High School / Calvary Church

This is our final week in our summer series on the Fruit of the Spirit. Our final characteristic of a Spirit-led life is Self Control. In Galatians 5:19-21, just before Paul gives us the Fruit of the Spirit, he gives us the acts of the flesh. These horrible actions show us what a life without self-control looks like. A life without self-control brings destruction and pain to the world around us. As we learn to walk by the Spirit, we are not controlled by our desires, instead, the Spirit controls our natural tendency towards sin and allows us to live in step with God.

What do you think about when you hear gentleness? It can often have negative connotations, but gentleness is so important in the Christian life that Paul includes it in his Fruit of the Spirit. Gentleness is shown in how we react to others when they are aggressive towards us, how do we respond to them? A gentle response doesn’t just mean saying nothing, but gentleness can also be strong, firm and clear, but without responding with anger or rage.

As followers of Jesus, we long to one day hear Him say, “well done good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25:21-23), but what does it mean to be faithful to God? In the Fruit of the Spirit, faithfulness is being dependable and trustworthy, someone who proves themselves consistently. Being faithful is not something we can do on our own, we need God to be working in us through his Spirit.

When we say that someone is a “good person”, we mean that they have integrity, they not only do the right thing, but they do it for the right reasons. God is in His very nature good and as a result he does good things. God wants us to not only do good, but to do it with a pure heart. In Ephesians 2:8-10, we are challenged as those who have been saved by faith, to walk in the Spirit by doing the good works that God has prepared for us.

Biblical patience comes from Spirit as we wait on the Lord to work according to His will.

When we trust Christ, he gives us the Holy Spirit, and we experience, internal peace, peace with others, and peace with God.

In our culture and world today many misunderstand joy by looking through the lens of happiness. As a God-given emotion, there is nothing wrong with happiness, in fact God desires that we are happy. True joy though is separate from happiness and our shifting emotions. The key to this joy is found only in Christ, and our hope for the future we have in Him.

As we start our summer series on the Fruit of the Spirit, we start by focusing on the most important of all, Love. When Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was in Matthew 22:37-40, he said it was love. Jesus boils down all of the christian life into to commands, love God and love others. Following Jesus’ example, love is more than a feeling, but an action that costs us to benefit others. We want our lives to be defined by loving God and loving others, showing the world around us just how much God loves us, by loving others.

This Sunday is our Uprising Sunday in CSM. This is the official "move up" Sunday for all grades. As we welcome our 8th graders to High School, we are so excited to see them take the next step in their walk with Christ. Students will be challenged to be united as followers of Jesus, as we pursue life in Christ together.

This is an exciting week in Calvary Student Ministries as we celebrate our graduating seniors! Graduation Sunday is a chance to honor our graduates, hear from them about their time in CSM and challenge them to continue to pursue life in Christ as they transition to what’s next. As we celebrate our seniors, our seniors will also encourage our underclassmen to lead and make the most of their time in student ministry. It is always a bittersweet time, but we are excited to see what God has next for our seniors and challenge all our students to make their faith their own now before they graduate.

We all define ourselves in some way, either externally or internally. Most of us move through the world creating and maintaining our image. We want to be known for things we do, value and accomplish. We live in a world of brand image and personal branding that gets pushed out on all our social media platforms. While careers, relationships, possessions, and other things are important aspects of our daily lives, they do not last forever. It is God who breathes purpose and meaning into the details of our lives, and when we seek our identity in places other than Christ, we find ourselves empty. As we wrap up our series, we want to look at all the ways that God describes our identity throughout scripture and live in light of who He says I am. We want our Identity to not be centered around what we do, but who we are in Christ.

Our Identity can often be determined by what we want in life, what drives us, what we are passionate about. Whatever is of first importance to you becomes your identity. Every person is pursuing something, we all get out of bed in the morning for a reason! This week Joel Martin, a teacher in C4, one of our gatherings for Calvary Young Adults, will be asking that question, what should we be pursuing? In Luke 5, early in Jesus ministry, some men did everything they could to get their paralyzed friend to see Jesus, even cutting a hole in the roof! They were primarily concerned about their friend's physical health, but Jesus was concerned about his spiritual health as well. As we study this passage, we want to ask, what are we willing to do to pursue Jesus?

In John 8:36, Jesus said that “if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” If we are in Christ, we are free but free from what? This week as we continue our Identity Series, Who you say I am, Dwight Shelly from Lancaster Bible College will be speaking to us about what it means to be free in Christ. Romans 8:1-11 tells us that we are made free from sin and death, no longer slaves to the desires of our flesh. In Christ, we do not have to sin anymore! We are also free from the law, working our hardest and ultimately failing to obey rules to earn favor with God. We are free from sin, death, guilt, shame and free from works. We should live every day victorious, in the reality of our freedom!

God has loved us and when we are in Christ, we have moved from strangers to citizens, enemies to friends, orphans to children. We are now a part of God’s family, we have a place where we belong, with brothers and sisters, a loving father and big brother. Most of us struggle with the idea that God loves us and is a loving father. If we are honest, it doesn’t make sense that he chose us, saved us and made us his children. The reality from Ephesians 1:1-6, is that we are chosen, cherished, adored, adopted.

As we start our identity series, Who you say I am, we are excited to hear from Jack Kubinec. Jack is one of our senior students and will be sharing the foundation for who we are in Christ, His love for us. God is love and shares his love with us, without condition or reserve. Nothing can separate us from this love, no matter what our life circumstances, we are loved. As we study through Romans 8, we will see how much God loves us and that His love overcomes all our insecurities.

Love those who you don’t see as your neighbor.

The “how” not the “who”.

This week we end our SHAPE series by looking deeper into who God made us to be. In this series, we see how we are God’s workmanship (Ephesians 2:10), uniquely shaped to glorify Him and serve others. As we consider our SHAPE, we will dive into how our Spiritual gifts, Heart, Abilities, Personality, and Experiences SHAPE us to be the person that God made us to be. Students will have time to work through each of these areas as they take a step in better understanding themselves as God’s workmanship. As we end our series, we want to commit to continuing to learn about who God made us to be, to continue growing and changing into that person and to serve others.

This week we will be focusing on Spiritual Gifts. We all love to receive gifts, whether for our birthday or Christmas, we can't wait to tear open (or neatly remove) the wrapping paper and use what’s inside! God has given each one of us a special gift, a spiritual gift. This spiritual gift is a special ability, given by the Holy Spirit to every believer at their conversion, to be used to minister to others and therefore build up the Body of Christ. This week we will talk about what spiritual gifts are, why they are given and how we can discover and use ours.

How are you pursuing life in Christ?