Many people pray. Who we pray to and what we pray for makes all of the difference. As Paul writes to the church in Ephesus, he expresses his thanks to God for them following Christ and then he shares with them what he prays for them. What he prays is not for their safety or their prosperity, but for their full experiential knowledge of what they have in Christ – Hope and His Great Power! What would change in our lives if we received this type of prayer and prayed it for each other?
Sermons by Rob Cupp (Page 3)
Is there a recipe for walking closely with God in today’s world? Jesus mastered walking with His Father and He seeks to teach His disciples to do the same. What He taught was relatively simple: You stay close when you obey and do what Jesus, Our King, commands. Jesus has and will command many things, but specifically He repeats the command that we “love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12). So, we walk closely with God when we obey Jesus Christ’s example and command to love each other as he loved us.
Have you ever searched and searched for something and then you discovered that it was right in front of you all the time? In the book of John, many religious people had “searched the scriptures” but totally missed that the words they studied were pointing to Jesus as the Christ and Messiah. Many of us do the same. We seek to learn and grow, but when Jesus arrives in our everyday lives we don’t recognize Him at all.
John The Baptist saw something with discerning eyes which allowed him to believe and passionately preach that Jesus was the Messiah. What he saw was a heavenly reality of relationship between Spirit and Son. This relational reality was what empowered Jesus in His earthly ministry, and it is what he invites us into as we walk with God in our own daily lives. To be immersed in the fullness of the Triune God is Christ’s example and gift to us.
How and why you walk with God matters to the world around you in a big way! When you, as a follower of Christ, obey God and do what he says in faith (no matter the weirdness of what he asks) others will come to follow God in the same way. This is the story of the Israelites, The walls of Jericho and the Prostitute named Rahab.
How would we cause Jesus to begin to weep (Luke 19:41)? On a very important day in the life of Jesus, He announces to the world that He is the King and Messiah that they are all waiting for. However, Jesus realizes that not everyone wants Him to be the King He came to be, rather they were looking for another type of King who would do what they wanted and make the world into the place they wanted it to be. Just as the crowd that day had a choice to make, we have a choice to make as well…what type of King do we want Jesus to be?
Have you ever wondered why some people do seemingly bizarre, illogical or even crazy things for God? Abram (later called Abraham) left home and left his family to follow God’s call on his life. As we read in Hebrews 11:10, Abram was focused on a home that was more important to him than anything else and that is why he did what he did.
As we learned last week, Noah listened to God and did what God commanded. In the New Testament, we learn that Noah “became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.” How do we become heirs of that righteousness? And what are the implications to our world when we receive and live that righteousness?
Noah was born with a purpose. His biological father wanted him to help in the family business, but God had other plans for him. Throughout his life, Noah demonstrated that he walked with God and followed God before anyone or anything else, even when it meant breaking from others he loved and cared for.
For the 4th Sunday of Advent, we are continuing our focus on the character of Jesus Christ that was prophesied in Isaiah 9:6. The final characteristic of the this passage for us to focus on is Wonderful Counselor. Jesus is the Wonderful Counselor. His advice and plans for us are beyond human explanation. His solutions for our problems may not make sense to us, but when He enacts them our response has to be praise because only He could make something like that happen.