Treasured Truth

As we continue to learn more about jealousy, Pastor Ford will not only share the negative effects that jealousy can have, but he’ll also share with us some practical ways to defeat jealousy and prevent it from taking root in our lives.

As we continue to learn more about jealousy, Pastor Ford will not only share the negative effects that jealousy can have, but he’ll also share with us some practical ways to defeat jealousy and prevent it from taking root in our lives.

In his writing, Shakespeare referred to jealousy as a “green-eyed monster”—and as Pastor Ford will point out today, that is a very fitting analogy.  Jealousy can have many negative effects and it can destroy us, if we’re not careful.

Do you run to anybody other than the Lord?  Because He’s the only One Who can help us.  And when life seems to present us with “what” problems—what’s going on in my life? This is going on, that’s going on in my life—we need to realize instead that we should have a ‘Who’ perspective.  And then we can say, “No matter what’s going on in my life, I know Who can deal with it.”

When does anger become sin?  When it motivates us to hate, to wound, to damage, to despise, or to demolish another person’s character, reputation or name.  If our anger makes us desire for any kind of ill to come upon another person—that’s when it becomes sin.

According to the Bible, is it okay to be angry?  We read in scripture that we’re told to “be angry and sin not.”  But Jesus was obviously angry when He made the money changers leave the temple—and in that anger, He still didn’t sin.  So, Pastor Ford will point out today that it’s righteous indignation when your anger is about the person, the purpose, the plan or the provision of God.  And whenever we see someone who’s experiencing an injustice, we shouldn’t just stand by, but instead, we really should get angry about it.

Are there safeguards we can use to prevent ourselves from participating in gossip?  Pastor Ford shares eleven questions we can ask ourselves to help combat the natural tendencies that we all have toward the sin of gossip.

Satan likes to use division as a tool to disable the effectiveness of those who follow Jesus.   And one thing he uses to cause division is gossip.  Gossip often leads to confusion, arguing and fighting.  And when believers are involved with all of those things, they are not moving forward and they are certainly not being effective for the cause of Christ.

When we’re going through a situation that involves misunderstanding, it’s easy to want to take things into our own hands and try to fix it.  But Pastor Ford will encourage us today to turn it all over to God.  We should pray that God will open the eyes of those who have misunderstood us.  We shouldn’t rush in and try to fix things ourselves.  We should let God handle it!

We’ll see today how the Lord leads his children, just like a shepherd leads his sheep.  And if the Lord truly is our shepherd, and we have committed to follow Him, then we can be confident that He will give us everything that we need.