As You Follow Christ
Well, good morning. Happy near you to you, just so, you know those middle queues section, those are not reserved for anybody. Saying, if you ever want to move down, you can so, just so, you know that, anyway, good to have you here this morning. Well, if you feel comfortable, raise your hand if either mentally or you wrote it down somewhere, raise your hand if you may have made any new year's resolutions. Okay, good, that's right, the first service like only three. Raise their hands. So I don't know if they have they're over that or what, I don't know, but I was going to then say, lower your hands if you've kept them so far. And because we know that they can go pretty quickly, we we have a tendency to do that. But there's something about the new year, I think, which is a natural time for people to think about their lives, to possibly resolve to do something different. So new year a new start time to think about something they can do differently. So it's a natural time you're getting out of the Christmas yesterday, sadly, we finally took down our Christmas decorations. I thought about asking my wife, we could just leave them up all year. Nobody would know, you know, but that enabled me to kind of organize the Christmas clause a little bit. Enabled me to do some other organization and everything. And then so I did a little bit of the work in the house. And I told my wife, okay, I'm done. I did work, so I'm going to enjoy the rest of the day, but, but, but it's a natural time to kind of reorganize our lives and reorganize our focus, and re focus our energies, our motivations, on following Jesus. And so this year, we're going to be spending the year looking at the lives of different men and women through Scripture. And for the first six weeks, we're going to be looking at the life of a man named Abram, who God would change his name to Abraham. So you might hear me calling him both names here and there, but he's Abram. As you pick up today, we're talking about what your spiritual purpose is now, if you are a Christian, God has a very specific plan for your life. When it comes to being a part of His kingdom, you're saved. You're saved because of the work of Jesus, Christ, and then you were brought into a Christian community, and you're giving a clear mandate to make disciples. Now that looks differently in all of our different lives, but you have a very specific plan, and that plan, the intricacies of that plan, can change. Sometimes the plan might change. Sometimes the the methods could change. Sometimes your location might might change. But as long as you're here on this earth and God has not called you home, yet you have a very specific part of to play in the kingdom of God's growth. So today we're looking at a passage of scripture that shows us God's very specific plan for a very specific man. We have to be careful not to look at someone else's story in the Bible and then insert ourselves in there and say, Well, God made Abraham a great nation. So I'm claiming that God will make my family a great nation. That it's not how it works, but it's still good to see the models that God uses and the principles for that So Genesis, chapter 12, starting at verse one today. Now the Lord said to Abram, go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you, and I will make you a great nation. And I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and Him who dishonors you, I will curse and in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. So Abram went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was 75 years old when he departed from Haran and Abram took Sarai, his wife, and Lot, his brother's son, and all their possessions that they had gathered and the people. People that they had acquired in Haran, and they set out to go to the land of Canaan. When they came to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Mora. At that time, the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said to your offspring, I will give this land. So he built there an altar to the Lord who had appeared to him. From there, he moved to the hill country on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent with Bethel on the west and I on the east. And there he built an altar to the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord. And Abraham journeyed on, still going toward the nego Heavenly Father as we worship you today, this first Sunday of 2025 many of us probably have hopes, dreams, plans for how we can improve ourselves in 2025 Lord, a lot of that success lies in the truth of, are we living the life you would call us to live? Lord, impress upon our hearts what changes we need to make in our lives, what motivations we need changed, what plans we need directions on Lord and Lord ultimately, as we try to chart our course, we know that you chart our steps, you are ultimately in control of our lives. And so this should not be something that should give us anxiety or should give us fear or worry. But Lord, let us seek for a peaceful falling in your steps. Lord, show us what that would be today. Lord, I pray that today, that my words are your words, today, that your spirit will dwell in the hearts of those who receive this today, and that you will feel your presence in a mighty way. And we ask these things in Jesus name, amen, I want to give you today three aspects, if you will, three elements that we see in this passage of your spiritual purpose of maybe finding your spiritual purpose of maybe even committing that spiritual purpose. Number one, your spiritual purpose involves hearing God. Involves hearing from God. Verse one tells us this right away, the Lord said to Abram, he spoke it. This is what he told him, go from your country and your family and your kin to a land that I will show you now. If someone in your family said, you know, God told me to leave monk's corner and you and I'm going somewhere else, you would say, Well, where are you going? And if they said, Oh, I don't know, God just told me to go. You probably would not be a big fan of that plan. Would you? You would be like, you don't have any sense. You don't just get up and go, what's your plan? I don't know. God just told me to go. You would just kind of stare, probably quizzically at them. You got to have a plan. Well, humanly speaking, that's what we think, but that's not what God did. He said, Go, leave your hometown, leave all your kin, leave your family, and go, and I will show you where to go. That was what he told him. That's all he told us. Now we see that God spoke to Abram. Well, how did he speak to him? How did he speak to him? Well, the Bible, in this instance, doesn't tell us the exact manner of communication. But throughout the Bible, God spoke in various ways. He spoke to people through angels, which, by the way, is a word for being God's Messenger. He spoke through prophets. He spoke through dreams, he spoke through visions, and even one time, he even spoke to an obstinate man through the mouth of a donkey with Adam and Eve, the Bible describes God walking in the garden with them, and they can hear the sound of his footsteps, so it suggests that he had a presence with them and was a regular part of their lives, and that he was close to them, but he seems to have audibly spoken to Adam, calling out to him where. Where are you? And Adam answered, that's what usually happens when someone calls out to you that way. We don't know the manner in which God spoke to Abram. We're just told he spoke to him and he said, leave your family and go. We don't know where you're going, but not here again, humanly speaking, that's not necessarily a plan for success. It seems like some of these people who get up and move to LA to be a star, and they have no idea what they're doing or why they're going and they might make it. They might might not make it. This is what Abraham was doing. But it was God's plan. Verse two, and here comes this promise. He says, I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and Him who dishonors you. I will curse and in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. So one thing we can see here is the magnitude of the assignment from God is usually equivalent to the magnitude of the change that God's going to require from you. And when I was called into the ministry, that's a big change. It's a big change in my life's direction. My goal as a college student was to get a job and get a good job and make as much money as possible. That was really my goal. Okay, God changed. That changed. My heart called me to the ministry. So with that, my motivations had to change my my pursuits had to change my desires, how to change. My habits had to change. I remember one person even told me going to college. Friend of mine said, when I told him I was going to ministry, he said, I can't imagine you doing that. Now, that was kind of a doubter to me, but now looking back, I'm like, that's probably a good thing, because God's worked in my life. Everyone has something that God's working through God, though, called Abraham, to bless the entire world. Through his lineage. Through Abraham came the nation of Israel. Through Abraham came Jesus. That is as big a call as one can receive you will not, and I will not ever have a call as big as starting the lineage where Jesus came from. Jesus has already come. But nevertheless, God's Kingdom purpose in your life is extremely important. Notice I said Kingdom purpose. If you're a Christian, your purpose in life now is not just to benefit you. Look what it says. It says, so that you will be a blessing. He says, I'm calling you Abram, so that you will be a blessing to others. It's not just about us being blessed. It's now about us blessing others. And the body of Christ, the church does so in so many different ways. So the Bible talks about different members of the body. If you're a Christian, your purpose now is to benefit others, whatever field, whatever vocation God has put you, he's calling you to build His kingdom through blessing others. Well, how will God speak to you? Look at Hebrews one long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days, he spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed, the heir of all things, through whom also He created the world. So it tells us that God spoke to us through Jesus. Well, Jesus now in heaven, yet we have His Word, which he speaks to us. Many people say, I just need a word from the Lord, and I'm like, Here you go. Let's master this first, right? Let's master this first. And then maybe there might be something extra, right? We have the word of God. We also have the Holy Spirit that that guides us. And so when we're talking about hearing from God, there's several ways, the Bible being the first and foremost way they just speak through us. And I want to, I want to talk a little bit about how the Holy Spirit talks through us, how he leads us several ways. Number one, we get this inner prompting conviction. Holy Spirit convicts us of our lives, of sin, in our life where we should make changes, it prompts us to do certain things, to to to help people. Had a conversation with our deacons a few months ago about about helping the needy people, and they had this great conversation about, how do I know if this person really needs help or not? And I said, that's where you just have to rely on the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit to lead you into those situations, those promptings. Convictions, Holy Spirit will do that. Secondly, the the reading, the illumination of Scripture, as we read through the Bible, certain things come at us depending on where we are in our life, that we've read it many times before, and then we read something for that first time because we're going through something, it clicks with us and it helps us and and God illuminates the Scripture into our lives, and it it helps us understand what we are called to do three prayer and worship. We What if I told you that you could talk to the living God who created the universe at any time you wanted to would you do it? Well, that's called prayer. You can speak to him at any time, and he listens, and he speaks back to us. And then when you come in here and you worship as we're singing certain songs, as we're praying together, as we're hearing the Word of God preached, we hear what God is calling us to do. This is why our songs and both services, we're very careful about what we sing, because not every Christian song has what we would call sound theology. Make sure that it lines up with what the Bible is telling us to do and doesn't detract from God's Word. Four other people, sometimes other godly people who are also trying to hear from the Lord can give you good counsel. You know, few years ago, I just needed some help with some stuff, and I talked to a pastor friend, and I told him some of my worries, and I told him some of my struggles, and he took me to some scripture verses and said, So what's the really the problem? It's like, well, there really isn't a problem, actually. I guess it's pretty good. Just, you know, I need another pastor friend to kind of just show me a different perspective, like, hey, it's really not an issue here, right? Other people can talk to you circumstances. My wife always sees God working through signs, and she'll show me from time to time about God working through her life. You know, we have, we have two pets. By the way, I might get in trouble for telling you this or two pets. Our dog was born on my son's birthday, and the breeder gave us this dog for free. My wife says that's God's dog. And then on her birthday, a few years ago, a cat showed up on her fort. She says, That's God's cat my birthday. So, you know, we have six birthdays in our house, so hopefully I won't have four more pets. If one comes on my birthday, I get to claim it's not God's pet, but anyway, but through circumstances, things like you can see how God works together. Sixth, when you're doing God's will, you will have a sense of peace, sense of assurance. God's calling you to do this. Now, there might be a little fear there, but you'll know what you're what you're being called to do, is correct. It's a sense of peace, a sense of assurance. The Holy Spirit can speak directly to us, can guide us, and the more we grow in our relationship with Christ, then the more we know when he's speaking to us. When I was dating my wife, she was living in college, she would live at home during the summer and stuff. Even though I knew her really well, I would call and sometimes her sister would pick up the phone and I'd have a conversation with her sister for two minutes before I realized, wait a second, this isn't Emily, and they would kind of play a joke on me, because that's similar voices, right? I'd only been dating a few months, but now, if I were to call, I would know immediately who was who, because I know my wife's voice a whole lot better now than I did when we started dating. It's the same thing with hearing from the Lord. The more we know what God has to say, the more we know and he's speaking to us, the more we can crowd out the other voices in our lives that come to us that aren't speaking the things of God. Your spiritual purpose involves hearing from God, but you have to be listening. Secondly, your spiritual purpose involves obeying God. This is the hard part, obedience. Look at verse four. So Abram went, as the Lord had told, and I didn't have to go. He the story committed right there. Why wouldn't he go well, maybe because it says, here he was 75 years old. I don't know about you, but when I'm 75 I'm probably hopefully going to be settling down. Hopefully I'll be somewhat retired as you can in ministry, hopefully not really looking to move somewhere, not really looking to pick up my life and start over. Most people, I would think, would be the same way. But he doesn't. He doesn't reject the offer at 75 years of age. He uproots. His life. He leaves the only home we'd ever known. He actually has a conversion experience. He was worshiping the stars. He gets saved and places his faith in this God. So he has a religious conversion, if you will. And then he moves. Then what does he do? Verse five, he takes sariah's wife and lot his brother's son, that's a Southern way of saying, it's his nephew, and all their possessions that they've gathered and the people they had acquired, which means he was a wealthy man, and they set out to go to the land of Canaan and it said he passed through there where the Canaanites were. So he has this change, but it doesn't just affect him. It affects his entire family. Because he was the father. He was the patriarch, so to speak. You know, put this on Facebook this week, when a man comes to faith in Christ, usually, majority of his family will follow. Statistics say that if a child is the first person to come to faith in the household, there's about a three and a half percent chance that everyone else in the household will become a Christian. If the mother is the first to put their faith in Christ, there's about a 17% chance the household will follow. But if the father is first, there's about a 93% chance that everyone in the household will come to Christ. Men, you can have a massive eternal impact on your family just by getting up on Sunday mornings and coming to worship, just by reading your Bible, praying and walking with Jesus. That's the first part. Is just obedience. So with that said, what are the challenges we have in obeying God? Why don't we just do it all the time? Why can't we just obey God when He tells us to do well, there's several things when it comes to his calling real quickly. Number one, we all have an identity. Our identity can be a challenge for us obeying the Lord. What do I mean? We all have an idea of who we are. We have an idea of who we've been. We all have an idea of who we want to become in life. We have goals, we have aspirations, we have things we've lived through. We say, I'm never doing that again, or I'm not going to do this again. And as my grandmother would always tell me, never say, what are you have the same grandmother, never say, never, never say, Never. These factor into our identity. These identity traits can become a stumbling block to us because we're holding on to who we are. We, if we live solely for our own desires, we're going to struggle in following God. If we're goal oriented people, and we have future achievements that could get in the way we're not being obedient to God's calling. And finally, our identity is such that we want to appear in a certain way to other people. We all seek to present a a certain image of who we are. But true obedience to God requires a certain willingness to let go of our preconceived notions of who we think we are and what we should be, and then fully embrace the path that God has called for us. It's a matter of submitting to the authority of God in our life. So the answer to this is that we should align our identity with that of Jesus, Christ's identity. Look at second. Corinthians, five. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. Galatians, two says, I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ, who lives in me and the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. See, we are new people. We now live by faith, not by certainty, but by faith. Our foremost identification is not in our race. It's in our gender or nationality or any other segment that the government can tell us we are. It is in the fact that we are in Christ we are Christians, that is our new and permanent identity. Secondly, security is a stumbling block for us. We all have a natural desire for safety, comfort, stability. Safety and stability are good desires and. But we have to understand that safety, stability can only truly be found in God. We also desire comfort, but we are prone to rely on our comforts from worldly entities. Those things inevitably, inevitably fail us too. We ultimately are to take our comfort even from God. We're to take our sense of security and stability from God. Look at John 10. Jesus says, My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow Me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of My hand. Amen, we have complete security in Jesus. No one can snatch us out of the hand of our Savior. We have that security in him. Look at Romans eight. Paul says, I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God. In Jesus, Christ, our Lord, nothing can separate us. We have that security and stability in Christ. Third, sometimes our future becomes a stumbling block for us. Identity, security, future are all obedience issues? Are we trusting God in our future? Do we believe that God holds our future in his hands a big part of our spiritual purposes, obeying God when He calls us to do something and trusting him in the plan and the details. Look at Philippians four. Do not be anxious about anything, but with everything, by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving. Let your requests be made known to God. And it says, And when you do this, when you come to God with your anxieties and worries. Then he says the peace of God, which surpasses all of our understanding, guards our hearts and our minds. In Christ, Jesus, we come to him with those things. And in the future, God gives us that peace. Isaiah, 41 fear not. That's a command. Fear not, for I am with you. Be not dismayed, for I'm your God. I will strengthen you. I will help you. Amen. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand, when you're fearful, when you're worried, when you're anxious, God says, I have you, I have you. I have your future, you know, and and look at his track record, because we're all here today, amen. We all made it here. He has us. We can obey God no matter our fears, because it's a part of his plan. And third, finally, your spiritual purpose involves worshiping God, worshiping God. Verse seven. Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said to your offspring, I will give this land. So he takes him into the land. He just happens to be in Canaan now. And at that point he says, this is your land. I'm going to give you, but not yet, as we see, he keeps journeying. So he built their altar to the Lord and who had appeared to him. From there, he moved to the hill country, and then he moved on and made another altar, and says verse nine, he journeyed on. So I want you to notice something here. Abram worships God, not for what God has given him. He's still a good 25 years away from having a child. He's still there's this promise of inheritance. This is nowhere near happening. He worships God for not what God's given him for the promise that God has given him, God has not yet given Abram offspring, he believed God's promise. He had faith he would do it, and he worshiped him. When's the last time you worshiped God for a promise he's given you that has not yet been realized? What would that be? It's easy to love God when He gives us the stuff we want. Lord, thank you so much for my family. So it's for a place to live, for this church. Thank you so much for this job promotion. But when's the last time you've you've worshiped the Lord and praised him for a promise he's given you that he's not yet? Given you What's he promised? Me? The Bible is full of them. First of all, he's promised forgiveness of sins. Amen, you're still alive. You're not done sinning. He's forgiven you of every sin you've ever made or will make, and he continues to do so throughout your life. What else has he promised you? He's promised you victory over death that hasn't realized yet, because you're still here. But when it does happen, you have victory over it. Third, peace and comfort. You might say, well, I don't feel very peaceful and comforted now. Well, you will at some point in your life, you will if you haven't experienced it yet, because God's promised, He will give you peace. He will give you comfort. What about those, those character building tribulations? Have you thanked God for sending a person or a situation in your life that hasn't happened yet that will cause you to change your character, we can look back in the past and see where that's happened and say, Well, I'm glad I went through that. But do we worship God for something that hasn't happened yet that we know will make us better? Or there's those faith building experiences where we we can look back and say, I never would have made that went through that without God my life. But do we thank him for those faith building experiences which have not happened yet? What have we ever worshiped him for that? That's what Abram's doing. He's worshiping God for the promise that has not been realized. What about eternal life? We haven't experienced that yet, but we will. What about our place in heaven, our mansion in heaven that's coming to so we can worship God for our place in eternal life. Maybe we do think about that. Sometimes I do. We can thank him for what, not just he's done, for what he will do in our lives. Last two weeks, you know, on vacation some and had some time off, and my son and I were driving around in the car. You remember that song? My family's going to groan when I tell them this, that song of 1980s we are the world, you know, we are the world. I don't see the rest of it, big compilation of artists we're driving my son. And I said, you know, I remember seeing this video years ago, and they made this thing. They had all these famous musical artists in one room singing this. I don't how they or they had them all doing it together. And my son was like, Well, they probably recorded it separately. And I'm like, Well, you would think that, but they didn't actually, like, they had them all in the same room. And, like, I don't know how they did that. So then I went on YouTube to try to find the video. Went on YouTube and found it and saw it. It's like, look, see, they're all singing together. And then in the comments, someone said There's a great documentary on this that just came out. I was like, oh gosh, now I'm going down the rabbit hole. So I watched this entire documentary on how they created the song We Are the World. Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie co wrote it, which is amazing to think about. They co wrote the thing in like, a few weeks, and they had all these artists who came down for the AMA awards in Hollywood. It's only to get them all together. They had to do the night of the awards because they were all there, said Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones and Lionel Richie and Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan and Diana Ross and Cyndi Lauper and hooey Lewis and Steve Perry and Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles. All these famous people. Some of you are like, I don't know whose people are, but I know who they are. They get 40 plus stars in a room at the same time. And the producer, Quincy Jones, put a sign on the outside the recordings door that said this said, check your ego at the door, because think about it. These are all famous musical artists. They just got done winning awards, literally. And from 10pm to 7am they recorded this song together 10pm to 7am the night after the night of the awards, and they did. There was a little bit of bickering here and there, and Lionel Richie had to keep them all together somehow and work through it. At one point, Stevie Wonder suggested singing a line of the song in Swahili. Can you imagine if that were to come about, even though the Ethiopians, who they were singing for, didn't speak Swahili, and they had a big argument, and then Waylon Jennings left. I never knew that. He laughed at that point. He walked out from 10pm to 7am they recorded this all night. Why did they do it? The purpose was to bring awareness to the massive starvation that was happening at the time in Ethiopia. And so they got together. They put their agendas aside. They put their egos aside. They used their incredibly talented voices. They had to decide who would sing where and who would sing what. Some people didn't get solos. I mean, can you imagine the egos dealing with that? Some people didn't get solos and some did, and some sing more than others. Put them all together just to raise money. In awareness for the starving children and families in Ethiopia. Somehow they got them together to do that, brothers and sisters in Christ, as good as that causes and as important it is to send relief to starving people, I'm not diminishing that we as Christians are ambassadors to the greatest cause known to man, and then a salvation through Jesus Christ. We should have a sign outside this door. Check egos at the door. We come here together to worship and through every local church across the world, big, medium and small, we all have the same mandate that is to make disciples of the nations. That's what we're called to do. You are walking around with the keys to the kingdom, and every single person has a part. You might not get a solo. You might be singing with someone you don't necessarily like, but God puts them all together in the body of Christ the way he wants it. He organizes everybody where he wants you to be if you have ears to hear and to follow him on a spiritual journey. He has for you a kingdom mindset is one that God says you, I will put other people above my need. I will use my gift not for the benefit of me but for others. So as we enter 2025, today, where is God calling you to follow him? How is he teaching telling you this year? Maybe it's maybe it's to do the same thing you've been doing. Maybe it's a reaffirmation, but maybe for some of you it's a change. Maybe for some of you, it's a new thing. But think about it and pray about it, and God will reveal it to you, Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for what you've done through us in Christ, Jesus, every person in here today, every heart in here today, has been touched by you in a special way to serve your kingdom, Lord. If there is one in here today, it's never placed their faith in you that today they would that today they would turn from their sins. They would place their faith in you, and they would follow that with baptism. Or that would be the best decision they could make, life changing. But for those of us in here who know you, Lord, as we enter into this new year, that you would show us what this new year can hold for us, show us how we can align our lives with you. Whatever it is Lord for some of us, it might just be more regular church attendance. For some of us, it might be joining a Sunday school class. Maybe for some of us it's starting a new one or teaching one. Maybe for some of us it's serving the elderly or the widows. Maybe for some of us, Lord, it's just praying for people in the church, whatever it is, Lord and press upon our hearts, specifically that desire we have for how we could be the most effective part of your body this year. But we love you. We thank you so much for what you've done for us through Jesus, through His death on the cross, through his burial and resurrection, how he's purchased eternal life for all we thank you for that Father. We ask these things in His name. Amen. Amen, would you stand and sing with us? Amen.
