Day 1 – Hebrews 10:19-25

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Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.

The writer of Hebrews tells us how we can come into God’s presence. We are not able to come to God because of what we have done, or who we are. As we begin this journey of worship, It is vital that we realize that only through the blood of Jesus can we come into God’s presence. All throughout the Old Testament, when a priest would come into God’s presence, he always had to bring a sacrifice. God still requires a sacrifice when one comes into His presence.  Jesus is our sacrifice.  He allows us access into God’s presence. We can not come into God’s presence any other way than by Jesus and His blood, which was shed for us.

As we live a life of worship, we must understand that it is only through Jesus that we have access to God. We must also remember that we do have access to God. We can come to His very throne because of what Jesus has done on our behalf. Whenever we have a time when we feel like we are not good enough to come into His presence, we must keep in mind that we are never good enough to come to God. The only way that we have access to God is through the blood of Jesus, the sacrifice made for us!  The writer tells us to encourage one another to continue pursuing God. There are times in the Christian life that we get weary and tired. We often need encouragement and sometimes we have to be ready to encourage someone else. What an awesome privilege we have that we can come to God because of what Jesus has done for us! Our motivation to worship God should come from two places. It comes from who God is and from what He has done. God is God. He is Lord, Creator, Sustainer, Provider, Healer, Judge, Protector, and King! This is who God is. WHat has God done for us?  Jesus died for our sins. That is what He has done for us. He gave His very life when He stepped out of Heaven and walked on earth and died a sacrificial death for each one of us. We should be motivated to worship God with our entire lives because of this. This is a life of worship. Knowing that we can only come to God because of the blood of Jesus. We are never good enough for God. We didn’t earn a place in His throne room. It is from the very blood of Jesus, our Lamb, that gives us access to the Father.

  1. Have you entered into the dwelling place of God by the blood of Jesus? Or are you trying to earn your way to Heaven?
  1. When you get discouraged, do you stop spending time with God because you don’t feel like you are good enough for Him?
  1. Are you motivated to give your life to God because of what He has done for you?

Today, rejoice in the fact that the only reason you can come to God is through Jesus. It is not because of how good you are. Praise the Lord for Him allowing you to know Him.

Bag of apples

I stumbled upon a great verse of Scripture today. In 1 John 2:21 the Bible says “no lie is from the truth”. John says this as he is reminding the readers that they know the truth and as such no lie comes from the truth. It is a fascinating study to look at this word ‘truth’.  The same author quotes Jesus in John 8:32 when Jesus says, “know the truth and the truth will set you free”.  Many people know this verse. It’s often found or quoted in our own legal system. Jesus is talking here of eternal freedom. It also has meaning for freedom in this life as we serve Jesus. Freedom to worship Jesus, freedom to discern His will, freedom to live in His truth. 

So, if it is the case that no lie comes from truth, how do we find this truth?  How do we take hold of this truth that can and will set us free?  Jesus tells us in John 8:31 and 32. He says IF we abide in His Word, we are His disciples. And IF we abide in His Word we will know the truth. And If we abide in His Word, the truth will set us free. So the key to unlock this freedom is to abide in His Word. Abide means to stay, reside, and take up residence. Do you abide in His Word?  Do you abide in this truth?

1 John 2:21 says that this truth, that we get from His Word, contains no lies.  I am reminded of buying a bag of apples at the store. If my wife asks me to buy a bag of apples, and I buy a bag of apples, she can be sure if she pulls out a piece of fruit for the kids, it will be an apple.

  
On the other hand, if my wife asks my to buy a bag of apples and I buy a bag of apples and oranges, she can’t be sure when she reaches into the bag that she will pull out an apple. She might grab an orange. It’s still a small, round fruit that grows on a tree…but it isn’t an apple. If we are not basing our lives on the truth of Scritpure, we cannot be sure we won’t follow after lies. Lies often masquerade as truth. Lies often contain some truth. But they are not truth. If we have a bag that isn’t all truth, we may pull out some truth, but we will also pull out some lies. 

 

You and I must abide in His Word. It sets us free, it keeps us from lies.  We won’t grab an orange when we’re looking for an apple. 

First Love

A simple truth with an eternal lesson. God loved us before we loved Him. 1 John 4:10 says this 

In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

The implication is reaches us all. God’s love for you is not dependent on your actions, words, thoughts, motives, or desires.  This is freedom!  God loved you before you ever had an action, word, thought, motive, or desire. His love doesn’t grow based on what you do. It also doesn’t diminish. That is the beauty of the gospel…God loves you because of His love, not because of you!  His love propelled Him to send Jesus to take the punishment for your sins. What an amazing God we serve!

Accept His love, live in the freedom of His love!

Give Us This Day, Our Daily Toast

As a pastor I get the joy of hearing stories of big things God is doing in people’s lives.  When this happens, we always want to share and tell the story to others.  We praise God for His work.  As great as the “big” things are, they are infrequent.  As someone once said, “if miracles happened all the time, they’ be called regulars.”  Most of the time God works in the small details, in the small tings in life.  If we aren’t careful we can overlook them since they aren’t the big things we hear about from time to time.  It may even lead you to think God doesn’t work in your life unless one of those big things happens.  I challenge you to look out for the small things that He does.  This is the garden where our faith grows…in the small things.

In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7 Jesus talks some about prayer. He says in 6:11, “give us this day our daily bread.”  That is that we are to ask and trust God to give us what we need each day.  Notice that Jesus says ‘bread’, He does not say ‘ribeye’ or ‘ice cream’.  Those are nice, but they aren’t needs.  That’s not to say that He doesn’t give us our wants from time to time, but He promises to meet our needs.  The extra things are just…extra!

Last Thursday evening Matthea was preparing dinner.  Our 6 year-old spilled a container of milk into our toaster and onto the counter and floor.  You say, “how did that happen?”  My best answer is to simply reply, “have you ever been in the kitchen with a 6 year-old?”  Needless to say the toaster was done (it was toast).  We use our toaster very frequently.  With a family of 6 it is a necessary appliance.  I almost went out to the store to purchase a new toaster after dinner.  I decided to wait until Friday morning to deal with the toaster situation.  I can’t say I prayed about it, but I did ask God on Friday morning to help me make wise decisions in all that I do.  Not long after I prayed I received an email from our neighborhood email list-serve.  A family in the neighborhood said they were getting rid of their 4 slice toaster, it works great and is sitting on their porch for the first person who came to get it.  My thought was “there’s our new toaster!”

I drove over to the house and picked it up.  It works great!  I learned that the previous owners had bought a new toaster and spent about a week trying to decide what to do with their previous toaster.  They decided to set it out for free for the neighbors.  I mean, how often does someone need another toaster?  What’s the average time a used toaster would sit on the porch awaiting a new home?  For this one, it sat for less than an hour!  Had they emailed about the toaster prior to Friday morning, someone else would have gotten it….maybe.  Either way, it was a great lesson for us about God’s provision.  Even the details like a toaster!

The added bonus with this toaster is that it has digital timers and controls!  I know that isn’t necessary, that wouldn’t have been a requirement on the new one I bought.  But, God knows I like buttons and lights!

What do you need for God to do today?  What thing seems small to you that He is willing to meet in your life?  Trust Him for it, celebrate it when He provides!

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Are you praying?

devotedIn my message yesterday I talked about the power of God in the local church.  We looked at God’s work in Acts 2.  In verse 42, it says that they “devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”  Churches have a healthy desire to emulate this early church.  We want to be devoted to these things like the early church.  We provide much opportunity for teaching and learning.  There are classes, small groups, preaching, seminars, books, podcasts, blogs, etc that are devoted to teaching.  We also like to be devoted to fellowship.  This is living life together.  Healthy churches have healthy community where people genuinely love one another.  We create many opportunities to connect with each other and live life together.  We also are devoted to meals together.  For the early church, this was the Lord’s Supper that they observed on a very frequent basis.  We don’t do that as often as they did, but we love to share meals together.  Whether in homes, restaurants, or church fellowship halls…we like to eat together.  I’m a baptist and I can tell you that one could say we are devoted to breaking bread together!  In all of our efforts to mimic the church in Acts, there is one item in the list from Acts 2:42 that we are not devoted to – prayer.  We, like most churches, have a weekly “prayer meeting.”  This prayer meeting takes on different formats.  Often the format is that the pastor has a teaching time, a printed prayer list is distributed, other prayer requests are verbalized, and a short prayer is spoken by someone.  In most churches it would be a stretch to say we are “devoted to prayer.”

In 1997 Jim Cymbala wrote a book entitled “Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire“.  It remains a powerful work on the faithfulness of God in response to the prayers of His church.  Cymbala tells the story of God’s work, through the people’s devotion to prayer.  The Lord has used that church, Brooklyn Tabernacle, to impact many lives for Jesus.  He tells the story of the early days in the church when only a handful of people were in attendance.  On one Sunday morning, Cymbala challenged the congregation to pray earnestly.  He said that God impressed on his heart to gauge the success or failure of the church by the Tuesday night prayer meeting attendance, not the Sunday morning Worship Service attendance.  In that same service he introduced a minister from Australia.  The minister stood up and made one comment.  He said, “you can tell how popular a church is by who comes on Sunday morning.  You can tell how popular the pastor is by who comes on Sunday night.  But you can tell how popular Jesus is by who comes to the prayer meeting.”  This is all he said.  Such powerful truth.

I believe we must do 2 things.  First, we must all be devoted to prayer.  It must happen on an individual level and on a corporate level.  We must be devoted to spending time in prayer.  Second, we must create opportunities for believers to come together for the purpose of prayer.  Maybe that means changing the structure of  weekly prayer meeting so that more prayer happens…  Whatever we do, we need to create the opportunities for God’s people to come together and seek His face in prayer.  In the midst of our busyness, prayer is one of the first things we hedge on.  The enemy has fooled many believers into thinking that they don’t need to pray.  He has many convinced that their prayers don’t matter or make a difference.  The reality is that we must pray, and we must pray more.

Looking back at Acts 2:42, Luke tells us that they were devoted to 4 things.  The word he used is used 7 times in the New Testament to reference devotion.  In 5 of those 7, it speaks of devotion to prayer (Acts 1:14, 2:42, 6:4, Romans 12:12, Colossians 4:2).  The noun form is used one time and that also refers to prayer (Ephesians 6:18).  This word comes from the word family that means patience and to attend to something.  Can you see the connection?  Devotion to prayer involves patiently waiting on the Lord!  It involves attending to Him and His plan!  Devotion to prayer not only means spending more time in prayer, it also means patiently waiting on the Lord.  Through our devotion to prayer, we see His hand and His power.

If you were to describe your prayer life, would you use the word “devoted”?  If you were to describe the prayer life of your church, would you use the word “devoted”?  If not, we must make it that way.  Throughout the New Testament we see many things the believers were doing.  Almost every time it mentions what they were “devoted” to, we find them devoted to prayer.  Friend, pray now.  And in a little while, pray some more.

 

 

18 Months

18 Months ago, September 15, 2013 I preached a sermon from 1 Kings 18.  It was the story of the Prophet Elijah confronting the wicked King Ahab.  Along the way he meets Obadiah.  Obadiah is trying to stay in the middle.  He is trying to appease the wicked king as well as honor God by protecting God’s prophets.  Elijah was direct in dealing with the king.  Elijah didn’t fear man…only God.  When I preached from this passage I was in the midst of an 11-day fast.  At the conclusion of the sermon, I called for the people of the church to come forward and pray with me that we would be like Elijah and not like Obadiah.  It was a moving thing to see over 2 dozen people down front crying out to God for His work at Cresset.  God had burned in my heart that He was doing a new work in our midst.

The next 4 months were difficult.  Some of the same people who had prayed for God to move were not happy with how God was moving.  We began to see new faces coming, lives changed, and a transformation in our church.  Through those months, some people left and went to other churches.  However, since that time we have had 58 new members in our church.  In a couple of weeks we will baptize a few more people, bringing the total number baptized to 32.  We have also sent out 5 people from our ministry to serve the Lord in other places!  All of this in the past 18 months.  God has been faithful to build His Kingdom here at Cresset.  He has moved in mighty ways in our children’s ministry, student ministry, young adult ministry, women’s ministry, and our school ministry.  It has not been without challenges.  I have learned in 17 years of ministry that when God is working, the evil one is working as well.

I am thankful for the privilege to serve the Lord here at Cresset.  I am thankful for the army of His servants who labor here as well!  It is a joy to see so many use their talents to build up the body of believers at Cresset.  I just celebrated my 6 year anniversary as pastor at Cresset.  God is doing new things.  He has birthed a new vision in our hearts.  He has called us to reach those who are broken, and see Jesus bring healing to their life.  We have many stories to celebrate the healing that Jesus has brought!  There was a time that Cresset set out to reach “those who are basically satisfied with their station in life.”  I am thankful that He is now calling us to walk as Jesus did…reaching those who need hope and healing in their lives.

Will you join us in thanking God for His work?  Will you join us in reaching people for Jesus?

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Jesus Heals

Sunday was part 5 of the 7 part series “All Things New”  We looked at some of the times Jesus Healed people.  3 things were present in each.  First, the person believed Jesus could do it.  Second, the person acknowledged that Jesus’ will was more important than their desire.  Third, Jesus acts in a way to bring glory to Himself.  This is true in healing…and in any of our prayers.  Do you believe Jesus can do something about it?  Are you submitted to His will?  If He answers your prayer will it glorify Jesus?

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