Life Change - How to Sustain a Changed Life

Many of you have been allowing God to change you since we started this series. I can tell by the number of people getting involved with ministry and CARE groups.

How do we keep it up? New things become old and the freshness goes away, how do we maintain.

First we can maintain if we stay focused on the fact that Jesus is coming back. If we get tired of something here on earth, we can continue on when we focus on Jesus and His return. I want to keep my eyes on Jesus and I pray you will also.

Nest we looked at doing the right thing. Many times we face doing what God wants and what our friends want to do. to sustain life change we learn to do the right thing no matter who is watching, God is always watching. Grace is not some grease we can slide into God's blessings, it take obedience after we become a child of God.

Our third point was to realise who we are. We are God's children with all the rights that go with that. Even though I love the song Friend of God and am glad I am a friend of God, to maintain under pressure, I remind myself that I am God's child.

To sustain we have to keep ourselves pure. Not that we can be perfect, but we can at least try. To know you are going to heaven, all we do is trust Christ's blood to get us on the road, nothing else can do that. God does expect us to learn to be obedient as we learn more about Him. He called us to be Holy, which means we will ask WWJD and then do that.

The last point was to love one another. You can sustain your new life change if you will obey Christ in loving each other. We do that by spelling love T I M E. We spend time with others int he church, a CARE group. We spend time with those that don't attend church so they know we love them. Most importantly, we spend time with God. Time reading His word, Time in prayer, Time in meditation will all help us to sustain our life Change.

You want to sustain a life Change, give it to God and then stay close to HIM!

Life Change Why do we want to Learn?

This was our last family day in the present format. Starting in February the children and teens will meet together out of church. We are using this time to train teens toward maturity in the church.

Today's message was about learning. We start learning when we are born and need to continue until death. It is proven that the more active we keep our minds the better they will function as we grow older.

We looked at how to meet with God and where. Two places we talked about was in church weekly and in small groups.

God has an appointment with you in His appointment book. He is waiting on you each Sunday at church. He is with us all the time, but this is a special appointment. He wants us all to meet together and worship Him together. Would you make a commitment to be in church each week until Easter?

Secondly, we talked about joining a CARE group until Easter. Jesus met in a small group and if it is good enough for Him it is good enough for me. We have three new groups starting in February and each one is looking for a few people to meet with them. If you life near S Stafford, Spotsylvania, or Bumpass, Contact us and we will help you find a group. The teens look to meet every other Friday in S Stafford.

This week study Hebrews 10:19-39
Memorize Hebrews 10 :25
(ICB) "You should not stay away from church meetings, as some are doing. But you should meet together and encourage each other. do this even more as you see the day coming."

Life Change - Choice

What a wonderful day at church. We enjoyed the Lord's presence in a sanctifying way. HE is all powerful to cleanse us from sin.

The question of the day, Do you love God or the world?

In loving the world, John the writer, was talking about the mindset of the world. God gave us the world and told us to take care of it and we know god loves humans, that leaves the mind set. The Bible teaches that Satan is the prince of the world and to follow the worlds ways instead of Jesus' way, is to not love God.

When you read John 2.12-17 you can find out how we know we love God. We will be obedient to His commands. We will believe His word and and the truths we learn. We will find fulfilment in God's will. We will base our life on eternity and not on what just will happen while we are here on earth.

As we researched, we understood that all this is not about rules and regulations, even though God's laws are always best for us. Our love for God is what is in our heart. We obey out of love, not fear.

What are some temptations that keep us from loving God? Cravings of the flesh which is the original sin we are born with. It needs to be cleaned. Lust of the Eyes is about us wanting things that are not ours. and Boasting is an unhealthy pride. God loves humility but not many people can claim this virtue.

We looked at we can't love both the world and God because they are headed in different directions. It all acme down to this,

DO YOU LOVE GOD OR THE WORLD?

The problem many people struggle with is trying to love God and the ways of the world. Today, many decided to make the choice to follow God with all their heart, mind, strength and soul. they asked God to forgive them for wanting both and gave Him everything they could think of. Then they gave God themselves.

Wouldn't you like to do that?

Obedience

As we continue our walk with Jesus from the book of 1 John, this week we talked about obedience. In this book the people of God had failed to obey God, live as Jesus did and to love their brothers. What can we do to make sure we don't make the same mistake.

We start by saturating our lives with obedience. We learned it is not about legalism but about following Jesus out of love. When you are in love with Jesus, being obedient comes natural. sometimes easier then others, but it is always our objective.

Next we looked at how all relationship have standards, rules and guidelines. God gives us those guidelines out of love. He created us and knows what is best.

Do you love God? You can tell how much you love Him by your desire to follow His commands. What needs to change in your life/