Community Baptist Coweta - Refill

Today we looked at the story of the Samaritan woman at the well and how her life was transformed when she met Jesus.

Jesus not only transforms our person and our priorities but he also transforms our purpose. Christ has called us on a great adventure to go out into the world and be his ambassadors. He has called us to drop our nets and to pick up our cross knowing when we do so we find the very purpose for our lives; to bring God glory through the declaration of the gospel. In this weeks teaching, Jesus encounters two sets of brothers who were fulfilling the purpose they felt like was there lives destiny until they encountered Jesus Christ who called them out of their boats, away from their nets and transformed their purpose from temporal to eternal.

There are many things in this world pulling out us for our time and attention. There are many needs in this lost and dying world that we as the church of God must rise up and meet with fervor and zeal. However, we must never prioritize the work of God he has for us over the word of God because it is only in our understanding of the word of God that we will truly understand with any clarity and certainty what the work of God we have been called to do actually is. If we are to prioritize serving at our Masters side we must first and just as emphatically prioritize sitting at His feet. In this weeks teaching Jesus encounters two sisters, one chose to be busy and the other chose the better… sitting at the feet of Jesus.

A true encounter with Jesus Christ changes our lives literally forever. We are transformed by Jesus Christ when we place our faith in him. He changes the trajectory of our life but also gives us a testimony to share with those who once lived among the tombs like we did. In this weeks teaching, the first of our Transformed series, we meet just such a man who had a eternity altering encounter with Jesus Christ who set him free from the graveyard he was living in to share the truth of his transformation.

Paul concludes his prayer for the church at Ephesus by pointing them to the rest of the story of Jesus Christ after his resurrection. Paul points them and subsequently us to the fact Jesus sits on the eternal throne as King of kings and Lord of lords having ascended to heaven and sat down at the Fathers right hand. To know Jesus fully is to know him beyond the virgin birth, earthly ministry, death, burial and resurrection but to know him as he sits victoriously on the throne of grace with all authority and in all supremacy.

Paul the Apostle faced many hardships in his life serving Christ from being flogged on 3 separate occasions, to being beaten with metal rods, pelted with stones and left for dead, to being shipwrecked and bit by a venomous snake yet he weathered all the storms. Paul would write the letter to the Ephesians from prison and after he praises God for the many treasures he has given us in Christ he pauses to pray for those at Ephesus. In his prayer we gain great insight into how we can wether our storms as well for in the prayer Paul prayer for us to know God on a deeper level and how he has covered our future, our present and our past by giving us a hope, making us saints and cleansing our unrighteousness.

A trust fund baby is someone who has been giving an extravagant inheritance and didn’t have to do a thing to earn it. As believers we have been giving an inheritance that is grander than anything a billionaire could give and we too didn’t do anything to earn it but it was freely lavished on us by the grace of God. The question is what will we do with it? Although as believers we can never lose our inheritance we can squander it by living to find our satisfaction through fulfilling our fleshy desires instead of being satisfied in doing God’s will.

While in Babylonian captivity the Israelites were giving a message of hope through the prophet Isaiah to “Behold My Servant”, to take their eyes off their current situation and put it on the one promised to bring justice, to open the eyes of the blind, to bring the prisoners out of the darkness. As we live in a culture today that very much resembles the Babylon of old we must look to Jesus who is the redeemer, the forgiver of sins and the uniter of all things. As we follow God’s instructions to “Behold My Servant” the things of the world grow strangely dim.

One of the most amazing things about the Christian faith is that God has chosen to relate to those in Christ Jesus in a Father child relationship. The Creator of the universe loves us so much that when we place faith in Jesus Christ He adopts us into his forever family. One of the greatest signs of spiritual maturity displayed in the life of a believer is the understanding that he did not give us a spirit of slavery producing fear but in love He instead gave us the Spirit of adoption which allows us to cry out to God as our Father through an intimate relationship. It is resting in that relationship that gives us spiritual refreshment. In this message we look at joy that comes from the treasure of being adopted into God’s forever family.

Ephesians is a powerfully practical book that teaches us who we are in Christ, how one comes to be in Christ and how we are to live our faith out in a world that is becoming increasingly hostile towards Christ and his followers. In the opening message to the study of Ephesians we look at the DNA of every believer and who we are in Christ Jesus.

In the book of 3 John we see the “The Elder” John writes to a small church in Ephesus to encourage the faithful, call out the disobedient and report on what the missionaries he’s sent have testified to him. In this book we see how much our faithfulness in Christ or our disobedience and sin not only impact us but our fellow believers. John writes to Gaius to encourage him because he is “walking in truth” and the members around him are being encouraged in their faith due to his faithfulness and love for Christ. This letter also calls out Diotrephes because as John describes him “he puts himself first” and because of his pride he turns away missionaries, slanders John and other believers and expels members from the church. In this message we how easily we could be someone like Diotrephes and the secret of how to be a Gaius.

In the message we looked at Paul’s testimony in Acts 22 to see who was Saul, where his life was changed, and who was Paul. From there we looked at Philippians 3 to see that our past no longer holds us back, but we can have a future in Christ.

The Bibles view of love is radically different than the worlds view. How we show that love and who we show it to is clearly laid out for us in Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan. As we continue our series Antithesis we see in this very well known passage of Scripture that different people views another person in different ways and only one sees them with Christ like vision and shows Christ like love. In this teaching we look at who we are called to love and how we are to love them.

In the book of Genesis, we find the story of Joseph and his brothers. He is faithful while they are wicked. Yet, through their actions, we find a God who can take the evil of man and use it for our good.

On the night before Christ was crucified he gathered with his disciples in an upper room and over the traditional Passover meal Jesus transformed the meal by bringing its symbolic meaning to its fulfillment in the description of what was to happen to him, the Lamb of God who would take away the sins of the world. In doing so he took bread and broke it, held up a cup and proclaimed the establishing of the new covenant and gave the disciples and subsequently the church the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper. In this message we explore the meaning and the deep significance of the Lord’s Supper as giving to us by Jesus Christ.

At the very heart of our celebration of Christmas is the marvelous awe-inspiring truth that Jesus came for us. In Luke 2:21 God’s word shows us 3 amazing truths that transform how we look at Christmas and the celebration of it. In this message we explore the life transforming facts that Jesus came and sympathized with us, Jesus came and suffered for us and how Jesus came and supplied us with the greatest name ever giving.

Shepherds in the days of Jesus were despised and lived as outcasts of society. They were viewed as ceremonially unclean, untrustworthy and of no importance or value. Although the world saw them that way God did not. God saw the shepherds out in the field the night of Jesus birth as his cherished creations and potential communicators of the good news. What started off as a regular night out tending to a flock of sheep changed instantly to where these despised individuals would become inseparable from the Christmas story. These ostracized and maligned men would be some of the very first ones to lay their eyes on the Savior of the world, God in the flesh, the Christ and Lord, Jesus Christ. In this message we look at the most amazing of nights as recorded for us by doctor Luke in his gospel.

Things are not always as they may seem. Perception is very rarely reality. On the first Christmas Eve as Joseph and Mary made there way into Bethlehem they would have appeared to be nothing more than an insignificant couple from an insignificant town about to give birth to an insignificant baby whose future was as bleak as theirs, but nothing could be further from the truth. In our second message of our Christmas series we look at Luke 2:1-7 and the backdrop of history that was the world Christ was born in to, who exactly the betrothed, Joseph and Mary, were and the birthplace of Christ. This text gives us four truths to apply to our lives that can bring things into focus and show us that many things in our lives are not as they may seem.