The Steps of a Good Man

If God is not in an area of your life, it is in vain. Everything we involve God in, it will be something that bears fruit for all eternity. Every area we invite God into, he will come in, bless that area and there will be eternal blessings. God has given you, mothers, the ability to nurture and raise up. Pouring out good Godly heritage is such a necessity. Our society, our church, is crying out for women of God to be mothers. Our children are a heritage from the Lord. He has given you, the warrior, arrows for your quiver.  As parents we are the warriors, we need to be skilled in our weaponry. An arrow has four parts. The head, the shaft, the fletching and the nock. It is up to the warrior to sharpen the warriors head. Some arrows have dull heads and cannot pierce. The shaft is the body- we could not be who we are without our body. The fletching is the spirit- if we don’t have the fletching we won’t fly straight, we'll go all over the place. The fletching need to be arranged a...

I cannot be remiss to say that we as a church, we as a people may have some tables in our temple that need to be toppled. The last thing we want to do is turn a blind eye to those things we may have gotten used to. All the garbage, we need to get rid of so that we may be one with Jesus as He and the Father are one. Now you may ask yourself, ‘How do we figure out what those tables are? ‘You will know them by their fruit.’ Does a bad tree bring good fruit? Does a good tree bring bad fruit? Many a times we get used to the tables in our temple. They’re little things. They’re not ‘bad’ sin. So many people in the body of Christ are walking in the grey. There is no light, there is no dark, but let’s be real...the grey is darkness. Often times, in the grey, you can see less than if you were walking fully in the dark. When we leave those tables in the temple, it puts a damper on the flow of God. God is unable to flow through our lives the way that He wants to. We need to get up, remove ...

We like to say that something is our ‘god-given right’. To talk freely is my God given right. To do what I want is my God given right. There’s only one right we really have. ‘You have the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.’ In a kingdom, you don’t have a voice because the only voice that matters is the voice of the king. What he says, is law. What he says is immediately the way. You don’t get a choice. Kingdoms are made up of kings, dukes, earl’s, peasants, serfs, knights and so many more. Each individual has a title and they know their role. It’s the kings job to be the king. Not the peasant. Not the duke.They have expressed purpose, destiny. Jesus sent his disciples out with purpose, a certain power, with a message of the kingdom.He has sent us out to declare the same message of the kingdom. The reason you have the job that you do is to spread the message of the kingdom in that place. You were sent to that place to be a...

It’s not enough that we merely say He’s a good father. It’s so easy to just lift our hands here in church and declare He is good. But that’s not enough. We need to make a declaration of faith through our actions. We’ve got a decision to make, are we going to be those that will arise? Awaken? Will we be like Peter and step out of the boat? We need to recognize that before we step out of that boat, realize that the wind, the rain, the boys back in the boat are going to try to take your attention. You have to determine, before you step out of the boat. As we prepare to take steps of faith we have to know that it won’t always be easy. There will be challenges that come when we step out of the boat. There’s a tiny bit of safety in the boat and that safety is completely gone when we step out. But Jesus doesn’t want us to have the relative safety of the boat and the oars and the sails or the friends around you. He wants you to find 100% complete security in Him. It’s scary, but it’s the sa...

Tenacity, it’s not just enough that we have faith and action, we need to understand that there is timing. A time to build up, a time to crash down. Often times we begrudge the process, we begrudge the time of preparation. We resent the process, the preparation. We desire the outcome but we begrudge the process. When we resent it, out hearts get hard and so the process does not have the desired effect and outcome and we have to take another trip around the mountain, through the wilderness. David faced the lion and the bear to prepare him for Goliath, he faced Goliath to prepare him to face Saul, he faced Saul to prepare him for the throne. God has a plan but in order to execute that plan, you have to be prepared. If you avoid that time or preparation, you will not enter into the promise. God has used beaten, broken people to usher Israel into its Golden Age but they had to walk through the process. We have to get rid of the begrudging of the process. We have to go from beg...

To have the best season, a fruitful season, we have to begin to act. But it’s not enough to just act, we have to act at the right time, for the right result. And it’s not enough to just act at the right time, we have to have the tenacity to act at the right time. God has created minutes, hours, days, the everyday, kronos but inside of those minutes, hours, days, there are kairos moments. God-ordained moments. Kronos is the moment to moment, time, our most precious gift, a gift that is given to both to saved and the unsaved. Kairos is God ordained time, a specific time where God ordained something to happen. It was the kairos moment “let there be light” that God ordained light to be. The God ordained moment for creation to take place. The kairos moment of Jesus’ birth, the kronos moment, the day to day, where a kairos moment take place. The son of God was born. We have this misconception that the kairos moment is meant to be easy. That if it’s not easy, it’s not of God. Only t...

God does not desire that the trials we face bring despair in our lives. God desires it brings about goodness and growth in our lives. God allowed the enemy to test Job but it wasn’t so that the enemy could test him. It was to put Job into a place so God could bless him the way He wanted. Now that doesn’t mean that sin takes place because it’s God’s will. Sometimes we’re stubborn enough that we need a little knock on the head. Jesus did not die on the cross for you to wander in the wilderness. It is time for you to enter into the promised land. When I come to the point in my spiritual maturity, enter into my place of kingdom purpose, there are still problems, but I know, good or bad, that God is there. There are many of us in the body of Christ who, we’re in church, but we haven’t crossed over the Jordan. We are still in the wilderness, wanting our tasty onions back in Egypt. It’s time for us to move on from Egypt. At some point we need to come to the realization that being in E...

As you grow closer, you desire to grow closer. As you taste your Heavenly Father’s love, you desire for more of His love. But that can also be said of sin. The closer you grow to your sin, the more you desire to grow even closer to it. Those desires will never be fulfilled. The more you try to fill that hole with the desires of this world, the bigger the hole gets. The more you bind yourself to those things, the more unsatisfied that you feel. You’re not simply binding yourself to the things of the world but you’re binding yourself to the enemy. It brings despair and destruction. You weren’t formed to be bound to those things. Peter wasn’t created to be a fisherman but a fisher OF men. If you have not found yourself in your Heavenly Father, you will never be satisfied. It was in His likeness that you were formed. As you get to know Him, you get to know you and as you get to know you in Him, you realize what true satisfaction and identity are.

You can be in the house and not know the Father. Not understand the personality of the Father. The Pharisees knew all about God, but when He was right in front of them, they could not see Him. They did not have that intimate relationship with God. The things with which we are intimate with will effect the way that we are. Now to define it, intimacy is a close personal friend, to be a friend to, involving friendship, to honor, to prize, to value. So if we honor and cherish the things of this world, we are intimate with them. If we are intimate with the world, our identity is shaped by what we are intimate with, what we hold close. And being intimate with the world is like having bad breath, everyone knows you have it, except you. Everyone sees the slop you live in, but because you have become so comfortable with it, you see no problem with it. I don’t want to prize and honor the slop, I want to prize and honor and value the Father.         ...

Luke 15:11 When I ask the question ‘Who are we’ it is imperative we know who we are, what we are and what we do. We won’t know what to do until we know what we are. We won’t know what we are until we know who we are. We first need to know where we are from. We need to find our identity. If God created us, blew his breath of life into us, created us in his likeness, then we should know who we are. We are all called to be royalty but if we don’t come to the conclusion that we are royalty, realize what God made us to be, we will forever be peasants. Much like the prodigal son, how many times have many of us walked away from our Father’s house? Ran to ‘far off lands’ and squandered what our Father gave to us? Many of us here today have run off to far off lands and we need to make our way back. I read the story of the Prodigal son and, in hindsight, I see him make all of these mistakes. Wasting his money, running from his family, gluing himself to a man of the land who treats ...

God does not desire that our tragedy end in tragedy, but victory. But that also doesn’t mean you won’t go through the tragedy. God is not a happenstance type of Father. He has a plan. God’s word has the ability to change your life. There’s so much we concern ourselves with that consumes us. We’re so wrapped up in social media, we have no room for Jesus. If all we allow into ourselves is the world, all we’ll have faith in, live our lives based on, is the world. And God doesn’t like having to share us with the world. He desires to be the center of our worlds. This week we talked about the paraplegic man. We talked about operating in faith, out of love. To get this love we must first know God. As we come into contact with Him, make room for Him, we will operate from a place of love, know that love. The friends of the paraplegic man loved him. That love brought him to the house, carried him onto the roof, lowered him down. That love operated in faith. God will respond to your faith...

As I look back at the battles, the hardships we faced in 2018 it was only to prepare us for the victories in nineteen. Now that doesn’t mean 2019 will be easy and we won’t have any battles in 2019. It just means God is molding the Kingdom. He is preparing us. There will still be battles in 2019 but because of the battles in 2018 we are better prepared for them. Do we really know how important ekklesia is to God? Ekklesia, being the bride, His end reason. We need to begin to expand the way that we think and begin to cultivate a relationship with God. God knew before He even created light that man would sin. He had a glorious bride envisioned at that time. Let there be light because they all have a purpose, a reasoning. So that we will be joined with God and His son for all eternity. Jesus came. Why? For the Kingdom. Everything that has been done has been for the kingdom. He allowed Himself to be humbled as a baby, as a human man for the kingdom, allowed Himself to be taken care of...

Everything Jesus has done has been for Kingdom purpose. The reason He has done everything He has done for us, has been for Kingdom purpose. I can’t begin to fathom this. All that this means. Everything God has done and will do has been for us, for the ekklesia. Looking back at the birth of Christ in Luke 2 we see that God became flesh. And it was messy. Childbirth is messy and the Lord our God became flesh, became human and allowed Himself to be born! Jesus was born. Came forth from a woman’s womb, with all the blood and other stuff. He allowed Himself to have his diapers changed, to be fed and burped. He became HUMAN. He tripped, He fell, He skinned His knees. GOD! Can you even begin to imagine? I cannot fathom the creator of earth, of light, humiliating Himself, getting His diapers changed. I imagine it got interesting being those close to Him. You’d begin to see Him as a normal boy and then He’d do something crazy and you’re reminded THIS IS GOD’S SON! You’d be just hangin...

Being a part of the body is imperative. I believe that anyone that is saved is connected to the body and anyone that is connected to the body is saved. You can’t really have one without the other. Everyone is a part of a body, but what body are you a part of? Today we’ll be talking about clans, and not the Ku Klux Klan, but a clan as in a family line. We need to identify that it is to be a part of a nation, a tribe, a clan, a family. A family is your immediate circle of accountability. Not just your mother and your father, brother and sister, but your family is anyone that keeps you accountable, that keeps you moving towards Christ. Next is your clan, your gospel community, your small group or bible study. Then comes your tribe or your local church. And finally your nation, your life in the body of Christ at large. Not everyone in your nation is a part of your family, or even your tribe. But you are all a part of the same nation, all a part of the body of Christ as a whole. Jo...

What is it to be a part of the team, the ekklesia? To be a part of the team, the tribe, the ekklesia we need to identify and value what we see. We need to have a picture and value what we see within that picture. To even begin to have a picture we need to go back, all the way back to Creation. We see in Genesis 1:1 the Trinity. God speaks, ‘let there be light’, the Spirit hovers over God’s creation and the Son being the light that God speaks. God was unified. Creation was a collaborative effort. Creation was an expression of their unity and man, a culmination of their unity. Without their unity, Creation would not have come to be. UNITY creates things, disunity destroys them. Jesus prays that we might be one as He, His Father and Spirit are one. How can we get to the place of this kind of unity? Like Creation, the Father must speak over it, the Son must be the powerful spoken word and the Spirit must hover and brood. Just as in creation each must play their part. I play mine ...

Acts 1:4 Before ascending to heaven, dying on the cross, Jesus gathers his disciples. He brings them all together in koinonia. He gathers them together and speaks to them as one. When Jesus is saying ‘you’, he is speaking to them, assembled together, in one accord. People mistake being in one accord with always agreeing, being of one mind. Being in one accord doesn’t mean we always agree on everything. The disciples didn’t always agree and yet they were of one accord. Being in one accord is being one, being together even when we disagree. Seeing beyond the disagreement because it’s not about who is wrong and who is right. We each have our own points of view, our own vantage points. I am a firm believer that until you have a good, heated argument with an individual, you aren’t in a relationship with them. Until you have been through the hard times, the furnace, you won’t know if you can take the heat. It’s not about if you are right and they are wrong, it’s about if you make...

John 17:20-18:1 Jesus prays. Not just for himself and his disciples but for us. ‘…but also for those who will believe in Me through their word.’ He prayed not just for the disciples but for those that they would reach. He prayed, more than 2000 years ago, for you and I. Jesus knows what will transpire in His last days. He knows He is going to be killed. Yet he still prays for not just Himself, but His disciples and even us. Let’s look at the points He makes as He begins to pray for us. Point 1. ‘That they all may be one as you Father and me are one.’ His first point to pray for is for us to be one. There are some in the body of Christ that don’t believe that oneness is important but Jesus Himself prayed that we would be one. He was praying for our unity. Point 2. ‘That they also may be one in Us.’ Point one is that we would all be one, His second point is that we would be one with Him. Is it possible for us to be one with the Father if we are not first, one with each other? ...

When talking about the parable of the sower and the seed we need to understand that the field is our hearts. Looking at our own hearts we can not make the mistake of believing we only have good ground in our fields. There are areas where we have rocks in our heart. Areas where we get excited, fired up for something but once the sun comes out, it withers. Areas that have the thorns, the cares of this world that choke out that passion when it has sprouted. Areas that people have trampled over. Areas that can’t even receive the seed because it has not been cultivated. We must look within at those areas. If we want to become the Ekklesia, the Kingdom tribe, we must first look within and tend to those areas. What’s within us affects what is on the outside, affects those around you. Our thorns affect each other’s lives. Your thorns affect me and my thorns affect you. Take a step back, evaluate and love. Don’t take the splinter our of your brothers eye when you have a beam in yours. Foc...