Where is God in your response ; Details changed my life?
Title: Where is God in your response?
Text: Matthew 1: 18-25
Theme: There comes a critical moment where we must respond by choosing faith.
Goal: Challenge our community to look at where they are living in their life. What do the details of their life tell them? In their critical moment choose to operate by faith live in the truth.
Introduction
Me: orientation: (find common ground with the audience)
There are responses in my life where in truth God isn’t there at all.
We: Identification (Make it clear that you struggle)
The struggle is to not make Christ part of our life but all of our life.
· Swimming… person asking for help… thoughts…
To live and walk the Christian life is both a battle and struggle. If reality be told there are few willing to live by faith in the walk.
Every day we struggle to follow Christ, to live in the action of faith. To know how to share, build relationships, serve and sacrifice.
God: illumination (The goal here is to resolve the tension by pointing people to God)
Sterilize
· Destroy microorganism: to kill all living microorganisms in something in order to make it incapable of causing infection
· Make infertile: to stop a person or animal from reproducing, e.g. by surgical removal or alteration of reproductive organs
We sterilize Christianity, the birth, death so that we safely look at it from a distance under a veil.
When in reality this was an action passions moving journey of faith, hardship and loss to gain that which is above all the most important.
I. Details can change your life.
A. Our details in life
1. Tell the stories about the two men on disability, and how they lived it out.
2. Economy fear or faith and everyone around you is playing with it.
B. Joseph and Mary Details
19Because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.
9And her [promised] husband Joseph, being a just and upright man and not willing to expose her publicly and to shame and disgrace her, decided to repudiate and dismiss (divorce) her quietly and secretly. ( amplified)
1. That would have been my first thought
2. He had every reason to do this, he didn’t sign up for this he wasn’t sure what was real.
3. He was a man of faith, he hungered and sought God. While we have no words well one just. That world describes him as a man of his day who hungers and seeks God.
· What word describes you?
· Amazing what funerals have to say ( loved golf, good business man, good family man… what about Jesus in your life.)
C. Christian details
1. What will be said about your life and faith in the funeral?
2. Will it be said that you loved God that you were truly being willing to step out the edge.
Will you be like Joshua… saw God in the promised land
In the end said as for me and my house we will serve the Lord.
II. Truth should influence the response
A. What is truth?
1. Listening to a live Bible Study on the internet arguing over scripture proving the virgin birth.
2. Scripture briefly talks about it really in a few passages in Luke & Matthew, but Mark and John are silent
3. You too will have to choose to believe this as Joseph and Mary did by faith
B. Do we live in it?
1. The real question is will you live in it?
2. Describe Joseph’s living in truth
C. Is the truth relevant?
III. We are Mary & Joseph
A. The critical moment is here
1. Like all those who have come before you…
14 "Now fear the LORD and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your forefathers worshiped beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD. 15 But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD." Joshua 24
B. Response will be beyond words
1. It will mean more than a busy life… If Christ be lord make him first
2. It is the choice of Mary & Joseph… must be ours
C. Faith will involve action
1. We are too busy for Bible Study, church, service.. what is most import is where w begin.
2. Jesus said let the dead bury the dead… follow me
You: Application (tell people what to do with what they have heard)
We will need to be like Joseph and Mary. There is this moment where we will have to decide what is truth. Our response will be vital to our faith and how we live out our lives.
· Will I follow God living out faith or will I live my way and hope for the best.
· Will I respond in faith or choose to live another way
· Will my life bring God Glory or will I choose to live for me
We Inspiration is an emotion identify, vision casting