Waypoint Omaha

This week Pastor Luke continued on with week two of our new sermon series with ‘Wait on God; Together.’

He asked and answered the question: How do we as the people of God press into the Spirit of God and allow Him to do a work in us to make us more like Jesus?

Because, if we all do this as individuals then we will be ready for what God is doing collectively in our church and in the world. This is a historic time, and we don’t want to miss out on what the Lord is doing.

His three main points were:

1. The Holy Spirit

Christians are built differently because we have the Holy Spirit. He is a giver, our comfort, our peace and our power. He is like a wind who comes and fills, lifts and brings life to the believer. He is the one who convicts us and conforms us to the likeness of Jesus.

Unbelief and disobedience hinder this life and power, and it is possible for us to grieve the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 4: 29-32). If you’re relationship with God feels dead, you need to repent and receive the wind of the Spirit back in your heart and lives.

2. God wants to use this season of your life.

Hardships have great power to refine us and we all have the choice to use this time well through a process of repentance, refining and renewal. The goal of our lives is to bear fruit.

3. You’re not alone in this season.

We have our comforter and helper (the Holy Spirit) and we have each other. We need to lean into God both individually and collectively. We need to be not just hearers of the Word, but doers. We need to repent of sin and self-pity, spend time with Jesus and encourage one another daily.

This week, Pastor Matthew led us in celebrating Easter Sunday with the good news that Jesus is RISEN!
He is alive, and because of that we have been extended the greatest invitation of all time; to be freed from our guilt, sin and shame and to know God as Jesus knows God, as intimate children with the Father.
The death and resurrection of Jesus broke the power of sin and defeated every evil power and principality. There is no brokenness that is beyond His power and love to heal and to set us free.
This invitation requires our response; to turn from our sin, to repent from running our own lives, and to invite Jesus in.

Pastor Jermaine take us on a reflective journey through Scripture as we stop and give thanks for the Cross on this Good Friday.

This week Pastor Luke led us in our Palm Sunday service; asking and answering the question of Jesus in Matthew 21:10 "Who is this?"

We serve a God who is in control, who is never hurried and whose timing is perfect. We have great hope in this season (and every season!) because our God is a faithful and trustworthy King. We have access to great peace when we are in close proximity to Jesus. This is great news!

This week Pastor Matthew finished up our Revival series with a sermon on anchoring in.

God is not bound by a building and wherever we are He is. He has the ability to refresh our souls in the midst of this crazy season.

In times like this what our souls are anchored to will become known. If our lives are anchored to idols such as our sexuality, our nationality, our body image or our personal "rights" then our souls and lives will shake alongside our world. We will be tossed to and fro and we will be forced to learn the hard lesson that our idols have nothing to offer us. They have no power, they can’t sustain us, they can't carry us and they can't help us.

However, if we quiet our souls and anchor ourselves into the immoveable God – then He will bring us refreshment. We have to be anchored to Yahweh, to Jesus. His peace. His joy. His goodness. His faithfulness. The truth that He is the same God yesterday, today and forever. He is the only one who can save us.

We anchor into this truth by knowing who He is, and who we are in Him as His sons and daughters. As His children we can know the love of the Father. A Father who wants to be with us, who loves us, who delights in us, who will never leave us or forsake us.

Likewise we will be good children who seek to please the Father, who receive His correction and teaching, who are secure in His love, who know His voice and who love to spend time with Him. God is the firm foundation on which our lives can be built. If we are anchored to Him who is immoveable, we too will be immovable.

This week Pastor Jermaine shared on the topic of race. He encouraged us as the church to
come back to our first love (the Lord) by coming back to what He first loved (the world).

He emboldened us to see in color when it comes to compassion and understanding,
and beyond color when it comes to love and acceptance. We must see in color because our experiences are so different to one another, and it allows us to walk in somebody else’s shoes with empathy and understanding. When we have a lack of understanding it creates condemnation and fear which in turn produces division and hatred.

Our supernatural love for others is from the Lord, it is not human nature and it is not our own. This is why the church is the answer to issues of race. We need to be the thermostat for our culture and not the thermometer. We must champion Gods kingdom call for the nations of the earth. We must go to ALL the world.

In the Lord’s prayer Jesus prayed “your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Jesus would not pray a prayer that wasn’t possible. We must go to ALL the
world, not just where we deem worth going to.

This week, Pastor Luke led us into the start of a new series called Revival: Reform to Transform. The heart of this series is the prayer of Saint Augustine “Revive thy church, Oh Lord, beginning in me.”

The title of his sermon was ‘Preparing the Way of the Lord’ and took us through the life of John the Baptizer. Pastor Luke’s three main points were:

You need to exchange your vision for God’s calling
Start with your heart
Receive the grace and power of Jesus

As followers of Jesus we need to exchange our cultural values with kingdom values, submit our vision for life under God’s call for our lives (to prepare the way of the Lord and make disciples) and live out our faith as the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Our lives are not about going to heaven one day but bringing heaven down today. It’s not about getting into heaven, but about getting heaven into you. We need to live lives of repentance (recognizing, confessing and turning from our sin) lived out in community and discipleship. We need people in our lives who can call out our sin and baggage.

Pastor Luke concluded by offering two cautions: we have to bear fruit in keeping with repentance without becoming religious, or irreligious. We must rely fully on God and not allow our freedom in Christ to become freedom from Christ.

This week, Pastor Jermaine told his story in the context of Judges 6 and finding himself in the narrative of Scripture, God’s calling and the church. He encouraged us that if we have to, we need to do it afraid and learn to obey in the context of fear.

This week Pastor Matthew finished up our Psalm 23: Life Without Lack series by sharing on the topic of dying to self. His four main points were:

- Death to self does not mean death of self
- The flesh is not all bad
- We all have desires and a Spirit
- Desires must not dominate us

Dying to self is super important if we are going to live a life without lack. We live in a world where everything is telling us to constantly fulfill self, whereas Jesus calls us to the opposite. When grounded in a correct view of God, death to self is a rising up into the very life of God. Death to self isn't killing us, it's actually bringing us life.

Desire is the impulse to possess or experience something when and how we want it to. Desires are terrible masters, and yet so many of us have let our desires master us. We need to place God's dreams and desires in the most important position within our lives, because only in them will we find true life and what we were made for.

This week Pastor Jermaine led us in a sermon titled 'What's in your hand?'

We looked at the story of Moses in Exodus 4, the story of David and Goliath in 1 Samuel 17 and the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 in John 6. His emphasis was:

Everyone has something in their hand.
You can’t use what’s in someone else’s hand.
God can use whatever we have in our hands in ways beyon