Gateway Church - MO

The world can be a very dark place. Sometimes, in the darkness, it’s easy to lose hope. But Christmas points us to the hope we can have in Jesus. He came into a world of darkness and was a ray of hope for those who needed it most. He offers that same hope to us today.

Choosing to do the right thing is easy. Doing the right thing is hard. Often we get discouraged when we try to live out our right choices. We start to wonder if it even matters. Haggai tells us yes, it does matter. Your choice to purse Jesus now will not only change your life, but will impact the lives of people you will never meet.

Our modern, busy, overcommitted lives can leave us feeling empty. In fact, the paradox of our time is that our lives are filled with emptiness. But there’s a remedy. The remedy for our empty lives is not to add more things to them but to focus on the one thing that matters: A life of worship aimed at Jesus.

God’s plan, from the very beginning, was that we do life together. As followers of Jesus that means we are in this together. Our faith is not simply a personal faith, it is a shared experience. This calls for us to have an extreme devotion Jesus and to the community of Jesus followers we call home. But with that extreme devotion comes extreme results.

When there is division and conflict within any group, but especially within the church, then it becomes weak and ineffective. If the church is going to transform the world, we must be united in our love for Christ and for each other. Anything short of that is defeat.

We are each made unique. We are each made in the image of God. Individually, that makes us impressive; collectively that makes us unstoppable. When we each use our gifts and work together to create communities of transformed lives, there is nothing we can’t do because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

You were created in the image of God, a masterpiece made for a purpose. And there is only ONE OF YOU. That means you have a reason to be and a purpose to fulfill. It also means that everyone you encounter is a masterpiece created in the image of God. If we are all masterpieces, then we need to treat others like it and we need to act like it. It will change the world.

I will never be complete until I quit trying to complete myself. When I fully surrender to the leadership of Jesus in my life, I find a fully complete life filled with joy and peace and loaded with the potential to change the world.

Doing life ‘my way’ sounds great. But it rarely works out. That’s because you are not your own. You were created by God and you must answer to him for the life you live. The question we each must ask is, “Am I living a life that honors God?”