ARE YOU PREPARED TO LIVE WITH INSECURITY?

Hebrews 11:7 ‘By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family. By his faith he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.’(NIV)

“When you live by Faith, you are living on the edge of insecurity”

Faith heroes always challenge the the status quo. In one way or another, they are not ‘normal’ by most people’s standards.

God told Noah to build a boat. ‘Great,’ said Noah, ‘what’s a boat?’ ‘You know,’ came the reply, ‘one of those things you use when it rains a lot.’ Noah was excited, but perplexed. ‘Great,’ he said, ‘what’s rain?’ (Genesis says there had never been rain to the point in time.) When God told Noah to build a boat, it wasn’t a balsa-wood boat-in-a-bottle constructed out in the garden shed. Noah built a supermarket-sized boat in his driveway — and several other people’s driveways. It was huge! Tourists came from miles around to take photographs of ‘the fool and his boat’. Noah found favour with God — and saved his family — because he refused to be ruled by popular opinion. God declared a flood to world that had never seen rain — and only Noah was prepared to believe him. Were their moments when Noah felt doubt? Of course. Were there times when Noah wished someone else had received the call? Sure. Nevertheless, Noah was prepared to live with the insecurity and that was what made him a world changer.

Prayer: ‘Dear Father, thank you for the example of people like Noah who are obeyed your call even in the face of ridicule. I want to pursue your call on my life whatever the cost, so please, I pray, trust me, call me afresh even today.’

ARE YOU A DANGEROUS PERSON?

Hebrews 11:33-34 '[It was faith people] who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised; who shut the mouths of lions, quenched the fury of the flames, and escaped the edge of the sword; whose weakness was turned to strength; and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies.' (NIV)

Faith people are dangerous people! They are not people who mirror the status quo: they challenge the way things are and point the way to something better, the Kingdom of God. Sometimes, they are sandpaper that disturbs a complacent world. William & Catherine Booth defied religious convention and brought relief to millions suffering in poverty. They challenged the powers of respectable society.

William Wilberforce, the famed English politician, worked for over a generation to overthrow the practice of slavery in the British Isles. He challenged the powers of trade and commerce that lived off the sweat and suffering of the slaves.

Martin Luther nailed 95 statements to the door of a city church one October morning. His statements called for massive reform of the Catholic Church. He was ex-communicated by the pope and then called to appear before a council of princes. Facing possible death, he ended his defence with this classic statement: 'I cannot and I will not take back anything. My conscience is bound by the Word of God. Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen.' He challenged the powers of dead religion -- and changed not just the church, but also the world. Faith people are dangerous people. What 'damage' can you do to the Kingdom of darkness today?

Prayer: 'Lord, help me to be dangerous to the ways of this world. Help me to stand up to the pressures of conformity and complacency. Help me, even today, to do some damage to the Kingdom of darkness, by walking in your light.'

It matters what you BELIEVE . . .

The Apostles Creed begins by saying, “I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.”

Like the Apostles CREED when crafting a personal statement of faith it makes the most sense, of course, to start at the beginning. God is that beginning. Belief in the Creator is the foundational, the beginning step in our journey of faith.

I find it amazing, sometimes appalling at how many Christians don’t know what they believe. Have you ever been asked by someone outside the faith of why do you believe what you believe?

I believe that everything we see, and all that we cannot see, in the world around us was created by God Himself - spoken into existence. With one word He brought light to the darkness of the universe.

Genesis 1:1-3 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

Compare that first verse to this one in John
John 1:1-5 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

The recognition of a Creator has many implications. Once we acknowledge His existence, we must acknowledge His authority over His creation.

Romans 1:20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

Once we acknowledge God and He reveals His nature to us, we begin to see ourselves as we really are, in the light of His qualities. That’s what belief does.
Let me ask you a revealing question: How has coming to know God brought you into a deeper understanding of yourself?

Remember when Jesus said to Thomas “Stop doubting and believe", what was the result and reaction?

Thomas said to him, "My Lord and my God!" The personal revelation that Jesus was God and therefore must be Lord as well.

When we say that we believe in Jesus yet do not follow Him as Lord, we are deceived by this conflicting truth. A friend of mine Jim Leek says each day on Joy 1250 “If Jesus is not Lord of all, He is not Lord at all.” How true! How convicting!

“Strong lives are motivated by dynamic purpose; lesser ones exist on wishes and inclinations”. King Solomon wrote in Proverbs 28:19, “He who works his land will have abundant food, but the one who chases fantasies will have his fill of poverty.”

Sharpening The Mind

Ecclesiastes 7:25 'So I turned my mind to understand, to investigate and to search out wisdom and the scheme of things and to understand…'(NIV)

We live in a world that seems to want to weaken our faith. It's important for us to keep ourselves inspired by, for example, keeping our minds fresh and alive. Having a healthy mind is vital to walking in God's favour and protection. Our minds process what our hearts are learning about God and his ways. In our minds we make the decisions that shape our future. That's why so much of today's pop-culture seems intent on dulling our thinking processes, or making us mentally lazy so that we accept what we're told and give up independent thought. To keep our minds fresh and sharp, we must establish among other things the discipline of reading. We should all read often and widely, drawing from many sources. We should read for style and for substance. Some things we read will inform us, others will entertain and stimulate us with their style. Now and again, we'll find material that does both. We should expose ourselves to fresh experiences, developing interests outside of our normal routines. That way, we learn to appreciate aspects of God's creation, and of our own abilities, that we'd not seen before. Above all, we should read the Bible - often. Reading from different translations helps to keep the wonder of God's awesome book alive for us.

Prayer: 'Lord, I want to keep my mind sharp and alert. Help me to establish the disciplines that will keep me from thinking in a rut!'

Signs of The Kingdom

This first message of the New Year is based on the premise and the promise that says “Seek Ye first the Kingdom of Heaven”. Also as we begin our week of prayer & fasting, part of our Lord’s Prayer says that we should ask “Thy Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven”.

The reason Jesus taught us to pray that is because His expectation that some of that Kingdom would be breaking through in our lives so that we would not have to wait until we get to heaven in order to have heaven get into the earth through us. So with that in mind I want us to look at the ‘big picture’ of what are the signs of the coming of that Kingdom. How can you tell if the Kingdom is coming? What are the signs?

One of the signs is healing. Both personal and social – in other words spiritual and cultural healing.

Let's read 4 verses from Matthew 9:35-38
Jesus was going through all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness.
36 Seeing the people, He felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd.
37 Then He said to His disciples, "The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.
38 "Therefore beseech the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into His harvest."

First of all, like I said earlier, I want you to understand the big picture of what we are talking about here. We are going to talk about ‘personal healing’ today but personal healing was much more than a physical correction. It wasn’t just about a touch in the body because quite frankly, they did not see it limited to just the make up of a physical need. BUT physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, cultural… they saw them all together. You have to see that in the way that the Bible is written.

In your Bible you have commas and numbers etc. but when it was written in the original texts we don’t have these divisions. So in verse 35, the teaching and the proclaiming and the healing all go together. They all follow each other. They are a part of one another. That is to say we are people who are not divided simply as physical bodies only and that it is not related to the rest of our make up.

We are intricately interrelated. Our physical bodies are directly affected by our emotional parts and relational parts of our lives. In fact many of our illnesses come from our stresses of our relationships or from the diseases THE DIS-Eases of our culture. That has a profound affect on our physical health.
So we are not a divided people, as a matter of fact, the word here for ‘Healing’ is “TheraPune” and we get the word therapy from it. It has an interesting source, it did not just mean therapeutic or medicinal healing. This word started out as ‘CARING FOR’.

A simple word ‘caring for’ and it graduated to the term ‘ministering physically to someone’. So therefore the word ‘Healing’ meant much more than just a physical correction.

In deed today, if you wanted to become a doctor and they interviewed you for medical school, they will ask you this question. In fact they will ask you this question several different times with differing words but it comes down to this. Here is the question. Why do you want to become a doctor? Now let me give you the wrong answer, “I want to be a doctor so I can work on peoples bodies and mechanically fix what is physiologically wrong” Not a good answer. Not what they are looking for.

Here is the right answer, “I want to be a doctor because I care about people and I want to compassionately help people”. Listen, if you are going for an interview for medical school they already know you are smart enough or you wouldn’t be interviewed, what they are looking for in this process is what else you are involved in, they don’t know if you are a ‘caring person’ so they are listening for that.

So the scripture is very explicit that our healing is not just about our physical body because we are an interconnected people. Our Spiritual life or lack of it is directly related to our well being.

I want you to see in Psalm 103 where it says, 1 Bless the LORD, O my soul, And all that is within me, bless His holy name. 2 Bless the LORD, O my soul, And forget none of His benefits; 3 Who pardons all your iniquities, Who heals all your diseases; 4 Who redeems your life from the pit, Who crowns you with loving-kindness and compassion; 5 Who satisfies your years with good things, So that your youth is renewed like the eagle. 6 The LORD performs righteous deeds And judgments for all who are oppressed.

Look at what it says, It talks about healing in connection with pardon of our sins, healing of our physical sicknesses, redeeming our life from the pit, but it also talks about healing with the justice of our society. In other words you will never be truly well until those around you are made well. All who are oppressed. Like when the drug addict is delivered, the mentally tormented freed, the abused healed, the weary are renewed, the marginal & forgotten restored. Wholeness includes all of us. Shalom.

The word SHALOM. Means “Peace, wholeness, complete, nothing lacking”. Personally & culturally.

This is what it says in 2 Chronicles 7:14. Many of you know this by heart. “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land”.

Before we ever get to our physical healings I want to say a word about our upcoming week of prayer. We His people are going to humbly seek His face & consecrate ourselves. God will hear our prayers, forgive our sins, heal our lives, loved ones and community.

Our health is dependent upon the health of our community. And just as God cares about us as a whole, He cares about us alone. Why did Jesus go into all the towns and villages? Why did He not just set up a clinic? People would have come. If you have ever been on a Medical Mission trip before you know. People will show up and stand in line when you open the doors to your clinic.

He could have done that but He went into the whole land, into the harvest fields, because he loves the community…

Matthew 9:36 “Seeing the people, He felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd”.

God cares about our community, God cares about our congregation but here is what is key and we’ll end with this. God never loses you in the crowd. If it feels crowded don’t worry he won’t miss you. Don’t ever feel alone because you are never alone with God. Don’t ever feel ignored because you are never ignored. Those of you who are sitting alone right now in this place or watching this DVD in your living room right now by yourself, you are not alone. You are with all of us just as if you were sitting here in the sanctuary and God is with you. You don’t get lost in distance or time. You don’t get lost in numbers of people either. When we grow don’t say I liked Bethel when it was small in numbers.

In Luke chapter 8 it talks about a crowd surrounding Jesus. They are just trying to get close to Jesus on this roadway, on this journey, just trying to touch Him, be near to Him.

There is this woman who has had an issue of blood for 12 years. Now I have to tell you this if you don’t know, any woman who has that issue of blood, while she has that condition is unclean. NO ONE can touch her. For her, her issue made her an untouchable one. That means she has not been touched for 12 years. Can you imagine the isolation? Can you imagine the shame? Somehow she sneaks her way pass the crowds and reaches out past her shame to come towards Jesus. She sneaks her way and the Bible says this… 42 “As Jesus was on his way, the crowds almost crushed him. 43 And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years, but no one could heal her.

44 She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped.” 45"Who touched me?" Jesus asked. When they all denied it, Peter said, "Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you." 46 But Jesus said, "Someone touched me; I know that power (KJV – Virtue) has gone out from me." 47 Then the woman, seeing that she could not go unnoticed, she came trembling and fell at his feet. In the presence of all the people, she told why she had touched him and how she had been instantly healed. 48 Then he said to her, "Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace."

Why did Jesus say that last verse? Did that heal her? No she was already healed. Until He pronounced her well, it made her allowed to be touched, for the first time in 12 years. For the first time in 12 years she could be loved again, she could be held again. She could be accepted. Jesus knew her social healing was just as important.

And now we are going to ask if any of you need healing. Are you broken hearted? DO you feel like you are an outsider, an untouchable perhaps, socially disgraced or emotionally distant? I pray that you say “Today I choose to follow you Jesus, past the eyes of the crowd to the heart of your love & compassion for me”

Some of you will be healed today, physically. Some of you won’t but let me tell you there is something more important than even instantaneous physical healing and the virtue of Jesus is present to work in you to heal your issue or issues.

We’ve had His teaching from the Word, we’ve heard the proclaiming of His Spirit and now He wants to bring His healing.

Always - Hillsong United Video

Saviour King - Hillsong Video

Your Grace is Enough - Chris Tomlin Video

WHEN WORSHIP IS A ‘10’

How many different ways are there to worship God? Probably as many ways as there are people who worship him, because worship is primarily a relationship shaped by who we are. Worship is the shape of your life lived in awareness of God. It is uniquely your – a reflection of your personality, your gifts, your needs, and your passions. Your worship has your own stamp on it.

We are so used to thinking of worship as a corporate, unified thing that we reduce it to a shared experience of songs, liturgies, and orderly services. This, of course, is a part of worship, but it is not the whole thing. It isn’t even the half of it.

Worship is ultimately a state of mind. In its broadest sense, it is the totality of our relationship with God. It involves talking to him, listening for him, and looking for him behind the scenes of things. It is being aware of his presence and acknowledging and evaluating his purposes in all we do. It is chatting with him – reacting to the world around us and imagining his reaction. It is getting familiar with him through his Word so that we begin to know how he thinks and feels about things. It is, in its simplest form, a God consciousness that permeates everything we do.

In an interview once, a pastor asked me to put my relationship with God on a scale of one to 10 – 10 being warm, close, and in fellowship. I thought about the apparent arrogance of putting this at a 10, but then I realized 10 was the right answer, not because I had arrived at some superior spiritual status that warrants it, but because I live a life of such quiet desperation that I am constantly in relationship with God out of necessity. I am conscious of God all the time because I have to be or I fly apart at the center. I have nothing to hold onto without him. I know myself well enough to know that if I am not living my relationship with God at a “10,” I am living in some form of lie or denial. My need for him is the bedrock truth of the matter.

If some of you find this alarming, then read Psalms, because I have just described the essence of David’s sentiment as expressed in his prayers and poems. Over and over again, his soul cries out to God, he is in a dry and thirsty land, he waits patiently for the Lord, and the Lord hears him and brings him comfort.

You don’t have to be perfect to be a “10” in your relationship with God, holding on for dear life will also do the trick.