SWYC 2010: Stand

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GYC Southwest

For Women: Godly Relationships

Nicole Parker

Chasing the Knight in Tarnished Tinfoil

Water Lily White in a Sewer Pond World

Crystal Fountains and Slimy Cisterns - Part 1

Crystal Fountains and Slimy Cisterns - Part 2

Lord Jesus, thank you so much for sending your Spirit to speak to our hearts.

Lord, I know this message is so important.

It can break the shackles of sin for some of the people here and some of those that are going to be listening on AudioVerse.

Lord, I pray that you will send your spirit to every person who's listening, that you will drive away the forces of darkness, that they may not have power to distract.

Send your angels to be a wall of fire around us, to keep us focused on you, not on ourselves or anything else.

I presented the previous part before, which some of you may have heard on AudioVerse.

But this part is something that builds much more on it.

It was frustrating to be finishing that 1, realizing I had so much more to say, but I just gotta say, okay guys, just work on it.

But this is gonna go more deeply into how do you really base your life on God, your sense of worth and identity, and how do you break out of the ways of thinking that are so normal in our culture.

First, I'd like to point out there are 2 paths.

There are only 2 paths in life that you can follow.

You may make a million different choices on what you're going to do, but your fundamental motives are going to be 1 of 2.

Either you're going to pursue God's glory primarily or you're going to pursue your own glory.

You're going to pursue holiness and glorifying God or you're going to pursue happiness and getting what you want.

And all of us until the day we die struggle between these 2 fundamental motives.

We know that God wants us to be 1 way, but we see in our members another man warring for the supremacy, our self, our carnal nature.

So we've talked before about some of the things that we pursue instead of God, the ways we try to satisfy our thirst by taking matters into our own hands.

And that's a very fundamental part of our nature.

Our generation, more than any generation in the past, loves control.

We love to be able to control the temperature in our house and the air conditioning goes on.

It's only 3 hours drive from here and we get in the car and we're right there.

You know when I was in Africa we found there were a lot of difficulties in churches that were trying to transition from being white to being multicultural.

Because the white people are saying, well, if somebody agrees that they're going to be in charge of Sabbath schools or song service, why don't they just show up at 930 for song service?

If you have a car and you can get to the church on your own and you have a watch, so that tells you what time it is.

But you see in the black culture up until recent generations they didn't even have a watch.

They're waiting for the taxi to come and maybe the bus doesn't come this week or it comes late.

But that's okay because in the black culture they knew if I'm not there on time, some brother will take over.

We're all gonna be there all day long rejoicing in the spirit.

What does it matter whether I'm there at 930 or at 10?

Somebody will take over because there was this brotherhood of we'll all be in there together, and more relaxed rules.

Because the black people weren't used to being in control of their lives, but that drove the white people wild.

You can get in your BMW and get to church on time if you want to.

They just didn't understand the cultural clash.

We are people who are used to being in control.

And when our air conditioning goes out, we have a heart attack.

Forget that people for thousands of years didn't have running water and did just fine.

Lord, how can you allow this to happen to me today?

I've got to get my hair looking good because I have this appointment this morning.

And because we think that we're in control, it really unnerves us when we find out we're not.

When we see the weather forecast, which for thousands of years nobody had, they woke up in the morning and saw what the weather was going to be like.

But now we think, okay I know what the weather is going to be like, now I've got a plot ahead.

We love control, but God wants us to know that He is the 1 who's in control.

In some ways, I think that our journey to heaven is kind of like what I went through when I was climbing Mount Whitney.

This is a picture of climbing on Mount Whitney.

But there was a place, not this place on the trail, but there was a place that I remember there was a very steep drop off.

And a steep drop off, when you look down a steep drop off, imagine that you're walking down a steep drop, where you're walking on a trail and there's a steep drop on both sides.

You're right on that narrow way going up this hiking trail.

This is what it's like on the way to heaven.

There is a narrow way that leads unto life and few there be that find it.

There are 2 sides that you can fall off of, but both of them are similar.

You see the narrow way that leads into life?

We find that by looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.

When we take our eyes off of Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, we start looking at self.

That's the 1 side of the trail you can fall off on.

If I fall into pride, pride makes me feel like I've got it actually pretty much under control.

I do all of these wonderful things and we may feel pretty good about ourselves.

I have a good job, I've got my life pretty much pulled together, I finished college unlike other people around me, I even had great grades and I don't actually look too bad and I'm married to a really nice guy and my kids are healthy, life is good.

I may feel in those circumstances like I'm actually just fine.

And this is what you'll hear often in our culture.

Well, I'm not really, I'm a basically good person.

I may not go to church, but I'm basically a good person, right?

Or we may fall onto the other side of self-reliance.

There's a whole continuum, a range of ways that we can look at ourself.

There's that pride, where we feel like we're just fine.

There's that despair, where we feel like we're not worth anything.

And then we come face to face with the fact that we can't do everything.

At the same time, we're on the way to do that.

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Series

For Women: Godly Relationships

Crystal Fountains and Slimy Cisterns - Part 2

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

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