Rev Raymond Mooi
26-05-2019
John 6:2 New King James Version (NKJV)
2 Then a great multitude followed Him, because they saw His signs which He performed on those who were diseased.[a]
Every miracle of God is a sign to demonstrate truth to mankind.
Jesus performed many signs that speak a message that came from God.
These signs were significant because they caused people to sit up and pay attention.
When He calls the church to go into all the world and preach the good news, when the eyes of the people and ears of the people are open, it would cause the gospel to penetrate into the hearts of people.
We in turn become people that do the works that Jesus Did and do them greater.
Nicodemus was a religious man. He was a teacher. Yet when he as a community leader that kept hearing the things that Jesus was doing, it was astounding to hear the lepers that were cleansed and the blind eyes opened, it started to provoke him and he wonder what was it that was missing in his belief and where was the reality that excited him to see God and His Word that's relevant to his time.
John 3 New King James Version (NKJV)
The New Birth
3 There was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. 2 This man came to Jesus by night and said to Him, “Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him.”
3 Jesus answered and said to him, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born [a]again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
4 Nicodemus said to Him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”
5 Jesus answered, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ 8 The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
9 Nicodemus answered and said to Him, “How can these things be?”
10 Jesus answered and said to him, “Are you the teacher of Israel, and do not know these things? 11 Most assuredly, I say to you, We speak what We know and testify what We have seen, and you do not receive Our witness. 12 If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? 13 No one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man [b]who is in heaven. 14 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in Him should [c]not perish but have eternal life. 16 For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. 17 For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.
18 “He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. 21 But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God.”
We know whom we worship but do we really know Him?
We proclaim the resurrected Jesus. He lives in the church of the Living God. The people saw the signs.
Mark 16:15-18 New King James Version (NKJV)
15 And He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. 16 He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned. 17 And these signs will follow those who [a]believe: In My name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new tongues; 18 they[b] will take up serpents; and if they drink anything deadly, it will by no means hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
Jesus gives us the authority to declare the miracle of God and it will happen because we are believers.
Every miracle is a sign that is a beginning that leads to an glorious end.
The miracles bring a sign that God's kingdom has come.
The world needs those signs. We need to present those signs.
We want our nation to know Jesus. We want our community to know Jesus Christ as Saviour.
There shall come redemption and there is hope for mankind.
He is a miracle-working God.
There was a time when Jesus broke the oppression and He has set us free from condemnation and shame.
But as time passes, when we could learn how to pray and know that He is a prayer answering God and we got it all, we have a problem with God. "Where is God? Why is this happening to me?"
When we have tasted the goodness of God, now we set conditions.
And we lose our way. We lose the joy of our salvation. We get excited and joyful when God blessed us but nobody got excited when we won a soul for God. Is this the kind of church that He has that He is the Head of?
When the church prayed for a change, the prayer meetings are packed with people. But we only wanted to see change that benefit us.
How things can change by affluence and by having the goodness of God, it causes us to go off track. We forget the signs that He would save us and that our eternal hope is heaven.
Jesus is not the saviour of our economy or our politics or our nation. Jesus is the saviour of our soul. He came to seek and save them that are lost.
Can we find the way back to the joy of our salvation? There is no reason for us to muble and murmer. As long as Jesus is my saviour, this world is not my home.
John 6:26-29 New King James Version (NKJV)
26 Jesus answered them and said, “Most assuredly, I say to you, you seek Me, not because you saw the signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled. 27 Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to everlasting life, which the Son of Man will give you, because God the Father has set His seal on Him.”
28 Then they said to Him, “What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?”
29 Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He sent.”
Believe in God. Get the people of the earth to have faith in God.
Are we doing the works of Jesus or are we steering the people to every where else but God?
Are we helping people to find faith or are we helping people to lose faith in God?
Jesus is the Son of God. He is the saviour of human souls.
Do what Jesus did. Pray for the sick. Believe God for the signs and miracles. How amazing signs and wonders are!
Christ Jesus is the Head of the church and we are members of the body. What men cannot do, God can!
God is ready to touch you right where you are. The power of God will come upon you and give you a miracle.
Don't Let Jesus Become An Incidental: Make Time to Enter into the Presence of God
Pr Malcolm Dennis
24-05-2019
Psalm 72:18-19 New King James Version (NKJV)
_18 Blessed be the Lord God, the God of Israel,_
_Who only does wondrous things!_
_19 And blessed be His glorious name forever!_
_And let the whole earth be filled with His glory._
_Amen and Amen._
The Book of Psalm is divided into five books. At the end of each book, you will find this: "Blessed be the Lord God" or "Blessed be God" or "Blessed be His glorious name" or something like this. That will signify the end of the book. Each of the five books is summed up that way.
Psalm is a very interesting book because the psalm is written with a lot of emotions and feelings. You cannot read it intellectually. You cannot read it with your mind and leave out your emotions and your heart. You have to use your feelings and your emotions as well as your imagination to read Psalm. That idea applies to all of the Bible as well.
In the Psalm you will also see a lot of lamenting. Lamenting is where the psalmist will project his discontentment, his heartache, his disappointments or his pain when he is grieving the loss of the Lord's presence or he is grieving because his enemies have ravished and destroyed God's temple or land or the psalmist is grieving because his enemies are prospering. In a sense, lamenting is complaining and murmuring but all his complaining and murmuring are legitimised because they are done in the presence of God in the form of a prayer as well.
Everything that the Hebrew believer in the Old Testament goes through, whether in the form of a question or in an expression of anger, is expressed in the form of a prayer. It is always directed towards God. That's how central God is in their lives and that's how prominently God is featured in their whole existence. So you cannot take God out of their system, no matter what they're going through.
Sadly, today when you go to Israel, there are unbelieving Jews and there are Jews who are atheist who do not believe in God.
It is often very hard for us to believe that God has good intentions and good things for our lives and it is hard to see the goodness of God in all circumstances of our lives, especially the painful ones.
It is hard to belief that God is in difficult, negative and disappointing circumstances and that He is using these circumstances to work in our lives even though we are feeling unhappy about our circumstances.
The different between our God and the feng shui god is that God is at work doing wondrous things all the time in our lives. God has no ups and downs.
The Christian God is consistently good and everything that He does all the time is good. That's what the psalmist is trying to say. God only does wondrous things.
But when life is contradictory and painful, how can God be doing wondrous things that the whole earth be filled with His glory?
Many Christians have difficulty understanding how God works and the way God works because of our faulty lens of our expectations. Often a time we expect God to work in ways that fit in our expectations. We are unconscious of our expectations of how God should work in our lives. Because of this lens, we want God to fit into our expectations on our terms. We may not verbalise it but our unconscious and conscious expectations are there.
If we don't understand how God works and the way He works, it will lead to frustration, disappointment, disillusionment and despair in our Christian lives. When the church disappoints us, when life disappoints us, when circumstances at work disappoint us even though we pray very hard, we read the Bible, we walk with God, it shocks us and comes against our expectations, and we find it very hard to understand what God is doing in our lives.
We need to understand that we have to orientate our heart and mind to fit into the kind of God that He is. We have to fit our expectations to fit into the kind of God that He is and the way He works in our lives. The God that we are believing and the God that we are following is a cross-carrying God. Jesus didn't just take up the cross and die at the end of His life. Physically Jesus died. But inherently in His nature and being, He lived a crucified life. Every moment and every day He died to His own will to live and to do the Father's work.
Jesus obeyed the Father's will and purpose and came down and became human. God became man. The eternal glory of God came down in the form of Jesus, who is infinitely one with the glory of the Father. Jesus came down in obedience to God and took the form of a human being. The eternal God, who has no beginning and no end and who is infinitely pure and perfect in holiness, suddenly becomes so human and so ordinary that He is no different from any other human being. So people didn't see God in Jesus at least for the first 30 years.
They said, "Isn't the son of Joseph and Mary the son of a carpenter?" That's what they see in Him because He was so ordinarily human.
Then again, He obeys the Father. At the age of 30, He comes out to do ministry for three years and then He dies on the cross like a common criminal at the time of the Roman empire. It was the most humiliating form of death. There was no dignity in His death.
Revelation 5:5-6 New King James Version (NKJV)
_5 But one of the elders said to me, “Do not weep. Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has prevailed to open the scroll and [a]to loose its seven seals.”_
_6 And I looked, [b]and behold, in the midst of the throne and of the four living creatures, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as though it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent out into all the earth._
When John saw Jesus on the throne, he described Jesus as not only the Lion of Judah but also as a Lamb that was slain.
Jesus was a cruficied Lamb as well as a glorified Lamb from eternity to eternity.
Jesus calls us to follow Him. He's a cross-carrying Lord. He is not a Santa Claus carrying a goody bag going around answering all our prayers and distributing goodies to us. He is not that kind of God. If the gospel is presented that way to people, it's a faulty and truncated gospel.
Luke 9:23 New King James Version (NKJV)
_Take Up the Cross and Follow Him_
_23 Then He said to them all, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross [a]daily, and follow Me._
Jesus was the embodiment of the crucified life--the life at the cross. He was also the embodiment of the resurrection at the same time. When Jesus died a very gory and bloody death at the cross, that was the climax of the revelation of God. The heart of God was revelation of the crucified Lamb.
Central to the Christian salvation is the cross. It was a symbol of shame during the time of the Romans. For the first few hundred years, they never wore a cross like we wear a cross in the form of a gold chain today. At that time, it was a symbol of shame, humiliation and defeat.
How can a victorious God, a God of salvation, be associated with the cross? That's why the gospel was hard to preach--that Jesus died for your sins and rose again from the dead--and hard to accept at that time.
When Jesus did that, He redeemed the negativity of the Cross. From a symbol of shame, it became a symbol of salvation and redemption. That's how powerful God is. God can take something that is so shameful, degraded and has no meaning and purpose that they spit upon and God can make it and use it for His purpose and His glory.
The crucified life and the glorified life coexist. Death and resurrection coexist. Suffering that leads to glory coexist.
2 Corinthians 4:12 New King James Version (NKJV)
_12 So then death is working in us, but life in you._
2 Corinthians 6:9 New King James Version (NKJV)
_9 as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as chastened, and yet not killed;_
The work of the Holy Spirit is to lead us and bring us through the cross to experience a dying to ourselves and our old nature continuously. This is what water baptism means. Water baptism is not telling the world that you're a Christian.
Romans 6:3-5 New King James Version (NKJV)
_3 Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? 4 Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life._
_5 For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection,_
Baptism into the life of Jesus is not the problem or the issue. It is baptism into His death and identifying the death to our old lives with the death of Jesus for us.
Jesus' dying must become our own. The Holy Spirit takes the death of Jesus which He suffered and died on the cross and makes it ours but by the grace of God. As we seek to obey God, it becomes a reality in our lives.
When the dying is the work of the Spirit in us, naturally the life of the Spirit will flow out. If the dying is of the Spirit and is the work of God, then the automatic fruit is the life of God. New life is a natural process. It is the dying that is difficult and hard to understand.
This whole idea of dying and rising to a newness of life coexist.
When we follow Jesus, it means putting to death our old life continuously.
Without a life of prayer, it won't happen.
If we don't understand that this is central to the Christian life, we will never understand why there is suffering in the world and why the righteous suffer. "Why when I choose to obey God and lay down my life, why is it that life becomes more difficult sometimes?" "Why isn't it smooth and prosperous?"
God is after raising of a new life that is called His glory. His glory comes out of dying, suffering and out of putting to death our own will and desires to live the kind of life that we want to live--an easy and comfortable life with no suffering, pain and commitment so much so that everything is discounted.
Today, Christianity is a discounted gospel. That's why Christianity is not impressive. There is no suffering. When it doesn't cause us anything, we have nothing to give and nothing to say. Preaching, worship, song-leading, sharing and teaching the Word of God have no life in it. This life is the zoe life that Paul calls the life of the Spirit.
You can pray in tongues but if there is no dying and experiencing the power of God and seeing it work in us, there will be no life.
If we don't understand this, then Christianity becomes more and more an intellectual kind where we have all the right words, all the Bible verses, all the right quotations from books, all the right programmes etc, but no life of the Spirit.
When we respond to God's calling, God has respond to my response to His calling. God has to do something by responding to my response to His calling to show that I have responded rightly to Him that I have met up to the requirements of the way He wants me to respond to His calling so that He put a stamp and approves the fact that I have responded correctly. If there is no seal of approval or no evidence or proof that heaven has sanctioned my calling, it is only my word. When we respond to God's calling or direction, God has to do something to show something to approve and sanction the fact that we have responded rightly to His voice or to His calling. One of the signs is the presence of the Spirit on the person - the gifting or the fruit or the change in his character or a transformation in his life. He can hear from God. He has got revelations and insights from God. And there are many other things as well. But material blessings is the last one.
How does our contradictory circumstances (our hardships, injustices) lead to God's glory?
God is sovereign over everything. If I am in a boat facing a thunderstorm in the middle of the Indian Ocean, God is still sovereign over my life. Thunderstorm or tornado is not outside of God's rule. Everything we go through in life is under the rule and covering of God.
For God to show His glory in our lives, we have to put all of our lives into the Hands of God.
When Jesus prayed, He committed Himself to God.
Luke 23:46 New King James Version (NKJV)
_46 And when Jesus had cried out with a loud voice, He said, “Father, ‘into Your hands I commit My spirit.’ ” Having said this, He breathed His last._
Right to the very end, Jesus was still committing Himself to the Father even though He was nailed on the cross and suffered a very humiliating kind of death. Jesus committed His life and His spirit into the Hands of the Father.
Luke 23:34 New King James Version (NKJV)
_34 [a]Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.”_
_And they divided His garments and cast lots._
Matthew 27:46 New King James Version (NKJV)
_46 And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” that is, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”_
Jesus was constantly in communion with the Father. Even when He called out to God, it was in the form of a prayer in the midst of being forsaken by the Father. Right from the beginning to the very end, we see that Jesus was in communion with the Father and He committed to the Father's will in that He was obedient.
Luke 22:42 New King James Version (NKJV)
_42 saying, “Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done.”_
And He was in union with the Father. Jesus' life was saturated with prayer and with communion with the Father. Right to the very end of the cross, His communion and dialogue with the Father shows that His intimacy with the Father determines His direction, choices, goals and pace in His life. God was so central to Jesus' life that God was foremost in His heart and mind.
This idea of communion and this whole idea of prayer is only possible if there is a yearning in our hearts for God.
Today the way we pray and the way we seek God is determined, most of all, by what is foremost in your heart and mine. The thing that you and I are most concerned about will tell us a lot about ourselves and our faith. It would show us where we are in our closeness or distance with God.
From time to time, we need to be alone with God. It is good to be silent and to search our hearts and to ask ourselves, "What is the greatest concern in my heart?" "Is God the foremost person that my heart is longing after?"
Most of the time it is not God. Most of the time our concern is about our future, our next paycheck, our finance, our material things, our children and their education and our earthly stuff. These are very natural. Jesus didn't condemn us. We are broken people living earthly lives and these are natural concerns.
Because we are like this, we need to come before God constantly.
We need to cultivate a stronger awareness or consciousness of God in ourselves because if left to ourselves, God will very quickly deteriorate down to the bottom of the list.
If we don't have a prayer life, our Christian life cannot go anywhere. There would be no life and no meaning.
The only thing that would make our Christianity real is Jesus Christ.
Unfortunately the presence of God has become less and less real not just in times of corporate worship but also in personal devotion times. Why? Because it is not being prioritised; it is not being cultivated.
Learn to experience the reality of Jesus Christ personally in our own hearts and in our own lives.
Our prayer time tells us a lot.
Self-examination must always be done in the context of the presence of God. It cannot be done by ourselves mechanically. The Bible talks about healthy introspection and healthy self-examination that is done after a time of prayer, after a time of dwelling in the presence of God, after a time of communion with God, after a time of connecting with Him, after a time of allowing His presence to fill our hearts.
And when there is a sense of God that fills our hearts and our consciousness, then we approach God and allow God to examine our hearts.
2 Corinthians 13:5 New King James Version (NKJV)
_5 Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not know yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you [a]are disqualified._
Ask, "God, where are you in my life right now? Am I searching for You with all my heart? Are there areas in my life where I am strained and where I have left You out? Is my Christian life dying of becoming a form?"
As we approach God, very often the Holy Spirit will help us and make us aware of us. We cannot do this flippantly. If we do it flippantly, then our experience of God will be shallow.
Our hearts are not only deceitful but also prone to wonder. We experience all kinds of temptations that tempt us very easily. We have all kinds of greed in various forms. These are the darkness that is inside us.
When we search our hearts in the presence of God, do we really want God to show us the sinful things inside us?
1 John 1:5 New King James Version (NKJV)
_Fellowship with Him and One Another_
_5 This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all._
There is so many layers of darkness inside us.
John 1:4 New King James Version (NKJV)
_4 In Him was life, and the life was the light of men._
Jesus brought the life of God to us. Jesus also brought the light of God into our lives.
John 8:12 New King James Version (NKJV)
_12 Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, “I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.”_
Matthew 5:14-16 New King James Version (NKJV)
_14 “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. 16 Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven._
Loving the light also means loving God.
John 3:19 New King James Version (NKJV)
_19 And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil._
Shunning the light is not a good sign of our love for God.
The moment we come into His presence, there is a consciousness of darkness in our lives. That consciousness is a healthy thing. It is not a condemning consciousness.
We are most conscious of God when we are in prayer, when we are in worship, when we are reading the Bible.
The consciousness of God is stimulated inside us. It shows that the consciousness of God can become cultivated. As we regulate regularly our time with God alone, we have a human consciousness that is like a vacuum. The Holy Spirit will fill the vacuum of our human consciousness and saturate this consciousness with the consciousness of God. Only the Holy Spirit can make you and I aware of God and conscious of it. This consciousness can be cultivated by regularity, by taking God seriously, by reading His Word and really seeking after God. When you start doing it, the inspiration will come. If you wait for inspiration, it will never come.
1 John 1:3 New King James Version (NKJV)
_3 that which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ._
1 John 1:7 New King James Version (NKJV)
_7 But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin._
Our hearts' spiritual condition has to conform with the nature of God in order for us to have fellowship with Him. The remedy is made in the light of God's presence as we enter into the presence of God and into His light through prayer. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us.
The Holy Spirit shows us places in us that have got darkness, hidden and unconfessed sins, reactions and attitudes towards friends and neighbours, relatives and people who have crossed our paths and have hurt or disappointed us.
There are all kinds of darkness inside us and all kinds of motives that are wrong and intentions that are hidden and are justified and rationalised by our own reasoning to cover up our sinfulness.
When we take time and make time to come into the presence of God unhurriedly, the Spirit of God will gently show us so that He can bring us further into the light further and as we acknowledge and confess the sin in us, we are practising repentence which means turning our hearts towards God. And being honest and acknowledging it, we allow God to come inside our hearts to cleanse us, to heal us, to make us whole and to fill us with His Spirit and His grace that lead to a transformed heart.
When the heart is made right, then it is ready to be filled with the Holy Spirit in a deeper way. When our heart is cleansed, our awareness of God and His Holiness is being felt by us. We experience the purity of God and His light.
Making time in prayer to God is the central thing. If we take this out, we can't carry the cross. To cleanse hearts, we need the grace of God and the infilling of God's Spirit.
Don't let Jesus become an incidental.
24-05-2019
Psalm 72:18-19 New King James Version (NKJV)
_18 Blessed be the Lord God, the God of Israel,_
_Who only does wondrous things!_
_19 And blessed be His glorious name forever!_
_And let the whole earth be filled with His glory._
_Amen and Amen._
The Book of Psalm is divided into five books. At the end of each book, you will find this: "Blessed be the Lord God" or "Blessed be God" or "Blessed be His glorious name" or something like this. That will signify the end of the book. Each of the five books is summed up that way.
Psalm is a very interesting book because the psalm is written with a lot of emotions and feelings. You cannot read it intellectually. You cannot read it with your mind and leave out your emotions and your heart. You have to use your feelings and your emotions as well as your imagination to read Psalm. That idea applies to all of the Bible as well.
In the Psalm you will also see a lot of lamenting. Lamenting is where the psalmist will project his discontentment, his heartache, his disappointments or his pain when he is grieving the loss of the Lord's presence or he is grieving because his enemies have ravished and destroyed God's temple or land or the psalmist is grieving because his enemies are prospering. In a sense, lamenting is complaining and murmuring but all his complaining and murmuring are legitimised because they are done in the presence of God in the form of a prayer as well.
Everything that the Hebrew believer in the Old Testament goes through, whether in the form of a question or in an expression of anger, is expressed in the form of a prayer. It is always directed towards God. That's how central God is in their lives and that's how prominently God is featured in their whole existence. So you cannot take God out of their system, no matter what they're going through.
Sadly, today when you go to Israel, there are unbelieving Jews and there are Jews who are atheist who do not believe in God.
It is often very hard for us to believe that God has good intentions and good things for our lives and it is hard to see the goodness of God in all circumstances of our lives, especially the painful ones.
It is hard to belief that God is in difficult, negative and disappointing circumstances and that He is using these circumstances to work in our lives even though we are feeling unhappy about our circumstances.
The different between our God and the feng shui god is that God is at work doing wondrous things all the time in our lives. God has no ups and downs.
The Christian God is consistently good and everything that He does all the time is good. That's what the psalmist is trying to say. God only does wondrous things.
But when life is contradictory and painful, how can God be doing wondrous things that the whole earth be filled with His glory?
Many Christians have difficulty understanding how God works and the way God works because of our faulty lens of our expectations. Often a time we expect God to work in ways that fit in our expectations. We are unconscious of our expectations of how God should work in our lives. Because of this lens, we want God to fit into our expectations on our terms. We may not verbalise it but our unconscious and conscious expectations are there.
If we don't understand how God works and the way He works, it will lead to frustration, disappointment, disillusionment and despair in our Christian lives. When the church disappoints us, when life disappoints us, when circumstances at work disappoint us even though we pray very hard, we read the Bible, we walk with God, it shocks us and comes against our expectations, and we find it very hard to understand what God is doing in our lives.
We need to understand that we have to orientate our heart and mind to fit into the kind of God that He is. We have to fit our expectations to fit into the kind of God that He is and the way He works in our lives. The God that we are believing and the God that we are following is a cross-carrying God. Jesus didn't just take up the cross and die at the end of His life. Physically Jesus died. But inherently in His nature and being, He lived a crucified life. Every moment and every day He died to His own will to live and to do the Father's work.
Jesus obeyed the Father's will and purpose and came down and became human. God became man. The eternal glory of God came down in the form of Jesus, who is infinitely one with the glory of the Father. Jesus came down in obedience to God and took the form of a human being. The eternal God, who has no beginning and no end and who is infinitely pure and perfect in holiness, suddenly becomes so human and so ordinary that He is no different from any other human being. So people didn't see God in Jesus at least for the first 30 years.
They said, "Isn't the son of Joseph and Mary the son of a carpenter?" That's what they see in Him because He was so ordinarily human.
Then again, He obeys the Father. At the age of 30, He comes out to do ministry for three years and then He dies on the cross like a common criminal at the time of the Roman empire. It was the most humiliating form of death. There was no dignity in His death.
Revelation 5:5-6 New King James Version (NKJV)
_5 But one of the elders said to me, “Do not weep. Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has prevailed to open the scroll and [a]to loose its seven seals.”_
_6 And I looked, [b]and behold, in the midst of the throne and of the four living creatures, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as though it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent out into all the earth._
When John saw Jesus on the throne, he described Jesus as not only the Lion of Judah but also as a Lamb that was slain.
Jesus was a cruficied Lamb as well as a glorified Lamb from eternity to eternity.
Jesus calls us to follow Him. He's a cross-carrying Lord. He is not a Santa Claus carrying a goody bag going around answering all our prayers and distributing goodies to us. He is not that kind of God. If the gospel is presented that way to people, it's a faulty and truncated gospel.
Luke 9:23 New King James Version (NKJV)
_Take Up the Cross and Follow Him_
_23 Then He said to them all, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross [a]daily, and follow Me._
Jesus was the embodiment of the crucified life--the life at the cross. He was also the embodiment of the resurrection at the same time. When Jesus died a very gory and bloody death at the cross, that was the climax of the revelation of God. The heart of God was revelation of the crucified Lamb.
Central to the Christian salvation is the cross. It was a symbol of shame during the time of the Romans. For the first few hundred years, they never wore a cross like we wear a cross in the form of a gold chain today. At that time, it was a symbol of shame, humiliation and defeat.
How can a victorious God, a God of salvation, be associated with the cross? That's why the gospel was hard to preach--that Jesus died for your sins and rose again from the dead--and hard to accept at that time.
When Jesus did that, He redeemed the negativity of the Cross. From a symbol of shame, it became a symbol of salvation and redemption. That's how powerful God is. God can take something that is so shameful, degraded and has no meaning and purpose that they spit upon and God can make it and use it for His purpose and His glory.
The crucified life and the glorified life coexist. Death and resurrection coexist. Suffering that leads to glory coexist.
2 Corinthians 4:12 New King James Version (NKJV)
_12 So then death is working in us, but life in you._
2 Corinthians 6:9 New King James Version (NKJV)
_9 as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as chastened, and yet not killed;_
The work of the Holy Spirit is to lead us and bring us through the cross to experience a dying to ourselves and our old nature continuously. This is what water baptism means. Water baptism is not telling the world that you're a Christian.
Romans 6:3-5 New King James Version (NKJV)
_3 Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? 4 Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life._
_5 For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection,_
Baptism into the life of Jesus is not the problem or the issue. It is baptism into His death and identifying the death to our old lives with the death of Jesus for us.
Jesus' dying must become our own. The Holy Spirit takes the death of Jesus which He suffered and died on the cross and makes it ours but by the grace of God. As we seek to obey God, it becomes a reality in our lives.
When the dying is the work of the Spirit in us, naturally the life of the Spirit will flow out. If the dying is of the Spirit and is the work of God, then the automatic fruit is the life of God. New life is a natural process. It is the dying that is difficult and hard to understand.
This whole idea of dying and rising to a newness of life coexist.
When we follow Jesus, it means putting to death our old life continuously.
Without a life of prayer, it won't happen.
If we don't understand that this is central to the Christian life, we will never understand why there is suffering in the world and why the righteous suffer. "Why when I choose to obey God and lay down my life, why is it that life becomes more difficult sometimes?" "Why isn't it smooth and prosperous?"
God is after raising of a new life that is called His glory. His glory comes out of dying, suffering and out of putting to death our own will and desires to live the kind of life that we want to live--an easy and comfortable life with no suffering, pain and commitment so much so that everything is discounted.
Today, Christianity is a discounted gospel. That's why Christianity is not impressive. There is no suffering. When it doesn't cause us anything, we have nothing to give and nothing to say. Preaching, worship, song-leading, sharing and teaching the Word of God have no life in it. This life is the zoe life that Paul calls the life of the Spirit.
You can pray in tongues but if there is no dying and experiencing the power of God and seeing it work in us, there will be no life.
If we don't understand this, then Christianity becomes more and more an intellectual kind where we have all the right words, all the Bible verses, all the right quotations from books, all the right programmes etc, but no life of the Spirit.
When we respond to God's calling, God has respond to my response to His calling. God has to do something by responding to my response to His calling to show that I have responded rightly to Him that I have met up to the requirements of the way He wants me to respond to His calling so that He put a stamp and approves the fact that I have responded correctly. If there is no seal of approval or no evidence or proof that heaven has sanctioned my calling, it is only my word. When we respond to God's calling or direction, God has to do something to show something to approve and sanction the fact that we have responded rightly to His voice or to His calling. One of the signs is the presence of the Spirit on the person - the gifting or the fruit or the change in his character or a transformation in his life. He can hear from God. He has got revelations and insights from God. And there are many other things as well. But material blessings is the last one.
How does our contradictory circumstances (our hardships, injustices) lead to God's glory?
God is sovereign over everything. If I am in a boat facing a thunderstorm in the middle of the Indian Ocean, God is still sovereign over my life. Thunderstorm or tornado is not outside of God's rule. Everything we go through in life is under the rule and covering of God.
For God to show His glory in our lives, we have to put all of our lives into the Hands of God.
When Jesus prayed, He committed Himself to God.
Luke 23:46 New King James Version (NKJV)
_46 And when Jesus had cried out with a loud voice, He said, “Father, ‘into Your hands I commit My spirit.’ ” Having said this, He breathed His last._
Right to the very end, Jesus was still committing Himself to the Father even though He was nailed on the cross and suffered a very humiliating kind of death. Jesus committed His life and His spirit into the Hands of the Father.
Luke 23:34 New King James Version (NKJV)
_34 [a]Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.”_
_And they divided His garments and cast lots._
Matthew 27:46 New King James Version (NKJV)
_46 And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” that is, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”_
Jesus was constantly in communion with the Father. Even when He called out to God, it was in the form of a prayer in the midst of being forsaken by the Father. Right from the beginning to the very end, we see that Jesus was in communion with the Father and He committed to the Father's will in that He was obedient.
Luke 22:42 New King James Version (NKJV)
_42 saying, “Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done.”_
And He was in union with the Father. Jesus' life was saturated with prayer and with communion with the Father. Right to the very end of the cross, His communion and dialogue with the Father shows that His intimacy with the Father determines His direction, choices, goals and pace in His life. God was so central to Jesus' life that God was foremost in His heart and mind.
This idea of communion and this whole idea of prayer is only possible if there is a yearning in our hearts for God.
Today the way we pray and the way we seek God is determined, most of all, by what is foremost in your heart and mine. The thing that you and I are most concerned about will tell us a lot about ourselves and our faith. It would show us where we are in our closeness or distance with God.
From time to time, we need to be alone with God. It is good to be silent and to search our hearts and to ask ourselves, "What is the greatest concern in my heart?" "Is God the foremost person that my heart is longing after?"
Most of the time it is not God. Most of the time our concern is about our future, our next paycheck, our finance, our material things, our children and their education and our earthly stuff. These are very natural. Jesus didn't condemn us. We are broken people living earthly lives and these are natural concerns.
Because we are like this, we need to come before God constantly.
We need to cultivate a stronger awareness or consciousness of God in ourselves because if left to ourselves, God will very quickly deteriorate down to the bottom of the list.
If we don't have a prayer life, our Christian life cannot go anywhere. There would be no life and no meaning.
The only thing that would make our Christianity real is Jesus Christ.
Unfortunately the presence of God has become less and less real not just in times of corporate worship but also in personal devotion times. Why? Because it is not being prioritised; it is not being cultivated.
Learn to experience the reality of Jesus Christ personally in our own hearts and in our own lives.
Our prayer time tells us a lot.
Self-examination must always be done in the context of the presence of God. It cannot be done by ourselves mechanically. The Bible talks about healthy introspection and healthy self-examination that is done after a time of prayer, after a time of dwelling in the presence of God, after a time of communion with God, after a time of connecting with Him, after a time of allowing His presence to fill our hearts.
And when there is a sense of God that fills our hearts and our consciousness, then we approach God and allow God to examine our hearts.
2 Corinthians 13:5 New King James Version (NKJV)
_5 Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not know yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you [a]are disqualified._
Ask, "God, where are you in my life right now? Am I searching for You with all my heart? Are there areas in my life where I am strained and where I have left You out? Is my Christian life dying of becoming a form?"
As we approach God, very often the Holy Spirit will help us and make us aware of us. We cannot do this flippantly. If we do it flippantly, then our experience of God will be shallow.
Our hearts are not only deceitful but also prone to wonder. We experience all kinds of temptations that tempt us very easily. We have all kinds of greed in various forms. These are the darkness that is inside us.
When we search our hearts in the presence of God, do we really want God to show us the sinful things inside us?
1 John 1:5 New King James Version (NKJV)
_Fellowship with Him and One Another_
_5 This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all._
There is so many layers of darkness inside us.
John 1:4 New King James Version (NKJV)
_4 In Him was life, and the life was the light of men._
Jesus brought the life of God to us. Jesus also brought the light of God into our lives.
John 8:12 New King James Version (NKJV)
_12 Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, “I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.”_
Matthew 5:14-16 New King James Version (NKJV)
_14 “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. 16 Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven._
Loving the light also means loving God.
John 3:19 New King James Version (NKJV)
_19 And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil._
Shunning the light is not a good sign of our love for God.
The moment we come into His presence, there is a consciousness of darkness in our lives. That consciousness is a healthy thing. It is not a condemning consciousness.
We are most conscious of God when we are in prayer, when we are in worship, when we are reading the Bible.
The consciousness of God is stimulated inside us. It shows that the consciousness of God can become cultivated. As we regulate regularly our time with God alone, we have a human consciousness that is like a vacuum. The Holy Spirit will fill the vacuum of our human consciousness and saturate this consciousness with the consciousness of God. Only the Holy Spirit can make you and I aware of God and conscious of it. This consciousness can be cultivated by regularity, by taking God seriously, by reading His Word and really seeking after God. When you start doing it, the inspiration will come. If you wait for inspiration, it will never come.
1 John 1:3 New King James Version (NKJV)
_3 that which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ._
1 John 1:7 New King James Version (NKJV)
_7 But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin._
Our hearts' spiritual condition has to conform with the nature of God in order for us to have fellowship with Him. The remedy is made in the light of God's presence as we enter into the presence of God and into His light through prayer. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us.
The Holy Spirit shows us places in us that have got darkness, hidden and unconfessed sins, reactions and attitudes towards friends and neighbours, relatives and people who have crossed our paths and have hurt or disappointed us.
There are all kinds of darkness inside us and all kinds of motives that are wrong and intentions that are hidden and are justified and rationalised by our own reasoning to cover up our sinfulness.
When we take time and make time to come into the presence of God unhurriedly, the Spirit of God will gently show us so that He can bring us further into the light further and as we acknowledge and confess the sin in us, we are practising repentence which means turning our hearts towards God. And being honest and acknowledging it, we allow God to come inside our hearts to cleanse us, to heal us, to make us whole and to fill us with His Spirit and His grace that lead to a transformed heart.
When the heart is made right, then it is ready to be filled with the Holy Spirit in a deeper way. When our heart is cleansed, our awareness of God and His Holiness is being felt by us. We experience the purity of God and His light.
Making time in prayer to God is the central thing. If we take this out, we can't carry the cross. To cleanse hearts, we need the grace of God and the infilling of God's Spirit.
Don't let Jesus become an incidental.
Jesus Came to Seek and Save the Sick and Lost
Dato' Dr Kim Tan
12-05-2019
Luke 18:35-43 New King James Version (NKJV)
A Blind Man Receives His Sight
35 Then it happened, as He was coming near Jericho, that a certain blind man sat by the road begging. 36 And hearing a multitude passing by, he asked what it meant. 37 So they told him that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by. 38 And he cried out, saying, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
39 Then those who went before warned him that he should be quiet; but he cried out all the more, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”
40 So Jesus stood still and commanded him to be brought to Him. And when he had come near, He asked him, 41 saying, “What do you want Me to do for you?”
He said, “Lord, that I may receive my sight.”
42 Then Jesus said to him, “Receive your sight; your faith has made you well.” 43 And immediately he received his sight, and followed Him, glorifying God. And all the people, when they saw it, gave praise to God.
Luke 19:1-10 New King James Version (NKJV)
Jesus Comes to Zacchaeus’ House
19 Then Jesus entered and passed through Jericho. 2 Now behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus who was a chief tax collector, and he was rich. 3 And he sought to see who Jesus was, but could not because of the crowd, for he was of short stature. 4 So he ran ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see Him, for He was going to pass that way. 5 And when Jesus came to the place, He looked up [a]and saw him, and said to him, “Zacchaeus, [b]make haste and come down, for today I must stay at your house.” 6 So he [c]made haste and came down, and received Him joyfully. 7 But when they saw it, they all [d]complained, saying, “He has gone to be a guest with a man who is a sinner.”
8 Then Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord, I give half of my goods to the poor; and if I have taken anything from anyone by false accusation, I restore fourfold.”
9 And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he also is a son of Abraham; 10 for the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.”
Jesus was heading to Jerusalem through Jericho. His mind was on the betrayal, the flogging, the torture, and the Cross.
He wasn't intending to stay in Jericho.
The crowd got very excited.
In His way to the cross, Jesus took time out for Bartimaeus, the blind man, who was a nobody. No one is insignificant in Jesus' sight. He set aside time for this man.
Immediately, he received his sight and followed Jesus. And all the people got seriously excited.
In the time of Jesus, if you belong to a certain profession, you're a sinner.
Zacchaeus was the chief tax collector. Jericho was the absolute best place to collect taxes. And he got rich. He worked for the Romans. He was the Bill Gates of Jericho.
The crowd walked with Jesus and they were expecting great things to happen in Jerusalem.
Zacchaeus couldn't see Jesus because he was short. And the crowd completely ignored him.
So Zacchaeus ran. It's embarrassing for important people like him to run in public. He was willing to humiliate himself to see Jesus.
And he climbed a tree. Important people do not climb trees in public. He was so hungry to see Jesus. He was so bankrupt inside that he was willing to embarrass and humiliate himself publicly in order that he might see Jesus.
The father of the Prodigal Son also ran to get his son.
Jesus had already turned down offers from other people to stay a night in Jericho. But Jesus asked him to come down and said He wanted to stay overnight in his house.
But He stopped and looked up at Zacchaeus. The crowd also looked up and fixed their eyes on Zacchaeus and they wanted to kill him. The crowd expected Jesus to preach the most hellfire sermon to Zacchaeus. That's what Zacchaeus deserved.
Instead Jesus offered Zacchaeus undeserved love and grace.
The rabbis taught that you could be contaminated with sin if you sit with sinners or sleep on the bed of sinners.
The crowd began to grumble and murmur. And their anger was diverted from Zacchaeus to Jesus.
Zacchaeus was touched by the generosity of God's grace. And he went beyond what is required by the law. The law states that if you're a thief, you are required to pay 20%. If you are caught, you have to pay 100%. But if you steal something essential, you have to pay back four times.
Zacchaeus was only required to pay 20% but he offered to pay back fourfold. It was an extraordinary act of generosity.
The true sign of a Church is the extraordinary sign of generosity and hospitality. That's what happens when you're touched by the amazing grace of God.
Zacchaeus called Jesus Lord.
Matthew 1:21 New King James Version (NKJV)
21 And she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name [a]Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.”
Jesus didn't come to seek the high and mighty, the rich and the famous. He came to seek the weak, marginalised, the poor and the lost.
On His way to the cross, Jesus made time for the blind and the billionaire of Jericho who was bankrupt inside and was willing to humiliate himself publicly that he might see Jesus.
That's the extravagant love and forgiveness of Jesus for sinners. He loved them as they are, for who they are.
12-05-2019
Luke 18:35-43 New King James Version (NKJV)
A Blind Man Receives His Sight
35 Then it happened, as He was coming near Jericho, that a certain blind man sat by the road begging. 36 And hearing a multitude passing by, he asked what it meant. 37 So they told him that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by. 38 And he cried out, saying, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
39 Then those who went before warned him that he should be quiet; but he cried out all the more, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”
40 So Jesus stood still and commanded him to be brought to Him. And when he had come near, He asked him, 41 saying, “What do you want Me to do for you?”
He said, “Lord, that I may receive my sight.”
42 Then Jesus said to him, “Receive your sight; your faith has made you well.” 43 And immediately he received his sight, and followed Him, glorifying God. And all the people, when they saw it, gave praise to God.
Luke 19:1-10 New King James Version (NKJV)
Jesus Comes to Zacchaeus’ House
19 Then Jesus entered and passed through Jericho. 2 Now behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus who was a chief tax collector, and he was rich. 3 And he sought to see who Jesus was, but could not because of the crowd, for he was of short stature. 4 So he ran ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see Him, for He was going to pass that way. 5 And when Jesus came to the place, He looked up [a]and saw him, and said to him, “Zacchaeus, [b]make haste and come down, for today I must stay at your house.” 6 So he [c]made haste and came down, and received Him joyfully. 7 But when they saw it, they all [d]complained, saying, “He has gone to be a guest with a man who is a sinner.”
8 Then Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord, I give half of my goods to the poor; and if I have taken anything from anyone by false accusation, I restore fourfold.”
9 And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he also is a son of Abraham; 10 for the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.”
Jesus was heading to Jerusalem through Jericho. His mind was on the betrayal, the flogging, the torture, and the Cross.
He wasn't intending to stay in Jericho.
The crowd got very excited.
In His way to the cross, Jesus took time out for Bartimaeus, the blind man, who was a nobody. No one is insignificant in Jesus' sight. He set aside time for this man.
Immediately, he received his sight and followed Jesus. And all the people got seriously excited.
In the time of Jesus, if you belong to a certain profession, you're a sinner.
Zacchaeus was the chief tax collector. Jericho was the absolute best place to collect taxes. And he got rich. He worked for the Romans. He was the Bill Gates of Jericho.
The crowd walked with Jesus and they were expecting great things to happen in Jerusalem.
Zacchaeus couldn't see Jesus because he was short. And the crowd completely ignored him.
So Zacchaeus ran. It's embarrassing for important people like him to run in public. He was willing to humiliate himself to see Jesus.
And he climbed a tree. Important people do not climb trees in public. He was so hungry to see Jesus. He was so bankrupt inside that he was willing to embarrass and humiliate himself publicly in order that he might see Jesus.
The father of the Prodigal Son also ran to get his son.
Jesus had already turned down offers from other people to stay a night in Jericho. But Jesus asked him to come down and said He wanted to stay overnight in his house.
But He stopped and looked up at Zacchaeus. The crowd also looked up and fixed their eyes on Zacchaeus and they wanted to kill him. The crowd expected Jesus to preach the most hellfire sermon to Zacchaeus. That's what Zacchaeus deserved.
Instead Jesus offered Zacchaeus undeserved love and grace.
The rabbis taught that you could be contaminated with sin if you sit with sinners or sleep on the bed of sinners.
The crowd began to grumble and murmur. And their anger was diverted from Zacchaeus to Jesus.
Zacchaeus was touched by the generosity of God's grace. And he went beyond what is required by the law. The law states that if you're a thief, you are required to pay 20%. If you are caught, you have to pay 100%. But if you steal something essential, you have to pay back four times.
Zacchaeus was only required to pay 20% but he offered to pay back fourfold. It was an extraordinary act of generosity.
The true sign of a Church is the extraordinary sign of generosity and hospitality. That's what happens when you're touched by the amazing grace of God.
Zacchaeus called Jesus Lord.
Matthew 1:21 New King James Version (NKJV)
21 And she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name [a]Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.”
Jesus didn't come to seek the high and mighty, the rich and the famous. He came to seek the weak, marginalised, the poor and the lost.
On His way to the cross, Jesus made time for the blind and the billionaire of Jericho who was bankrupt inside and was willing to humiliate himself publicly that he might see Jesus.
That's the extravagant love and forgiveness of Jesus for sinners. He loved them as they are, for who they are.
Serving with a Vision
Pr Handoko Soerjanto
05-05-2019
Have a humble heart when you serve the Lord.
The work of Jesus Christ is not done yet.
The Church is built because of the Great Commission.
The Church exists for the Great Commission - discipleship, baptism, teaching.
Acts 16:9-10 New King James Version (NKJV)
9 And a vision appeared to Paul in the night. A man of Macedonia stood and pleaded with him, saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” 10 Now after he had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go to Macedonia, concluding that the Lord had called us to preach the gospel to them.
How can you use your business, your life and your hobby to support the church vision?
Avail yourself. Use your potential, your brain, your wealth.
If an old man can do, surely you can do better.
There is potential in young people in this church.
If you don't use it, God will take it away.
Luke 13:6-9 New King James Version (NKJV)
The Parable of the Barren Fig Tree
6 He also spoke this parable: “A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it and found none. 7 Then he said to the keeper of his vineyard, ‘Look, for three years I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree and find none. Cut it down; why does it [a]use up the ground?’ 8 But he answered and said to him, ‘Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and fertilize it. 9 [b]And if it bears fruit, well. But if not, after that you can cut it down.’ ”
Luke 9:23 New King James Version (NKJV)
Take Up the Cross and Follow Him
23 Then He said to them all, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross [a]daily, and follow Me.
Use your life as a mission.
Use your hobby to win souls.
Use your wealth and your intelligence for God's glory.
Luke 16:27-28 New King James Version (NKJV)
27 “Then he said, ‘I beg you therefore, father, that you would send him to my father’s house, 28 for I have five brothers, that he may testify to them, lest they also come to this place of torment.’
John 4:1-42 New King James Version (NKJV)
A Samaritan Woman Meets Her Messiah
4 Therefore, when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John 2 (though Jesus Himself did not baptize, but His disciples), 3 He left Judea and departed again to Galilee. 4 But He needed to go through Samaria.
5 So He came to a city of Samaria which is called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. 6 Now Jacob’s well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied from His journey, sat thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour.
7 A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give Me a drink.” 8 For His disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.
9 Then the woman of Samaria said to Him, “How is it that You, being a Jew, ask a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.
10 Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.”
11 The woman said to Him, “Sir, You have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Where then do You get that living water? 12 Are You greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, as well as his sons and his livestock?”
13 Jesus answered and said to her, “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.”
15 The woman said to Him, “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.”
16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.”
17 The woman answered and said, “I have no husband.”
Jesus said to her, “You have well said, ‘I have no husband,’ 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; in that you spoke truly.”
19 The woman said to Him, “Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet. 20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship.”
21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father. 22 You worship what you do not know; we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. 24 God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”
25 The woman said to Him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When He comes, He will tell us all things.”
26 Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am He.”
The Whitened Harvest
27 And at this point His disciples came, and they marveled that He talked with a woman; yet no one said, “What do You seek?” or, “Why are You talking with her?”
28 The woman then left her waterpot, went her way into the city, and said to the men, 29 “Come, see a Man who told me all things that I ever did. Could this be the Christ?” 30 Then they went out of the city and came to Him.
31 In the meantime His disciples urged Him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.”
32 But He said to them, “I have food to eat of which you do not know.”
33 Therefore the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought Him anything to eat?”
34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work. 35 Do you not say, ‘There are still four months and then comes the harvest’? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look at the fields, for they are already white for harvest! 36 And he who reaps receives wages, and gathers fruit for eternal life, that both he who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together. 37 For in this the saying is true: ‘One sows and another reaps.’ 38 I sent you to reap that for which you have not labored; others have labored, and you have entered into their labors.”
The Savior of the World
39 And many of the Samaritans of that city believed in Him because of the word of the woman who testified, “He told me all that I ever did.” 40 So when the Samaritans had come to Him, they urged Him to stay with them; and He stayed there two days. 41 And many more believed because of His own word.
42 Then they said to the woman, “Now we believe, not because of what you said, for we ourselves have heard Him and we know that this is indeed [a]the Christ, the Savior of the world.”
Mark 5:1-20 New King James Version (NKJV)
A Demon-Possessed Man Healed
5 Then they came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the [a]Gadarenes. 2 And when He had come out of the boat, immediately there met Him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit, 3 who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no one could bind [b]him, not even with chains, 4 because he had often been bound with shackles and chains. And the chains had been pulled apart by him, and the shackles broken in pieces; neither could anyone tame him. 5 And always, night and day, he was in the mountains and in the tombs, crying out and cutting himself with stones.
6 When he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and worshiped Him. 7 And he cried out with a loud voice and said, “What have I to do with You, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I implore[c] You by God that You do not torment me.”
8 For He said to him, “Come out of the man, unclean spirit!” 9 Then He asked him, “What is your name?”
And he answered, saying, “My name is Legion; for we are many.” 10 Also he begged Him earnestly that He would not send them out of the country.
11 Now a large herd of swine was feeding there near the mountains. 12 So all the demons begged Him, saying, “Send us to the swine, that we may enter them.” 13 And [d]at once Jesus gave them permission. Then the unclean spirits went out and entered the swine (there were about two thousand); and the herd ran violently down the steep place into the sea, and drowned in the sea.
14 So those who fed the swine fled, and they told it in the city and in the country. And they went out to see what it was that had happened. 15 Then they came to Jesus, and saw the one who had been demon-possessed and had the legion, sitting and clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. 16 And those who saw it told them how it happened to him who had been demon-possessed, and about the swine. 17 Then they began to plead with Him to depart from their region.
18 And when He got into the boat, he who had been demon-possessed begged Him that he might be with Him. 19 However, Jesus did not permit him, but said to him, “Go home to your friends, and tell them what great things the Lord has done for you, and how He has had compassion on you.” 20 And he departed and began to proclaim in [e]Decapolis all that Jesus had done for him; and all marveled.
Luke 19:1-10 New King James Version (NKJV)
Jesus Comes to Zacchaeus’ House
19 Then Jesus entered and passed through Jericho. 2 Now behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus who was a chief tax collector, and he was rich. 3 And he sought to see who Jesus was, but could not because of the crowd, for he was of short stature. 4 So he ran ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see Him, for He was going to pass that way. 5 And when Jesus came to the place, He looked up [a]and saw him, and said to him, “Zacchaeus, [b]make haste and come down, for today I must stay at your house.” 6 So he [c]made haste and came down, and received Him joyfully. 7 But when they saw it, they all [d]complained, saying, “He has gone to be a guest with a man who is a sinner.”
8 Then Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord, I give half of my goods to the poor; and if I have taken anything from anyone by false accusation, I restore fourfold.”
9 And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he also is a son of Abraham; 10 for the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.”
If you believe in Jesus Christ, your life will be changed completely.
If God can use a cock to glorify His name, God can use you to glorify His name.
God can use you mightily in the days to come.
Don't waste your life.
Use your life meaningfully for Him.
05-05-2019
Have a humble heart when you serve the Lord.
The work of Jesus Christ is not done yet.
The Church is built because of the Great Commission.
The Church exists for the Great Commission - discipleship, baptism, teaching.
Acts 16:9-10 New King James Version (NKJV)
9 And a vision appeared to Paul in the night. A man of Macedonia stood and pleaded with him, saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” 10 Now after he had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go to Macedonia, concluding that the Lord had called us to preach the gospel to them.
How can you use your business, your life and your hobby to support the church vision?
Avail yourself. Use your potential, your brain, your wealth.
If an old man can do, surely you can do better.
There is potential in young people in this church.
If you don't use it, God will take it away.
Luke 13:6-9 New King James Version (NKJV)
The Parable of the Barren Fig Tree
6 He also spoke this parable: “A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it and found none. 7 Then he said to the keeper of his vineyard, ‘Look, for three years I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree and find none. Cut it down; why does it [a]use up the ground?’ 8 But he answered and said to him, ‘Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and fertilize it. 9 [b]And if it bears fruit, well. But if not, after that you can cut it down.’ ”
Luke 9:23 New King James Version (NKJV)
Take Up the Cross and Follow Him
23 Then He said to them all, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross [a]daily, and follow Me.
Use your life as a mission.
Use your hobby to win souls.
Use your wealth and your intelligence for God's glory.
Luke 16:27-28 New King James Version (NKJV)
27 “Then he said, ‘I beg you therefore, father, that you would send him to my father’s house, 28 for I have five brothers, that he may testify to them, lest they also come to this place of torment.’
John 4:1-42 New King James Version (NKJV)
A Samaritan Woman Meets Her Messiah
4 Therefore, when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John 2 (though Jesus Himself did not baptize, but His disciples), 3 He left Judea and departed again to Galilee. 4 But He needed to go through Samaria.
5 So He came to a city of Samaria which is called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. 6 Now Jacob’s well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied from His journey, sat thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour.
7 A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give Me a drink.” 8 For His disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.
9 Then the woman of Samaria said to Him, “How is it that You, being a Jew, ask a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.
10 Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.”
11 The woman said to Him, “Sir, You have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Where then do You get that living water? 12 Are You greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, as well as his sons and his livestock?”
13 Jesus answered and said to her, “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.”
15 The woman said to Him, “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.”
16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.”
17 The woman answered and said, “I have no husband.”
Jesus said to her, “You have well said, ‘I have no husband,’ 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; in that you spoke truly.”
19 The woman said to Him, “Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet. 20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship.”
21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father. 22 You worship what you do not know; we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. 24 God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”
25 The woman said to Him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When He comes, He will tell us all things.”
26 Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am He.”
The Whitened Harvest
27 And at this point His disciples came, and they marveled that He talked with a woman; yet no one said, “What do You seek?” or, “Why are You talking with her?”
28 The woman then left her waterpot, went her way into the city, and said to the men, 29 “Come, see a Man who told me all things that I ever did. Could this be the Christ?” 30 Then they went out of the city and came to Him.
31 In the meantime His disciples urged Him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.”
32 But He said to them, “I have food to eat of which you do not know.”
33 Therefore the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought Him anything to eat?”
34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work. 35 Do you not say, ‘There are still four months and then comes the harvest’? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look at the fields, for they are already white for harvest! 36 And he who reaps receives wages, and gathers fruit for eternal life, that both he who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together. 37 For in this the saying is true: ‘One sows and another reaps.’ 38 I sent you to reap that for which you have not labored; others have labored, and you have entered into their labors.”
The Savior of the World
39 And many of the Samaritans of that city believed in Him because of the word of the woman who testified, “He told me all that I ever did.” 40 So when the Samaritans had come to Him, they urged Him to stay with them; and He stayed there two days. 41 And many more believed because of His own word.
42 Then they said to the woman, “Now we believe, not because of what you said, for we ourselves have heard Him and we know that this is indeed [a]the Christ, the Savior of the world.”
Mark 5:1-20 New King James Version (NKJV)
A Demon-Possessed Man Healed
5 Then they came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the [a]Gadarenes. 2 And when He had come out of the boat, immediately there met Him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit, 3 who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no one could bind [b]him, not even with chains, 4 because he had often been bound with shackles and chains. And the chains had been pulled apart by him, and the shackles broken in pieces; neither could anyone tame him. 5 And always, night and day, he was in the mountains and in the tombs, crying out and cutting himself with stones.
6 When he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and worshiped Him. 7 And he cried out with a loud voice and said, “What have I to do with You, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I implore[c] You by God that You do not torment me.”
8 For He said to him, “Come out of the man, unclean spirit!” 9 Then He asked him, “What is your name?”
And he answered, saying, “My name is Legion; for we are many.” 10 Also he begged Him earnestly that He would not send them out of the country.
11 Now a large herd of swine was feeding there near the mountains. 12 So all the demons begged Him, saying, “Send us to the swine, that we may enter them.” 13 And [d]at once Jesus gave them permission. Then the unclean spirits went out and entered the swine (there were about two thousand); and the herd ran violently down the steep place into the sea, and drowned in the sea.
14 So those who fed the swine fled, and they told it in the city and in the country. And they went out to see what it was that had happened. 15 Then they came to Jesus, and saw the one who had been demon-possessed and had the legion, sitting and clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. 16 And those who saw it told them how it happened to him who had been demon-possessed, and about the swine. 17 Then they began to plead with Him to depart from their region.
18 And when He got into the boat, he who had been demon-possessed begged Him that he might be with Him. 19 However, Jesus did not permit him, but said to him, “Go home to your friends, and tell them what great things the Lord has done for you, and how He has had compassion on you.” 20 And he departed and began to proclaim in [e]Decapolis all that Jesus had done for him; and all marveled.
Luke 19:1-10 New King James Version (NKJV)
Jesus Comes to Zacchaeus’ House
19 Then Jesus entered and passed through Jericho. 2 Now behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus who was a chief tax collector, and he was rich. 3 And he sought to see who Jesus was, but could not because of the crowd, for he was of short stature. 4 So he ran ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see Him, for He was going to pass that way. 5 And when Jesus came to the place, He looked up [a]and saw him, and said to him, “Zacchaeus, [b]make haste and come down, for today I must stay at your house.” 6 So he [c]made haste and came down, and received Him joyfully. 7 But when they saw it, they all [d]complained, saying, “He has gone to be a guest with a man who is a sinner.”
8 Then Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord, I give half of my goods to the poor; and if I have taken anything from anyone by false accusation, I restore fourfold.”
9 And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he also is a son of Abraham; 10 for the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.”
If you believe in Jesus Christ, your life will be changed completely.
If God can use a cock to glorify His name, God can use you to glorify His name.
God can use you mightily in the days to come.
Don't waste your life.
Use your life meaningfully for Him.
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