Father's House Church Sermon of the Week

There are many people today in life who are pulling out of the race set before them. The good news is that God is with us. To finish strong we have to let God be God. This past Sunday Pastor Greg Timms shared that for us to finish strong and healthy we have to be teachable, accountable, correctable, remain humble, live thankful, renew our minds, guard our hearts, pay attention to our words, do family well and live powerfully supernatural.

Jesus invites us to place him over our hearts like a fiery seal of love, the jealous flame of God that burns continually in our hearts. We cannot allow anything else to stamp our hearts or replace his seal upon us. He calls us His own, we have been set apart for the King and the King alone. We carry the name above all names stamped on our hearts, sealed by His unrelenting love. God wants nothing more than for us to love Him with all of our heart.

The father of lies effects us one lie at a time lying to us day after day. We can only call the father of lies out when we know what the truth is. The spirit of truth is always with us. The good news is this, that God’s Spirit will guide us into all truth. The change for us will be to spend more time reading and meditating on the word of God. Change is not natural, easy or automatic! Small, intentional, continual steps will have life changing results.

God often changes our perspective on things and shows us from his viewpoint to see the bigger picture. A lot of the church today lives with the belief that we are meant to convert others, live separate from and not engage at all with the world and just hang in there until heaven. If we live in this place we are going to be ineffective and lose our influence in culture today. The story is bigger than that.

Paul writes in Phil 4:6-7 that we are not to live worrying or being anxious, but through thanksgiving and prayer, we can discover God’s perfect peace which will guard both our hearts and our minds. We can live by default or by design. The solution is to live by design. Transformed by God, knowing that in Christ all things are possible.

This past Sunday, Denise Steyn shared on “Taking Ground - Accepting the Invitation”. Just like Abraham had to leave his hometown and all that was familiar to enter the land God was going to give him, we have to do the same in our spiritual lives. As we look back and see the distance God has brought us, and the ground we have taken in Jesus’ name, we need to build an alter of praise and thank Him for all He has done and is still going to do! Read Psalm 23:1-6 in The Passion Translation this week and be encouraged!

What we believe about freedom is crucial! We can only truly live in freedom when we are living in relationship with Jesus. We know from the book of John that the Holy Spirit will guide us into all truth and this truth will set us free! We need to embrace Jesus’ teaching as though our lives depend on it because in all truth it does.

We so often use the prophetic as a slot machine, waiting to see what we get at every pull of the lever. It was meant to be out of a relationship with the Father - not just “getting a word.” Jesus’s whole life was in response to the Father. God’s word over us will always be tested. Having a word tested produces faith and trust in what was spoken even in the middle of the trial. We need to have faith and trust in what God has spoken. What is God saying to you?

This past Sunday Jaren Barnes shared on demystifying the prophetic. God is speaking all the time, the Kingdom is a flowing stream. The disconnect between us hearing him is due to us not knowing how He speaks. Prophecy is God speaking to us and He does this in various ways.We are to follow the way of love and eagerly desire the gifts of the Spirit, especially prophecy!

How do we pray and minister to people? This is possible through an intimate relationship with Jesus. Jesus did everything out of His relationship with the Father. We aren’t called to be spectators of the word but doers! God gives us His ability, that is the Father’s gift to us. Our gift to God is giving God our availability. Amazing things will happen when we make ourselves available to God.