Element Christian Church

For those who love Christ, righteousness is the standard. But there are no human means to achieve righteousness. The Church has long specialized in piety and chastity and temperance in the futile effort to attain righteousness apart from God. God called Abraham a friend and declared him righteous, but why? Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. Once again, in His loving pursuit of sinners, God has set the standard then graciously provided the means to achieve it. What will happen in God’s church when His people stop mimicking righteousness and start living it?

In Genesis 31 we see Christ moving, changing, and growing Jacob and his family, while Laban continues to seek only his own selfishness. The inevitable happens when Jacob and his family move away from the abusive Laban. God uses the last 20 years of suffering to produce great character and faith in Jacob, just like He uses the hardships in our life to mold us into the people He made us to be. It is often through times of suffering that our faith is restored and our hope renewed. Through our tough life experiences the goal of scripture is that we should be drawn to repentance because we understand that God is good. Our goal is not to have our problems disappear, but to be more like Christ. We give thanks to God and repent of sin because Jesus forgives, Jesus restores, and Jesus heals.

God has one plan for this entire creation: He is called Jesus. When Jesus came He did not seek His own comfort, He sought to save us from ourselves and our sin. Yet in saving us, Jesus doesn’t leave us to ourselves, He calls us to become the church; a people who are called out to be His people, His priests, His ambassadors, His blessing.

Jesus came as King and Lord to conquer Satan, sin, and death. This family (Jacob’s family) becomes the family of promise and it is solely due to grace. These people are not our heroes; they are our examples. We don’t put our faith in them; we put our faith in JESUS.

What happens to Jacob is not karma, it is growth that is forced upon him by a God that loves him more than Jacob could imagine. God is growing him up, teaching him the error of his ways, and building him into the man that God needs Jacob to be.

James Dunn “The character of Abraham’s faith is determined by the character of the God in whom he believed.”

We must be a people who will choose this day who we will serve. Will we serve all the idols we have made with our hands, or will we serve the Lord, the God of scripture...the only God who is alive, knows us by name, and can call us to be who we are supposed to be?

Isaac gets tested over and over again, yet we see God remains faithful and trustworthy. We should be a people striving to live like Isaac (in some ways) and honor God with everything He has given us.

We must understand that everything that is not Jesus is just Lentils. We must understand that God has given you and I a birthright and says “don’t give up…live your destiny as a child of God.” Don’t give up and accept anything less than Jesus in your life.

No matter what our history is, Jesus came to redeem and restore; that’s grace. Jesus died and rose for His bride. There is no sin in the world He lacks the power to forgive. There is no regret anyone has that He lacks the power to redeem.

Matthew Henry “If therefore our houses be houses of the Lord, we shall for that reason love home, reckoning our daily devotion the sweetest of our daily delights; and our family-worship the most valuable of our family-comforts...A church in the house will be a good legacy, nay, it will be a good inheritance, to be left to your children after you.”

God is the watcher; we are the watchee(s). We are the kind of beings who need to be watched over. If no one is watching over our little life then we are doomed. That is why God is also called our watcher.

Abraham learned through loss, joy, pain, and hope that their truly is only one hope… and that hope doesn’t make everything turn out the way we want. People still die, the world may seem to pass you by…but My AND YOUR help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth…

God’s original promises to Abraham was not based on Abraham’s specific actions in carrying out the test, but rather was based on the faith and obedience of Abraham that showed through this test.

Soren Kierkegaard “The press of busyness is like a charm. It’s power swells…it reaches out seeking always to lay hold of ever younger victims so that childhood or youth are scarcely allowed the quiet and the retirement in which the Eternal may unfold a divine growth.”

God makes promises to Abraham that he would have a son. Abraham finally gets his son, but he has another son who was born of another woman (bad decision, you can listen to audio of that message at http://goo.gl/w0oQaweek 27). Today, this distrust of God has ramifications that effect the world even unto today.

The complete picture of an intercessor is found and fulfilled in Jesus. He was God and Man, yet died in our place and rose three days later and now lives as an intercessor between us and God forever.

When God speaks, He fulfills what He says. This is a statement you hear a lot at Element, so much so that we almost take it for granted and almost always over look the very simple and yet extraordinary thought: THAT GOD ACTUALLY DOES SPEAK.

Jesus, as God, can bring hope to any situation; even Lot’s and even yours.

It’s easy to condemn the people of Sodom and Gomorrah when we read this story. Pride, injustice, sexual immorality, and violence were the ways of their people. Whether in great ways or small ways, these are not the ways of the kingdom of God. We are called to forsake the ways of Sodom and Gomorrah, both great and small, and flee to Jesus to save us from the wrath to come.