Waypoint Omaha

Pastors Luke and Alex continue the discussion on what being a witness means through discipleship.

This week, Pastor Alex continued on with our Witness sermon series with a message about the how and why of Discipleship.

We have a mandate to be a witness to our city, nation, and the ends of the earth.

1. Discipleship is Jesus’ model.

We see in the Gospels that Jesus invited people in to follow Him. He taught them, modeled the Kingdom of God for them, sent them out to do the work, and then gave them feedback on their experiences. The life of Jesus displays a model not only of evangelism, but also discipleship.

2. Discipleship leads to real transformation.

Discipleship is a journey. Isolation is the biggest enemy of spiritual growth within the church, and we need community. We need to not only be saved but transformed, which occurs within the process of discipleship.

We all need to ask and answer the question: who is discipling you and who are you discipling?

Without accountability and discipleship, we are not following Christ.

Pastors Alex and Luke are joined by Hunter as they discuss the importance of prayer that goes into revival--historical revivals and what can come!

This morning, Pastor Luke preached the second message in our ‘Witness’ sermon series titled Revival on Hamilton Street.

The start and foundation of revival is two things; understanding the need, and beginning to pray. Prayer is both the fire and fuel of evangelism and revival. It is what fuels and precedes any great move of God.

1. Prayer aligns us with God’s heart

Jesus was a walking revival; when people encountered Him they experienced freedom, healing, and salvation. Jesus was and is in a perpetual state of harvest, and thus we must also be.

When we begin to pray, we get God’s heart and eyes – ones of transformation and revival. If we sow sparingly in prayer, we will reap sparingly. If we sow generously, so too will we reap.

2. Prayer must be focused on God to prevail.

Prayer is not easy, otherwise we would all do it more. We must move past distraction and doubt, and instead our prayers must be sustained by faith in God, and not in our own efforts.

There is a tension that we wrestle with constantly in prayer – the tension between our efforts, and the power of God. God is not impressed by our ability; He is impressed by our faith and our faithfulness, and it is through those things that He moves.

What would God do if we actually put our faith in God instead of our own limitations?

3. Travail before you prevail.

Travailing means perseverance, to press through, to believe in the God of the harvest. It is a type of praying that doesn’t settle. We must let the Lord stir up our hearts again for the lost.

Midweek Reflections is back after the summer break! Join Pastors Alex, Jermaine, and Luke dig into the new sermon series, Witness.

This week, Pastor Alex introduced our new ‘Witness’ sermon series.

Before Jesus ascended into heaven, He said that we would be His witnesses all over the earth, and thus we must be people who share the Good News with others.

Pastor Alex made two primary points:

1. A passion for Jesus means that you are compelled to be His witness.

All of us came to faith through somebody being a witness to us, and therefore our passion for Jesus means that we must tell others about Him. People come to faith through hearing, and we all have a responsibility to be witnesses for Jesus in this world.

2. We live in a world that is in urgent need of a witness.

A recent Barna study listed Omaha as the 34th most post-Christian city in the USA. Additionally, half the people who went to church pre-covid are not going back. Therefore, even living here in Omaha, we all have an urgent responsibility to tell other people about Jesus.

We can be a witness in this world through our lives, our stories, our voice, and His power.

Our lives: we are to live as a reflection of Jesus. Our lives are to reflect His power and relationship in our lives.

Our stories: if we are followers of Jesus, we have a story of redemption. Our testimonies are powerful statements of the power and purpose of God.

Our voice: there is power in proclamation, and we are to be unashamed of the Gospel. Jesus is for the whole world, and we have to get that, speak that, and live that out.

His power: when the Holy Spirit came upon us at salvation, we received His power. Therefore, we carry the Holy Spirit, who is the witness for us. We do not have the have all the answers, we simply have to wait on the Holy Spirit and trust His power to work in the lives of other people.

This week, Pastor Alex finished up our Galatians series with a message out of Chapter 6: 1-10.

Within this Chapter, Paul lays out a series of exhortations to the churches in Galatians, which Pastor Alex broke into three primary points:

1: Growing (verses 1-5)

If we are living by the Spirit, we need to be restoring people through gentleness. We do this as part of making disciples, which includes giving space for correction and feedback. When we see people in sin, it's crucial that we speak truth to them in the right way, with both correction and gentleness. This is part of carrying one another's burdens and therefore fulfilling the law of Christ.

2. Sowing (verses 6-8)

Sowing into the church includes the giving of our finances, but it also includes the sowing of our time, attention, and resources. In addition to sowing into the church, we also need to sow into the Spirit. Part of this process is soaking in the Word of God. We need to know the Bible so that when things are called into question, we know what God's Word is, we have something to stand on, and we are therefore not simply guided by our feelings.

3. Going (verses 9-10)

We need to not give up, but instead continue to do good - because in the right time we will reap a harvest. We need to be good and kind, wherever we go - as we are the ones who bring the light of Christ.

This morning, Pastor Luke continued on with our Galatians series with a sermon out of Chapter 5: 16-26.

His message was broken down into three parts:

1. There is an inward battle going on within us, but not with equal forces.

When we come to Christ, we enter into a battle between our flesh and our Spirit. The battle itself is evidence of the Spirit of God within us. But this is not an equal fight, as the Spirit of the living God is immeasurably stronger than our flesh. If we allow the Lord to work, we are always on the winning side.

Transformation within the Christian life is not optional, it’s essential – and it comes through the Spirit of God.

It is not an equal fight, and so we need to stop hitting snooze on our sanctification. Revival happens when the human heart partners with the Spirit of God within us.

2. The Flesh

Paul mentions four categories of sin to define what the flesh looks like:

Sexual
Relational
Excess
Religious
These categories have not changed over time. It is the same flesh and the same God, just a different day. The Lord came to set us free, so that we can love others fully and walk completely in the purposes of God for our lives.

3. The fruit of a follower

Jesus embodied the fruits of the Spirit, and they are the litmus test of the Spirit of God within us. As followers of Jesus, the goal is to mature – we want to live, walk, and love like Jesus.

It is the fruit of the Spirit and not the fruits of the Spirit, and therefore we are only as mature as our least mature quality. We all need the Lord to work in our hearts, because we never arrive. This leaves us in a place of great humility, where we consistently need the Lord to search us, know us, work in us, and take us from strength to strength.

One of the paths to maturity is walking through hardships. We all have the opportunity to walk through hardships either with our eyes on Jesus, trusting in Him – or walking in our flesh with discouragement, fear, and panic.

Our lives are to be testimonies to the world that we know and trust in a living God.

This week, Pastor Matthew continued on with our Galatians sermon series with a message out of Chapter 5: 1-12.

One of the most important things that we can do in this life is live by God’s values and truth, and not simply by our feelings. Anything aside from freedom in Jesus bounds us to a yoke of slavery.

We have new life in Christ, which means that we must leave our old lives and its many loves behind. Jesus has provided for us a new mode of transport through this life – a Freedom Boat, who is Jesus.

1. You are FREE on the Freedom Boat.

We have been set free by Jesus. This includes freedom from shame, guilt, and old patterns of attempting to earn our salvation. Jesus has paid our entrance fee, as He has with everyone else, and thus we are all on the same playing field.

We need to renew our minds, and not get stuck within our old ways of thinking and feeling about the world and ourselves. We have the ability to confront the things that have bound us because the Freedom Boat is not held back by them. The enemy wants us to believe we are bound, but we are not. We do not have to be.

The Freedom Boat is also not affected by sin. When Jesus died for us, the power of sin and death was broken. Sin has no authority anymore, and we do not have to wait for heaven to receive the freedom promised to us. We need to learn more and more to yield to His Spirit within us, which will walk us into more and more freedom as we abide, obey, and follow.

Furthermore, this boat is Jesus’s boat, and therefore demonic principalities and powers have no power over us. With Jesus, we have the power to defeat darkness and we do not need to live in fear. The storms may rage, but will not swallow us up.

2. You must stand fast on the Freedom Boat.

There will always be temptations to go back to the old ways, but we must resist and stand firm. Jesus has set us free and called us to His purposes, and therefore we must stand firm – being people of forgiveness, as Christ has forgiven us.

3. Faith works through love on the Freedom Boat!

True freedom is not about using our freedom to do whatever we want – that leads only to slavery. True freedom is instead about faith working itself out through love.

We need to love God, and love others. If we do this, people will see God. If we want to know what love is, we only need to look at Jesus.

Faith moves us to forgive, to love our enemies, to run into the crisis, to speak truth in compassion, to believe in impossibilities, and to lay our lives down over and over again – that is what true freedom looks like.

This week, Pastor Matthew continued with our Galatians series with a sermon out of chapter 4: 1-7.

People have the potential to be enslaved to many different types of influences – both physical and spiritual. Pastor Matthew made three primary points on this topic:

1. We are enslaved to elemental spirits

These elemental spirits govern the way things are done within our society and culture. They represent ideologies such as politics, religion, militarism, nationalism, imperialism, capitalism, and other societal laws that control and constrain us. They exist before us and outside of us.

Within Galatians, Paul challenges us to examine how these elemental spirits have shaped and continue to shape us – and how they come up against the Gospel and the way of Jesus.

So many of these elemental spirits we are taught not to challenge, and often they are presented to us as being synonymous with Christianity itself. This is very dangerous, and it enslaves us.

2. God sent Jesus to redeem us and adopt us as sons and daughters.

Jesus paid all and any debts we have. He redeemed us fully and completely. He adopted us into His family as sons and daughters. When Jesus came, He did so free from elemental spirits and He brought with Him a completely new Kingdom and way of life, with a new set of values.

Too many of us fail to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, doing the hard work of renewing our minds through the Word of God.

3. He has given you His Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is the key. We must be filled with and receive it, learning to yield to the Spirit at all times. The same Spirit that filled Jesus, fills us.

It is the Spirit that empowers us to walk in freedom, who gives us gifts, and who brings us hunger and thirst for the Word. Too many people try to walk the Christian life without yielding to the Spirit of God.