Victory Rock Fellowship: Recent Episodes
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Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem began with the giving hearts of the people and would end with the Messiah giving of His very self.
God is not concerned with your station in life, your success, or even your failures. What God is concerned with, is your willingness to be used by Him in order to help His people continue on their journey of faith.
To be called God’s people is no minor thing. We become an example to a dark world of all that God has to offer. We must understand being a part of God’s family is no light responsibility and should never be looked at as such. Commitment is the bonding agent of love which holds us together.
Because God is the very essence of our life, we must listen to what He says and then carry out what He directs. In doing so, we are able to show our love for Him by allowing ourselves to be immersed in His commands.
Because you have a gracious and merciful God, One who never breaks His promises, even when you break yours, you can expect the Lord to not only hear but to answer your prayers. He can and will restore even the most broken and hopeless of situations. No one, I mean no one is beyond the restoring power found in prayer.
Knowing that you are a child of God and actually living it out on a daily basis is a challenge for each and every Christian. Because, you have the hope of Christ in you and have been sealed by the Holy Spirit, there are ways to live better in 2016 than you did in 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and on and on and on.
O Come Let Us Adore Him is a popular and well-love hymn. However, if you are truly seeking to know the Messiah, then you must not simply adore Him, you must accept Him as the Savior He is, was and is to come.
A King unlike anything the world has ever seen. A King described in such a way as you must take notice. A King who must be honored and accepted. A King known for being Wonderful, being a Counselor, being a Mighty God, being an Everlasting Father and being the Prince of Peace. A King who was willing to present Himself to an uncaring and hostile world in the purest form of love ever known to man. I ask again, are you prepared to meet the Messiah?
The Holy Spirit is not some nebulous part of God that is wholly removed from the birth of Christ. He was active in the life of Christ and He is active in the life of any believer who is willing to let Him be. Seeing how the Holy Spirit worked in Mary’s life gives each of us an idea on how He can work in our own lives
There are times in your life when you will feel disconnected from God. You will feel abandoned and alone, even hopeless. It’s during those times when you must rely on the Holy Spirit to lead you more than ever.
Have you wandered around aimlessly in life? Maybe you have started moving forward then ended up moving back to the place you wanted to leave? Maybe you're just stuck where you're at?
Without the Holy Spirit guiding you and even sometimes carrying you along, you will find yourself still stuck and wandering along in the wilderness, lost and very much alone. Knowing that you have the Holy Spirit as a guide is much different than actually relying on Him to lead you along.
When we start to understand and embrace the friendship, the companionship of the Holy Spirit, we truly recognize the friend we have. There’s an old hymn, What A Friend We Have in Jesus. The same thing is very true with the Holy Spirit. As part of the Trinity, it is so easy that our very best friend, our BFF for eternity is God Himself.
Because God knows what gifts we need in service to Him and His church, the Holy Spirit provides which gifts we are given, when we will have them and how they are to be used for God’s glory and not our own.
Because Jesus is who He says He is, you can know the Holy Spirit was sent to convict you and the rest of the world of our need for the Messiah. Having the presence and the power of the Holy Spirit in your life is an advantage that is often underestimated, undervalued and underutilized.
How do you know what truth is? How can you tell in an upside down world what is true and what isn’t? Who’s truth do you believe? Understanding that truth exists does not mean that you are able to see it without the help with the Holy Spirit active in your life.
The misconceptions and misperceptions that we have today of the Holy Spirit are profoundly disheartening. As the church of Jesus Christ who has been given the power of the Holy Spirit, we should be rightly ashamed and upset that we have abandoned, neglected and even thrown out such a precious gift.
Change is a process that can only occur when something drastic happens in our lives and typically is not done through sheer willpower alone. The only true change that occurs in a Christian’s life starts when we become a new creation in Jesus Christ.
The prevailing thoughts of today, both in the young and the old is that I can be good enough to get into Heaven. If that’s the case, it opens up a can of worms and begs the question, by whose standard. Let's see what the Bible has to say.
While many of us may be familiar with both Judy Blume and even the story of Margaret, all of us can in some way even relate to them. We often ask the same question, maybe even over and over. Are you there God? Are you really there? It’s me, _____________.
Knowing that we have a God who has experienced pain and suffering in human form, we can expect that Jesus understands the healing we need.
When I say the word provision, most of us would immediately think of money. God providing us with the funds which can be used to engage in our own pleasures or for our own needs. Yet, is that really all there is? Is that the way that we should view God? Is He just that big Sugar Daddy in the sky?
Courage is what most people want in life. Yet, they choose a life of fear. They are so busy looking down at the world and all of the scary things that it contains rather than looking up and believing in what Jesus has to offer. Living a life of courage does not mean the absence of fear but rather having comfort knowing that we serve a BIG God!
Because God created us in His image in order to have a relationship with us and the fact that He is a righteous and Holy God, we can expect God to forgive us of our sins. For God to know that we would sin and not offer a means of salvation would make Him an unrighteous and unholy God.
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
Now let me give what the Bible says about strength.
Psalm 73:25-26 25 Whom have I in heaven but You? And there is none upon earth that I desire besides You.
26 My flesh and my heart fail; But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
Both of these statements cannot be true. One relies on the strength of man and circumstance. While the other relies on the strength of Almighty God. What do you rely on? Are you relying on strength found in God’s word or inspirational quotes of man?
As we continue to look at what you should expect from God, today we are going to discuss the attribute of strength. I don’t mean simply muscular strength. Rather an enduring strength that does not exist in any one of us apart from the Lord Jehovah.
No matter how many times you have failed God, no matter how many times you have fallen short, God has an enduring love for you that does not fail. His love has not failed you in the past and is a love that will not fail you in the future. You can expect God to always love you!
Have you ever gotten lost? You didn’t really mean to but somewhere along the way, you simply took a wrong turn. Maybe you realized you were lost but kept going anyway or maybe you didn’t even realize you were lost, you simply just weren’t getting where you needed to go. One simple wrong turn can simply take us to a place that we never intended. It can take us to a place that we never wanted to go. It can take us so far off the path, that we feel we may never be able to get back on track. But, at that last moment, someone is there to give us the much needed directions to point us in the right way to go.
The most underutilized and at the same time the most abused weapon that we have been given in this life, outside of the Holy Spirit is in the power of prayer. How we utilize this power, how we employ this power, how we harness this power in a way that impacts us on a daily basis as an integral part of our life is one of the greatest challenges facing the Christian community today. Yet, it should be the first thing we turn to and not just in a time of emergency but more as something as natural to us as breathing. Prayer should be the first thing we do in the morning, the last thing we do at night and everything we do in between should be covered in prayer. If you were to start praying in this fashion, I believe, I truly believe that you would be amazed at the results and you would see what prayer really can do for you.
Looking around at Christians today, you would think that we are most bitter, hateful, depressed, angry, judgmental, critical, self-hating, self-loathing, complaining, whiny, sniveling, griping and miserable people you have ever met. And…you would be right. When…we live as ourselves and not in the person we are in Jesus Christ. When…we live without the God of the Bible and the power of the Holy Spirit guiding us on a daily basis. Oh sure, some days, we wake up a little cranky or grumpy-bumpy as we like to say in the Noe household. However, that is not the life that God intended for us to live and the life that Christ died for. As we go back into the book of James, let us see both how we should be living and how we should not.
Today, we are going to explore the subject of freedom from a Biblical perspective. Not only is this a fitting topic for this weekend due to the holiday but it is also important to see freedom allows us to experience true revival.
Those like you and me need constant reminders to guard our hearts against the riches of this world in favor of the next. But the text that we are going to look at today goes far beyond just guarding our heart against riches, it also means for us to guard our hearts against those who persecute us.
Men, it is time to stand up and be the leaders that God called us to be. We can no longer stand on the sidelines and let our world fall into sin. It is time to stand up, oh mighty man of God!
God is Powerful so Just Hold On!
If you will look around, you can probably tell that the sanctuary looks a bit different than normal. As most of you know, based on the decorations and the songs that we just sang, we have either radically changed things at Victory Rock or we just finished Vacation Bible School. I can assure you that it’s the latter. So, why do we still have everything set up? Well, you are going to hear what the kids learned this week. However, you will learn not only the lessons that they learned but you will now be able to reinforce and open a discussion with your children since you will have heard the same lessons.
Don’t judge me! Who are you to judge me? You can’t judge my actions! If you have no sin, then throw the first stone. These are just a few of the lines we may heave heard when we are judging someone’s behavior. But do they have any truth or fact from a Biblical standpoint? Are you or are you not allowed to judge others? Do Christians have any right to judge?
What does it truly mean to be humble? Most of us would picture some quite and shy person. Almost introverted or maybe even what we call a mousy type of person. Usually, they are the more quiet and shy persona not drawing a lot of attention to who they are or what they do. Yet, is this the picture that is drawn by the Bible of what true humility looks like?
Anger is simply not healthy for us. It is contradictory to the way a Christian a should live. It not only can physically kill you but also kills your testimony. James tells us how we should respond a better way. Listen in and find out how to deal stop anger from ruining your walk and your life.