First Friday Fellowship

#Matthew 7:21 / #Philippians 2:12 / #Romans 11:17-21

Do we really know the Good Shepherd?

Do we have the zeal and courage to stand up for His house and ours, and be a tool that He uses to protect His sheep?

The Bible says when speaking about Jesus, “Zeal for your house will consume me…”

Satan wants us to be concerned with manners. Well-mannered people don't talk money, politics, or most importantly, religion, right? Not good for nice conversation, polite conversation. And Christians should ALWAYS be the most polite conversationalists, right? Never saying anything that might shake the tree, right?

Far too many of us are sleepwalking in our faith. We look good and smell good. We have a beautiful family, all of us showing up in our best clothes to church on Sunday. But, when we leave church, and in the hour by hour of our week, how concerned are we with the business of the kingdom of God?

We can't follow two masters. We will follow Him, or we will follow the worries and concerns of this world. The days of Christians just being nice, and not understanding the difference between nice and kind are over. It's time to make a difference.

Some warning lights are on, and we need to make sure that we are continuing to work out our salvation, with fear and trembling.

There is no bigger decision you have ever made in your life, than to follow Christ as your King, and Messiah and Savior.

#Matthew 7:21 / #Philippians 2:12 / #Romans 11:17-21

Life isn't fair.

Bad stuff happens to good people, and good stuff happens to bad people. 

But, God gave us something, the only thing, that would allow us to truly love Him, love each other, and give us true freedom. 

But, this very thing, call it our FREE WILL or AGENCY, also allows us to reject Him, reject our inheritance, follow Satan and this world.

God is the perfect father. He cares for who we are and who we become. He does not concern himself with what a fallen world thinks of us.

Satan HATES us, wanting nothing more than our BLIND IGNORANCE AND COMFORT, that allows us to ride that fur-lined coffin right into hell, because Satan IS NOT a good father.

#Jeremiah 12:1-2 / #Job 21:7-9 / #Hebrews 12:6-7 / #Proverbs 3:12 / #Job 5:17-18

#1 Kings 16:30 / #1 Kings 21:25 / #1 Kings 21:20-26 / 1 Kings 21:27-29 

How is it that I surrender to God, and yet completely break his law within, I guess, apparently minutes of that surrender? 

Many of us have sinned in a way that we don't believe God could ever forgive, and even though we know what to say in church and with our Christian friends and family, we also know that we haven't completely walked away from that sin. And worse, we keep repeating certain sin.

How can we ever expect God to show mercy and not punish us when we so clearly deserve it? 

No matter what your sin, or what our sin, and how long we have been struggling with whatever sin it is, God's hand of mercy is ALWAYS there to forgive freely, quickly. WE NEED ONLY TO REPENT… sincerely and trust that mercy. 

#Proverbs 3:5-6 / #Psalm 32:8 / #Philippians 3:13 / #Proverbs 4:25 / #Jeremiah 29:11

When considering our lives, most of us believe that we are the captains of our life. It's our life. We call the shots. “My body, my choice, right?”

No.. wrong.

In life, we are the helmsman, and the helmsman is a very different role. The helmsman is responsible for steerage… moving the rudder. 

THE CAPTAIN is who the helmsman must listening to, and take orders from. 

Why does this matter?

The captain we have chosen to follow, is leading us to our destination. It's our job just to listen to his corrections, directions, and trust that he knows what he's doing. That is why we better choose the right captain to serve. 

The ship (our lives), will ultimately end up where the captain has led the ship. The helmsman just get to manage the rudder. 

The thousands of course corrections don't matter. They're all part of the journey. You're going to have good and bad days. We're going to have high and low years. Those are course corrections. Just LISTEN TO THE CAPTAIN, and when it's all said and done, our life will have been a straight 

JESUS CHRIST is the only good captain. He is the only way that knows the way, to the only home that we would want for eternity. 

Don't forget… There are many captains, but there's only ONE GOOD CAPTAIN that will lead us to him.

TRUST IN HIM… ALONE. 

Our minds were not built to consume all the ugly that the world has to offer. If we are doomscrolling… If we're consuming mass junk from Reality-TV, bad stuff on the internet, all of the stuff is having an impact. Our minds cannot swim in a sea of poison, with no consequences to the thoughts and ultimately to our actions. 

The average TV show or media feed is NOT BUILT to fuel our spirit of gratitude and thankfulness.

God did give us something very special, though. He gave us a heart for beauty, a mind that can potentially understand what is truly inspiring, a spirit that can detect His hands all around us. 

IF… if… and that's a big IF, if our minds and hearts are open to these things. 

If we want to begin to fix… REALLY fix our attitudes, heal our minds, and live in appreciation of God's creation, we need to consume good spiritual food. 

We need to take a minute, and reorient refocus on the beauty all around us. Read THE TRUTH OF HIS WORD. Listen to music that praises Him, and think about the things that are pure, lovely, admirable, excellent and praiseworthy. 

This will reorient our minds. We will reorient our attitude. We will reignite our gratefulness, and we will praise God, our King and our Savior, Jesus, like He deserves.

Philippians 4:8 / 1 Thessalonians 5:21-22 / Proverbs 4:25-27

We hope for all the promises of God's Kingdom and eternity. And the manifestation of that faith is our confidence that this will happen for us, because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. 

It isn't enough to go to church every Sunday, to give everything you own to the church, or or to be a so-called good person every day of our lives, if we are not sure that we will be spending eternity with our Savior. 

In Matthew 17:18-20, rebukes his disciples for their lack of faith, which caused them to fail in casting out the demon. 

To call ourselves Christian, we have to take several very big steps of faith, and we have chosen to believe things that we did not witness, or see with our own eyes.

Faith cannot be faked. We either believe or we don't. And that is why faith is the key, that picks the lock to all spiritual expression of God's power in our lives.

Salvation is through faith. We have to believe like a child who believes when asking a parent for food. This faith is going to be tested our entire walk, our entire life with Jesus as a believer.

We have a Good Father who loves us, who wants a relationship with us, who wants us to spend eternity with Him.

But, we must come to Him on His terms, NOT ours. We come under His protection, because He loves us. But it's on His terms, NOT ours.

We all know what sin is. Simply, if it goes against God's Word, or God has convicted us in our hearts, or puts anything in our life before Him and His will for our life, then by definition, that's sin. We struggle, of course, with all kinds of sin, and being a Christian, for sure, doesn't put us above it or beyond it; In fact, sometimes the closer we get to God, the more sin tries to hunt us down. 

What should we do when we struggle with sin?

Here's our pattern… We choose the path that we know we shouldn't choose. If we do love God and we do know right from wrong, we feel guilty. And then, Satan, whose very name means, “Accuser,” he gets in our ear, and he reminds us of every detail of our failure, and how unworthy of forgiveness we truly are. 

We can handle this one of two ways… The accusation from Satan in our ear, in our hearts, can take us away from God and send us hiding.

OR…

If we really know who God is, and we use the wisdom that he's given us, we run to His throne, and we beg for His mercy, and we beg for His forgiveness.

Those choices are critical, and make all the difference. 

That heart of our submission to God's will, needs to be a lot more pure. 

It’s no different than working out… Any muscle that you want to get stronger, you HAVE to overload it, and then you have to PUSH and RESIST against that load. YOU HAVE TO WORK. That's how you get muscles stronger.

You can't just give up as soon as you feel the pressure, if you have any intention of getting better, getting stronger, improving. 

We are responsible for our decisions. And while we can take peace, in a perfectly merciful father who is always ready to forgive, it's our responsibility to at least begin the process of getting stronger, and actually push back against the resistance. 

Resistance takes many forms, and we want to encourage you with anything that you’re struggling, there is help in the body of Christ. There are professionals, and ministers, and therapists, and stuff that can help us.

LOOK FOR THAT HELP! 

We have to focus on getting stronger, putting up a resistance, and in turn, developing those muscles to a point, where we can be a great example to the world around us, and to the people that we love.

The first time I saw  the Michelangelo painting, “The Creation of Adam,” I was struck by the hands.

The hand of God, and the hand of Adam, are telling the whole story. 

God is reaching, and stretching his fingers, and fully spread out, trying to connect with Adam.

Adam is relaxed, passive, his wrist is hanging. His hand isn't reaching for anything. 

This is the WHOLE PICTURE of our relationship with God. 

God pursues a relationship with us. He wants to be in our life. He loves us, and He's working moment by moment, to connect with us. 

But, in our passivity, and our careless comfort, we continuously create a gap. 

The beauty in the painting is the truth of it. Adam can hardly be bothered to reach back. Yet, God constantly pursues us, constantly loves us, constantly  pursues our souls.

The Bible says, that it is His heart that NOT ONE of us is lost. He wants us all to be saved. 

But just like Adam, how many of us are sitting back, passive and relaxed, waiting for the God of the universe to find us? 

How about we put out a little effort? What if, instead of passively going through life, what if we started to take a direct interest in the things that God actually cares about? 

What if we actually started reaching our hand back? What kind of amazing things could He do in our lives? 

A gift as great as eternal salvation, a gift that was paid for by the BLOOD OF KING JESUS, is not something to treat passively.

How about we reach back? How about we try? 

Luke 15:4-7 / 1 John 4:19 / Hebrews 13:5

We are good at “Grace” in the modern Western world.

Not necessarily the “Biblical Grace” that the Bible teaches. More like the, “I can do whatever I want and say sorry, and you have to forgive me” kind of grace.

When God was made mortal, and the price of grace was HIS blood, and HIS pain and HIS suffering, our freedom was purchased, and it wasn’t purchased cheaply.

If we as believers have genuine faith, we will produce genuine fruit. And God will use that fruit to nourish anyone who come across us.

That's why when James said, “Faith without works is dead,” that's a TRUE statement. It doesn't mean your salvation is dependent on works. What it does mean is, if you have genuine faith, all of a sudden you're going to start doing something with it. It's going to start producing good stuff. You're going to start using your resources of time, and money, and energy, to share God's GOOD NEWS for all of mankind.

So, when the Bible says, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my father who is in heaven.” What He means is, there's people out there throwing that "Jesus” name around, and throwing that “Lord” name around, and claiming this, that, and the other. But, God sees the heart. He sees whether that belief is real.

And based on that, will determine whether or not we inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.

Matthew 7:21 / Galatians 5:6 / James 2:26

I read something recently on social media, “Believing in Jesus, but not doing what he says, is the same thing that Satan does.”

How many of us know what idolatry is? 

Idolatry, quite simply, is making a god in an image, and assuming power that it has that makes us comfortable; A god that cares about, what WE care about, and wants what WE want. A god that is in alignment with all our various proclivities. If we believe in something… ANYTHING… amazingly, so does our god. 

A god made in OUR image, is a god that makes US comfortable. And we can be in agreement with everything that this god tells us.

We are called to take up our cross and follow Jesus.

If we TRULY follow the Jesus of the Bible, we will not be the most popular people in our social groups. We probably won't even be invited to all of our church gatherings. 

Hell will be full of people that believe in Jesus, but don't really concern themselves with what He wants for their life, or ever choose to live a life that showed that Jesus was even in it. 

We don't get to choose what we like and what we don’t, because WE ARE NOT GOD. 

Either God is sovereign over our hearts, and it is HIS will in our life, not ours, or He's not. 

Anything other than COMPLETE WORSHIP, and bowing down to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the man described in the Holy Bible, the one who was killed and resurrected three days later… Anything other than that, is idolatry.

Satan believes in Jesus. He just doesn't really care about following what Jesus says.