is unbelievable, and what God wants to do through His people is unbelievable.

As the runway of life begins to run out, everyone starts to ponder this question...What am I going to leave behind? The two most important things to consider, according to the Bible, are people and influence. Leaving a legacy is about the people you impact, not about the possessions you leave. Leaving a legacy is about the influence you leave, not about the inheritance. You may not be a king like David when you die, but you can definitely leave behind a legacy worthy of a king.

One of the greatest illustrations of grace in the entire Bible involves the story of a man with one of the worst names in the Bible. The man is named Mephibosheth, and despite his odd name, he finds himself in the middle of a story that paints a vivid picture of salvation. King David plays a role in the story as he paints a picture of the Savior. Mephibosheth, as you might have guessed, paints the picture of a sinner. And, throughout the whole story, God is ever-present as He colors the canvas with His remarkable grace.

When you ask someone about David, inevitably two stories involving two very different people come to mind—Goliath and Bathsheba. If you know anything about King David, you would truly understand how far he fell when he got involved with Bathsheba. In fact, he fell farther than perhaps any powerful figure in human history. His “lyin’ eyes” were his undoing. He lost the game of sin, and honestly, we all lose the game of sin, which is why we so desperately need a savior.

One of the greatest illustrations of grace in the entire Bible involves the story of a man with one of the worst names in the Bible. The man is named Mephibosheth, and despite his odd name, he finds himself in the middle of a story that paints a vivid picture of salvation. King David plays a role in the story as he paints a picture of the Savior. Mephibosheth, as you might have guessed, paints the picture of a sinner. And, throughout the whole story, God is ever-present as He colors the canvas with His remarkable grace.

There are two things that tend to get people into trouble: their temper and their tongue. How many times have you said something you didn’t really mean but you said it anyway out of pure anger? How many things do you wish you could take back? Truly, everyone has felt this way at one time or another. King David comes close to falling into what is known as the “revenge trap” but fights back against his temper and his tongue and puts his trust into God’s capable hands.

Despite the triumphs of David, King Saul became filled with the poison of jealousy and sought to have his revenge by killing David. Saul hires elite soldiers to kill David, but he escapes just before they are to execute him while sleeping. Filled with rage, Saul sent his entire army after David, and yet God provides David with the unbelievable opportunity to kill Saul and end the whole ordeal. David must now decide to give in to revenge or to honor God by respecting His choice for King. David ultimately chooses the latter as he overcomes the urge to take his revenge and, in doing so, gives God the glory.

There are two things that are true for everyone: we all need to have the right kinds of friends and we all need to be the right kind of friend to others. In this life, we will make many acquaintances, but we won’t make many true friends.

This entire story of David and Goliath is not about a little shepherd boy who beat a huge giant. It is a story about GOD! The point of the battle between David and Goliath is this: there is a God who rescues, a God who will fight our battles for us, and a God who is bigger than any giant we will ever face.

Would it surprise you to learn there has been more written about David than any other character in the entire Bible except Jesus? This typical, unassuming, not-so-special young man did not come from wealth, did not possess any unique characteristics, and did not enjoy the benefits of a learned profession. He was an average person with a below average job as a shepherd from a poor family. And yet, he would become a king because he truly sought God’s own heart.

It’s one thing to have a relationship with God. It’s another thing to have a relationship with God and be sure of it. Many Christians struggle with doubt, wondering if there’s anything they can do to lose their salvation. They question whether God’s faithfulness to them is conditional. So in this message, we are going to set the record straight and answer the question, “Can I lose my salvation?” We’ll take a look at what Jesus has to say about this matter where He identifies the people who really have a relationship with God, and where He verifies exactly how permanent that relationship is.

Many people today struggle with managing their money. They don’t save enough. They spend money they don’t have. They have their financial priorities flipped upside down. Many of them can’t even sleep for worrying about money. But God never intended for us to live our lives bogged down by financial pressure. Instead, He wants us to live in financial freedom. So in today’s message, we are going to take a look at four steps you can take to achieve financial freedom in your own life.

Have you ever asked the question, “Does God always answer our prayers?” Well, there’s a very simple answer to that question. The truth is, God always answers our prayers, but we must understand that that doesn’t mean He always answers our prayers the way we want Him to. Prayer is not about getting God to do your will; it is about getting God to do His will. The key to getting your prayers heard and your prayers answered is by praying according to the will of God because prayers prayed in the will of God will always accomplish the work of God.

As we close out this series, we are going to look at a character trait that is certainly not in abundance. Disrespect is found in greater quantities everywhere – in the home, in the government, in the media, in our schools, and on our highways. There is a story of a man in the Bible who one day would be king, who had every reason not just to disrespect the one who was king, but to destroy him and bring his kingdom to an end. But, the fact that he did not and the reasons that he did serve as a great reminder over 2500 years later why respect is so important and what it looks like. This story teaches us three tremendous lessons that we need to not only learn but desperately need to pass on to the next generation who desperately need to recover.

I have heard it said that the greatest ability is availability. I no longer believe that. I believe the greatest ability is reliability because if you are available without being reliable things would be better off if you were simply unavailable. Today, we are going to look at a man that was inducted into God’s hall of fame, because of his faithfulness. A savior ultimately came into this world because of his faithfulness. A nation that at one-time history had given up for dead is in miraculous existence today, because of his faithfulness. He has been called “the father of the faithful” and “the brightest star in the Hebrew heaven,” because of his faithfulness. His name is Abraham. There was an incident that took place in his life that is both at first glance difficult to believe and fathom it is in the Bible. Yet, it gave him an opportunity to define once and for all what true faithfulness really is.

There is a lion within every one of us called “self.” You will find that the biggest enemy you will have to your success, to going where you can and should go, and being who can and should be will always be you. If you want to win the battle of life the first battle you have to win is the one over yourself. In his letter to the church at Corinth, Paul talked about living the Christian life which is a life lived for the glory of God and under the power of the gospel in terms of running a race and he tells us that if you are going to win this race and live what we call the cross-shaped life, it begins and ends with self-control.

Never in our lifetime has something so profoundly affected the entire world like the COVID-19 pandemic. Many questions of faith have been raised over the last few weeks including 1) Is God mad at the world? 2) Are we being punished for the sins of the world? 3) Is this pandemic a sign of the end-times? 4) How should we, as believers, respond to the virus?In this special presentation of Touching Lives with Dr. James Merritt, hard questions will be asked and answered using God's Word as the source. Tune in online on Touching Lives TV to watch this special broadcast.

You will discover there are two situations you cannot avoid. It is a situation that befalls all of us no matter how good a person you may be, no matter how hard you try, and no matter how nice you are you will be in one of these two situations. You will need to be forgiving or you will need to be forgiven. One of the reasons why the Bible is so valuable is because it gives us real life examples and shows people who faced real hurt and heartache just like we do. Rather than becoming victims they became victors. Rather than sinking into the quicksand of bitterness, they were able to get to the oasis of forgiveness. The poster child for forgiveness is a man named Joseph. How did Joseph keep from being burned by the fire of bitterness? Avoid drowning in a sea of bitterness? Becoming immune to the poison of bitterness? It is because he refused to do four things that even though stated negatively will bring a positive result for you if you will refuse to do them as well.

After He lived a perfect, sinless life, Jesus Christ died on a cross. He claimed to have died for the sins of the world, but technically anybody can make that claim. If He did die for the sins of the world, His death was unlike any other death. The clincher, though, is the belief that He rose from the dead. If those three things are true regarding His life, death, and resurrection, then Jesus, in fact, did live an unequaled life, died a unique death, and experienced an unmatched resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus Christ makes Him different and superior to every other person who has ever lived. Everyone in history has died and stayed dead except Jesus. Every other religion of the world can point to a founder and then point to a grave or a tomb, but only Christians can point to an empty tomb and say, “Our founder is alive!”

Last week, we talked about how Jesus lived an unequalled life. He is the only person who ever claimed to be without any sin, and who never had anyone convict Him of sin. Today, we are going to look at His death, because He died a unique death. Death itself is not unique, rather it is universal and inevitable. Even the way Jesus died by crucifixion was not unique. Thirty thousand Jews were crucified, and He was just one of them. But why He died and what His death accomplished was very unique. The reason He died and the result of His death is unlike any other death in the history of the world, past, present, or future. So, as we are answering the question, “Why should everyone only look to Jesus to have a relationship with God?”, we must understand that it is not just the way He lived, but also why He died that helps answer that question.

How often have you ever slipped up, made a mistake, blew it, and said, “Well nobody’s perfect!” Well, that statement technically isn’t true. There is one person who was perfect in every area of life. From His thoughts, to His words, to His deeds, He was absolutely and pristinely perfect. However, if Jesus wasn’t perfect, if He wasn’t sinless and instead sinned like everyone else, then several things would be true of Him. If this He wasn’t perfect, then Jesus was not who He said He was. If He was not who He said He was, then He could not have done what He said He did. If He didn’t do what He said He did, then there is no hope for anyone being delivered from sin and having a relationship with God. If Jesus sinned, He couldn’t be the Savior. And if He is not the Savior, we cannot have salvation.

There is one particular story about Jesus that is so remarkable, first of all, because it even made it into the Gospels, and also because it didn’t involve a miracle. The reason the story is so phenomenal is because of what Jesus saw and what Jesus said. What Jesus said was so remarkable, because what Jesus saw was so refreshing. He saw the greatest example of generosity anyone has ever witnessed. A generous person is the epitome of what generosity is all about. It really is amazing that this story makes it into the Bible, because this woman that is talked about does something that to the ordinary eye was so small, so unimportant, so inconsequential, that nobody would have given it a second thought except Jesus. In fact, only one person left that day talking about it, but because Jesus did talk about it, we are still talking about it two-thousand years later.

In this portion of our study on character, we are going to talk about one of the greatest values and virtues you must have if you are going to be a person of character and that is perseverance. You will never read biographies of great quitters. You will never see a long line of followers behind great quitters. You will never see trophies and awards given to great quitters. There is a man in the Bible who is in the Bible and has a book about him in the Bible, because of one thing – his perseverance. He ran the stop sign and didn’t quit, but he had every reason to. His name was Job. No man in the Bible, outside of Jesus Christ himself, suffered more than Job. It would even be fair to say that outside of Jesus, no man suffered more unjustly and more unfairly than Job. If Job had responded the way the vast majority of people would and do this book would have never been written and Job’s name would have never been known. We learn a great character trait called “perseverance” from this man who teaches us that tough times never last, but tough people do.

As we continue this series on character, we are going to deal with a character trait that I believe is lacking more and more in every part of our society. It is why we refuse to listen to each other, refuse to face and solve our biggest problems, refuse to face up to reality, and refuse to call things the way they are and that is courage. The type of courage I am talking about is moral courage. It is the kind of courage that exposes you to ridicule, criticism, ostracism, and the judgmental wrath of others. It is the kind of courage described in the story that has been preserved for more than twenty-five hundred years, and that is the story of Esther.

When you are authentic, you are the real deal. You aren’t one thing in public and another thing in private. You aren’t one thing with this group and another thing with that group. To be authentic, you never put politics above people and popularity above principle. A conversation between Paul and Peter gives us a great example of what it looks like to be authentic. Paul reminds Peter that a big part of character is authenticity. It is being the same person in public as you are in private. You being you regardless of where you might be or who you might be with. Paul shows us what authenticity looks like, how authenticity acts, and why authenticity is important.

In this message, we are going to talk about a trait that is becoming more and more rare but is still desperately needed, and that is loyalty. There is a book in the Bible that has as its main character, a woman named Ruth, neither of which we would have heard of had it not been for her incredible loyalty. Ruth is one of the greatest love stories not just in the Bible, but in history. Movies, novels, and books have been written about this beautiful story, but there would have been no love story had it not been for Ruth’s loyalty. It is a story that will take you from the agony of defeat to the thrill of victory. It’s a story that will make you appreciate your family, your friends, your future, and your faith more than ever.

One of the greatest character qualities you can possess is humility. If you see good character in yourself, then you will be humble about it. Nothing will take you lower than pride, and nothing will lift you higher than humility. In this message, we are going to take a look at Mary, the mother of Jesus, and how she was an amazing picture of humility. What made her most blessed and most favored was not just that she was the mother of the Son of God, it was that she was incredibly humble. As we study this story, we are going to see time and time again how God places a supreme value on the sublime virtue of humility. We enjoy the greatest blessings of life today because of a woman who did not go as high as she could, but got as low as she could and because she went as low as she could, she went higher than any woman ever before or since.

Unfortunately, we are living in a world where lying is common, practically expected, and seemingly just the way we do business. But at the end of the day, character is still important, and it still matters. It matters not just morally, ethically, and spiritually, but practically. We began by saying that the foundation of character is integrity. In this message, we are going to learn that the first fruit of integrity is honesty. Integrity is more than just honesty, but there can be no integrity without honesty. There is a man in the Bible who exemplified this trait in an incredible way, and that is Samuel. What elevated Samuel, both in the eyes of God and in the eyes of his people was his absolute, unfailing, uncompromising honesty. What distinguished him was not the high positions that he held, but the honest person that he was.

The first thing that people would know about you if you truly have the right character would be integrity. We are going to study a man who was the epitome of the word “integrity.” It is because of his integrity that we even know who he was and why he has a book in the Bible. His name was Daniel. Anyone familiar with the Bible thinks about Daniel and the lion’s den. But what is important about this story is not that Daniel was thrown into the lions’ den. What’s more important is what happened beforehand that resulted in him being thrown into the lion’s den. This story teaches us three tremendous truths about integrity, why it is so important, and why we must have it.

There are two words in our vocabulary that carry very negative connotations: conflict and confrontation. Now, with few exceptions, most of us don’t like conflict. But we are going to learn from Jesus that neither conflict nor confrontation has to be negative. God can use conflict as an opportunity to demonstrate the love of Christ, to bear witness to the Gospel, and to teach other people how to work out their differences. The negativity comes in when the conflict is unresolved and the confrontation that is needed never takes place. The reality is that there are no problems too big to solve, only people too little to solve them. If we would just follow the simple instructions Jesus gave, we could defrost cold marriages, resurrect dead friendships, and restore broken relationships quicker than we could ever imagine.

One of the reasons why we have so little influence with those outside the church is because we are experts at condemning those who are on the outside while cutting slack for those who are on the inside. When people outside the church see us do this, it is no wonder that our light has become a flicker and the salt has lost its flavor. The same exact thing happened to the church at Corinth. And to make matters worse, everybody in the church knew about the problem, but nobody was doing anything about it. The result? The character of the church was compromised, and its witness was weakened. The church needed to lose some baggage. When a church today is in that same situation, there are three steps it must take.

One of the most widespread criticisms of Christians is that we are judgmental. We are told that we sit in the judge’s seat far too often, pointing fingers at those we deem unworthy. But if you think about it, as human beings we’ve all sat in both seats. We’ve sat in the seat of the judge, and we’ve sat in the seat of the judged. While we can all admit that it’s must easier to judge than it is to be judged, the truth is that nobody should be sitting in either seat. Jesus was very clear when He said, “Judge not, that you be not judged” (Matthew 7:1). Unfortunately, most people don’t understand what Jesus meant by this statement. Thankfully though, He goes on to explain what He means, and He has a message that those inside and outside the church both need to hear.

In his letter to the church at Ephesus, Paul talks about the importance of ridding yourself of bitterness and instead being kind and forgiving towards others. He says, “Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind of one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you” (Ephesians 4:31-32). The word “forgiveness” literally means “to let go” or “to send away.” It refers to a cancellation of debt. In essence, when somebody does you wrong, they are in your debt. So, forgiveness is your willingness to simply write off that debt. Now, there is not a more difficult decision to make in life than to decide to forgive someone. But Paul is making it clear that God took the biggest debt ever incurred, which are the sins of everyone who has ever lived, and let Jesus Christ pay for them and cancel them. Therefore, we must understand that we should be forgiving people because we are forgiven people.

Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “We may not be able to prepare the future for our children, but we can at least prepare our children for the future.”  As followers of Christ, we have a divine plan from God himself, to enable us to be the parents, that our children need and to give our children the guidance they deserve.

The word “doxology” comes from two weeks Greek words, one which means “praise” or “glory” and the other one which means “word.” A doxology is literally a word or an expression of praise and glory. To understand Christmas doxology, we turn to a man who unlike the shepherds and (a little later on) the wise men, was not at the birth of Jesus. This man is the apostle Paul. As a writer of Scripture, he never explicitly talks about the birth of Jesus. Unlike the disciples, he never physically met Jesus, but he did meet the risen Jesus. Though he never mentions of the biology of Christmas and doesn’t dwell on the theology of Christmas, he does record the greatest doxology of Christmas. He shows us the full meaning of Christmas. He shows us Christmas completely unwrapped. He tells us the rest of the story.

The hardest thing to believe about Jesus is not how He got here or what He did while He was alive on the earth. The real difficulty is truly understanding Jesus Himself and who He was as God in the flesh. The hard message for many to swallow is not the Good Friday message of atonement, or the Easter message of resurrection, but the Christmas message of incarnation. The first Christmas gift ever given was given by God Himself, and it is the greatest Christmas gift ever given because the gift was God Himself.As we move from Christmas Biology to Christmas Theology, we will learn that Christmas doesn’t just celebrate how Jesus was conceived, but Christmas also celebrates who Jesus was when He was born.

The story of Christmas begins with the virgin birth of Jesus. This virgin birth remains the second-most controversial miracle in all of history, second only to Jesus’ resurrection. Unfortunately, this miracle has been under intense scrutiny by scientists, physicians, and people who simply say common sense tells us this isn’t possible. But as you will see as we begin this study, the virgin birth is essential to Christianity, and if you understand Christmas biology you will see why.

As we conclude our series on Galatians, let’s remember how Paul has emphasized from beginning to end how the cross of Jesus that delivers us from the burden of sin and the bondage of religion. While the entire world wanted to take the focus off of the cross, Paul wanted to put it front and center. So how do we follow Paul’s lead? Well, he gives us three tremendous reasons why all of our focus should be solely on the cross of Jesus Christ.

If I could give one piece of advice to every human being that is born as they begin their life and I knew they would take it, it would be in four words – “don’t waste your life.” It’s not that there is anything wrong with retirement or having nice things and enjoying life. The point is we shouldn’t spend our life majoring on those things or those activities. We should spend our life sowing, serving, and sharing. Paul urged the church in Galatia to not waste their lives as well as he was closing out a letter he wrote to them. Keep in mind the words you are about to read were written by a man who was in prison many times, beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, went many times without food or shelter, was robbed and wound up being beheaded. He endured all of it, because he was determined not to waste his life. He gives some tremendous advice which will show you how to be sure you live not a wasted life, but a worthwhile life.

The book of Galatians was written to show how we are not only free from having to keep rules and regulations to be right to God, but we are also free to love others who either don’t know God and need to come to God, or they have come to God but have fallen away. How do we treat people who are broken down, burdened down, and breaking down? How do we make sure as it has been famously said, “We don’t become a museum for saints; we become a hospital for those who are sinning and suffering.” The scripture gives us three pieces of advice.

Whether we think it’s fair or not, there is an increasing antipathy, apathy, and antagonism toward the church and modern Christianity unlike anything we’ve ever seen in our nation’s history. A big part of it is our fault, and it is exactly why a man named Paul wrote the book of Galatians, because the church that had been taught the liberty that comes from faith in Jesus was being tempted to replace it with legalism that comes from trying to keep the law. This problem is still a major issue in the church today, because many Christians believe you have to add “do’s and don’ts” to following Jesus if you want to be a true Christian. But that’s simply not the case. When people walk into a true New Testament church, they ought to find two things: the God of grace and the grace of God. As believers, we must be about the only thing that counts so that unbelievers will see that we understand the only thing that counts.

Every religion is basically trying to answer the same two questions: 1) How do you relate to God?2) How can you have a relationship with God? Not only do all religions ask the same two questions, but they all basically give the same answer – how you live before you die determines where you go after you die. Paul wrote the book of Galatians to show all religious people that if you want to be rightly related to God, you have to lose your religion. Surprisingly enough, focusing too much on being religious and trying to follow all of the rules and laws can actually keep you from ever finding God. Jesus did not come to introduce us to a new religion. He came to deliver us from religion so we could enter into a relationship with God.

The church was meant to be centered around the message that focused on three words: God, grace, and Gospel. The Gospel says everyone can have a relationship with God and be accepted by God because of his grace. Grace was provided by the death, burial, and resurrection of his son, Jesus. However, there were religious leaders in the early church who came in and wanted to add to the list rules, regulations, and restrictions. To this day, there is this battle going on between the relationship crowd and the religion crowd. In Paul’s letter to the Galatians, he shares the revolutionary message that God wants to accept everyone into his family by grace and the only ticket needed is faith. Because of God, and the grace of God, and the Gospel of God, we are free from the shackles of legalism. We don’t have to be good enough for God, because we can never be good enough for God. Jesus was good enough for all of us. Once we accept Jesus and his free gift of grace, through faith in Him, God completely and totally accepts us.

There is a phenomenal quote from the movie “Braveheart” that says, “Every man dies, but not every man truly lives.” There is so much truth in this statement because the vast majority of people who live on this earth will live and die in slavery and bondage – in bondage to lust, pornography, jealousy, anger, bitterness, pride, or arrogance. In Paul’s letter to the Galatians, he talks about how to be free – free from sin, free from self, and free from shame. He explains that this kind of freedom can only be found in Christ, saying, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me,” (Galatians 2:20).

Paul’s main point in the book of Galatians is that because of Jesus, you are free from rules, regulations, rituals, and even religion. None of those things have anything to do with establishing a relationship with God. The most important thing for you to understand is that the only thing you have to do be right with God is to receive the Gospel. Paul explains to us how the Gospel is the one central message that makes Christianity the only true faith worth believing and the only true faith worth living. With this in mind, Paul jumps right into these Galatians because of a problem going on within their church, and he tells them what the one and only Gospel really is.

Now we are going to talk about the final fruit of the spirit, which is self- control. If there is any fruit on the list where all of us are sometimes lacking, even the most disciplined of us, it would be this fruit. Whether you’ve eaten too much food, spent too much money, wasted too much time, or asked too many questions, there’s some aspect of self-control we all struggle with. Thankfully, if you have accepted Christ and acknowledged that God is in control of you, then you can begin to learn to control yourself.

The next fruit of the Spirit from Paul’s list is gentleness. Another word that is often used synonymously with gentleness is meekness. Meekness can be defined as trusting God in every circumstance and treating other people in light of this trust. In His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells His disciples, “Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5). In other words, Jesus is saying if you will be meek, you will be blessed and wind up with everything that matters. That is the complete opposite of what the world tells us, saying that you will be blessed if you have money, muscles, might, or missiles. But as we all know, we are not called to be like the world, but to be like Christ, and Jesus was the perfect example of gentleness and meekness.

The next fruit of the Spirit we are going to discuss is the fruit of faithfulness. Every one of us is given opportunities in this life to find God’s will and do God’s work. We are given opportunities to make a difference in the lives of other people, using the gifts and talents God has given us. In other words, we are given this life in order to be faithful to our Heavenly Father and the work He is calling us to do for His Kingdom. In Matthew 25, Jesus told a parable that illustrates the importance of faithfulness, and this is a parable we can all learn from in regards to how we should be faithful with our lives and our gifts.

When a person comes to faith in Jesus, though at the time he might not realize it, the Holy Spirit of God comes into his life and takes up residence. From that point on, God wants that Christian to walk in the Spirit and bear fruit through his life. Part of that fruit is goodness, which is the fruit of the Spirit we are going to discuss today. We must first be good before we can start doing good. And in order to be good, we must realize that goodness can only come from the Lord, not from anything we’ve done. Once we acknowledge this truth, we can begin showing goodness to the people around us.

The next fruit of the Spirit we are going to cover is kindness. Kindness is something this world could use a lot more of. You will be hard pressed to ever go a day in your life where you don’t meet someone who needs a kind word. Jesus modeled kindness so well during His time on earth, never turning anyone away who wanted to see Him or talk to Him. He always had time to speak a kind word or do a kind deed, and as His children, we should desire to do the same.

Two of the most frustrating words in the English language are, “Be patient.” Patience is not an easy thing to master and is something many of us struggle with. But patience is also a fruit of the Spirit that we are called to bear as followers of Jesus. When we lack patience, we are basically lacking trust in God and His ability to take care of us. So the key to having patience is being willing to trust God to move His process, work His plan, and accomplish His purpose.

Today, we’re going to be talking about the third fruit of the Spirit – peace. It’s easy to think that peace would be a constant companion for those who are followers of Jesus, but unfortunately that’s not necessarily the case. There are pressures, problems, and people we deal with every day that can threaten to rob us of our peace. But we must not forget that peace can be found when we are confident that God can relieve our pressures, solve our problems, and handle the people in our lives.

The second fruit of the Spirit that Paul lists in Galatians chapter 5 is joy. As we begin to talk about having joy, it’s important to remember that being happy and being joyful are not the same thing. Happiness is external. Joy is internal. Happiness is based on chance. Joy is based on choice. Happiness depends upon circumstances. Joy depends on Christ.

We begin with the first fruit, which is love. Without love, we will not bear any of the other eight qualities on a consistent basis. Love should be the foundation of everything we say and do.

The reason Jesus did not condemn the woman in this story is that He was about to go to the cross and be condemned Himself for this woman. Jewish law was clear…she deserved death, but Jesus declared, “Neither do I condemn you.” But, he continues on and says, “Go now and leave your life of sin.” He provided grace and truth together in perfect balance, and He is ready to provide that for you today.

Jesus clearly and carefully tells us in John 8 we will know THE truth. Not “a truth” or “some truth”, but THE TRUTH. If ultimate truth comes from God, it can never change because God never changes, and it can never be wrong because God is never wrong. The only way you will ever know the truth of God is to personally know Jesus, who is the true savior. Come to know Jesus personally today and experience first-hand THE truth that will set you free!

There are 3 things you must do with this wonderful story from the book of Luke. First, you must see yourself the way you really are—a sinner in need of grace. Second, you must see others the way they are—no worse than you and no better than you, yet all needing grace. And thirdly, you must see Jesus the way He is—always full of grace and willing to provide you the grace you need to overcome your sin issues. Jesus made it abundantly plain that both lawmakers and lawbreakers are equally in need of grace and forgiveness.

Perhaps there are 2 kinds of people—“truthers” and “gracers”. Some lean hard into truth at the expense of grace where others focus on grace at the expense of truth. Jesus said we are to be “full of grace AND truth”. (John 1:14) With Jesus, grace and truth are joined at the hip and always in perfect balance. He never shared grace at the expense of truth, and He never spoke truth at the expense of grace. He was perfectly balanced, and we are to follow His example.

While praying is an integral part of a relationship with God, giving Him praise is equally important. Our praise is music to His ears! The book of Psalms is full of beautiful praise to God for who He is and what He has done. We need to set aside intentional time to praise God for His love, faithfulness, creation, , and so much more!

The greatest blessing any of us can ever receive is God Himself. The reality that the creator of the universe loves us and wants a relationship with us could never be matched. He loves us enough to guide us and give us joy, regardless of what we face. When we follow Him and bask in the fullness of this love, He is glorified in the way we confess with our mouths and live out our obedience to Him.

Psalm 121 is a beautiful description of who God is and what He has done. It reminds us that, as our Creator, He has every part of our life covered. When we commit to love Him with all our heart, He will provide what we need. When we follow Him, He will protect us from harm and keep our paths straight. As we serve Him, evil will not prevail against us. He will watch over us and keep us. How great are the promises of God!

To believe God does not exist actually takes an enormous amount of faith. To say you believe God is real, but to live like you don’t really believe it is foolish. God’s word provides enough evidence for His existence and calls us to live out what we believe about Him and His son, Jesus.

If you’ve ever read Proverbs 31 and felt like a failure as a wife or mother, you missed the greatest lesson found in these verses. The Proverbs 31 woman doesn’t represent some unreachable goal. She represents all that a woman can become through the grace of God. Not only does she have the highest qualities a woman can possess, she is an overwhelming success in every area of life – personally, relationally, professionally, and domestically.

There is simply no other explanation for the church today, for the gospels that we read, or for the beginning of Christianity and its survival for 2000 years apart from the resurrection. But, the question is not do you believe in the resurrection...the main question is this--Do you believe on the Jesus that was resurrected?

We can teach our children how to be safe, how to clean their rooms, and how to study. But we often forget to teach them the skills they need to build, maintain, and even end relationships. It’s easy to assume this wisdom will just show up when they need it, but that’s just not true. We have to teach our children how to be a good friend, how to choose good friends, and what to avoid.