Element Christian Church of Santa Maria

We must be a people who will choose this day who we will serve. Will we serve all the idols we have made with our hands, or will we serve the Lord, the God of scripture...the only God who is alive, knows us by name, and can call us to be who we are supposed to be?

Isaac gets tested over and over again, yet we see God remains faithful and trustworthy. We should be a people striving to live like Isaac (in some ways) and honor God with everything He has given us.

We must understand that everything that is not Jesus is just Lentils. We must understand that God has given you and I a birthright and says “don’t give up…live your destiny as a child of God.” Don’t give up and accept anything less than Jesus in your life.

No matter what our history is, Jesus came to redeem and restore; that’s grace. Jesus died and rose for His bride. There is no sin in the world He lacks the power to forgive. There is no regret anyone has that He lacks the power to redeem.

Matthew Henry “If therefore our houses be houses of the Lord, we shall for that reason love home, reckoning our daily devotion the sweetest of our daily delights; and our family-worship the most valuable of our family-comforts...A church in the house will be a good legacy, nay, it will be a good inheritance, to be left to your children after you.”

God is the watcher; we are the watchee(s). We are the kind of beings who need to be watched over. If no one is watching over our little life then we are doomed. That is why God is also called our watcher.

Abraham learned through loss, joy, pain, and hope that their truly is only one hope… and that hope doesn’t make everything turn out the way we want. People still die, the world may seem to pass you by…but My AND YOUR help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth…

God’s original promises to Abraham was not based on Abraham’s specific actions in carrying out the test, but rather was based on the faith and obedience of Abraham that showed through this test.

Soren Kierkegaard “The press of busyness is like a charm. It’s power swells…it reaches out seeking always to lay hold of ever younger victims so that childhood or youth are scarcely allowed the quiet and the retirement in which the Eternal may unfold a divine growth.”

God makes promises to Abraham that he would have a son. Abraham finally gets his son, but he has another son who was born of another woman (bad decision, you can listen to audio of that message at http://goo.gl/w0oQaweek 27). Today, this distrust of God has ramifications that effect the world even unto today.