Have you ever considered that your struggle with God’s command to submit your life to Him might be caused by the wedge sin drives between our heart and God’s? If so, then I pray we can find comfort in knowing we all struggle with this same issue. It is especially hard for us as Americans because we are rewarded by our society if we are strong independent thinkers. From the time we are about two years old forward we don’t want to be told what to do. We pride ourselves in our desire to be our own boss.

But that isn’t what God wants for us and at times we struggle because Jesus confronts us with the danger of us professing to be living as His friends when our actions tell others we are friends with the world as our worldliness and our sinful desires to engage in behaviors that are offensive to God.

As we turn to our Biblical texts today, we will compare the lives of two military commanders who are in desperate need of having Jesus intervene in their lives. Both are men of high esteem, who direct armies, who are known by many as strong leaders. Yet, one fully submitted his will and life to Jesus as he acknowledged Jesus’ ability to heal his servant and the other man – Naaman – fought God’s plan for Naaman’s healing. When God told Naaman what he would have to do to be healed Naaman rejected God’s word and spitefully walked away. However, when one of his servants convinced Naaman to humble himself before God and submit to God’s will Naaman was miraculously healed.

That is so often the case with us. We pray asking for God’s will to be done and yet when the Holy Spirit tells us what God’s plan is, we rebel and reject what we are told to do. If you are struggling with submitting any area of your life to Jesus, if you think you need to get yourself as fit as possible to be worthy of submitting to Jesus, then please hear me when I tell you that all the fitness God requires of you is to acknowledge your need of Him. For in our struggle, the Holy Spirit comes to remind us that God loves us so much that even in times when we chose to be friends with the world instead of Him, He gives us grace upon grace so we are able to turn our hearts toward Jesus and submit our will to His. So, pray for the Holy Spirit to open your ears so your heart can surrender and submit to Jesus who calls us to draws near to His heart.

The Holy Spirit makes us holy--more Christ-like! The Holy Spirit takes the Son’s experience of the Father’s love and makes it ours (John 17:26; Romans 8:15). The Holy Spirit takes the character of Christ and makes it ours as the “fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22-23). The Holy Spirit takes the reconciling work of Christ and performs it through us (II Corinthians 5:18-21).

What does all this mean in daily practice? Pray and ask for a deeper experience of the Holy Spirit! Ask the Holy Spirit to have his way with you as he helps you repent of the things that are harming you and others. Learn to trust his guidance and obey!

As Christians we understand that when Adam and Eve sinned, God’s beautiful creation became filled with evil and brokenness. It became filled with pain, suffering and human hearts that ache because of our separation from our Abba Father whose perfect justice demands payment for our sins. The Bible teaches us that the wages of our sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life with Christ. (Romans 6:23) We receive this gift of God when the Holy Spirit gives us the faith to confess that Jesus is the Christ, our Savior, who is the Son of God.

When we confess our need for a Savior and we cry out to Jesus for mercy He hears the cries of our hearts and He comes to us with His forgiveness and grace. The Bible tells us that after we become Christians and the love of God lived within us we have a mission to fulfill. That mission is to go and tell others about Jesus so they too may know that they can be saved by the blood of the Lamb of God.

The story of Ananias, a disciple of Jesus Christ, teaches us about just such a mission. Jesus came to Ananias in a vision telling him to go and meet Saul of Tarsus who had been praying. My dear friends in Christ, Jesus came to Ananias because named Saul had not been forgiven of his sins. Saul had been lying in a state of blindness for three days enduring the eternal torment of hell his sins demanded. In his torment, Saul had cried out in prayer to Jesus begging to be forgiven and to be loved and accepted of God!

Jesus heard his cries. Jesus heard his broken submission and surrender. And Jesus sent Ananias to Saul because he was the person God had chosen to be the instrument of saving grace for Saul! Jesus has a “Saul” for each of us as well. Jesus is preparing that person for the time when Jesus will send us to pray for them so they too can know the grace of Jesus’ forgiveness and love. Are you ready to surrender to Jesus and be sent to tell the story of how He, Jesus, died for the sake of all mankind, of how Jesus can do for them what He did for you and to be God’s miracle for someone who is right now praying to Jesus? If so, call out to Jesus praying, “Yes Lord, for Jesus is waiting to send the Holy Spirit to give you the assurance you need to go!

We usually think of surrendering as a bad thing. You know, like we have been defeated... I'm arguing today that surrendering to God is the best and wisest thing we can do!

Psalm 8 tell us that God spread out the cosmos with his fingers. How big is God's domain? 93 billion light-years in diameter... Why does God love us? God is love and he created us to love and to bless others through us. God is awesomely powerful and we should gladly surrender to him!

Abraham surrendered to God, and walked a long road of obedience.

Mary surrendered to God, and God saves us through her son Jesus!

Jesus surrendered to God, and God saves us because of his obedience, suffering, and resurrection!

We are called to surrender as part of God’s plan to bless the world through us. Our surrender to a loving God is a beautiful thing. And he uses us to do beautiful and wonderful things. Surrender, and experience his joy!

God creates. It is what a loving God would do. He also creates with great creative plans for us. If we think of God's plans for us like a birth, we shouldn't be surprised when there are complications or morning sickness.

Jesus shows us that there will be trials, but gives an example of the leaves on a fig tree bursting out as a sign that better things are on the way. In the meantime, how do we deal with the labor pains?

Nehemiah was a guy with a God given dream, to rebuild Jerusalem and gather Israel together again. This dream was filled with complications, but there were four things Nehemiah did to stay on target: remember God's promises, confess and repent, commit to God's will, and let the joy of the Lord be his strength.

Jeremiah 1:4-10 teaches us that God has not only walked with us every day of our lives, but He knew and loved us even before He formed us in our mother’s wombs. He told Jeremiah and all of us that we can’t use the excuse of being to old/young to not accept the changes God wants to bring about in our lives.

Luke 1:26-38 helps us understand how God strengthened a young teenage girl named Mary with faith through the Holy Spirit as she accepted God’s call for her to be the mother of His child Jesus who is the Savior of the world. As we study this story it is important to remember Mary and her fiancé Joseph had great plans for their lives. They had expectations of what married life would be like, but God sent an angel to Mary with a message that changed their lives forever. Yet, both Mary and Joseph were able to accept the challenge of being the earthly parents of Jesus because with God all things are possible for His truth never changes.

How do you react when the Holy Spirit brings change to your life? How do you find hope in our Savior who is the same yesterday, today and forever? As Christians, we cling to the hope of God’s truth that teaches us God is with us always (Psalm 139:7-18) So we do not fear because we go with the one who promises to be with us always! There is no fear because there is no place we can go where Jesus is not already there. There is no fear for God loved us before the foundations of the world (Ephesians 1:4-6) We face change in our lives without fear because Jesus demonstrated His love for us on the cross! “Having loved his own who were in the world, he now showed them the full extent of his love.” (John 13:1)

Praise God, we know the promise of Jesus! We know the power of Jesus! We know the presence of Jesus! Jesus who fills us with His strength, peace, courage, and His power. So as we face a summer of seeking God’s will, I pray for us to hold fast to our Lord Jesus Christ, to stay focused on the mission He has given us and to ask the Holy Spirit these important questions: 1) “Jesus, what are Your good and perfect plans for my life?” and 2) “ Jesus what are Your good and perfect plans for Good Shepherd?”

Jesus poured out the Holy Spirit on God’s people on the feast day celebrating "first fruits" and this changed everything (Acts 2:1-4).

Empowered by God's love, we can show God's goodness and kindness to the world.

There is a difference between perspective and vision. In this sermon we are going to look at the short comings of perspective and what happens when we can see what God sees. There is a vision from Isaiah that shows a world where people give up their weapons and turn them into farm equipment. The reason is because they see that God's ways are good. How can we have that kind of change of vision?

We know we need Jesus. We know we need the Holy Spirit for renewal of the mind. We also need to love God. We'll talk about Deuteronomy 6:4-6 and see what God says happens when we love Him with all our heart, soul, and strength.

My dear friends in Christ, what is hope? Is God’s hope the same as the worlds hope? And an equally important question is, “Do we find hope in the world or in the promises fulfilled in the death and resurrection of our Savior Jesus? The world says hope is a wish, a dream, a plan, an ambition, or a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen. The world tells us that hope is directly related to our sense of possibility and the greater our perception of possibilities, the greater our hope. However, the Bible tells us hope is not just a wish, but it is a fundamental component of our Christian the life (Proverbs 23:18). God’s truth tells us hope is not a dream, but it is our “confident expectation and firm assurance regarding things that are unclear and unknown (Romans 8:24-25; Hebrews 11:1, 7). God’s truth tells us our hope is a resurrection hope, not a hope as the world hopes, but a hope as God hopes!

When we consider hope through the lens of God’s promise given in Isaiah 11:1 which reads, “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.” we are reminded that the world comes to cut us down to a stump so we feel defeated and hopeless. Yet, God’s hope reminds us that “When you are knocked down to nothing, God is up to something!” And, God has been up to something in your life, in my life, and collectively in our lives as believers gathered to be a part of the body of Christ here at Good Shepherd; even when we can’t feel it, or see it, or understand it with our natural senses. The root of Jesse, Isaiah said, would the Branch that would come and bear fruit, is our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ, born to be our “Living Hope” (1 Peter 1:3) and the “anchor of hope for our souls” (Hebrews 6:19)! Through the resurrection God fulfilled His promise to send His Son to be a living hope, an eternal hope, a hope that brings fear to Satan’s ears when he hears us shout out, “I have a hope rooted in the resurrection of Jesus!”

God’s hope is not always given to us easy in the most exciting and joyful times of our lives! In fact, God’s hope is often showered upon us the most in the hardest seasons and the darkest times of our lives! God’s hope comes in the seasons of our lives that cut us down to nothing when it feels like we have been cut down to a stump, when it looks to the world like we are clinging to life because the air has been sucked out of our lungs by the hardships the world brings upon us!

My dear friends in Christ, we are in the season of Easter, our Christian season of resurrection hope rooted and grounded in the shoot of Jesse that God raised up from the dark tomb of death Satan had put Him in when he struck the heel of Jesus and our Savior took His last breath on the cross! We are in our season of Easter, our season of Hope – our resurrection Hope – more powerful than any enemy God faced and most certainly more powerful than any enemy we face! During our Easter season we begin our time of worship shouting “He is Risen!” yet God’s resurrection hope tells us we also need to be shouting, “I have hope in Jesus!” Not a hope given as the world knows hope, but a hope given to the world the hard way! A hope given to the world God’s way! A resurrection hope God forged in His Son’s blood that paid the price of sin for you, for me, and for the world! We have a hope in Jesus!”

Human love is a limited thing. At best it is like a dead thing that wants to be alive. God's love is superior to human love in every way. 1 Corinthians 13 shows us what God's love looks like. God sets the standard for what our love can be and should be. The beautiful thing is that God has made it possible through Jesus for us to actually love with His own love.

Peter is living proof. He was a guy that couldn't even use the word for God's love. Jesus not only showed Peter the power of forgiveness in God's love, He also let Peter know that he would be able to love with God's very own love. Peter would be transformed by following Jesus, receiving the Holy Spirit, and putting that love to work.

Peter's story is my own in some ways. Christ changed me radically from the inside out. He changed restored our friendship with His love and changed my ability to love and my capacity for love. Like Peter I followed Him, I tended His sheep, and He filled me with His Holy Spirit which has made all of the difference in what the world that God loves means to me. If Jesus made it possible for Peter to love better, and for me to love better, His resurrection made it possible for you to love better too.