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Giving Our All to God…

Read Malachi 1:6-8,11:

In our world today, words such as integrity, honesty, authentic, real and trust have come upon hard times.

Today there is a genuine need for credible and authentic people to arise in every arena of life.

Far too many businesses, institutions and government agencies as well as CEO’s, politicians and church leaders have proven themselves to be fraudulent, not worthy of trust.

There are just too many “phonies” and not enough sincere, real and honorable people whose lives speak of justice and purity.

About 400 years before Jesus was born a prophet named Malachi delivered a stinging indictment of the careless, profane, and haphazard way in which people were serving God.

He begins with the priests and enlarges the scope of his message to include all who worship God in such an unacceptable way.

He classified their worship as indifferent, careless, half-hearted, and said their attitude toward God invited a heap of curses from Him rather than His blessings.

Hear the heartbreak of God in Malachi 1:6 –

“A son honors his father, a servant honors his master.  Where is My honor?  Where is the reverential fear due My name?”

There are four areas in which God calls upon us today to be credible and authentic before Him:

• In our profession
• In our gifts
• In our service
• In our time
  

We should not just give lip service to worshipping God, but let our worship come out of our lives.  The quality of our worship must be reflective of who God is – a great King.

The choice is to give God the first, the best, the purest, the perfect and open yourself up to a blessing

God is a great King and service to Him should not be boring, but a joy and an honor.

Members of the church will sit through 2-hour movies, 2-3 hour baseball, football and soccer games, and often want it to continue.  Those same people complain if the church service is much more than 90 minutes.

We have lost our credibility in worship.  We must become more authentic in the profession of our lips, the use of our gifts, the investment of our service, and the use of our time.

Being Gay is Not a Gift From God…

Recently, in the Toledo area, billboards carry the message, “Being gay is a gift from God.” 

Being gay is not a gift from God.  In more than 30 years of counseling with people who have chosen the gay lifestyle, not one of them has ever said – “I am delighted to be gay.”  No one has ever said to me, “My gay lifestyle is a gift from God.”  In every case, those engaged in this deviant lifestyle shared with me the pain of their choice, along with the shame and guilt they carry. 

In Romans 1:18-32, God defines for us, what happens when we exchange His truth for a lie.  Paul clearly outlines the unnatural affects of saying “No” to God and thus embracing a life without Him. 

Romans 1:18-32: 

 ^18-23But God’s angry displeasure erupts as acts of human mistrust and wrongdoing and lying accumulate, as people try to put a shroud over truth. But the basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is! By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. So nobody has a good excuse. What happened was this: People knew God perfectly well, but when they didn’t treat him like God, refusing to worship him, they trivialized themselves into silliness and confusion so that there was neither sense nor direction left in their lives. They pretended to know it all, but were illiterate regarding life. They traded the glory of God who holds the whole world in his hands for cheap figurines you can buy at any roadside stand.

 ^24-25So God said, in effect, “If that’s what you want, that’s what you get.” It wasn’t long before they were living in a pigpen, smeared with filth, filthy inside and out. And all this because they traded the true God for a fake god, and worshiped the god they made instead of the God who made them—the God we bless, the God who blesses us. Oh, yes!

 ^26-27Worse followed. Refusing to know God, they soon didn’t know how to be human either—women didn’t know how to be women, men didn’t know how to be men. Sexually confused, they abused and defiled one another, women with women, men with men—all lust, no love. And then they paid for it, oh, how they paid for it—emptied of God and love, godless and loveless wretches.

 ^28-32Since they didn’t bother to acknowledge God, God quit bothering them and let them run loose. And then all hell broke loose: rampant evil, grabbing and grasping, vicious backstabbing. They made life hell on earth with their envy, wanton killing, bickering, and cheating. Look at them: mean-spirited, venomous, fork-tongued God-bashers. Bullies, swaggerers, insufferable windbags! They keep inventing new ways of wrecking lives. They ditch their parents when they get in the way. Stupid, slimy, cruel, cold-blooded. And it’s not as if they don’t know better. They know perfectly well they’re spitting in God’s face. And they don’t care—worse, they hand out prizes to those who do the worst things best!

Within every person there is a seed of God and the God-thirst is the most powerful drive in us, stronger than all the drives of sex, power, security and fame put together.  When someone says “No” to God, they will then find something or someone else to worship.  Man always worships something or someone. Who or what he chooses to worship dictates the essence of his life.  We were born to worship and serve the Creator.  No other life will bring fulfillment of purpose.  Choose this day who you will serve- the God of the Bible or the god of this world.  There is hope, help, forgiveness, love, healing, and restoration to all who will simply believe in His name. 

And the greatest thing about sin… there is a cure.

The Will of God is the Real Life of Man

Advertising and marketing agencies often use images to show us what “real” men and women look like and do.

“Real men” ride Harleys, climb mountains, and use bow flex machines.   “Real women” use certain cosmetics, work out at Curves or Lifestyles, and dress in certain ways.

In fact, you could do all those things to perfection and still not be real.  No one is real until they become God-like, because as one becomes God-like, they will find that God’s will calls into play all those powers which God gives to them.

You only have the possibility of truly becoming real when you know and do the will of God. Only then will the gifts and abilities placed into you at conception be released without limits into your life.

No one can experience this kind of fulfillment until there is a renewing of their mind with the mind of Christ.

The conquering principle of life according to Paul is an inward renewal of the mind.

There is a two-fold process of coming to know and do God’s will:

• Do not be “conformed” to the pattern of this world.
• Be “transformed” by the renewing of your mind.

Only then will anyone be able to test and approve what God’s will is.  Every day we must choose to do these things.   All around us a whole climate of life is pressuring us, squeezing us, and insisting we conform, making it costly to us if we don’t.

The only way to escape this “conformity to the world” life is by the transformation of our minds.

Literally, our thinking must be changed by Christ’s mind in us.  Everyday the thinking of the world around me tries to influence “my mind set.”

Worldliness (opposite of godliness), lust, anger, vindictiveness, jealousy, greed, confusion, doubts, and fears take aim at my mind.   To be empowered by His will, we must surrender. 

The will of God is the real life of man.  When we recognize, accept, and agree with His will, our life discovers the harmony of all its powers, the fulfillment of all its hopes, the satisfaction of all its desires.