God's Will for Your Life | Spirit | 4.19..26

Welcome to the Journey Christian Church podcast.

This week's episode is called God's Will for Your Life.

Amen.

You know, as I uh have been working through and preparing this sermon series through the Holy Spirit this year and studying him, and that that has been my prayer and my desire for all of us that we know him and we understand him and that uh uh he works powerfully in our lives.

And so, so thankful that uh we've been on this journey together.

Um, because you know it can be difficult to figure out what is God's will for our lives.

What does God want us to accomplish individually and as a body of believers?

What is his desire for us?

I uh remember several points in my life where I felt called to serve God and uh to minister in his name.

One time was between my eighth grade and freshman year of high school, and I went to a camp, and it was the first time they'd offered this specific kind of camp and very, very poorly attended.

There were only nine campers, and there were uh eight faculty.

There was a youth minister and his wife and a couple of their friends, and then a camp team of four college students from St.

Louis Christian College.

But spending time with these people who are devoting themselves, their lives to ministry, some who had been doing it for years, and some that were just answering that call, I came away from that feeling like, man, I think this is what God is calling me to do.

And another time was when I was in Bible college, I felt called to preach, but I was terrified of public speaking.

I cannot tell you how terrified I was of public speaking.

But I had to do it for a class, and so I got up on stage and I did it, and I experienced God working in the preparation and God working in the delivery, and it was such a encouraging thing to be a part of that again, it was confirmation of the Lord's call.

Now that I have answered call for ministry, and now that I've been doing ministry for 30 years, there are still times when I wonder, is this particular thing that I'm working on what God really wants me to do?

Am I really making the right moves and the right turns in ministry?

There have been times I thought, man, I do not think I am doing God's will at this time.

Like the time I uh preached a wedding in a graveyard when there was a plague of Japanese beetles that were swarming us.

And Japanese beetles, I don't know if you're familiar with them, but they look like ladybugs, but they bite.

And uh they were just all over us.

They were in our hair, they were you know going down into our clothes, and they stink as well.

I mean, it felt like a scene from a horror movie.

And I wondered, man, is this really what God wants me to be doing today?

Or the time when I took a group on a mission trip, and the work project we were assigned to do, it felt very productive.

It felt like we were we were doing some good, that it was going to be like a uh uh shelter for uh battered women, uh, a home, a residence for them to stay in.

But two or three years later, we went back down.

Some some of our church people went back down to visit, and they saw that that the home that we worked on, put a new roof on and everything, had not been used at all in the three years since we had been gone.

And so again, wondered, okay, is that really what God wanted us to do?

Or when we moved Journey Christian Church from Roswell to Woodstock 12 months later to be shut down by a pandemic and kicked out of the school, and then my wife gets sick.

And uh again, so many times just thinking, God, is this really the path that you intended?

Is this what you wanted?

Discovering the will of God, knowing what He wants us to do, is challenging.

But I I I really like what Francis Francis Chan says.

He says, so many people say, I just wish I knew God's will from my life.

And they expect God to like lay out the plan.

But how many, how many of the heroes of our faith in the scripture had a plan?

How many of them did God even give like a five-year plan to?

As far as Abraham goes, God just told him, pack up your family and your things and start walking.

Abraham didn't know where he was going, he didn't know how long he would be there, he didn't know what the cost would be, he didn't know what the rewards would be, he didn't know what he would retire on, how he was going to provide for his family.

He didn't know hardly anything that was coming up.

He just knew that he needed to follow God and walk and go wherever God led him.

And all the men and women of faith, this was their story.

They were expected to walk in faith on a daily basis without this big plan that uh that God made them aware of.

And so Francis Chan writes, I think a lot of us need to forget about God's will for my life.

Just stop asking that question.

He says, God cares more about our response to his spirit's leading today, in this moment, than about what we intend to do next year.

In fact, the decisions we make next year will be profoundly affected by the degree to which we submit to the Spirit right now in today's decisions.

He says it's easy to use the phrase God's will for my life as an excuse for inaction or even disobedience.

It's much less demanding to think about God's will for your future than it is to ask him what he wants you to do in the next ten minutes.

It's safer to commit to following him someday instead of this day.

So then, what is God's will for you in the next 10 minutes?

The good news is he has made it very, very clear in 1 Thessalonians chapter 5, starting in verse 16.

1 Thessalonians 5 · chapter mention

Be joyful always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.

Do not put out the Spirit's fire.

We as Christians can either stoke the Spirit's fire in our lives, or we can quench it, we can douse it and put that flame out.

And if you want to see God moving and working in your life powerfully, if in the next ten minutes and every day this week you remind yourself, what is God's will for my life?

To be joyful always, to pray continually, to give thanks in all circumstances, you will start to see God working powerfully in every area of your life.

Pray with me, please.

Father in heaven, thank you for the clarity that your word provides.

We often get so confused and uh uh misunderstand what it is that you are calling us to, what you want us to do, and we are thankful, Lord, that your word shows us exactly what you desire.

I pray, Father, that you would give us the strength and the determination to make these things a part of our lives every single day, that we might reflect the power of your spirit, the joy of the Lord, that the joy of the Lord would be our strength, that we might be blessed with an attitude of gratitude, and we know the good that comes from even the secular world tells us the good that comes from being grateful.

And that we might be prayerful, always connected to your spirit, always asking you to be the one to guide and lead and to empower our every movement, our every decision.

Guide us, Lord, help us to keep in step with your spirit and not to quench his fire.

We love you, and I pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

From this text, number one, there are attitudes that will keep the Holy Spirit from working in you.

There are attitudes we can have that put out the Holy Spirit's fire in our lives and keeps the Holy Spirit from working powerfully through us.

And there are three that we can see as the opposite of the commands.

A is this griping and growling decreases the Spirit's desire to work in you.

The Holy Spirit, God the Father, wanted so badly to work through the Israelites when he freed them from the land of Egypt.

He wanted so badly to set up this nation as a blessed nation to show all the nations of the world this is what a nation looks like who follows the one true God to make them the healthiest people, the strongest people, the most admired people on the face of the earth.

He wanted so bad to work through them.

But all they wanted to do was gripe and growl and complain.

And it limited what God could do in them and through them.

Here's one example of one of their grumbling sessions in Numbers chapter 21, verse 4, it says they traveled from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea to go around Edom, but the people grew impatient along the way.

Numbers 21:4

I mean, it sounds like a family vacation, right?

It says they spoke against God and against Moses and said, Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the desert?

There's no bread, there's no water, and we detest this miserable food.

God loves when we make lists of complaints.

Don't you think, you know?

It's not just one thing, God.

It's that, you know, my shoes didn't fit quite right today, and my parents were mean to me, and my dog gave a funny look.

And that's the tendency to just make a list of complaints.

Then the Lord said, There, there, it's okay.

You know, let me hear all your complaints and comfort you and tell you, you're right.

You shouldn't be expected to do anything today because your life is horrible.

No, that's not what he says.

Then the Lord sent venomous snakes among them.

They bit the people, and many Israelites died.

What does this have to do with us?

Paul says, that story was written down to be a warning to us.

1 Corinthians chapter 10, verse 9, it says, We Christians should not test the Lord as some of them did, and were killed by snakes.

1 Corinthians 10:9

And do not grumble as some of them did and were killed by the destroying angel.

These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come.

Saying, what that's saying is the Israelites had every reason to be joyful because they were freed from slavery, but they kept wanting to go back to Egypt.

Man, if only we were slaves again.

This is literally what they would say over and over and over again.

How many times do we long for a past that really was not that great?

The past had all kinds of troubles of its own as well.

And pretty much every phase of our lives we were thinking, man, if I could just get to that next phase.

And then we get to that next phase, man, if I could just go back.

And what Paul is saying, the Israelites had every reason to be joyful because they had been freed from slavery, and God was getting ready to give them the best piece of real estate on earth.

This is a place that was so fertile that the grapes, you had to have two guys carry them on a pole.

The clusters of grapes.

A place flowing with milk and honey that was going to be theirs.

If they could just learn to rejoice in the Lord.

And Paul says they had reason to rejoice, but you and I.

On us, the fulfillment of the ages has come.

We have the Spirit of God living in us, we have a risen Savior, we have the hope of heaven, we have the promise that God will walk with us through this life.

We have all guilt and shame removed from us and the righteousness of Christ deposited to our account.

The blessings that we have are innumerable.

And the reasons for joy are great.

When we grumble, it limits what the Holy Spirit can do through us.

How many of you heard have heard David Ring preach?

Have any of you?

A couple people.

David Ring is a powerful preacher.

He uh was born with cerebral palsy.

And um I believe I've got a there, yeah, there he is, a picture of him.

Um so he he was just he is an amazing man of God, and he constantly is preaching about the joy of the Lord.

And his life is hard.

It is difficult for him to walk, it's difficult for him to talk.

When God called him and said, You know, I want you to preach the good news, he said, I said to God when I felt that calling on my heart, I said, But God, I have cerebral palsy.

And he felt like God was saying, Don't you think I know that?

Everything is a struggle for him physically.

Everything.

And yet he exudes the joy of the Lord and demands that Christians do the same.

He's got a great sermon called Thou Shalt Not Belly Ache.

And in that sermon, over and over again, he repeat, he repeats the phrase, I have cerebral palsy.

What's your problem?

We've all got a problem.

We've all got something, but there's nothing so great to take away the joy of the life that we have in Christ and the promises that we have of the future.

We can live in the joy of tomorrow.

We can borrow the joy from the future even when today seems grim.

And I look at somebody like David Ring and I think, man, if he can serve God joyfully, I can too.

Number two, lack of gratitude will raise the Spirit's ire, making him think twice about blessing you.

The command is to give thanks in all circumstances, and a lack of gratitude, we might not even consider that a sin.

It is a sin, but we might not think it's a sin, and if we do, we we might think it's one of those acceptable sins, you know.

Like the kind of sin that a Christian can get away with, and it's not really that big of a deal.

But I want to tell you that it is a much bigger deal to God than it probably is to us.

In fact, God put together his own list.

And it was a list of how horrible things are going to be in the last days when people stop loving each other.

Last days are horrible.

And he describes how terrible the last days is going to be.

And it's kind of surprising some of the things that are in God's list.

In 2 Timothy chapter 3, verse 1 says, Mark this, there will be terrible times in the last days.

2 Timothy 3:1

People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.

Look at the company that lack of gratitude keeps, brutality, treachery, abusiveness.

Maybe it's a bigger deal to God than it is to us.

And a lack of gratitude quenches the spirit's fire.

Puts it out.

See?

Prayerlessness will put out the spirit's fire in you.

All the most powerful Christians that have ever lived have been prayer warriors.

They've been people that realized I can't do anything without Christ.

I can't do anything without him working in me.

If he is not moving, if he is not working, then it is a complete waste of time.

All the most powerful Christians have been prayer warriors.

God wants to bless us as we pray and as we give everything to him in prayer.

He wants to surprise us with answers and show us things beyond our ability to ask or imagine, as Paul said.

David and Lynn Phillips were prayer warriors, our prayer warriors.

And in a time of prayer, they both felt this call that they needed to do something about the suffering of children around the world and the fact that all of these kids, so many kids, have never heard the name of Jesus.

But when you when you think about that, I want to help and fix the problem of suffering kids around the world.

Where do you even begin?

And God laid on their heart, well, maybe we should start a children's relief fund.

But knowing what would come with that, David was terrified.

David is extremely shy, and he knew that if he started this fund, he'd have to go around to different organizations and churches and ask for money.

There's nothing that sounds appealing about going around all these places and speaking in front of them and saying, hey, write me a check.

Give me some money.

And so he just felt like that was not appealing at all.

And yet this burden just continued.

It was persistent on their hearts.

And so they started the Children's Relief Fund in their garage in 1991.

Six weeks after they launched, they got a phone call from a cancer treatment facility in Honduras saying that we have seven kids who will die without this particular medication.

Could you get this medication for us?

And he said, I, you know, I don't have any connections, and told the guy, I don't have any connections.

I don't know any pharmaceutical companies, and I don't know how I'm going to accomplish this.

Nonetheless, the two men prayed about it over the phone, and then he hung up the phone and he didn't even get his hand off the receiver when the phone rang, and it was a pharmaceutical company saying, Do you have need of 48,000 vials of the exact medication that they requested?

And this was worth eight million dollars, which was a lot of money in 1991.

And they said, By the way, we will airlift this medication anywhere in the world.

And so he was not only able to send it to Honduras, but also to 20 other facilities around the world that were in need of that drug.

And it was great validation that they were doing God's will.

They were doing what God wanted them to do, and the Lord was blessing the ministry.

Since that time, they have given over a billion dollars away in foreign aid.

They have set up in 32 different countries with uh with clinics and centers, and uh they have shared the gospel with over 300 million children.

They're prayer warriors.

And they pray about everything.

His friends, David's friends, say that if you talk to him about anything, you can't get away.

Without him saying, let's pray about that.

Let's go to the Lord about that.

Everything.

Let's go to the Lord.

And the Holy Spirit's fire is burning brightly within them, working powerfully through them.

Just like their attitudes that will limit the Holy Spirit's work in a Christian.

Number two is this being grateful, joyful, and prayerful will make you the most magnetic, powerful version of yourself.

You want to know what God's will is for your life?

Today, tomorrow, the next 10 minutes, it's this be joyful always.

Pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances.

And if we do this, God is going to do the rest.

God, nobody who does these three things ever mopes around and saying, why don't I have any friends?

If you're joyful always, prayerful continually, giving thanks in all circumstances, people will flock to you.

The lost will flock to you because they will see there is something very, very different about you, and I want what you have.

I want to be joyful always.

I want to be grateful in all circumstances.

I want to see the power of Christ working in me.

I'm sure all of us probably at one point or another, maybe when we were kids, had dreams of being like this super magnetic person that everybody liked.

You walk into the room and everybody's like, oh, you know, uh Trey's here, you know.

Um maybe, you know, when you were a kid, it was like, ah, I just love to be on the basketball court and hit that game-winning shot and be carried out on the shoulders of my friends in celebration, or or uh, you know, just go to any party and be the life of the party.

But a lot of times what we think of as magnetism, the things that we think of would be magnetic, are not necessarily magnetic.

Maybe our dreams are kind of like uh that dream sequence in Dumb and Dumber, where Jim Carrey was thinking about impressing his in-laws with things that would not be very impressive.

Or like Spider-Man in Spider-Man 3 when he went cool.

Probably our idea of mag magnetism is not actually what is what is magnetic.

But I'll tell you what is gratitude, joy, and complete dependence on God and prayerfulness.

And so uh we have created a magnet for you to put on your fridge to remind you how to be magnetic.

And also remind you every day what is God's will for my life today?

What's God want me to do today?

And so uh I think we've got enough for everybody.

Uh if you want to take one, uh hang it on your fridge.

Um I tell you, if we focus on these things, we will unlock God's will for our lives.

When we're faithful in small things, he will give us greater things, greater tasks, greater ministry to perform.

1 Thessalonians 5, 16 through 19 says, Be joyful always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.

Do not put out the Spirit's fire.

There have been many times when I've thought that I took a wrong turn, only to be surprised to find God waiting at the end of that road with some surprise.

That wedding I did in the graveyard afforded me the opportunity to study the entire book of John in the home of this unchurched couple.

The mission trip that I took, where the work project did not seem very effective, while we were on that mission trip, we learned of an outreach program, and it was a powerful outreach program.

We adopted it to our community, and uh we did it for several years, and and at least one Sunday, uh, this might have happened multiple times, in a town of 1300, more than a thousand people in need came to our church on a Sunday morning for us to minister to them through this program.

And when our church moved from Roswell to Woodstock and were shut down by the pandemic, during the pandemic, I met the preacher of the Church of the Messiah, which was what this church used to be called.

And we talked about bringing the congregations together, and and God opened a door for us to purchase this property and provide for us a way forward.

And so don't count God out.

You just keep being joyful always, praying continually, giving thanks in all circumstances, and see if he won't open up doors that you didn't even know were there.

Don't worry about what God wants for the next 10 years of your life.

Ask him, Lord, what do you want for the next 10 minutes?

And here's the answer.

Be joyful always.

Pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances.

For this is God's will for your life in Christ Jesus.

Do not put out the Spirit's fire.

Pray with me.