Sunday Sermons

Those you hang around with matter and those you hang around with will impact our lives whether good or bad. They will either push you toward God or away from God. Your circle of friends will be a major factor on who you become. God wants to transform you from the inside out, but here’s the thing, this will not be comfortable. But His goal for your life on earth is not comfort, it’s character development. Soul Sharpeners help point you to Jesus so you can become more like Him.  

We all need people in our lives that will love us on different level. The problem with this is that love doesn’t always feel loving. Sometimes love requires that we speak up, confront, and challenge each other. The truth is we want people in our lives who are willing to say what is uncomfortable and kick us in the tail because that is what love requires.

Finding a model we can emulate or an example we can follow helps us take something we wish was true about our life and see what it looks like in real life. When it comes to experiencing growth and change in your life, following a model makes personal transformation easier.

Transformation doesn’t happen in isolation; meaning, we need relationships to be transformed into everything God created us to be. The first type of person you need can see beyond what you see for yourself and point you towards a preferred future. They can also call out of you what God put in you. But for them to be able to do this they have to know who you truly are. Until they know who you are they can’t see who you can become.  

Growing in our trust in God doesn’t happen by accident, when we choose to be rich our trust in God richly grows. One way to Be Rich is to love extravagantly by serving sacrificially. When we accept Jesus’s invitation to do what we can and serve, we’re are paving the way for our trust in God to grow, because it’s the only way we’ll ever see what he can do. When you feel the nudge to serve others and your follow through, not only will your trust in me grow, but people will see and experience God’s love for them through you. 

When we choose to BE RICH in how we give, serve, and love our trust in God richly grows. The thing that exposes or stretches our trust in God more than anything is money, because what we’re most tempted to trust in most for our future, hope, peace, and freedom is money. No amount of money can give all that Only God can, and he wants to teach us to trust him for it. Jesus’s 1st century invitation was and his invitation for you and me today is simply “Follow me”. Follow Jesus by giving what He is leading you to give, and give it FIRST.

We are in a battle daily, so we must daily prepare for battle. Prayer is where and how we daily prepare to stand firm. To not be devoured by our enemy we must daily be prepared to stand firm, but we can’t stand firm on our own strength. We don’t have to, through His death and resurrection, Jesus has already won it. All we need to do to stand firm is put on Jesus and his mighty power by putting on armor of God daily. Prayer is where we connect with Jesus, put on the armor of God and where God transforms us to enable us to stand firm.

We are in a battle daily, so we must daily prepare for battle. To stand firm in this daily battle, we must daily use the sword of The Spirit to be ready to fight in this spiritual war with the weapons of The Word. To win the battle against the enemy we cannot remain passive. But to fight with the word of God we must know the word of God. With the word of God as our weapon we must fight to take strongholds back and take ground in the battle.

We are in a battle daily, so we must daily prepare for battle. To stand firm in this daily battle, we must daily protect our minds by putting on the hope of salvation as our helmet. The helmet of salvation is one of the most important pieces, not to protect our head physically, but to protect our minds. The reason we must protect our mind is because it’s the battle ground for hope. When Satan can affect your mind, he can steal your hope. We protect our minds by focusing our eyes on Jesus because true hope is found in him alone.

We are in a battle daily, so we must daily prepare for battle. One of the ways we daily prepare to stand firm in this battle is arming ourselves with the shield of faith which can extinguish the fiery darts of the evil one. Satan wants you to feel guilty, experience regret and remorse through accusations. The Holy Spirit convicts to Draw you to the presence of God to experience grace. When we protect ourselves with the shield of faith, we can block the accusations that Satan sends our way. When we stand on the promises of God we can shield ourselves from the fiery darts from Satan.