Today I want to talk about the discipline of fasting, not because I love to fast but because of its value and importance. First of all I am not an expert on fasting. I have tried and failed so many times. I have also tried and by the grace of God been able to hold fast! I find it very humbling because when I fast from food, I realize how much of my life revolves around food and how often my flesh wants to eat! Fasting is essentially an exercise in dying to self. It is not my favorite discipline of the heart but I do appreciate its worth and I commend it to you.

Prepare for Life

Fasting

Today I want to talk about worship. Taking the time to worship God each week is so important. You can worship in church, you can worship at home alone. Worship does not have to be reserved for one hour on Sunday morning, you can turn in your heart to God’s heart in worship when you wake up in the middle of the night. Worship can be part of your lifestyle.

Worship

How do we develop strong vibrant spirits? Just as in the natural we need to exercise in order to to strengthen our bodes, so in the spiritual there are exercises we can do that will strengthen our spirits and deepen our relationship with the Lord. In the words of Galatians, we sow to the Spirit. These exercises are tiny daily seeds we sow as we walk on the ancient paths with the Lord. They are sometimes called spiritual disciplines. I like to think of them as Disciplines of the Heart.

Disciplines of the Heart

We have spent the past several weeks getting to know the Holy Spirit, learning about who He is and what He does. But there is another spirit who often gets overlooked and ignored—your spirit, the human spirit. The Bible teaches we have a triune nature — spirit, soul and body. I Thessalonians 5:23 lays this out for us, “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Holy Spirit, Part 11

As we walk on the ancient paths with the Lord we have a guide, the Holy Spirit. He leads us and helps us stay on the ancient paths. He knows about the twists and turns in the road ahead and He will be there to lead us through. His companionship is a treasure that means we will never be alone or forsaken by God. He teaches us and comforts us. We would be like an orphan if it weren’t for the Holy Spirit.

Holy Spirit, Part 10

Holy Spirit, Part 9

A normal man can walk or run 15 miles a day. What we see around us are not normal people but average people who think if they walk to the fridge they have gotten their daily exercise! Just because we all aren’t running great distances doesn’t mean that it is not normal to do so. We have learned to settle for average which is really subnormal. I think the book of Acts depicts the normal Christian life. Just because we don’t see healings and miracles, signs and wonders in our daily lives doesn’t mean that it is not normal to do so. We have just settled. So today I want to look at an obscure man in the book of Acts and see what we can learn from his life about normal Christianity. His name is Ananias. You may not remember Ananias because he is not a lead character in the Acts narrative, he is only mentioned in a few verses in two chapters. You might easily overlook him. He was not an apostle or an elder of the early church. If he were alive today he would not be a blue check. He was just a regular guy. We may be able to identify with him and that is why I want to focus upon him.

Holy Spirit, Part 8

Many of you may be waiting on the Lord right now… waiting to hear a doctor’s report, waiting for a wayward child turn back from walking away, waiting for some answered prayer. Waiting can be so hard! There is a great example of waiting on the Lord given to us in the book of Acts. We can learn a lot from the example of the first disciples. Forty days earlier Jesus had been crucified, died, buried and was resurrected. As the book of Acts opens the last thing He told His disciples before He ascended into heaven was not to leave Jerusalem, “but wait for what the Father has promised, for John baptized with water but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses…” Acts 1:4,8. The disciples were instructed to wait until they were fueled by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Holy Spirit, Part 7

Lamps, Wine and Fire - As we walk on the ancient paths with the Lord through our lives we are discovering how important it is to stay close to the Holy Spirit. Initially we might have a hard time relating to Him because He is a spirit, He is mysterious; but the Bible helps us to understand Him by giving us metaphors that tell us what He is like. We learn how to relate to Him. Today I want to help you get to know the Holy Spirit better by looking into three more of the metaphors that describe Him.

Holy Spirit, Part 5

As I continue to introduce the Holy Spirit to you I want to tell you more about Him. I want all of us to have a deeper understanding of who He is and what He is like. The Bible helps us in this endeavor by giving us many different metaphors that explain a different aspect of the Holy Spirit. Let’s explore some of these today

Holy Spirit, Part 4

If I wanted to introduce a friend to you, how would I do that? My friend is someone I have gotten to know and I think you will want to know him too. We usually begin introductions with the person’s name and then we might tell something about what they do and what they are like. Today I have the joy of beginning to introduce the Holy Spirit to you. I feel inadequate for this task because He is mysterious. He is God, we cannot reduce him down to our size. We will never fully understand Him. He has such depth and fulness that our finite minds cannot grasp who He is. A.W. Tozer in his book, The Mystery of the Holy Spirit, said you can discover more about the Holy Spirit in five minutes on your knees adoring him than in five years in a seminary. So we must approach this topic of the Holy Spirit prayerfully.

Holy Spirit, Part 3

I had been taught that experiences with the Holy Spirit were not for today, that we have the settled Word of God and do not need supernatural experiences. But I felt so dry inside, like a gear grinding against metal needing oil. I read the book of Acts and saw the amazing activity of the Spirit there. I began to wonder what happened to the Holy Spirit? Was He on break? Is there more to the Christian life than what I know? Learn more in this podcast.

Holy Spirit, Part 2

What if I told you the Lord wants to bring you someone who will comfort you when you are sad? He will bring guidance when you don’t know what to do. He will never deceive you. He will always bring you the truth. He will teach you and give you the very words you need to say. He is your advocate, your counselor, your helper. He prays for you and through you so that your prayers are effective. He initiates your salvation and then cleans you up and empowers you to live a life that pleases God. He discloses the future to you. He always glorifies Jesus. He strengthens your inner man. He is the One who floods your heart with God’s love, so that you know the God of the universe actually loves you and you can live out of that love. He will never leave you. He will go with you through all your life.

Holy Spirit, Part 1

The amazing thing about the holiness of God is that He isn’t just holy, He calls us to be holy too! In fact this is explicitly spelled out for us in I Peter 1:15-16, Like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves also in all your behavior because it is written, “You shall be holy for I am holy.” We are clearly called to be holy. Wow. Is that even possible? The short answer is yes, but only through the blood of Jesus. When we come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ many wonderful things happen to us. For instance, our eternal destiny is changed, we have eternal life, the Holy Spirit comes to dwell within us AND we become holy in the eyes of God. We make a divine transaction, we give Him our sins and He gives us His righteousness. He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him, II Corinthians 5:21. When we turn to Jesus in faith and receive the gift of salvation, His blood covers us so that God the Father declares we are righteous. This is our position before Him. This is why we can approach our holy holy holy God with confidence.

Sanctification

As we walk on the ancient paths with the Lord we are learning more about God and how to relate to Him. This week I want to focus upon something we don’t hear much about these days: God is holy. He is not just holy, He is holy, holy, holy. We sing about His holiness in our worship songs, we call the third person of the trinity the Holy Spirit, we use the words holy and holiness, but what exactly does holy mean? Many of us have a negative concept of holiness. Someone who is holy sounds like someone who has no sense of humor and looks down their noses frowning on all of us because we are having fun. I think we are getting holy confused with “holier than thou.”

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