Let’s walk in the confidence of faith
What if I tell you that your taste of God will conform the way you see Him?
Okay. I’m not making this up.
Consider this invitation...
Taste and see that the Lord is good;blessed is the one who takes refuge in him. (Psalm 34:8)
In this verse we are invited to taste the Lord. By doing that, we see that the Lord is good.
But how can we taste the Lord?
Yesterday, we were singing No Longer Slaves, in our Next Gen gathering. That song starts with these lines:
“You unravel me, with a melody. You surround me with a song, of deliverance, from my enemies
Till all my fears are gone.” —Jonathan David Helser, Brian Joel Case, Mark Johnson; No Longer Slaves lyrics © Bethel Music Publishing
While singing, our NextGen pastor mentioned that the secret to get out of bondage—things that are holding us down—is in those first two verses of that song. Yes, in fact the secret is right there...
At some point you have been told that the Bible is a love relationship between God and human being. As you read the Bible you realize that God is always seeking mankind and not the other way around. Mankind keeps wandering away. Then God decides to do the most unbelievable thing…He becomes one of them and dwells with them…
Can Christians forget their identity? Is this even possible?
I have heard so many people refer to Christians in this way... “If that is to be a Christian, I don’t want to be a Christian.” With “that” they refer to acts of hatred committed by alleged Christians.
And you know what?
I don’t blame them. I don’t, because for a while, I struggled with that very perception too.
There may be various issues here. One issue is those who think that being a Christian is to adopt a religion or a moral set of values. Another one is those who loved what Christ did, and received His message with joy and open arms... but in the walk of life, they forgot Christ.
So the issue we are talking today is that, when we forget Christ, we forget our sense of identity. And in doing so, we fail to portray the very pure love we had received.
Sometimes we as christians focus more on the mission, on the harvest, rather than in the Lord of the Harvest. Here’s one of the situations this creates:
Focusing more on the mission than in the Lord of the mission, can lead to boasting in our own reasonings. This creates the potential to start molding the work of God to our own arguments, instead of having the word of God shaping and feeding our faith so that we could be “fellow workers” for the glory of our God.
The object of our faith is Christ.
Through his word and the Holy Spirit is how we can grow together and firm, as one. This is how we should seek to share the gift of Christ in love and prayer. For the glory of God and not ours.
The other day we took a walk downtown with the boys. There was a fair, so it was a good excuse to go out in a clear sunny day to get some fun and street food.
We found a public parking lot and once we parked the car, we started walking. A lot of people everywhere. I saw a lot of families too... walking through the traffic with small children. And I could help but notice this mom.
Her little one wanted to go across the street toward the shaved ice and cotton candy stands. She was about to go across the street when the light changed. You could see immediately how she held his little boy’s hand so hard to prevent him from going forward into the traffic. The little one’s eyes were so fixed on what he wanted, but yet... he had to wait.
Throughout these past weeks, in my church, we have been studying the four Gospels by reading one chapter per day. Then, on Sunday the pastor would discuss the highlights of those seven chapters we read corresponding to that week. The deal is to read the four Gospels in 90 days and understand the concept that “Jesus Has Left the Building,” the name for these sermons’ series. This series of sermons have been an eye opener to me and I have even found things in the Gospels that I was unaware of or that I previously overlooked.
This idea of “Jesus has left the building” is basically to illustrate that we, as followers of Jesus, are Jesus’ hands and feet; that Jesus is not confined to a structure; thus, we shouldn’t be living “double” lives—being one thing one day of the week and another thing the rest of the week. In a general sense, we—the church—should be a reflection of Jesus. If we are following Jesus and ask ourselves “what would Jesus do?” in a particular situation, we first need to know “what Jesus did.” Therefore, through these sermon series we are going through the Gospels to know Jesus, back to basics, back to our first love. Here’s this quote from Henry Blackaby that I find very revealing:
