After months of planning and working, we had our official LAUNCH SUNDAY on September 10. If I were honest about it, it was nerve racking. As a matter of fact, I was up in the middle of the night with chest pains the night before. But God...I love those words. It means that God does something that we couldn't. He steps into the situation to make a way. But God, He did what I could not.
We had a packed house, special guests, 8 salvations and God did something we did not expect. He provided a blessing of a $20,000 dollar grant from our ministry network. Understand something, our church launched out without one dollar of outside help. It taught us to depend on God. But God...He one upped us. He put a blessing in our church that will allow us not to hoard it up, but to reach out more for Him.
Here is a FREE THOUGHT (won't cost you anything)...If you want God to bless your church, your life, your family...use what He has already given you. Then He can trust you with more!
For this Launch Sunday, we began a new series entitled, GREATER THAN. The idea behind this series is to understand that God has called each of us to a GREATER purpose and plan. A purpose and plan that only we can live out. But if we are going to realize this purpose and plan, we have to submit all that we are to Him.
The first thing we discovered this week, is that for us to move into our purpose and to live a life GREATER THAN what we have, we must get real with ourselves. This is all about looking at what drives our lives and motivates every decision that we make.
You see, you will never move into the great things that God has for your life until you begin to see yourself the way that God sees you. Too many people have gotten stuck into seeing who they were or by the perception of others.
Do you remember playing games on the playground in school? I do. They all started the same way. Someone got chosen to be the captains and then, we had to go through the tough process of being chosen or picked to be on the team. We all wanted to be chosen first, but there was nothing worse than be last. It was like we were just taken because we were standing there and they had no choice.
To be chosen is interesting. We all want to be chosen for something. Too many times, those feelings of just being taken because...never leaves us. Even as adults, the feeling of not being wanted can define you. It can begin to get into your thought life and change who you really are. It can change you into something that is counterfeit or fake.
John 15:12-17 (ESV) 12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. 14You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. 16You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. 17These things I command you, so that you will love one another.
Jesus says that we are to love others as He loved us. That kind of love is one that gives it all away, even the very life that we thought we would live. But He goes one step further and says that He chose us for this mission. We were selected not be just servants to the master, but to be friends of God. And with that comes a GREATER PURPOSE...to bear fruit!
If you are going to bear fruit in keeping with this kind of love, you will have to real with yourself. You can't just fake it until you make it. Getting real with yourself is about truth. Being the real you.
Too many times, we put on a front that seem airtight. While all along, there are cracks all throughout our lives. We live in comparison of others and how we stack up to them. So we will hide our faults and failures trying to put an image out there that others will like. It's like we have to fake who we are, because we are not enough for someone to want or choose. In the end, what are others really picking, if it's not who you really are?
But Jesus sees us at the core of who we really are. He knows us. Even in our failures and faults and picks us. He chooses you to be in relationship with Him. But you have to see yourself the way He sees you if you are ever going to walk in the GREATER THAN life that He has for you.
Last year, I went on a personal journey in my life. I had so many questions about who I was and why I was not moving forward in the calling that God had for me. It seemed like every book that I read dealt with the mind and the thought life. I am not talking about thinking on the perverse, but simply not seeing myself the way that God saw me. I realized that the battle that I was facing was one that was waging over my thought life.
2 Corinthians 10:3-5 (ESV) 3 For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. 4 For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. 5 We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ,
Our thoughts become imaginations, and imaginations become strongholds in our lives. If you see yourself as second rate, a failure, a screw up, it will come out in your life. You will make decisions based on those ideas. They will set up camp in your life and keep you from achieving all that God has for you. They become a battlefield that everything has to fight through to get to success. If a thought stays around long enough, you will begin to live it out.
The book of Corinthians teaches us to capture these thoughts before they become a stronghold. They must be filtered through the TRUTH of the Word of God. Anything that does not align with that in your thought life must be taken captive and pulled down. You and I must constantly renew our minds (Romans 12:2) to be conformed to the likeness of Jesus. We wont be perfect. We will fail. But it doesn't mean that we don't strive for that.
There is a test for your life to find out what really is in your heart...listen to what comes out of your mouth. You see the heart is connected to your thought life. And your heart is where the words of mouth come from. You will speak what is from the overflow of your heart. (Matthew 15:18)
You have the power to unleash life and death through the words you speak. Your words demonstrate what your faith is built on. They will demonstrate what you believe in.
I believe that God has created you for a purpose GREATER THAN what you can imagine. That He placed in your life all that you need to be successful at this purpose. But until you see your life in light of what He speaks over you, you will never live that out. You have to choose the GREATER THAN life. You have to let go of the things that separate you from Him today. That is your choice...
PJ