Bringing your life together
Review
 Goal of this Series
 Developing active exhilarating faith
 experiencing God's intervention in our daily life.
 You can believe in God without believing God
 Faith is believing God that God will do what God has
promised to do
 It is time to synchronize what we say we believe and
what we truly believe.
 What we truly believe is evident in our reality
Review - Continues
 God wants to bring us to paradise on earth
 A place of abundance, peace and safety.
 We need to cooperate with God in order to receive
what He already desires to give us.
 God does not need us to protect Him
 We should not give God an escape clause when we claim
his promise.
 The enemy (satan) is determined to stop you from
entering God’s paradise.
 We are at war
 There are giants in the Land
Review - Continues
 I relate with God based on how I see Him
 Many of us define who God is based on our experience
of Him or our culture. This is bad.
 Our definition of God must be base on what God has
said.
 God is bound to His principles, He always keeps to
them.
 His Character (good, love, merciful, justice)
 God is a “Wild Thing”.
 We can never fully understand how He is going to work.
Review Continues
 What God entrusts to us depends on how much truth
we know of who He is.
Class V
 God can do what God says He can do
 God is willing to do what He says He will do
 God is committed to do what He says He will do
 God desires to do what He says He will do
 NOTE:
God is committed to do what He says NOT what we
want
 God can do what He says He can because He is who He
says He is
 Who we believe God to be and what we believe God
can do, controls if we will believe that he will do what
He is committed to do.
 God’s names/titles reveal his ability and commitments
 Jehovah Jireh – Provides for His own
 Jehovah Nissi – Protects His own
 Saviour – Delivers His own
 Almighty – No one can stop Him from doing what He
wants.
Two Extremes
 All God does is perform miracles.
 He is mean lean miracle working machine
 You just push the right buttons and out come miracles.
 Miracles are a thing of the past therefore they are
hardly happen today
Bible’s view of these extremes
 Matt 16:4
 Those of us who want to make God out to be a miracle
machine are considered to be “Wicked and
adulterous”
 Luke 9:41
 Those of us who deny the miracle workings of God today
are considered to be “Unbelieving and perverse”
Problems with these extremes
 They both use our experience to determine our
expectation of God
 One insists that God must do what we want simply
because He has the ability
 The other kills hope, expectation, faith and so destroys
dependency upon God
Miracles come with God
 The song says:
 God moves in a mysterious way He’s wonders to perform
.....
 God asked, “ Is anything too hard for me?”
 One of the reason we pray is to have God do something
the would be otherwise impossible. If this is not a
definition of miracle what is.
 To say miracles have stopped is to say God no longer
answers prayer.
 1 John 5:14, James 5:13 -16
Why do we have few miracles
today?
 It may due to our expectations of God
 In the 3rd world countries, we hear of many more
miracles because they have no other place to turn to and
so expect much from God
 This indicates our expectation is based on our
experience of God
 We expect more as we see more or are exposed to more
of God’s working
 Our hope and expectation must be based solely on
what God says.
Why do we have few miracles
today?
 Many of us are cynical
 We would deny a miracle even if it hit us right on the
head.
 We need to expect God to keep true to this previous
deeds.
 Psalm 77:10-14, 44:1
 If church can not provide access to God and His
miracles, we must close our doors
 Isaiah 61:1-3
 The purpose of the Church
 Habakkuk 3:2
 Should be the cry/prayer of the church
 James 5:16b
 Should be our mode of operation
 Colossians 3:17
 Should be our goal
Priority affects miracles
 Give us this day our daily bread (food, shelter, clothing,
comfort, healing ....)
 It gives God glory that we depend on him to give us our
daily bread
 Before “Give us this day ....” comes “Thy kingdom come
thy will be done”
 In order for God to answer “Thy kingdom come ....” He
sometimes withholds the answer to “Give us this day
......”
The way priorities work
 There is an A, B, C ....... List
 The things on the “C list” will be done if and only if it
does not hinder the things on the “A list” or “B list”
 The things on the “B list” will be done if and only if it
does not hinder the things on the “A list”
Priority Example
 The priority list I have for Samuel is something like this.
 A List : Love God, salvation, health, life, safety
 B List : happy, have friends, be kind, be good
 C List : cook, drive
 Every time Samuel makes a request, I go through this list
before I answer
 He asks
 Can I drive the car ?
 Can I use the knife to cut up the chicken ?
 He already made these requests – He is only 31/2 years old
 I say NO. Even thought it meets “C List” it violates my “A List”
Priority Example Cont
 Samuel will keep asking until He gets yes
 He will get yes when the time is right and it will not
violate my “A List” and “B List”
 We must keep asking and waiting with expectation
until God’s time is right.
 We may suffer a little denial of less important things so
that we do not lose out on the truly important
 Romans 8:17, 1 Peter 1:7
The blessing of Priority
 The knowledge of God’s priority frees us from wrong
assumptions when we do not get what we want:
 Examples of wrong assumptions
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God does not like me
God does not answer my prayer like he does for others
God hardly knows I am alive
God can not do it
God is not willing to do it
I did not have enough faith
I wavered for a split second
I have that sin in my past
I am a failure
I have made a fool of myself
Things to avoid
 Things that kill faith
 Arguing
 It kills faith because you keep hearing words of why you
are going to fail.
 Don’t argue instead focus on where the person is coming
from
 Judging others
 Condemning others who are not exercising faith kills
their faith
 Encouraging them will build their faith and build yours.
It is time for your miracles
 Release yourself
 Dare to have hope
 Dare to have faith
 Dare to expect God to do the impossible
 The glory of God is available for us if we will only
believe
 John 11:40