Week in Review

This is my father, my stepmother and one of my older brothers. Do you see the family resemblance? That should be the same with our father, God. We should resemble him.

Invest in Your Marriage and Reap the Benefits
Marriage & family, God’s Plan

1. The first step in investing in our marriage is to seek our happiness and joy from the right source.

2. The second step in investing in our marriage is seeking our roles through God.

3. The third step is having a forgiving heart.

There are many that believe you cannot forgive someone once you have been hurt. Yet, we must always be ready to be forgiving. In relationships, especially marriages we will find ourselves letting each other down even when this is not our intention. We will find ourselves hurting those that we love.

What are we to do then when we face these difficulties in marriage? We must first look are ourselves before God. When we were not saved (and even in our Christian walk) we have hurt God. How did we hurt God? Our sinful behavior and disobedience to what is right, hurts God.

When you and I come to the realization that we have hurt God we go to him and ask for forgiveness. God is waiting in anticipation for us to come and ask for forgiveness. So as quickly as we ask, he is ready to forgive.
I remember when I prayed the offender’s prayer regarding my husband. The Lord impressed upon my heart to not only ask God to forgive him for the offense he had done then, but to forgive him for whatever offenses he would do. God showed me why. He showed me that he not only forgave me at the time of salvation but he has forgiveness awaiting me even for those things that I have not done yet. So he let me know that he would be quick to forgive and I should do likewise.

In order for a marriage to have success we must invest in the art of forgiveness. We must be willing to forgive because forgiveness was offered to us. When you are willing to forgive you reap the benefits of how God can bless your marriage as well as the benefits of your spiritual growth in Christ. Some may worry, but what if the offense is so great? My answer to that is, there anything to hard for God? We simply have to be willing to forgive and then let God direct us.

Week in Review

Destined for Greatness

(Preached at Langley Avenue Church of God 2/17/08)

David’s confidence is in God. David sized this giant up and said he is nothing against God. It doesn’t matter his size because God is bigger. If God protected me against the lion and the bear, surely he will protect me against Goliath because it is God he is defying. Now here is where we have the problem.

READ verse 38-40: Then Saul dressed David in his own tunic. He put a coat of armor on him and a bronze helmet on his head. David fastened on his sword over the tunic and tried walking around, because he was not used to them. "I cannot go in these," he said to Saul, "because I am not used to them." So he took them off. Then he took his staff in his hand, chose five smooth stones from the stream, put them in the pouch of his shepherd's bag and, with his sling in his hand, approached the Philistine.

David was ready to go up against this foe, but the king thought he needed to put his armor on David. What he did instead was burden David with “his armor” and not allow the armor God gave David to work for David. See what happened is the King decided David’s weapons were not good enough. That’s true today. We must be careful about how we look at the generation coming behind. We cannot look at their weapons and decided they are not good enough, or that they need our armor. Let me ask a question, if you take your armor off to put it on somebody else, what is protecting you, where is the armor you should be wearing for the battle you should be in? Scripture says put on the whole armor of God and that is speaking to what you should be doing for yourself. It doesn’t say, put John and Mary’s armor on for them so they can be ready. If you take your protection off, you are in trouble. But we must understand, David had all he needed.

READ verse 49-52: Reaching into his bag and taking out a stone, he slung it and struck the Philistine on the forehead. The stone sank into his forehead, and he fell facedown on the ground. So David triumphed over the Philistine with a sling and a stone; without a sword in his hand he struck down the Philistine and killed him. David ran and stood over him. He took hold of the Philistine's sword and drew it from the scabbard. After he killed him, he cut off his head with the sword. When the Philistines saw that their hero was dead, they turned and ran. Then the men of Israel and Judah surged forward with a shout and pursued the Philistines to the entrance of Gath and to the gates of Ekron. Their dead were strewn along the Shaaraim road to Gath and Ekron.

·What is the message God wants you to see from the life of David? David had a calling, a purpose placed on his life in the womb of his mother way before he met the priest that would anoint him. David when he was anointed received the purpose and the anointing of God. God still does the same. When you accept his son’s gift of salvation you receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. That is what the oil represents God’s presence through his spirit. At that very moment that which God has purposed in you when he formed you in your mothers womb, can now begin to grow. He speaks into your life what his purpose is and he will grow that seed in you until it comes to be what he wants. David accepted his calling to be a king even though he did not become the actual king at that moment. He had to go through some things, some processes before that could happen. You will have to go through some growing processes so that which God has ordained for you can come to fulfillment. David was confident in what God was going to do, that is why he was able to stand up to that giant because he knew that God had not finished with him and surely he would have to bring him through in order to fulfill his purpose he had for him. You can have that same assurance when you face those giants, those things that seem too big to face, that God will give you the victory, because he is not finished with yet. You can have the assurance that your weapons are just what you need to face the giants in life. That is because they are the weapons God has given to you.

The warning to us the church is we need to be obedient like Samuel and speak words into the lives of our young people (and this goes to the young Christian as well) that will water that seed. Samuel didn’t see it at first, but he did what he was supposed to any way. We need to stop looking at our young peoples weapons and thinking, “they only have useless rocks”, they need what I have. We have too many “kings”, too many Saul’s that think they are the authority and are writing off our young people as being unable to stand in the battle. What we don’t understand is they do not have useless rocks; they have giant killers in their hands. Young people whatever the gift God has given you is not useless. It doesn’t matter if the naysayers do not see it; your weapons are not useless. Don’t worry about those that talk about you like David’s brother did. See David was not there on his own, his father had sent him there with provisions for his brother. Your Father, God wants to send you into some places with provisions that he has given to you to go and see about your brothers and sisters, and in your obedience to him, some may talk about you. Go any way and simply do as David did, turn you back to the negative stuff.