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Today we’ll be learning from one of the greatest Christians in history. His name was Paul. And we’ll learn two things from a prayer that he prayed.
We’ll learn that:
More specifically, we should pray for power to be what God wants us to be. And we should pray for glory – to God – because as that turns out, that’s the greatest thing for us.
This sermon is about sex. I think it’s a really interesting topic, but it’s can also be awkward because it comes with quite a bit of baggage.
Looking back, I’ve always wondered why they only used fear-based tactics to teach about sex? Sex is supposed to be a great gift from God. It’s not something to be afraid of or ashamed of. We just need a better theology of sex, even kids these days need to know what the Bible says on the topic.
We can’t avoid the topic, because some research suggests the average age of a person first viewing pornography is 12 years old. For many, the sexual part of our life can be a huge source of guilt and shame. I’ve counselled people who are still affected by sexual encounters from a decade ago. I’ve had conversations with many people whose marriages have ended because of affairs. They’ve told me how it has broken their families.
So, my big question today, what is the best way to handle the sexual dimension of our life? I want to explore the Christian view of sex and why it’s not just “Don’t do it”.
And as it turns out, there is a way to be victorious in this part of our life. No matter how tempted we are, and how much we have failed in the past, we can still please God. That’s what we learn from our Bible passage.
A lot of us, if we are honest, feel this kind of skepticism towards ALL prayers.
But no matter how you try to avoid it, prayer seems to be a huge theme throughout the Bible and therefore, a part of our Christian faith. We’re encouraged and even commanded to pray. Jesus, the one we’re following and imitating, has prayer as a core rhythm of his life and he even teaches us HOW to pray.
The reality, however, is if you ask any Christian about their prayer life, we kinda just look down, twiddle our fingers and say, “Oh yeah… I know I should pray more… but I don’t.”
What if prayer isn’t this dreadful chore but a way to access the source of life and joy, connecting with the one we’re made for. How can we approach prayer in a way that is life-giving instead of life-draining? Because for Jesus, as well as the New Testament writers, prayer was a source of joy! What do they know that we don’t? Let’s explore that today.
We’re halfway through our series on the Thessalonian letters, and Enoch has given me a special task to look through Thessalonians to see what we can learn about prayer because prayer is weaved throughout the entire letter. In the letter, Paul prays for them. Paul brings up the fact, he prays for them. Paul commands them to pray. Paul even asks them for their prayer. So a lot about prayer here. What does it have to do with anything?
Our question is simply: Why pray?
And our answer today is because:
We are expected to put in the energy and time to mentor people- raise disciples strong in the faith. However, this is often neglected and ignored. Maybe because just like parenting; it’s so much work to raise the next generation of disciples. It can be tedious, but we have to understand it’s worth doing/role to play.
So, my big question today, what is the joy of discipleship?
1. There is joy in knowing we will share eternity with our friends
2. There is joy in seeing people grow in faith
We begin a new series on the books of 1st and 2nd Thessalonians in the New Testament.
My big question today is: How can we know that we are on the right track spiritually?
The good news is, we can know. I’ll tell you my answer, and after that, I’ll spend the rest of my time showing you the answer from the Bible, because it’s important that you see it from the Bible. Pastors will fail you, but God’s words will not fail you. So it’s important for you to base your life on the Bible and not what pastors say.
That said, here’s my answer. If we want to know that we’re on the right track, we need to look in three places. We need to look INSIDE, we need to look BEHIND, and we need to look AROUND. I’ll explain what I mean.
We need to look INSIDE of us to see if we have courage to live out what we believe.
We need to look BEHIND to the past for evidence that supports what we believe.
And we need to look AROUND us for the approval of mature Christians.
That’s my answer and I’ll spend the rest of my time up here showing you my answer from the Bible.
Many Christians feel lost spiritually. They look at their relationship with God and it’s become stagnant. They don’t feel like they’re growing, and it feels like they’re just drifting with no direction.
On the other hand, there are other Christians who stay on track with God, and God is taking them places! They feel joy! They feel God’s overwhelming presence in their friendships, in their family and in their career. I believe all of us can experience God like that!
So, my big question today is: how can a Christian stay on track? That’s what our Bible passage is about today.
Our passage today tells us that if we want to stay on track spiritually, we need to make every effort to build character. It’s what matters the most! We should build character when we are alone, and we should build character with others.
Let’s be honest. We all know Christians who are the least loving, or most judgmental, or even the ones making the most harmful decisions in life. We look at them asking, why isn’t it working? Or maybe for yourself even, you’ve been going to church for years, serving, reading your bible, part of a small group, baptized, all of that and you still find that you’re perpetually unsatisfied in your everyday life. Stuck in the same cycle of brokenness. You don’t look any more like Jesus than you did on the first day of following him. You don’t have a sense of the abundant life Jesus promises.
It’s easy to start thinking, “is this all a hoax? Is it even real?” Across the Western World, people are leaving the Christian faith because they’ve tried it and it doesn’t deliver the way they expect it to. One stat shows that the western churches decline by 10-15% every year. Another stat reveals that Post covid, the average church only has 85% of their original attendance. What’s going on? I think these people leaving have come to the conclusion… this whole Christian thing doesn’t work.
And so that is what I want to focus on today.
“Why isn’t it working?”
Now this is a huge question with probably hundreds of different angles and factors to consider but we’re going to look at it through our bible passage today.
Now because this is such a deep and rich passage, we’re actually going to split this into two weeks. This week, I get to privilege of doing the theoretical big picture stuff and then next week, Pastor David will dive into the details of the practical stuff and the list of virtues.
Through our passage, we get a glimpse, a diagnosis of why this whole Christian thing isn’t working for so many people.
Why isn’t it working? Because:
Life is unpredictable. We might have some clues for what’s coming up next, but there’s no way to know for sure. That’s a challenge for me, because I’m trying to raise my three young kids and I think a lot about the future and the kind of world that my kids will grow up in. It looks like they’re going to grow up in a very different world than the one I grew up in. For sure, my kids will have some advantages. They’ll probably be better adjusted socially than I was, and their technology will be a lot better than what I had. However, my kids will also have more temptations, and a lot of ways to go wrong. With the way things are going, it feels our world is getting more unpredictable than ever.
We start a new series on the 2nd book of Peter in the New Testament. My big question today is: how can we navigate our unpredictable world?
The answer I want to show you today is, we need to follow God’s words in the Bible. We need to follow God’s words because they are TRUE, and we need to follow God’s words because they are WISE. That’s what our Bible passage is about.
Everyone has a reason to do the right thing. Some people do the right thing for practical reasons like if you want to make friends, it probably best to be kind. For other people, there’s a social pressure to do the right thing because we want people to like us.
But these motivations aren’t always fool proof because sometimes social pressure encourages people to be mean. Sometimes it feels good to do the wrong thing like getting revenge. We need a better moral compass, not based on our feelings because feelings change quite often- need something consistent
So, my big question today is: where do Christians get their moral compass from? Our Bible story teaches us that our moral compass comes from being consistently aware of God’s coming judgment (now some are uncomfortable with judgment, but we went in depth with it during our Revelation series, so check it out on our YouTube channel).
Remembering the coming judgment (that we are accountable to God) helps us commit to both fairness and generosity. That’s what we learn from our Bible passage today. Let’s read fom Job 31:13-23, here we find Job explaining why he’s committed to doing the right thing.
Every single one of us is going to one day witness a friend or family member lose someone they love. We will see people experience tragedy and suffer loss. So, my big question today, what can we do when someone is grieving?
That is what our Bible story is about today, our passage today comes from Job 2:11-13, and we’re going to see what Job’s friends did when they found Job grieving terribly.