River of Life Church Long Prairie (Audio)

The Christmas Story, no not the movie, but the incredible story of how God chose to save the world. As we walk through this familiar story, we stop and think about how and who God chose to use in His plan. The trust he showed in Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, and the trust that He has in us to continue his mission so that all will know Him.

Jesus saw children as valuable and as the greatest. We look at 2 interactions in the book of Matthew of Jesus interaction when it comes to children. What was it about children that Jesus wanted his disciples and us to learn? With what Jesus saw as valuable traits in children, how should this change how we approach Christmas?

This week we want to take some time to just focus in on Christmas, to get the correct mindset, so that we are able to connect with God in this busy season. We may have all sorts of emotions attached to this season, but are we slowing down enough to connect to the roots of waiting on a promise?

This week we continue our fully surrendered series. We take a look at surrendering our lives in order to fill the role we play in the body of Christ...the Church. We talk about the church, how the world sees it. How we as Christ followers have messed this up. How do we fix it? We must surrender ourselves, our calendar, our time to commit to the Church and begin to step into the role that God has called each one of us to.

Last week we talked and looked at what Jesus said it took to be fully surrendered to Him. We all have areas that we struggle to fully trust God in, one of those areas is in our finances. We say we trust God with our finances, and we say we trust that He will provide.  But does how we live and steward our money actually show that? So what does scripture say about our finances? How do we begin to fully surrender our money to God?

What does it mean to fully surrender? When we proclaim "Jesus is Lord" are we showing that with how we live our lives or is it merely a statement? In order for us to fully surrender we need to take a look at what Jesus meant to surrender our lives and to follow Him.

This week we look at a well know story in the gospel of John, the story of the woman at the well. We look at her story, what she was carrying and how it affected how she heard what Jesus was telling her....which leads to us having to look at our own lives...what are we carrying that is holding us back from understanding who God is, and what he has for our lives.

This week we look at the story of Job. It is a story that most of us are familiar with, and have found comfort in the story as we go through our own times of suffering. But is the story of Job just simply a lesson in suffering or is there something much deeper for us to learn and apply to our own lives?

This week we look at the idea of Missions, specifically the scriptural backing that is referred to as the Great Commission. For most of us, we have heard about missions and missionaries, but statistically how are we doing as a "Church" in spreading the gospel. We look at some eye opening statistics of how much of our world is unreached.

Obedience what does that look like? How would we define disobedience? Disobedience we all would agree would simply be saying no to something. Pastor Josiah walks us through a few passages of scripture, and different situations in our own lives and we find that we can be disobedient in different ways.