Sound Mind Set

Today, our Scripture is 1 Peter 4:8-13 … Most important of all, continue to show deep love for each other, for love covers a multitude of sins. Cheerfully share your home with those who need a meal or a place to stay. God has given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts. Use them well to serve one another. Do you have the gift of speaking? Then speak as though God himself were speaking through you. Do you have the gift of helping others? Do it with all the strength and energy that God supplies. Then everything you do will bring glory to God through Jesus Christ. All glory and power to him forever and ever! Amen. Dear friends, don’t be surprised at the fiery trials you are going through, as if something strange were happening to you. Instead, be very glad—for these trials make you partners with Christ in his suffering, so that you will have the wonderful joy of seeing his glory when it is revealed to all the world. (NLT) What gifts do you see in your life that you know God uses?What service do you do that you just feel the presence of God when You are involved in it? It just feels peaceful to you, almost as if you can sense God smiling?What do you do that you can tell impacts others even more than it affects you?Listen once again to today’s passage in The Message Bible … Everything in the world is about to be wrapped up, so take nothing for granted. Stay wide-awake in prayer. Most of all, love each other as if your life depended on it. Love makes up for practically anything. Be quick to give a meal to the hungry, a bed to the homeless—cheerfully. Be generous with the different things God gave you, passing them around so all get in on it: if words, let it be God’s words; if help, let it be God’s hearty help. That way, God’s bright presence will be evident in everything through Jesus, and he’ll get all the credit as the One mighty in everything—encores to the end of time. Oh, yes! Friends, when life gets really difficult, don’t jump to the conclusion that God isn’t on the job. Instead, be glad that you are in the very thick of what Christ experienced. This is a spiritual refining process, with glory just around the corner.Did you catch the phrase: “Love each other as if your life depended on it.”? Who do you love like that? Who needs you to love them like that?Who needs your words? Who needs your “hearty help”? Who needs some of God’s bright presence in their life with you being the one who delivers it?Our community will be made up of those who love us, but also those we need to love.Like the last verse said: This is a spiritual refining process, with glory just around the corner.Let’s pray together: “Father, from the love I give to the trials I walk through, help me to reflect Your presence. Help me to love like my life depends on it—just like You do. As above, so below.”

Today, our passage is James 5:13 through 16, 19 and 20.Are any of you suffering hardships? You should pray. Are any of you happy? You should sing praises. Are any of you sick? You should call for the elders of the church to come and pray over you, anointing you with oil in the name of the Lord. Such a prayer offered in faith will heal the sick, and the Lord will make you well. And if you have committed any sins, you will be forgiven. Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results. … My dear brothers and sisters, if someone among you wanders away from the truth and is brought back, you can be sure that whoever brings the sinner back from wandering will save that person from death and bring about the forgiveness of many sins. (NLT) This entire passage from praying to confessing has to do with being involved in a community of believers who trust one another, desire to help one another, and will even go the extra mile to rescue others.Confessing our sins to God is a given. But having someone to get real with about the evils and struggles of our own hearts can accelerate our spiritual growth. Especially as we create accountability and pray for one another.Here’s The Message Bible’s take on this passage … Are you hurting? Pray. Do you feel great? Sing. Are you sick? Call the church leaders together to pray and anoint you with oil in the name of the Master. Believing-prayer will heal you, and Jesus will put you on your feet. And if you’ve sinned, you’ll be forgiven—healed inside and out. Make this your common practice: Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed. The prayer of a person living right with God is something powerful to be reckoned with. … My dear friends, if you know people who have wandered off from God’s truth, don’t write them off. Go after them. Get them back and you will have rescued precious lives from destruction and prevented an epidemic of wandering away from God.Where do you go when you’re hurting?Where do you go when something great happens?Where do you go when you just can’t seem to get rid of something that’s hurting you?Who would come after you if you wandered away from your faith?Who would you go after if you saw them wandering away?Whoever’s names you answered with … that, my friend, is your faith community.Let’s pray together: “Heavenly Father, thank You for those who would work to rescue me and those You have placed in my life that I would rescue. Help me to surrender more to You each day so I can gain everyone in my community that You desire to be in it. As above, so below.

Today, our Scripture is Romans 12:1-5 …And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him. Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect. Because of the privilege and authority God has given me, I give each of you this warning: Don’t think you are better than you really are. Be honest in your evaluation of yourselves, measuring yourselves by the faith God has given us. Just as our bodies have many parts and each part has a special function, so it is with Christ’s body. We are many parts of one body, and we all belong to each other. (NLT) We’re all grateful that God no longer requires any sort of physical sacrifice for the forgiveness of sin, right? But yet, sacrifice is still a crucial part of following Jesus. In fact, it’s an everyday event. From the desires of our bodies, minds, hearts, and attitudes, we have to give up what we want if we are going to honor God and others. Notice what this sacrifice gains us … we realize we are part of a greater Body of believers, a community of people who belong to and function together.Listen once again to this passage as I read excerpts from The Message Bible… So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. … we are like the various parts of a human body. Each part gets its meaning from the body as a whole, not the other way around. The body we’re talking about is Christ’s body of chosen people. Each of us finds our meaning and function as a part of his body. … So since we find ourselves fashioned into all these excellently formed and marvelously functioning parts in Christ’s body, let’s just go ahead and be what we were made to be, without enviously or pridefully comparing ourselves with each other, or trying to be something we aren’t.Today, what do you need to sacrifice?What do you need to embrace?What do you need to readily recognize that God is wanting to tell you about your life, your community, your role in His kingdom and Body?Let’s pray together: “Heavenly Father, take my everyday, ordinary life—my sleeping, eating, going to work, and walking around life. I give myself to You. I embrace all You have for me. I ask You to bring out the best in me, for You and for the sake of those You desire for me to reach. As above, so below.”

We’ll begin our week with Philippians 2:1-5 … Is there any encouragement from belonging to Christ? Any comfort from his love? Any fellowship together in the Spirit? Are your hearts tender and compassionate? Then make me truly happy by agreeing wholeheartedly with each other, loving one another, and working together with one mind and purpose. Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves. Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too. You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had. (NLT) Today’s passage starts and ends with Jesus. In the community united in Christ, we can receive encouragement, comfort, fellowship, tenderness, compassion, agreement, and humility as we work together in one mind and purpose … and here’s the real key—with the same attitude that Christ Jesus had.Listen now to this same passage in The Message Bible … If you’ve gotten anything at all out of following Christ, if his love has made any difference in your life, if being in a community of the Spirit means anything to you, if you have a heart, if you care—then do me a favor: Agree with each other, love each other, be deep-spirited friends. Don’t push your way to the front; don’t sweet-talk your way to the top. Put yourself aside, and help others get ahead. Don’t be obsessed with getting your own advantage. Forget yourselves long enough to lend a helping hand.  Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself.As our culture becomes increasingly self-absorbed and self-focused, these Christlike qualities are going to become more and more attractive to our own hearts, to those in the faith, and those outside.What phrase jumped out at you today?I love the idea of “deep-spirited friends.” When we choose to put ourselves aside and help others get ahead, we can experience a community of deep-spirited friends. We will find those folks we can trust, lean on, count on, and do life with.Let’s pray together: “Heavenly Father, thank You for the kind of heavenly comfort, encouragement, and fellowship we can have in You. Help me to be the kind of friend in the faith that today’s passage talks about and be a part of Your community that can change the world. As above, so below.”

Today is our final day of a week spent challenging ourselves to place all our confidence not in ourselves or others but in God.Let’s go back to King David in the Psalms and look at a declaration He wrote for his life that we too need to choose to make:Listen to chapter 118, verses 5 thru 9 … In my distress I prayed to the Lord, and the Lord answered me and set me free. The Lord is for me, so I will have no fear. What can mere people do to me? Yes, the Lord is for me; he will help me. I will look in triumph at those who hate me. It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in people. It is better to take refuge in the Lord … (NLT) Think about the relationship that brings you the most stress right now, even someone that you fear or whose behavior invokes fear. A circumstance that brings you fear. How can this passage encourage you, bring you confidence, offer you safety, set you free?Listen to this passage in The Message Bible, but this time, I’m going to add down to verse 16.Pushed to the wall, I called to God; from the wide open spaces, he answered. God’s now at my side and I’m not afraid; who would dare lay a hand on me? God’s my strong champion; I flick off my enemies like flies. Far better to take refuge in God than trust in people; Far better to take refuge in God than trust in celebrities. … I was right on the cliff-edge, ready to fall, when God grabbed and held me. God’s my strength, he’s also my song, and now he’s my salvation. Hear the shouts, hear the triumph songs in the camp of the saved? “The hand of God has turned the tide! The hand of God is raised in victory! The hand of God has turned the tide!” (MSG) Say this declaration with me:The Lord is for me, …so I will have no fear. …What can mere people do to me? …Yes, the Lord is for me; he will help me. … Can you hang onto that thought and place your faith in Him with that statement? “The Lord is for me so I will have no fear.” And to do that, your confidence will have to be in your Father, not in yourself. And as have hopefully seen this week, that’s a really good decision.Let’s pray together: “Heavenly Father, You are for me and I will have no fear. With You, what can anyone do to me? You are for me and I believe and have confidence that You will help me. As above, so below.”

Today in our focus on placing our confidence in God, we’ll look at the Book of Hebrews. Again, we see the promises of God that offers us an eternal hope we can fully rely upon. We don’t trust in a story or a fairy tale but in a Person who delivered a plan for all humankind.Listen to Hebrews 6:16-20 …Now when people take an oath, they call on someone greater than themselves to hold them to it. And without any question that oath is binding. God also bound himself with an oath, so that those who received the promise could be perfectly sure that he would never change his mind. So God has given both his promise and his oath. These two things are unchangeable because it is impossible for God to lie. Therefore, we who have fled to him for refuge can have great confidence as we hold to the hope that lies before us. This hope is a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls. It leads us through the curtain into God’s inner sanctuary. Jesus has already gone in there for us. (NLT) It’s tough for us to believe the concept of never changing your mind, right?It’s hard for us to imagine the idea of it being impossible to lie, isn’t it?But doesn’t the hope of a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls sound amazing?All made possible by Jesus who went first to lead us into a relationship with the Father.Listen once again to today’s passage in The Message Bible … When people make promises, they guarantee them by appeal to some authority above them so that if there is any question that they’ll make good on the promise, the authority will back them up. When God wanted to guarantee his promises, he gave his word, a rock-solid guarantee—God can’t break his word. And because his word cannot change, the promise is likewise unchangeable. We who have run for our very lives to God have every reason to grab the promised hope with both hands and never let go. It’s an unbreakable spiritual lifeline, reaching past all appearances right to the very presence of God where Jesus, running on ahead of us, has taken up his permanent post … Of the Scriptures we have read this week, including this powerful passage today, what have you heard that assures and reassures you that God is 100% confidence-worthy?Why would placing all your confidence in God and God alone be the best decision you could ever make?What do you need to do to do, or let go of, to place all your trust in Him?Let’s pray together: “Father, thank You that You will not and cannot break Your promises. Thank You that You are truth and therefore cannot and will not lie. Thank You that your hope is a strong and trustworthy anchor for my soul. As above, so below.”

One of the greatest barriers to salvation itself can be mistakenly believing that we are somehow better than others, and that somehow guarantees Heaven. How many times have we heard someone say, “Well, I’m a good person”? But even after salvation, comparison to others and placing confidence in our ability to do good works can quickly get us off-track in our faith.In Luke 18, Jesus used a parable to show us how God feels about confidence in our own righteousness.Then Jesus told this story to some who had great confidence in their own righteousness and scorned everyone else: “Two men went to the Temple to pray. One was a Pharisee, and the other was a despised tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed this prayer: ‘I thank you, God, that I am not like other people—cheaters, sinners, adulterers. I’m certainly not like that tax collector! I fast twice a week, and I give you a tenth of my income.’ “But the tax collector stood at a distance and dared not even lift his eyes to heaven as he prayed. Instead, he beat his chest in sorrow, saying, ‘O God, be merciful to me, for I am a sinner.’ I tell you, this sinner, not the Pharisee, returned home justified before God. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” (vv. 9-14 NLT) The Pharisees were considered the mega-church pastors of the day, looked up to and revered for their spirituality. Tax collectors were looked at like we view sleazy, ambulance-chasing attorneys. For Jesus to flip this paradigm on its head was very controversial. Both men prayed but one focused on others’ sin, while the other man focused on his own sin. One didn’t think he needed God and the other desperately did.Being honest, don’t many of us go back and forth between feeling really good about ourselves and flirting with the thinking of the Pharisee or being very convicted and relating to the tax collector?One of the many paradoxes of the Gospel is that true confidence can only be found in humility. In knowing God, we discover who we are and find our identity in surrender to Him.Let’s pray together: “Heavenly Father, thank You for Jesus’ teaching, as controversial as it was then and now. Thank You that Your truth is a paradox to this world. Help me to discover my confidence as I humble myself before You. As above, so below.”

This week our focus is on placing our confidence in God, which of course means increasing our faith in Him. The Bible is filled with promises to us, offering the great consequences of a life of trusting Him. Listen to Jeremiah 17:7-8 … “But blessed are those who trust in the Lord and have made the Lord their hope and confidence. They are like trees planted along a riverbank, with roots that reach deep into the water. Such trees are not bothered by the heat or worried by long months of drought. Their leaves stay green, and they never stop producing fruit. (NLT) Trust … Hope … Confidence. Several times in Scripture the authors used a tree planted by a river as a metaphor for our lives. For the weary traveler, a large, healthy tree beside a river meant protection from the elements and provision for thirst. The very reason the tree could provide shelter is because its roots were not reliant on the changing weather but on the constant flow of the river. Such a great analogy for our lives rooted in God.Using this metaphor, is there heat or drought that is causing you to struggle, to wither? What’s the source of that issue?What places in your life would you connect to blessing, as in having green leaves and lasting fruit? What’s the source of that blessing?How can you get your roots into the river and not be so reliant on the weather? How can you go deeper with God and place less confidence in the things of the world?Let’s pray together: “Heavenly Father, thank You for all Your promises. Thank You that You clearly tell us how life can be when we trust You. Help me to grow deep roots in my faith and place more and more of my confidence in You. As above, so below.”

As we get started on our topic for this week, let me ask: how many times have you sensed you are starting to build up confidence in who you are and how you are doing, only for someone to do something or say something that rips the rug right out of from under you? In a heartbeat, we feel like all our confidence is gone. That is exactly why understanding this week’s truth as a believer is so crucial to our spiritual and emotional health.Listen to Psalm 146, verses 3 through 10 … Don’t put your confidence in powerful people; there is no help for you there. When they breathe their last, they return to the earth, and all their plans die with them. But joyful are those who have the God of Israel as their helper, whose hope is in the Lord their God. He made heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them. He keeps every promise forever. He gives justice to the oppressed and food to the hungry. The Lord frees the prisoners. The Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are weighed down. The Lord loves the godly. The Lord protects the foreigners among us. He cares for the orphans and widows, but he frustrates the plans of the wicked. The Lord will reign forever. He will be your God, O Jerusalem, throughout the generations. Praise the Lord! (NLT) For many of us, a great deal of our personal pain and emotional baggage has come from placing too much confidence in other people. And certainly the wrong people. Others did something or failed to do something that negatively affected our trust. Today’s passage warns us to be cautious and gives us so many amazing reasons to get our confidence from our Creator.Listen once again to this passage in The Message Bible … Don’t put your life in the hands of experts who know nothing of life, of salvation life. Mere humans don’t have what it takes; when they die, their projects die with them. Instead, get help from the God of Jacob, put your hope in God and know real blessing! God made sky and soil, sea and all the fish in it. He always does what he says—he defends the wronged, he feeds the hungry. God frees prisoners—he gives sight to the blind, he lifts up the fallen. God loves good people, protects strangers, takes the side of orphans and widows, but makes short work of the wicked. God’s in charge—always. Zion’s God is God for good! Hallelujah!As you think through your life right now, is there anywhere you are “putting your life in the hands of experts” when your trust and confidence really needs to be handed over to God? It’s actually amazing how trusting Him can bring us wisdom and discernment that will also improve our relationship with others.Let’s pray together: “Heavenly Father, heal my hurts where I have placed my trust and confidence in the wrong people. Increase my faith and trust in You and lead me to the right relationships in Your community. As above, so below.”

Wholeness was our state in the Garden but then the enemy of God came along and, through disobedience, robbed us all of that God-given state. The spiritual battle for us every day is choosing God over that same enemy, just as everyone in the Bible had to deal with as well.Listen to 1 Peter 5:6-11 …So humble yourselves under the mighty power of God, and at the right time he will lift you up in honor. Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you. Stay alert! Watch out for your great enemy, the devil. He prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. Stand firm against him, and be strong in your faith. Remember that your family of believers all over the world is going through the same kind of suffering you are. In his kindness God called you to share in his eternal glory by means of Christ Jesus. So after you have suffered a little while, he will restore, support, and strengthen you, and he will place you on a firm foundation. All power to him forever! Amen. (NLT) Listen for two things: the commands and the promises.Did you catch them? Let’s review, all under the concept of wholeness and holiness.The command? Humble yourself. … The promise? God will lift you up in His time.The command: Give your worries to God. … The promise: God will care for you.The command: Stand firm against the enemy. … The promise: God’s calling will bring you into His eternal glory.The command: Endure suffering. … The promise: God will restore, support, and strengthen you.Wholeness is found on the firm foundation only God can provide.Let’s pray together: “Heavenly Father, thank You for offering wholeness through holiness. Thank You for Your commands for my obedience and Your promises giving me hope. As above, so below.”