Peace. draft.

A gentleman I heard once was talking about getting upset in general in life... he says his normal habbit is to buy a tub of ice cream and some snickers and nuke’s it up into a homemade blizzard. He sits and eats it with his fat boy britches on. You know the ones, the ones that do not allarm you that you are overloading. He says that is his normal practice when he is upset over something in his life.

Does anyone else have a pattern of what they do when they get upset. Most of us do. I hole up. I get quiet. But that is not the kind of Life that Jesus calls us to live. He wants us free from anxiety and worry.

Now, as we beging talking about peace in our lives, and the anxiety we sometimes feel, I want to be clear. There are moments that we will be anxious. Jesus himself experianced a couple different types of anxiety. Some might say that he was feeling a bit of anxiety as he cleared the temple of Jerusalem of the cheeting moneychangers. But one time we can be sure he was anxious was in the garden of Gathsemeny as he sweat great drops of blood before his arrest and execution. So we will have moments of anxiety, but it is not supposed to be a continual way of life.

John 14:27, Jesus says, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” (NIV)

We can all live in the peace that Jesus intends for us to live in by accepting his authority over our lives and this world, and believing the lessons we find in this passage.

Romans 5:1-11 (read it)

We can have the peace of Jesus through the events of our lives. (vv. 3-5)
These verses start with suffering and take us through the steps that we undergo when we suffer and at the same time allow Christ to be Lord of our lives. We go from suffering to perseverance, to character, to hope.

Do you want to be know as a person of character? Yes, we all do. but to get there, we must persevere through suffering. And it says that character leads to hope. So if we continue to grow in character, our hope will also begin and then grow.

How important is hope? If a person is ill, or in a highly stressfull financial situation and looses hope. The experiance of the world has shown us that all to often they give up. Whether a person has faith or not, we all cling to some hope that things will get better in times of hardship.
Sometimes we feel that we are in a spot where there really isn’t any hope of it getting better. We’ve looked at the situation. We’ve evaluated it from every angle. And nope, there is just no way for this one to get better. You pray, but you know deep down, there is no way for this one to get better. It’s just unrealistic to even expect it to get fixed. My life is stuck.... Right???? No, not according to the Bible.

There was once a man named Joseph....
Joseph was hated by his brothers so much that they caught him out away from home and sold him as a slave. As a slave he succedded in managing his masters estate. But then a temptation came into his life. And Joseph was no fool. He realized that this temptation could ruin everything he had worked so hard to accomplish. So he ran from it. Got as far away from it as he could while still trying to fulfill his responsibilities.

The woman who was tempting him was his Masters wife, and she didn’t like being turned down. So she lied about Joseph and had him thrown in prison. In prison, Joseph again worked his hardest and God blessed him, as he was put into a position of managment in the jail that he himself was imprisoned in. Most of us would loose heart there. (most would have lost heart before there...) We’d turn cinical. Develop a what hope do I have kind of attitude. Not Joseph.

Joseph had multiple gifts, and he used one to encourage a fellow prisoner. A cupbearer to the Pharoah of Egypt. When the cupbearer was restored to his job, Joseph asked him to remember him and to plead his case before Pharoah. But the man did not... Until 2 years later when Pharoah had a dreem and no one could interprate it. But the cupbearer knew that Joseph could so it was then that he approached the Pharoah on Josephs behalf. Through the corse of events, Pharoah was so impressed with Joseph, and so pleased to have his wisdom, althought the true wisdome had come from God, that he made Joseph second in command only to Himself.

Now the question. When Joseph was in the cage on the way to Egypt. When Joseph was imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, and when Joseph was forgotten for 2 years by the cupbearer of the king... What do you think was going through his mind?

We must guard against sell pity even in times of suffering. If Joseph had given into self pity, he would have failed. We can have the peace of Jesus through the events of our life, but trusting that our character will grow, and hope will begin....

We can have the peace of Jesus through the salvation the Lord gives (vv. 6-8, and vv. 1-2)
Many times we sit through a sermon on salvation or the security we have through our faith in Jesus. But we just miss what it really means to be secure in Christ.

In other faiths, you spend your life working to attain a certain level of ‘goodness.’ Not in Christianity. Notice here in our passage, ‘while we were STILL sinners Christ died for us.’ That is so signifigant. It shows that Jesus came to us. He did the work, not us. We don’t get our lives straight and then come to God, rather we come to God and he starts helping us step by step in our life.

Eph 2:8-9 “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast.” (NIV)

i.e. It’s not about what you have done, but what he has done. He saved you, He did all the work.

I have a friend, a very successfull Pastor. He told me of a time where the church was allowing people to get up and give their testemonies after being Baptised. One gentleman got up to share, and he made the statement that anyone who will accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and follow the ten commandments will be saved. Now the pastor saw the problem with that statement immediatly. Do we? That is not the formula to Salvation.

The ten commandments are good, and it is wise to follow them. But obediance to the ten commandments can not and will not save you, or anyone else for that matter.

Romans 10:9 says, “That if you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead you will be saved.” (NIV)

Now, if you want to you can pick up your Bible and read the verses that precede or follow that, but you will find nothing that says that there is anything that saves you other than your faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God who died on the Cross for your sins, and rose again to eternal life.

Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life, no one comes to the father, but by me.”
So when you question if you have been saved, and I do believe that is a good question to ask. Go back to the Bible. Have you really surrendered to Jesus, and believe in him with all your heart? Is he your Lord and Savior? or do you base your salvation experiance on how well you behave compared to those around you? The Bible says that even their, or your, good deads, are but filthy rags.

The only thing that saves us is Jesus. So we can have peace in Jesus throught the knowledge of the Salvation he alone provides. We can have the peace of Jesus through the knowledge that the Lord has a purpose in for lives. (vv. 9-11) This is the combination of our suffering leading to perseverance, character and hope, WITH the salvation we have in Christ. It shows there is a purpose in life, and we are not just another life form floating through space. When God brings the good and allows the bad, and he sends his Son to save us, then we see already, that he is more invovled and interested in our world than some would accept.

Some folks, even those who believe in God, would assert that God made the world and spun it off and watched it go, but he has nothing else to do with it after that. That is far from the truth.

A well know verse from Romans 8, verse 28 says, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to his purpose.” That says plainly that God is involved, and that he has a purpose for our lives. J.R.R. Tolkein, author of The Lord of the Rings, was often known to take biblical principles and intertwine them in his stories. At one point in the story, two of the main charachters, Gandalf and Frodo are talking. Frodo, realizing what a tremendous burden the ring is to bear, makes the comment that he wishes the ring had never come to him. To which Gandalf replies, ‘so do all who live to see such times, but that is not for us to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time given to us.”

Now that is a huge lesson. We spend so much time thinking about the what if’s. Asking God to consider changing our circumstances, or altering something around us. But God works all things for the good of those who have been called according to his purpose. So what we see is that our world around us is not for us to decide. We must decide what to do with the time give to us.
When you sit in those seets, or you go home, and the worries of life creep in around you. And you are tempted to endulge in some self pity and a tub of Ice cream... Perhapse we can stop and remember, that we can have peace.

The Lord Jesus Christ has allowed it. He said that in this world you will have trouble, but he also said to take heart, I have overcome the world. He is the victor over all trouble.

Everything I do... 9-4-8 draft

I Corinthians 10:31-33

We can all learn to balance our lives for God by living out these actions.

Everything we do is for God.
We have talked before about the dangers of compartmentalizing your life.
That is to say my home life is this way, my work life is this way, my social life is this way, my church life is... and you can continue to break it down into lots of little boxes.
Now that doesn’t sound to bad, but the danger is that you will try to leave God out of one or more of the boxes. To do that is to be inconsistent with our faith.
God can and will healp with everything, so be sure to include him in every action and decision we make. To illustrate this, I have a few verses from Colossians that bring it to a simple understanding of how God is to be involved in one of those boxes. The Work box....
Colossians 3:23-24. (read them)
So in everything we do, we do it for God. No matter where we are or what we are doing.
That makes us consistant in our faith, home, work, and all other aspects of life.
We all seek to be an honerable person who is consistantly admired. The Best way to do that is to obey the scripture and put God in his proper place.... That is everywhere to help us with every situation. Everything we do is to build up others.

The passage says we are not to cause anyone to stumble. It is similar to a do not offend message. This does not mean ‘do not offend’ for we will do that enough just staying true to Christ. But we don’t have to seek out the oportunity to offend someone else. Also, offend here is used in the context of the verse meaning to cause a problem. In other words we are not to teach incorrect information for our own self serving ideas.

This has been seen in history through the Crusades of the Middle Ages. The Bible was written in Latin, which only a priest had enough eductation to read. In the intrest of wealth, the priest or King would direct the people to retake lands where Christ had walked or the early church had been. The motivation was that this was the will of God. But nowhere in scripture is that stated. Hence many Christian soldiers killed and were killed believing that they were following the will of God because someone had taught them something that was not in the scripture.
We have a great responsibility to stay true to the Word of God.

Everything we do is to reach out to those around us. That is to be our motivation. If we say, I like for it to be 79 in the sanctuary, that way I don’t get cold, but that makes those around you sweat like it’s 102, then you probably need to start bringing a sweater.

Please remember it is a church, you can always put more clothes on, but we frown on taking to many clothes off.... In a serious observation, Paul says that we are to seek to please everybody, and he’s talking about reaching people who don’t know Jesus. (We’ll talk about how we know that in a moment.) That means that we have to band together and work to reach those who don’t know Jesus.

If you have not read the book “Purpose Driven Life” by Rick Warren, I encourage you to pick up a copy, turn to chapter one. Skip the first quotation he offers and read the first sentance that the author himself writes. When I first picked up that book, I was skeptical, until I read the first sentance. “It’s not about you.” That brings us full circle, that everything we do, is for the glory of God.

Lastly, Everything we do is so that they may be saved. This last statement refers to all that we have been reading. And it is ment to share with us the goal of our efforts. It is easy to ask the question, why, when we are saved, doesn’t God just take us home to be with him right then.

The answer is because once we have been saved through our faith in Jesus Christ and his sacrificial death on the cross, that is when the real work begins. Because from then on, we live not for our own desires and goal, but for his goals, for his kingdom. And to love of other people by helping them in any way we can.

The biggest part of that is to share the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ with them.

The short version is as follows, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”

We work for the Glory of God, We work to encourage and build up and better the world around us. Everything we do is an effort to reach out to those around us. And we do it all so that the people of this world will be saved.

Those are the ideas I see come out in this passage. Remeber, we are to conform our lives to aling with what the Bible teaches, not just take what is convenient for us at the time.
So I encourage you to take this and learn from it, and seek the will of God in all you do.