Everyone has a celebrity that they love- who is your favorite celebrity? Why do you love them? Is it because they’re pretty and attractive? Is it because they’re successful and rich? Is it their talent? It matters what we admire, because we are becoming like the things we admire.
My big question today: what is the most important thing about a person? Our Bible passage today tell us that the most important thing is character. Talent is secondary but it’s the heart that is most important.
All of us have taken the path of nobody trying to prove to be somebody. Therefore, we disobey God and often we do not follow God’s instruction. But there is only one person who is truly somebody but became nobody for us.
Maybe we see something a type of injusticec on the news, and it infuriates you. But sometimes you don’t act on it because you feel like you don’t have power. But as Christians, we too have something powerful inside of us- a source of power called the Holy Spirit, God himself living in us.
Our Bible story today is about what happens when the Holy Spirit moves a person and takes control of their heart. We see that the Holy Spirit makes us angry at evil and dedicated to God’s glory.
It’s normal for young Christians to grow up going to church and believing whatever the pastors say. And we can be really passionate about Jesus, and we can spend a lot of time doing church stuff.
But then our faith gets challenged. We’ll be challenged by friends or culture or professors, or tragedy, or the stress of life. And in those moments, we actually need a reason to keep believing in God. And it really helps if we know where to find evidence.
So, my big question today is: How does God make himself known? My big idea today is that God makes himself known, to all of us, with extraordinary power and extraordinary kindness. My goal today is to show you this idea in our Bible story, and we’ll see that we are actually quite similar to the characters in the Bible story.
For some of us, we don’t know what it means to “hear God” because God doesn’t normally speak audibly, yet the Bible tells us we are meant to know and recognize his voice.
John 10:27 tells us, “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.”
So, we know that it should be normal for followers of Jesus to listen to his voice. But how does this happen? How does this work? So, my big question today is: How do we listen to God’s voice?
We are all in the process of becoming someone. Whether intentional or not, We are all in the process of becoming someone. At every single moment of your life, every decision and action you make or don’t make is an investment towards a future version of you. Hitting that snooze button in the morning. Reading everyday. Sneaking onto the transit without paying. Working out 3 times a week.
All these things shape you but it does so in a slow compounding way that you don’t really notice until one day, you realize, this is just who you became and you can’t pinpoint how you got here! And that’s a bit scary! Because I live a lot of my life on autopilot which means I’m probably becoming someone I don’t want to be.
The good news is that we’re not these helpless puppets that have no say in the way we’re formed. God has given us a lot of freedom to shape who we become 5 years from now, 10 years. 50 years. But where do we start?
That’s our focus today.
How do we grow well? In all ways, spiritual, physical, mental, emotional, financial even. How do we become Christians mature in Christ?
The answer I want to show you today is that to grow well, we need to honour God above all else, in order to:
This week, we begin our series on the life and times of the prophet Samuel.
Today, I want to start off with a question: What is the most mysterious part of prayer? Is it the lack of answers or the deafening silence? Or maybe it seems like God says yes to some people but then he says no to others?
We find prayer to be really mysterious. So my big question today is: What is the kind of prayer that God honors?
That’s what our Bible story is about today. Our Bible passage comes from 1 Samuel 1:1-20. It’s a longer story, but it’s a good one.
Our passage today tells us that God honors us when we: