2026 Wk 1
Altered LIFE • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Pre-SET
Pre-SET
I Surrender All
WORSHIP SET 1
WORSHIP SET 1
Praise
GREETING to WORSHIP
GREETING to WORSHIP
There I will go to the altar of God,
to God—the source of all my joy.
I will praise you with my harp,
O God, my God!
WORSHIP SET 2
WORSHIP SET 2
Way Maker
Come to the Alter
Worthy of it All
CELEBRATION & GENEROSITY
CELEBRATION & GENEROSITY
Give and it will be given to you!
Give, and you will receive. Your gift will return to you in full—pressed down, shaken together to make room for more, running over, and poured into your lap. The amount you give will determine the amount you get back.*”
It seems so simple “Give”
Feels like “Taking” sometimes
That’s why it is an attitude with faith involved and a heart that is in obedience of Loving God
Let’s give this year like we never have before.
UPDATE
UPDATE
MidWeek
21 Days of Prayer and Fasting
SERIES: AlteredLIFE
SERIES: AlteredLIFE
REVIVAL 2026
[Taken from Berding, Kenneth. 2013. Bible Revival: Recommitting Ourselves to One Book. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.]
Stacey Irvine ate almost nothing but chicken nuggets for fifteen years.
She never tasted fruits or vegetables.
She occasionally supplemented her diet with french fries.
One day her tongue started to swell and she couldn’t catch her breath. She was rushed to the hospital, her airway was forced open, and they stuck an IV in her arm to start pumping in the nutrients she needed.
After saving her life, the medical staff sent her home, but not before they warned her that she needed to change her diet or prepare herself for an early death.
I’ve heard people call a lack of available food a famine. LATE NIGHT TV!
But what do you call this?
Food everywhere but not eating it?
Like Stacey Irvine, I think we’re killing ourselves spiritually.
It’s surely not for lack of resources;
Church on every corner
The Bible still the best seller
APPs everywhere
nevertheless, in our culture, we seem to be starving ourselves to death spiritually.
LET ME EXPLAIN
In 1859 and then again in 1904 a deep and penetrating work of the Holy Spirit engulfed the country of Wales.
Yes, a revival!
Wales had already seen many other periods when God had moved in revival—perhaps more than any geographical location in the history of Christianity.
But these two spiritual awakenings were two of the most significant.
In both cases, the Holy Spirit produced a profound increase of love for God among professing Christians and moved in the hearts of tens of thousands of people who did not know Christ, bringing them to repentance and a relationship with God.
But there was a striking difference between the two revivals.
Evan Roberts, the best-known preacher of the second: “Roberts, a gifted exhorter who led meetings filled with prayers, singing, and testimonies,
But he did not prioritize Bible teaching.
Compared to the 1859 revival, fewer Welsh preachers taught biblical doctrine. Instead,
many new converts sought mystical experiences.”
The positive effects of the first revival both for the church and for society persisted for many years.
The second revival, lacking an emphasis on the Bible, was “gone as quickly as it came.”
When compared two writers remarked about the second awakening that:
“After several years, Wales returned to its previous state of religious indifference.” The second revival was like a sparkler that spouted brilliant colors for a moment, sputtered, then grew suddenly dark.
The difference between the two revivals was the Bible.
I believe we will never see anything worth calling a revival of the Holy Spirit in our lifetime—unless we recommit ourselves to the Bible.
We need a revival of the Bible.
Say it with me!
In 2013 Berding, Kenneth wrote a book on Revival.
Bible Revival: Recommitting Ourselves to One Book
To not only say we have a problem in knowing the meaning of the Bible, but also to uncover how we got here.
This will be a journey…not a sermon
Not much planning is needed for a…
30 minutes to Glenpool
2 hours to OKC or Fort Smith AR
3 hours to McKenny Tx
easy peasy for the most part — however
A trip that is…
9 hours to New Orleans
10 hours to Bloomington IL
12 hours to Madison AL
16 hours to Pinehurst NC
21 hours to Los Angeles or
A 24 hour flight to Africa
Planning is huge
Let’s plan to…
Attend
Engage
Expect God to show up
Plan to bear our soul at the Alter with God and see a different year - a New Year.
An Altered Life!
Christians used to be known as “people of one book.” THE BIBLE
Michael Vlach cites “The 9 Most Important Issues Facing the Evangelical Church,”
His final concern is “Biblical Illiteracy in the Church”
He agrees with George Barna’s assessment that “the Christian body in America is immersed in a crisis of biblical illiteracy.”
A brief summary of its conclusions in this area: “Biblical literacy is neither a current reality nor a goal in the U.S.” They then add that little progress, if any, is being made toward assisting people to become more biblically literate.
But note YOUVERSION says that there app is being opened one billion every 37 days;-)
Question — have you had the medication or antibiotic and not taken it?
So, FOR THIS FIRST SUNDAY of the year— could we just agree that we need more of God, more alter, and more BIBLE?
Thank you
As we tackle each chapter we will address one aspect of our present lack of engagement with the Bible.
Chapter 1 we will lay out how little we actually know about the Bible in our generation and why we will spiritually die if we don’t address this issue soon.
Chapter 2 we will describe where our underlying distrust of the Bible comes from and why we question its clarity and doubt that it can speak a message to our complex twenty-first century setting.
Chapters 3 and 4 we will explain why we struggle to understand and apply the Bible and sketch out a framework for how to interpret and apply the Bible well.
Chapter 5 we will tackle the sensitive subject of obedience to the Bible.
Finally, in chapter 6 we will issue a call for us to not only read, learn, and obey the Word but also to talk about it regularly with each other.
Plus, we will close our series with two special topics…
one describing the easiest way to memorize the Bible and
the second a method for reaching Bible fluency. The ability to speak with ease or gracefully about Bible.
We need to look at the hidden spiritual issues that has led us to where we are.
We will lovingly “meddle” a bit in our spiritual life with the goal of helping us become more God-honoring in your engagement with the Bible.
(Bedding, Kenneth. 2013. Bible Revival: Recommitting Ourselves to One Book. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.)
New Believers have question but so do older followers:
Do we know basic facts about the Bible?
Kenneth remembers a student—not a new believer—who asked a question after class about Saul’s conversion in Acts 9. If this was the same Saul who was king over Israel. No. King Saul’s story is found in the Old Testament; the Saul of Acts—also known as Paul—is found in the New Testament.
Kenneth also assigned each student to write a biographical sketch of an Old Testament character. He came across the following line in a paper about the Old Testament figure Joshua: “Joshua was the son of a nun.” This student clearly didn’t know that Nun was the name of Joshua’s father, nor did he realize that Catholic nuns weren’t around during the time of the Old Testament. But I’m sure it created quite a stir at the convent!
In Amos we see a people lost looking for God and His Word. They were experiencing a “famine of hearing the words of the Lord”.
Amos paints a picture of people without access to God’s revelation searching for a message from God like desperate people—hungry and dehydrated—in search of food and water
“The time is surely coming,” says the Sovereign Lord,
“when I will send a famine on the land—
not a famine of bread or water
but of hearing the words of the Lord.
People will stagger from sea to sea
and wander from border to border*
searching for the word of the Lord,
but they will not find it.
In Amos they want it, but are not permitted it.
In our case, although we have unlimited access, we often don’t want it.
The irony is intense.
SO WHAT HAVE YOU HEARD TODAY?
When God commissioned Joshua (the son of Nun), he charged him with these words:
Study this Book of Instruction continually. Meditate on it day and night so you will be sure to obey everything written in it. Only then will you prosper and succeed in all you do.
How often should you meditate on it? Day and night. Why? So that you do what is in it.
The Old Testament book of Psalms leads off with these words:
1 How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked,
Nor stand in the path of sinners,
Nor sit in the seat of scoffers!
2 But his delight is in the law of the Lord,
And in His law he meditates day and night.
3 He will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water,
Which yields its fruit in its season
And its leaf does not wither;
And in whatever he does, he prospers.
And in another psalm:
Ps. 119.97“Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day” (Ps. 119:97, emphasis added).
Oh, how I love your instructions!
I think about them all day long.
Is that how we fell about God’s Word?
A COUPLE OF QUESTIONS TO PONDER
1. What does it mean when we say that Christians are to be “people of one book”? Don’t we read other books?
That God’s Word is not just my final authority, but all followers’ final authority. (Eph. 4:5-6 One Lord, one Faith, one baptism… ONE BOOK).
We do read other books for they are encouraging but they must hinge on the Book.
Other books cannot preoccupy our time more than the Book.
2. What do you think are the main reasons for the sharp decline in Bible knowledge among Christians during recent times?
Busyness, increased opportunities that lead to many distractions, pleasure seeking, technology advancements, self-gratification, and lack of self-control.
These are compounded by attitudes and experiences that leave a “just get by—mediocre life” or a distaste for trusting God as people’s expectations are missed thus, we seek pleasure over a focus to develop our spiritual relationship with God.
We have believed the lie that it is too difficult to know God.
Jesus said, “To know me is to know the Father,” thus we should shift our focus to knowing Jesus—and we do that through the a word for he is the Word made flesh. .
3. Look at Psalm 1:1–3. What are the characteristics of a person who meditates day and night on God’s Word?
According to Psalms 1, a person who
doesn’t follow the world,
doesn’t try to be like ungodly people, or
doesn’t refrain from taking on the attitude of those who mock God are people who value God’s Word thus they meditates day and night.
This action brings about many blessings.
21 Days of Prayer and Fasting
Where will you start this week?
Join me in an Altered Life
Not to get more blessings
But to know the One who made us!
scripture
12 With his own blood—not the blood of goats and calves—he entered the Most Holy Place once for all time and secured our redemption forever.
13 Under the old system, the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer could cleanse people’s bodies from ceremonial impurity.
14 Just think how much more the blood of Christ will purify our consciences from sinful deeds so that we can worship the living God. For by the power of the eternal Spirit, Christ offered himself to God as a perfect sacrifice for our sins.
15 In this way, he disarmed the spiritual rulers and authorities. He shamed them publicly by his victory over them on the cross.
13 But now you have been united with Christ Jesus. Once you were far away from God, but now you have been brought near to him through the blood of Christ.
Living close to the altar is the guide we need throughout this New Year!
