I am a Masterpiece!

This my 3rd post tonight! I'm catching up on my "what I learned at church" posts. There are 2 others if you want to scroll down. :D This sermon, I watched after church this Sunday on Lifechurch.tv. Again, they have the best live sermons! If you ever have to miss church, or even if you don't, check them out! I'm not sure what the Lord is up to, but it just seems like He is on a mission to make sure I know exactly what this sermon was all about, that I am a masterpiece. I feel like the Lord is showing me where my thinking is wrong and He's making sure to replace those thoughts with the truth, through all of these sermons that I've been addicted to lately! Ha! I also just started Steven Furtick's book, "Sun Stand Still", and let me tell you.....it is amazing so far and I think I've only read the first chapter. LOL! It's about having audacious faith.

I could do a whole other post on this subject of faith. I know in my heart, those who know me in real life would probably say that my excitement about the Lord that I write about on this blog does not come through when I step out into the world. That crushes my heart, but I know it's true. I have a history of being painfully quiet and shy. I hate that word "shy", but what it means to me is that I keep quiet because I either just don't know what to say or I'm too afraid to say it. I am just not a good communicator in real life. But, when I sit down to write this blog, this is my heart. I'm not trying to pretend or be someone I'm not. It's just that this is the place where I am not afraid to be myself and to say what I really feel. Now, when you think about that, it is a huge shame that I cannot translate that into the real world and I have just begun to realize the past few weeks that this shyness is a sin. It is a sin to hide my excitement and the joy I have in my heart for the Lord, because I am afraid. And I am not sure how to come out of that. But, what I do know is that the beginning of change is being able to SEE what needs to be changed. My last post was talking about the holy spirit and how He will help you to see, and I believe that is what He is doing. I believe there is going to come a time where I will be able to look back on this and say, "I remember when I knew it was going to take some audacious faith to truly be who I was made to be." I believe it.

So anyways, Craig Groeschel preached this sermon and he started out by talking about how he got those huge red splotches everywhere when he first started preaching because he was so insecure. How nice to know I'm not the only one who gets those! How many feel there's something wrong with you? Without Christ, there is something wrong with you. But, God can change everything!

Who do you think you are? With Christ, you are God's MASTERPIECE!! Salvation is not from good works; it is a gift from God. (Eph 2:8-10) We are God's masterpiece, created to do good things. As God's masterpiece, or tapestry, you are created for the Master's purpose. Psalm 139:13-16 says that all of your days were written before one of them came to be. God chose this moment in history to create you because it was at this time that you would best bring glory to His name!

You have everything you need to do everything God wants you to do! (2 Peter 1:3) Life without purpose is time without meaning. You don't ask an object what its purpose is; you ask the one who created that object what it was meant to do. Ask He who created you what your purpose is! Don't try to figure it out yourself.....ask God why He created you. If you don't know the purpose of your life, you reduce your life to an experiment.

You aren't lacking one single thing you need to do what God created you to do. Most of us don't believe this though. Moses didn't believe it. We look to others and want to be like them. But, we weren't created to do what they were. We forget what we are good at. If we are not good at something, most likely we were not created to do that. Stop looking at what you can't do and see what you can do. You are a masterpiece.....feel the power of that!!

God uses everything in your life to bring about His purposes. God will use all things for good of those who have been called according to His purpose. (Romans 8:28) Craig told about how when he preaches against sin, it's because he knows how destructive it can be because he lived it and because of that, he doesn't regret what he went through. He knows that God can change lives.

If you don't like your life, let God remake you. God is the potter and we are the clay. Sometimes a potter will have a lump of clay and making it and all of a sudden something will go wrong and it collapses onto the wheel. Our lives are like that clay. Sometimes things can go wrong, but God takes that same lump of clay and He will remake it into what He wanted it to be, what He created it to be. So, let God remake your life. He doesn't discard us.......He will use our lives, that same lump of clay, and remake it into what it was always meant to be!