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Living Hope SDA Church

Christian Martin

Faith and Works

My message today is entitled Faith and Works, the 2 sides of the Christian life.

Let's bow our heads together as we acknowledge him.

Father in heaven, we take this moment to recognize that you are the God who speaks through your word.

And this is your moment, Lord, to speak to us through the preaching of your word.

You've already touched our hearts through testimony, through dedication, through prayer, through praise.

And now Lord, do so once again through your word.

May you tune our ears to listen to that still small voice that speaks to us today.

Everything you have belongs to God and comes from Him.

Every faculty you have, from your capacity to think and your ability to move.

Everything you have, your very breath, all your abilities, all, All belongs to God.

You could consistently and exclusively devote every moment of your life to God, to serving Him.

You could give him of your time from Friday evening vespers to Sabbath school, to the worship service, and then to afternoon ministries, and then a church social Saturday night.

And then on Sunday, a ministry in the morning, ministry in the afternoon.

Then on Monday, you got your Zoom Bible study.

Then on Tuesday, you got your in-person Bible study.

And then Friday, now you know why they say thank God it's Friday but only for the cycle to just start all over again.

You can give a generous offering, dedicate your life to God, dedicate your wife to God, dedicate your husband to God, dedicate your child to God, dedicate your home to God, dedicate your car to God, give Him your talents, give Him everything.

You can give God your time, your energy, your enthusiasm, even then you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense already His.

It's like a child going to their father and saying, Dad, Dad, Give me $50.

Yeah, give me $50 so I can go and buy you a birthday gift.

Give me $50 so I can go and buy you a birthday gift.

Of course, the father does and is very happy with his child's gift when it is given to him.

You know, even the faith we exercise to believe in God, even faith was given to us as a gift, as a gift from God.

The Apostle Peter writes of a faith that was obtained, a faith that was received, a faith that was given to us.

Paul writes to the Romans that God has given us an amount of faith.

In other words, all that we have done for God, all that we do for God, all that we will ever do for God, has been, will be, and is already his.

And the moment someone fully understands this truth, when this becomes the ultimate reality and you fully grasp it and accept it and believe it, God can then really get to work.

Because until then, until you've come to this conviction, this conclusion.

Until then, what hindered God from doing his work in us was our pathetic attempts to impress Him.

You know, it's sad, the amount of time and energy we waste trying to impress God.

We try our best not to be as bad as the other sinners.

We try to impress God with our church attendance.

We try to impress God by our church activities.

We impress God by going to prayer meeting every single Wednesday.

We impress God by signing up for another Bible study.

We praise God by our giving and our tithe and offerings.

We praise God with our afternoon outreach and the hours we dedicate to outreach.

Little do we realize that all those things are meaningless to him.

Because they were already his to begin with.

After all, Isaiah chapter 64 verse 6 plainly says, But we are like an unclean thing, And all our righteousness are like filthy rags.

We will find ourselves trying to impress God when we don't believe or when we forget that what he has given us as a gift is a gift that was already his to begin with.

When we forget that, we get into this mentality that wait till God finds out what I'm about to give him.

Wait till God finds out what I'm about to do for him.

Wait till God finds out how good I am and what I do and what I give.

But when we believe, when we remember that every good gift, every good gift and every perfect gift is from above and that's something we can impress God with.

We finally come to a place where we have a sense of our nothingness.

Then we come to recognize that we have nothing to offer God.

When we recognize our nothingness, we make way for God to be our all.

You see, what God takes notice of first is not how we act outwardly, which is only what we can take notice of ourselves.

And you think that that's what God notices first?

Instead, rather, God takes notice first of how we will relate to him inwardly in the heart.

First Samuel chapter 16, verse 7 says, For the Lord God does not see man as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance but the Lord looks at what?

It's what we notice first, it's what we see, it's what we recognize.

And Christians often debate as to whether 1 is more important than the other.

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Faith and Works

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