Yet, I so often see people as opportunities for me to feel fulfilled rather than opportunities for me to relate with the secure unthreatened love of Jesus.  And that depersonalizes them into useful objects that I either appreciate or despise.

God didn’t put us on earth to retire comfortably, but to draw the people in your sphere of relating to Him by the power of our holy, radically self-sacrificing, other-centered love.  We are here to live A NEW WAY, to draw close to God in order to be formed into the likeness of His Son.

Of course we’ll face opposition where the battle to be holy will become so difficult and the narrow road so steep that we may leave the narrow road for a season.  But know this: God will not leave us there!  There is always a way back from sin!  Tears of hope will flow every time we experience God’s loving mercy when we fail.  God still loves us.  He will not give up on us.  He still has a plan.

So we must remain alert to compromised spiritual leaders who entice us more with the hope of blessings than with the promise of holiness, who lead you to think that God’s love makes Him more concerned with your present comfort than your eternal joy.

We have to avoid 2 mistakes:

1. Never mistake earth for heaven.
2. Never mistake the enemies on earth (illness, financial problems, other people, you name it) for only those things that are wrong in the world around you.  There is much wrong in the world that we must try to correct.  But your worst enemy is you.  My worst enemy is me.  I mean our tendency to want what we want MORE than what God wants and to think that’s perfectly OK.  It isn’t.

Then your love is sustained by confidence in God’s character, not by enjoyment of current blessings.

Praise, by its very nature, is outward, open, demonstrative, and obvious to anyone watching.  Psalm 107:32 and 111:1.

There are 8 ways I count in the Bible to express praise:

Group 1: VOCAL: 1) singing 2) shouting 3) speaking

Group 2: AUDIBLE: 4) clapping 5) playing instruments

Group 3: VISIBLE: 6) kneeling 7) dancing 8) raising hands

Some common words in the Bible for worship: the Hebrew word “shachaw”= “to bow down, stoop”

Greek, “proskuneo”= “to kiss the feet”

Where is dancing?  Psalm 149:3

Raising hands? Psalm 63:4

How many do you feel comfortable using?  God has made us different so I don’t think we have to do all of them, but we should certainly not mock those that do.

Here’s what we did:

Your Grace Is Enough

Our God

Forever Reign

My Hope is In You

Message: Series TOXIC continued today as we looked at the toxic relationships in our lives and how to set up boundaries and when to cut them off.

Here I Am to Worship; (during communion)

You Lifted Me Out

One of the hallmarks of Jesus’ ministry was his constant attack on the status quo.  He challenged it every time he could.  Jesus loved people too much to allow them to remain such small persons.  Being nice has nothing to do with being Christian.  Being nice is often nothing more than a lack of compassion for people.

People who would rather be nice than Christian do not love enough.  They do not have enough compassion.  Instead, they are afraid of hurting someone or being hurt.  Fear is the opposite of love.  Remember, “Perfect love drives out fear” (I John 4:18).

This does not mean that we should set out to intimidate the bully or kick people out of the church.  But it does mean that we care enough about the future of our church not to allow anyone to stifle its ability to liberate people from bondage or victimization.  It means that we care enough about the bully that we will not allow the bully to intimidate the church because we know the spiritual vitality of both the bully and the church is at stake (120-21).

Does this seem reasonable?