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Notes
Transcript
Announcements:
Announcements:
Student leadership
Student leadership
We will be starting Student leadership Saturday October 24 at 10:30.
Student leadership is meant to be something that challenges you as students to become the next generation of leader leaders within the church, your home and your school
If you are serving in the kids room, tech booth or anything in the church, you should join leadership
And if you're looking for just another group to hang out, have fun and joke around this might not be for you. It will be fun. We will have a great time, but we are going to focus on growing in our relationship with Christ as leaders specifically.
If you would like to join, please talk to myself or your group leader and I will get you connected with the information you need
Trunk or Treat
Trunk or Treat
Trunk or treat is coming and we will need your help. October 31 Saturday we will be giving out candy and inviting the community to hear the gospel
As students we are going to be the ones helping make sure every trunk has enough candy and is ready to go for every group
Sarah 🤍 and I will also be putting a trunk together and I would like to get some ideas from you guys for what our trunk could be
In previous years, we did a pirate ship. If you have any ideas, please let us know!
Get connected:
Get connected:
If you are not connected, please go ahead and text “GB Students” To this number that will put you in our GroupMe where I sent updates and information
This is also a great thing for your parents to join as well so please take a picture of it. Show it to your parents and help them get connected as well.
Fall flannel night:
Fall flannel night:
It's beginning to look like fall and the weather is starting to turn so we are going to do a fall flannel night
Wear your favorite flannel or go buy a flannel from the thrift store
We will have donuts and hot cider, and we will do a bunch of fall games and activities outside before we go to our different groups.
This is gonna be a great thing to invite your friend too
Some of the activities will be our beloved Apple smash
Pumpkin smash
And a bunch of other fall group games
We will be doing possibly guys versus girls to see who the fall flannel champions are
October 18th Make sure to invite a friend it's gonna be a night to remember!
But with all that said, let's go ahead and head outside for our game
Intro:
Intro:
All right guys let's bring it in…
I promise not to go long if we pay attention… If you and I are able to lock in look at God's word and learn about who he is what he has done and what it means for us then I promise we'll only go for 15-20 minutes
And then we can jump into our communities and hang out for the rest of the night.
But before we get into anything tonight, let's pray…
But before we get into anything tonight, let's pray…
Tonight we're gonna talk about the topic of salvation
Over the next several weeks we're talking about what it means to be a Christian…
What it means to be truly a believer of Jesus and have a relationship with him
And before we jump into our text, I want to ask you what does salvation mean
What does the word salvation mean?
Salvation (noun): The act of being saved, rescued, or delivered from danger, harm, destruction, or loss…
You see the thing is we have a problem…
And our problem is that we have Sinned… We have broken God's law?
And when a law is broken, there is a punishment that is required…
How many of us have heard of the 10 Commandments?
What are some of the 10 Commandments
You shall not murder… You shall not steal… You shall not lie… And it goes on and on…
You shall honor her mother and father… You shall worship God alone Nothing else is worthy of worship…
These are just a few of the 10 Commandments these are a part of God's holy law perfect law
No, I want us to read something from the book of James… James chapter 2 verses 10 through 11.
10 For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it.
Another way to look at this is if your parents gave you a list of things to do and a list of things not to do
And you do everything except for one thing or you do one thing that you weren't supposed to
You have become disobedient you did not obey
Let me put it to you this way how many lies do you have to tell to become a liar?… The answer is one
How many times do you have to steal before you become a thief?… Once…
How many times do you have to murder before you become a murder murderer?
Five times totally kidding once
So we have a problem each and every one of us in this room have Sinned… We have disobeyed God's law
How many of us have lied?
How many of us have stolen or taken something that was not ours without permission?
How many of us have been angry, furious towards someone else had hatred?
All of these things are disobedient of God's law so we have a problem… And the answer to this problem is not you and I trying hard harder
We cannot do a bunch of good to make the bad go away…
A lot of people will teach you every religion in the world outside of Christianity. Will tell you that there's a scale that you can bounce.
That if you have a lot of bad, you can do a lot of good outweigh the bad…
And if you do more good than your bad, then you will be saved, but that's not true…
I want you to imagine this Daniel on his way in here drove his car into my truck completely destroyed my truck…
And he says don't worry, Zach… I know I did this bad thing, but I volunteering the kids ministry
I help out with youth group every week
I even helping in the soup kitchen, so my good has outweigh the bad so we're OK…
Does that fix the damage that has been done to my truck?
No, just because he has done good does not mean that his bad is automatically taken care of. There is still a penalty to be paid.
And the Bible says the wages of sin is death…
What are sin has earned is punishment is separation from God in hell…
So tonight we're talking about salvation and the question that we have tonight is how do we know we are saved???
How can you and I be secure salvation???
How can we know that our salvation is authentic?
Well, let's go ahead and jump into the book of first John and we'll find out…
First John chapter 1, looking at verses five through 10
5 This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.
6 If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.
First and foremost, I want us to see something… God is light and in him there is no dark darkness…
You see whether is light or can't be darkness… Light pushes away darkness that is it's nature…
And darkness is the absence of light… I can turn on the flashlight, but I can't turn on a darkness producing machine because it is the absence of light
Therefore, God is light there there's no darkness in him
But to be in darkness is to be away from the light to be far from the light…
And the second thing we see here is in verse six it says “If we say we have fellowship with him while we are in darkness, we lie….”
It doesn't say, if we claim to follow God's law… If we go to church, but… If we read our Bible…
No, it says if we claim to have relationship with God, but we live far from God there is no relationship…
It would be like me saying that I have a relationship with my wife, but I live in the middle of Russia wilderness and I never call her and never text her and never talk to her…
I'm not a husband to my wife if that's what my life looks like… If I do not live with her, if I do not do life with her if I do not interact talk with her and build our relationship, I don't have a relationship…
If we claim to have a relationship with God and yet we don't talk to him. We don't spend time with him. We don't love him.
We don't love the things he loves, but we love the things he hates
If that is where we are at, we don't have a true saving relationship with God…
If we claim to walk in the light, but it is obvious that we're walking in darkness, we are liars
And the scripture says we do not make a practice of truth…
It would be like if we turned off all the lights in this room, but we left the lights on the stage on and I walked all the way back to the tech booth where it's pitch black and dark and I said oh I'm walking in the light
You would obviously know that I'm lying and that's what the text is saying
But let's look at what it looks like to walk in the light
7 But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.
What this means is, if we are walking with Jesus, we will have relationship with him and with those who love him
If we have relationship with Jesus, if we walk in the light, his sacrifice will cleanse us from all of our sins
Remember, salvation is rescuing us from the punishment we deserve because of sin…
And verse eight says something very important
8 If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
Another way to say this is if you do not see your need for Jesus then you are not saved
If you believe that, you are good enough to earn your way into heaven than you do not have a relationship with God and you are deceived
To be deceived, is to trick yourself into believing a lie
If we say we have not send, we are lying to ourselves… And we do this all the time we do something wrong and we come up with a reason for why we did it wrong and a lie about what we did wrong, and then we begin to believe the lie
This is what happens when we believe that we can earn our salvation… Or even believe that we don't need it because we already are good enough…
But verse number nine tells us what happens if we do know that we have sin if we look at the truth that we have fallen short of God's perfect standard…
9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
To confess is to agree with God about our sin…
It is to say, God I have done wrong. These are the things that I have done and they are wrong according to your word according to your law.
To confess is to say Jesus I need you… I need relationship with you…
And if we confess he is faithful to forgive… He is faithful to cleanse us from our sin
Imagine sin is like a stain… Imagine you're wearing your nicest clothes maybe a white T-shirt and you get covered in motor oil grease stuff that doesn't wash out
That is our life. We are covered in stains from sin and yet Jesus is able to wash us white snow….
So how can we know if we are saved?
The only way to know if we are saved, is to walk in the light, which means to have a relationship with Jesus
To confess our sin and believe in what he did on the cross
16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
and romans 10:9 says…
9 because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
To walk in the light is to recognize our need to confess Jesus as Lord and believe in him as our savior
And this doesn't mean we will be perfect…
But it means that we have someone to go to in our need…
This isn't something that you can do on your own. This isn't me saying try harder be a better Christian this is me saying seek the one who can help you in your need.
To Jesus every day for his help trust in his finished work on the cross…
Salvation is a free gift from God. It's not something you can earn deserve or achieve.
5 I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.
Apart from Jesus, you and I are in the dark… Apart from Jesus, you and I can do nothing… We can't obey God's law… We can't do enough good work to outweigh the bad
So we need him…
And tonight if you haven't believed in Jesus, I want to tell you tonight is the night
Remember if we were pent and believe we will be saved
If we confess that he is Lord, and believe in our heart that God raised him from the dead, we will be saved
And tonight if you are saved, but you've been walking towards the darkness tonight, the night to walk back…
To run towards the light to run towards relationship with Jesus and relationship with his people…
But let's go ahead and pray before we go into our communities…
