Treasured Truth

Following Jesus’ example of intercessory prayer for us, when we’re praying for care from God for others, we ought to be praying about their comprehension of God.  While we are interceding for their preservation and provision, we also need to be interceding and praying about their revelation.

Intercessory prayer is prayer that’s concerned about the individuals with whom or for whom you are praying.  For example, in His intercessory prayer for His followers found in John 17, Jesus has their best interests at heart. He’s not praying to impress, He’s praying to express.  He’s praying for their needs. And He’s still doing the same thing for us today.

If you’re married and experiencing difficulty in your marriage, then you may be wondering if it would just be easier to be married to someone else. But Pastor Ford would suggest if the grass looks greener on the other side, then you just stay on your grass and start weeding it and watering it and fertilizing it.  And then you know what will happen?  Your grass will look as green as the grass on the other side.  In other words, marriages take work and care if they are going to succeeed.

God will do whatever it takes to us to make what He wants to happen in us come to fruition.  If there’s something God is trying to teach us that we haven’t learned yet, we need to realize that the storm we’re going through is going to continue until we learn what He wants us to learn. Pastor Ford will encourage us to be prepared because the rough ride isn’t over yet!

The storms that God allows to come into our lives aren’t meant to be stumbling blocks.  They are stepping stones.  Every storm was designed by God to get you to where He ultimately wants you to be.

As we consider further how God uses storms in our lives, we’ll discover that God knows exactly how to bring us back to Himself.  And for some of us right now—what we’re going through—it’s a storm that has divine design on it, because God wants to use it to push us back to Him.

God has a divine design for the storms of our life. Sometimes the things that we fear turn out to be the exact things that He is planning to use to deliver us.  So, our deliverance can potentially be found right in the midst our storm.  All we have to do is trust God in and through the storm.

The false teachers we are learning about in our study in Galatians 6 apparently wanted the admiration of people.  And false teachers today aren’t much different.  Often they teach what they teach so that people will like them.  They want to be popular and well accepted so they change the truth of scripture to make it more palatable and less convicting.

We all know know that traditional marriage vows require a couple to promise, “until death do us part.” But Pastor Ford points out that is so often not the case in marriage today.  As we begin a study in Malachi about divorce, he’ll explain how God established marriage as a permanent institution, with principles that govern it.  And so, it’s just like anything else—if we honor the principles, the principles will honor us.

As we begin this study about false teachers and heresy, Pastor Ford will remind us that we have to know the truth in order to be able to live the truth.  And we live out the truth in direct proportion to the amount of it that we know.  And then he’ll ask this probing question—If we don’t know the truth, how in the world are we ever going to live it?