God is.........Here

We started One Prayer 2009 today at church.
It was awesome!
Because we are part of this, we have access to messages from some wonderful Pastors who are preaching on the subject of "God is........."

Today, we watched the video from Perry Noble, Pastor of NewSpring Church in SC. His message was on "God is here."

He was so hilarious! He had us all laughing pretty much the whole time. It was a great message too.

But, before we watched the video, our Pastor shared with us something that happened and he found a great message out of it. This morning, about an hour before church was to start, he realized he didn't have the main connector piece that he needed to make all of their equipment/video, etc work. He said he was a bit frantic, trying to think of where it might be. He rushed home to try and find it. He said, without it, we could've still had the message today.....it would've been different, but he would've made it work. But, luckily he found the piece at home and rushed back just in time to get it all hooked up before the service started.

Anyways, he told us to think about our lives that way. He could've stayed at the church, wishing that he had that one piece....desiring with all of his heart that he had that one piece that would make everything work, but if he hadn't taken the initiative and went after it full-force, all the wishing in the world wouldn't have helped him. What if our lives were like that? What if, instead of just hoping and wishing for things to happen, for that one piece to happen that could make our lives so much better........what if we went after those things full-force, until we got them? Interesting to think of it that way, huh?!

So, the message today was God is Here. We talked about ways we know God is here with us. We started out by talking about Matthew 28:20: "Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." He told us that God isn't just out there somewhere; He is here with us right now!

The life of Jesus also shows us that God is here. John 5:30 says "for I seek not to please myself but Him who sent me." He talked about how the world needs us to be repeating His words, not our own. We need to stop doing things by ourselves and make it our goal to do things that please Him. Jesus didn't just come here to die. There's a reason He was here on Earth for 33 years.

The death of Jesus is also a reminder that God is here with us. 2 Corinthians 5:21 says that "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God." I loved the analogy he used. It was cracking me up! He was talking about his daughter's dirty diapers. He said when our kids have dirty diapers, we clean them up and we throw them away and we don't think twice about it. We don't show them the dirty diaper and say "Look what you've done!" As loving parents, we just clean it up and never look back. That's the same way God is with our sins. He's not obsessed with what we've done in the past. He cleaned that up for us and He never looks at it again.

The victory of Jesus also shows us God is here. We have already won the game! Our goal now is to run up the score on the enemy. 1 Corinthians 15:57 says "But thanks be to God! He gives us victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." We should walk in victory, not for it. Christ is in us. We have won. He said that He likes to imagine that the devil has a big mark on him, a giant cross on his forehead, that proves he messed with the wrong guy. He used a funny story about how he and his wife used to play wrestle and one time she totally won and left a huge, giant red mark on his forehead. The next day at church, everyone kept asking him what happened because it was so huge. He had to tell them that he got beat by his wife and they all got a good laugh out of that. He said he likes to think we wouldn't be so afraid of the enemy if we could see the big mark that was left on him! We have already won the battle.......now lets run up that score!

So, that was our message today. I really enjoyed it. Our handout today said this:

We pray to Jesus asking Him to answer our prayers - what if we became tha answer to His? In John 17:20-24, He prayed that we would be one, and One Prayer is an opportunity to see what can be accomplished when the Church works together.

I am very excited to see what is accomplished through One Prayer 2009!