First, it is essential to understand that people come into a marriage with their own subconscious ideas of what it will be like. When these two worlds collide, major problems can occur, which is evident in the number of marriages that are ended over “irreconcilable differences.” We must decide that rather than “my way,” we will commit to finding “our way.” Commonality of goal, the ability to communicate about everything openly, and understanding the need to compromise will help us craft a vision for where we are going as a couple…together.

Secondly, if we want to have commonality of goal, we must shift our mindset away from what society and tradition have said marriage should be. The old mindset of the 50’s and 60’s that sees mom at home all day vacuuming in a dress and pearls is still around and it’s completely unreasonable. In fact, it’s not even Biblical. True marriage is not about roles, it about sharing dreams together. It’s about submitting to each other in the knowledge of God. And it’s about putting the other first and making all decisions with the other in mind.

Finally, we must make the decision to commit to the commitment of marriage. No husband or wife is perfect. We all have faults and will all make mistakes. We cannot hold unforgiveness toward our spouse or shut them out. If we refuse to hear the other, we cause our marriage to begin to disintegrate. All marriages go through shifting seasons when one spouse’s needs overshadow the other. We must be willing to make whatever adjustments are necessary for the best interest of the marriage and the family – not simply decide based on our own self-interest.

As time goes on, life seems to be more and more hectic. We cannot forget that a marriage must be tended if it is to survive and grow. Resist taking the other for granted and be sure to make time for the wooing to go on. In marriage, we must offer affection and love that expects nothing more. Marriage is the most important relationship ever created. Children draw security from a strong marriage, and communities benefit from the foundation they provide. There is no condemnation in Christ. Perhaps you have gone through a divorce or are struggling in your marriage right now. The good news is, with God’s help, any married couple can decide today, to commit, or re-commit, to taking the steps that lead them to their best life.

There is only a 1/2 inch difference between cutting off a useless branch that is producing nothing, and pruning back a healthy, fruit-laden branch that just needs to bear more fruit next season. When things are removed from our life it hurts but there is greater good to come! God will prune us to teach us to grow even larger in our capacity, giftings, and fruitfulness. This makes us turn to the nurtrients of Jesus to grow, multiply, become stronger & healthier! When we make poor choices continually, sometimes we get cut off – however, unlike the churches who want to frighten us by saying “that’s it, once you are cut off you are gonna burn!”, the Father who grafts seemingly useless branches will carefully cut into Christ, the Vine, and attach us to the main, life-giving artery. This is when God gets us to where we must trust in Jesus, when we are grafted in and bound to the vine – literally, the vinedresser tapes the branches so they stay put. We don’t have to give up, God will graciously make a way to reconnect us to Him! Choose to contribute to your church, to get involved when you don’t feel like it, that is called “trying again”. God’s NOT trying to kill us!!

God wants fruitfulness and He will do whatever it takes to get fruit from the ones He owns – “You are Mine, I bought you with a price and I require something of you!” There is a calling on our lives to produce something good for God! He will always pick us up and graft us back in – choose to stay in Jesus and in the Word “for apart from Me you can do nothing.” (vs 5) It may seem unjust to the fruitful but God is always going to prune us to cause an area of our life to grow. It’s the only way to get to the next level! The branch (us) grows again and bears even more fruit – and it’s not hard because He has prepared us for the next season. When the harvest comes and the grapes are put into the winepress – which is the Church – that new wine is the Holy Spirit, pouring out the wine of revival into all the people. The move of the Spirit in the last days will come from the fruit of the saints who are willing to be cut back in order to grow the church. This new wine means miracles, power, outpouring, and a flowing of the Holy Spirit in the body of Christ.! “I have poured out My Spirit upon you”, Jesus said. We have to allow ourselves to be pruned and grafted or else the church will die. Look to Europe as an example, all the beautiful cathedrals and churches built hundreds of years ago are boarded up or have only elderly people attending – no fruit. In England, some Arab nations are buying up old churches and turning them into mosques, which then can only be used for that purpose according to Islamic laws and can never revert back to what they were intended to be – places where GOD shows up! This has happened because the church there decided to lay on the ground, wither and die. In Cambodia, they killed all pastors and Christians in the Khmer Rouge regime of the 70’s and now that nation is in desperate poverty. Even here in America, where we believe nothing bad can happen to us, we need to see that we are content to be a rich nation and have to open our eyes to the truth – we have to stay in Christ to survive!

Don’t run when you feel God’s hand pruning, we must ABIDE in Christ no matter what, that is the key. If we allow bitterness to fester in our minds during the times when we don’t understand what the Gardener is doing, it will wither us and we will die – but it will have been our choice. Instead, rejoice when you feel God is pruning you, cutting off something that you probably don’t need anyway, wanting to take you to the next level of joy and revelation He has for you! He is always getting the wine out of His fruitful ones, then asking us to grow more good grapes. Everything from Jesus feeds us and fuels us to start again. When things are really going terribly, you are probably getting cut – so get off the ground. Your attitude determines whether God regrafts you or not. Do not give in to the temptation to lay there, moan and groan about how sorry your life is and how mean God is – He always wants to give you a second, third, tenth, hundredth chance! He is patient with us and will always take us back again as we choose to put aside our pride and allow Him to heal us, to bind us to Christ and intertwine again with the other branches. Let the healthy ones around you help you grow.

Disciples, it’s time to GROW! Be fruitful, God wants your fruit to press out new wine for the church to stay alive and strong. Our focus now is on the 2020 mission to go into ALL the world and make disciples. A strong church keeps the Spirit moving and life flowing.

Verses Used:
*John 15: 1-6

While we believe that Eden was a real place, it is also representative of the human heart. Each of us has the responsibility to tend the garden of our heart – the garden of who we are. The four rivers represent principles that God has given to help us cultivate good fruit in the garden of our lives. The first river, Pishon, represents increase and expansion, a principal that Jesus taught repeatedly. To experience increase in our own lives we must believe that God is our source of all things, learn how to get into God’s flow, and avoid the things that cause us to get out of the flow.

Today we live in a society filled with self-help gurus. As a result, we often think we can will ourselves to success if we just find the right book to read. But the river comes from God and we can’t will or self-help ourselves into the life He brings. If we try to make it in our own strength, there will come a point when our human strength will fail us. When difficulties come, when we can’t take one more step, we must look to the God of the River of Increase to be the source of whatever it is we need. Whether it’s strength, peace, joy, forgiveness, grace, patience, wisdom….whatever it is you think you’re out of, God has it and wants to give it to you. We only need to plant our lives by His river and let Him be our source.

We all know that water is an incredibly powerful thing. Rowing against a strong current will quickly tire you out and make it virtually impossible to reach your destination. But, as humans, we often seem bent on rowing against God’s flow – trying to get to our destiny under our own power. The Holy Spirit is God’s river. He flows into our hearts and wants to branch out into every area of our lives and spill over onto others. But we have to get into the flow.

You don’t need to look hard to find examples of people who have fought their way to the top but have not found happiness. Rowing against the river of God will never get you to a place of contentment. We each must decide to turn our boat and stop fighting God’s flow. The river may take us to places we don’t understand, but we will find ourselves in a place of unending increase that will spill over and grow the Kingdom of God. So come on and jump in, the water’s fine.

Jesus sets us free from SIN, which is the slave-master of humanity. Sin slowly degrades and eats away at the conscience of a human being. We cover up, trying to cope with living under the world’s system. Then along comes Christ to shield, block, and destroy the power of sin. As we believe, at that moment we are released from bondage. Where the Spirit is, the truth is also! Galatians 5:16-18 says, “My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God’s Spirit. Then you won’t feed the compulsions of selfishness. For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness. These two ways of life are antithetical, so that you cannot live at times one way and at times another way according to how you feel on any given day. Why don’t you choose to be led by the Spirit and so escape the erratic compulsions of a law-dominated existence?” These 2 natures that we grapple with—sin and Spirit— are bound by the world and bound by Christ.

Galations 5:19-21 continues the results of living in sin. We are led into bondage by not choosing the Holy Spirit to guide our lives to freedom. “It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on.” BUT as we look on to the next verses, we are told what it looks like to live & be led by the Spirit, “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness & self-control” – the last one is the most important!! Respond in worship and prayer to convictions. When we’re worn down after allowing sin to rule us, prayer and worship lead us to strength to repent and become stronger.

When we give the Holy Spirit the opportunity to move freely, He will break the rules!! We struggle to stay free –even the apostle Peter got called out by Paul when he chose to stop fellowshipping with Gentiles once other important Jews came to the town they were both in at the time. Religion may make us FEEL spiritual, but it’s a counterfeit and does NOT set us free! Sin has no power over us when we’re led by the Spirit. The law exposes sin, but we can never get to God thru obeying the law—only thru Jesus and the Holy Spirit and not by the works we do. There is a constant fight within all humanity between the flesh and the Spirit to do the right thing or the thing we WANT to do. Only the life-giving, freedom-loving Holy Spirit, who can’t be contained, brings pure, real, total freedom! He obliterates what we think God should or should not be doing. We know we are being led by the Spirit when His fruits show up in our lives (while the fruit of religion is hypocrisy -the thing that set Jesus off the most!)

This week we are going to be led into a new level of freedom during the Encounter conference. There is a response to the conviction of the Spirit, to repentance and letting go—let it flow through you!

Next, it’s important to realize that our souls are birthed at conception, and the being which is created at that point never dies. Our conceived beings are eternal, as we are made in the image of God, and He is eternal! So when the horrible happens and a child, born or unborn, dies, we can take comfort in knowing that God receives them and that their names are written in the Book of Life, burning brightly as innocents. As we age, when we turn to the Lord, again our names are bright lights in that book as we become more like Christ and want to make His name higher than ours. Those who continue to turn away from the Holy Spirit’s promptings will find their names fade from that book, if they choose not to reach out to what God is offering them. Our name is a vital component of who we are, and, in Proverbs, we find out that “a good name is better than great wealth” – Prov. 22. Your name is your calling card, for good or bad, and for all eternity.

The Holy Spirit is God on the earth today, and it is HIS job, not ours, to convict all men of sin, to comfort, and to bring understanding as we continue to search out what God is saying to us individually. In the Old Testament, God the Father spoke to the men of that time, and the Holy Spirit instructed the prophets what to say to the people of Israel & Judah. Then, for 33 years, Jesus was God the Son on the earth, showing us what God looks, acts, and sounds like. He had to die, not only for the sins of man, but to release the Holy Spirit to empower men, women, and children to have the authority we are talking about. Our authority comes from living in Christ and being filled with the Spirit! Remember how important that is! Even our impossible situations can be fixed up and made BETTER by God’s miracle-working power when we know who we are and what we have. In 1906, people were for revival in the country of Wales, UK, and in the city of Los Angeles; now, as a result of their prayers, over 1 billion Pentecostals filled with the Spirit are in the world today! We must look up to heaven, position ourselves in alignment with God’s Word, and realize that in every situation, God is bigger, more powerful, more abundant, and “able to do exceedingly more than we ask or think” – Ephesians 3.

We have been exploring the topic of who we are in Christ. We have authority in Christ. We have authority to do greater works in Jesus than He himself did. We have authority to cast out demons and heal the sick. We have authority to speak God’s word into existence. We have authority to teach all the nations.

Authority is powerful. It is something given to you – given from a source over or above you. When you are at work, your boss gives authority; he gives you access. When you start operating in that authority, you become so integral to the work, that you end up having more power over that process than the boss who gave you that authority. Jesus said to his disciples, “I’m leaving, but I am leaving you the Holy Spirit.” God has given us access to His power. He has given it, or delegated it to us. We need to step into that position and move within that power. He had all authority and He gave it to us. He said we could do greater things then He did, IF we live and walk in that authority.

Matthew 18:18-20: “Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. “Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.” We have been given the authority to open and close things, to bind or loose them, and to unlock or shut them in the context of prayer. We use this authority for when a breakthrough is needed. We are loosing the will of God on earth. The Kingdom of God is bigger than us. God’s will is bigger and more powerful then the world’s will. Jesus was talking about prayer and faith, about standing on the Word of God in authority. It can change the course of human life. Words are powerful. In authority, words can change the course of human life; they become potent. It is like having a nuclear device in the world of the Spirit.

Mark 16: 17: And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues. These miraculous signs will follow those who believe: healing and casting out demons. You have the POWER of the Holy Spirit in you! Don’t live in first gear when you have a V8 engine inside! In authority, we can bridge the natural and supernatural! Jesus spent so much time in prayer, He knew the heart of the Father. All the perfection of heaven can heal the broken. In those times that you need to stir the faith and soul again, go back to a time in your life when the will of heaven and the will of earth collided, and in God – everything aligned. See that time, visualize it, and find the confidence and authority in Christ.

Continuing on the idea of veneer—that piecemeal pseudo-wood covered in a shiny thin layer of pristine hardwood—and how it can symbolize the Christian life, we return to the book of Matthew to read another account of Jesus’ challenging false authenticity.

Matthew chapter 6 deals mainly with the concept of one’s private versus their public life, those circumstances when the veneer is pulled back and the substance below is exposed. Jesus begins in verse 1 addressing good deeds. All Christians, once they have been regenerated, are called to what are often referred to as “good works.” (We’re not saved by our works, mind you, we are saved to our works.) But, more important than the works themselves, Jesus implies all throughout this chapter, is the heart of the worker. Jesus states in verse 4, for example, that it is better to give your gifts in secret. Why? When good deeds are taken out of the context of public adulation, they are left only for the Father to see. It will therefore being His affirmation and reward that drives our actions, and not the world’s.

Once again we find the teaching of Jesus in direct conflict from the deportment of this world. Our tendency is to reveal only the good in us and to hide those things—our shortcomings, mistakes, and brokenness—of which we are ashamed. In the kingdom, however, God asks us to conceal our good deeds and share with our fellow believers our messes. This may strike you as completely counterintuitive! Exposing our foibles, however, shining light into those places we’d rather keep hidden ultimately robs them of their power. And once these shackles have been removed, their powers zapped, that’s when real change can come into our lives. Another byproduct of exposing our baggage is the generation of trust within the Church. Jesus ultimately wants you to feel freedom in the very areas of your life you struggle most. Such a methodology is not always the easiest or the most fun, but it’s precisely the medicine that can begin to heal your heart.

Moving forward in the chapter, Jesus says in verse 5, “When you pray, don’t be like the hypocrites who love to pray publicly on street corners and in the synagogues where everyone can see them” (emphasis mine). Another word I have found for “hypocrite” is the word “actor.” Jesus is saying, ‘Don’t be an actor, pretending to be something that you’re not!’ (Again, this idea of a veneer.) Hypocrisy, Scripture shows us, is one of those hot-button issues that caused Jesus to go nuts! Just read Matthew chapter 23 and you’ll see Jesus lay down seven woes to the Scribes and Pharisees, calling them, in machine gun cadence, “Hypocrites! Hypocrites! Hypocrites! Hypocrites!” In Matthew 23:27 he refers to them as whitewashed tombs—shiny and pristine on the outside but dead within. Indeed, if there’s anything that gets Jesus’ foot tappin’ a little bit, it’s hypocrisy.

These areas of instruction all lead into a larger idea, which opens chapter 7: “Do not judge others, and you will not be judged.” A well-known adage, this revolutionary notion accomplishes two things: first, it instills in you a God-given grace for your fellow man; and second, it insulates you from incoming judgment as well. There is only one position in the universe whose job it is to call out our sins and screw-ups, and that’s the Holy Spirit. It is his job to convict us and it is his job to correct us. That is not to say that you can’t acknowledge sin in your fellow believers when you see it. Please do. And please pray for that person and, if you feel called, extend to them a hand of support. But do not judge them because, as Matthew 7:2 plainly states, that will become the standard by which you yourself shall be judged.

Jesus closes out this chapter speaking about worry—about money, shelter, food, and clothing. That these things are such basic necessities is what makes Jesus’ teaching here so bold. We need these things to survive, and yet Jesus instructs us not even to worry about them. I’ve found in my own experience that worry not only fails to help a situation, it most often hurts it instead. This is because worry sows the seeds of doubt into our very spirit and, if left unchecked, will begin to kill our relationship with God. The engine of our relationship with God—the engine of any relationship, actually—is trust. Simply put, God requires our trust to accomplish His work in our lives. And worry is the opposite of trust. Pastor Rick Warren of The Purpose Driven Life fame said it this way (and I’m paraphrasing here): “Worry is practical atheism. If you worry, why pray? And if you pray, why worry?” We need God to clean up our messes, to get us over our mountains, to walk us through our failures. And worry breaks our connection to Him by questioning or outright jeopardizing our trust in Him.

The truth of the matter is that, without God, we remain capable of getting ourselves out of our messes from time to time, but eventually our strength, wisdom, and self-reliance will tire and falter. We simply cannot rely upon our own cleverness to sort out the problems we face with any consistently. And we weren’t built to. But God is never short of an answer, never incapable of a miracle, never lacking in strength. He is infinite, and He alone is meant to be our source. So we needn’t ever worry.

I know this is hard teaching, church. Of course it’s hard! That is, after all, why Jesus spent so much time talking about it. And please don’t overlook the context of this sermon either. Within a year the disciples who were listening to Jesus would be asked to walk out his ministry in boldness. They would soon take his place to battle the Pharisees, heal the infirm, and build the Church. They would need to expand to encompass all that Jesus was handing over to them. And the weakness that comes with worry would have robbed them of the vastness God had placed in them and shortchanged the legacy they were charged to build.

It is no different with us. Therefore we need not, and should not, worry. God took care of them and He’ll take care of us too.

This story is one of the more…colorful narratives of Jesus’ ministry. We see a great of deal passion and determination from the characters involved—from the steadfast nature of the paralyzed man’s friends to the steadfast rigidity of the pharisaical onlookers. But let us focus on the former group.

Imagine the paralytic’s friends. Imagine their love for this man and their unceasing desire to help him in whatever way they are able. They’ve prayed with him. They’ve wept with him. They’ve perhaps defended him from others who have suggested that his sins are the reason for his condition. In spite of the efforts they have made, we can assume that none of the four are a doctor, and so any assistance that they’ve offered might seem to them ineffectual. (They’d be wrong, of course. But this is how they might feel.) Then, unexpectedly, they receive word that Jesus is returning to his adoptive hometown of Capernaum. An opportunity!, they think. From the beginning of his ministry, Jesus has—according to Mark’s Gospel—already healed many people, cast out many demons, preached with boldness, and cleansed a leper. So the four friends decide that need to get their friend to Jesus as soon as possible upon his return to the city.

Jesus does return and gossip goes out where he’ll next be speaking. And once these four friends learn of it, they make haste with their crippled companion over to the house where Jesus is staying. Upon arriving, however, they are immediately hit with a considerable obstacle—the house is packed with listeners, supporters and critics alike. There is no way in! One, faced with such a concrete challenge, could ultimately accept their defeat, or at least a delay. The four friends, on the other hand, keep moving.

The first task they must negotiate is to get their friend up on the roof of the house! This was probably not an easy charge considering that the paralytic lay on a horizontal mat, meaning that two men likely climbed onto the roof and then lifted their friend from a lying position. However they did it, once the five friends were successfully on the roof of the house where Jesus was preaching, they were still no closer to the encounter they were seeking. The only way to get to their healer, to pursue their hope, was to dig.

Can you imagine the reaction of the crowd within when that first finger poked through the clay roof? Here was Jesus, the Christ, packed into a hushed room of his followers (worshiping him) and his detractors (testing him), teaching and awing the crowd. Then, in that moment of extreme focus and palpable conflict comes a faint chipping sound, followed by a blanket of dust wafting down from the ceiling. A finger emerges through the crack, somebody gasps, and a murmur circulates throughout the room. But the disturbance is not finished. The finger becomes a hand and the hand, eventually, a hole roughly 7 feet by 3 feet. The murmurs below soon crescendo into chaos and then down comes the paralytic! When finally the man has been lowered upon Jesus’ table—an odd sight itself—the teacher breaks the silence: “My child, your sins are forgiven.”

There are two critical points I want you to notice. First, it is crucial to note that Jesus addresses the paraplegic as his “child.” Immediately he welcomes this man back into his family, fully accepted and whole. This is the relationship God wants with each of us, and this is one reason why He sent his son to come and reconcile us back to Him. This particular claim is central to the Gospel, so please do not skip over the ramifications of such a meaningful title.

Secondly, I want you to notice the phrase just before Jesus’ startling proclamation: “Seeing their faith, Jesus spoke.” One can get as caught up in the theological nitpicking if they’d like, but it seems perfectly clear that Jesus heals the crippled man by his friends’ conviction. The implications of this evidence are astounding! Piggybacking upon Bill Wiese’s message last week, what this means for you and for me is we are, or rather, can be in some way responsible for the healing of our friends! Our persistence in prayer for those placed in our sphere of influence is a considerable force. Our faith, in other words, has real impact on the lives of others, whether we know it or not.

This is the reason, I believe, this account is communicated not only in the Gospel of Mark but two of the other accounts as well. It seems to be a point that is important enough that God remind us on several occasions the impact we play in His kingdom in general, but on those sovereignly placed in our community in particular.

John 1:1-5 (NLT): In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

For 2011, get a word from God about your life. Not a lot of words, not a sentence, but one word. One word that stays in your life and can’t be moved. Think about what word God has dropped in your spirit and meditate on it. Pray about it and let the word settle in your spirit. Let it marinate.

When you get the word from God, you will know because everything will align. Focus on that word. When we get a word, it changes everything. We can think of “this” and make plans about “that,” but when you get a word, it fits and things start to happen.

The difference between an advanced life in 2011 and a stagnant one is a word from God. Excitement motivates us to think about plans and the future, but excitement only gets you excited. A word moves you into the miracle zone. A word bridges the gap between us, the natural, and God, the supernatural.

Faith is finding the word God has already spoken over your life and believing it. It may challenge us and maybe even scare us, but we are safer in the unknown of the word than we are in the safety of the “known.”

Excitement won’t allow you to reach your goals for 2011, but a word from God will. It will bring life to your world. Pray about it and get your word from God for this year. Let it grow and keep it alive. It has power but you have to have faith and believe it.