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L is for LearningLast week Krystal started a new sermon series covering the beginning of our new BLAST program. She talked about how B is for Bible. She specifically mentioned how it is one of the most important tools for us to have as Christians. It has almost every piece of Information that we might need to know in our walk of faith. It contains the standards of living which we all hold ourselves accountable to, or otherwise known as the Ten Commandments. It has teachings from Jesus, laws, and values that we should all be aware of. She covered quite a bit of them last week, but today were covering the “L”. Learning. Now this week I just got a 7 month old puppy. He’s been quite the handful this week, but he’s settling down. I’ve never had to take care of a puppy before but I imagine that it’s probably the same difficulty of taking care of child. The looks that I just got, tell me that it’s probably a little bit different. But the reason that I’m bringing this up is because I’ve had no experience with this before. It’s like a learn as you go type of thing. On Tuesday, I got a text from Riley saying that Cooper, that’s his name, has just fallen asleep in the back room, so she’s just going to let him sleep instead of putting him in the kennel before she left for her job. This was okay with me, I mean the dog’s asleep. This is an event that I hardly get to see. After I got back from work, I was going upstairs to work on a paper that’s due for school. As I opened the back door, I see Cooper laying on 50 pounds of dog food that he managed to layer all across the room. He’s just laying on the dog food, and you could tell that he was the happiest dog in the world. We learned that when Cooper sleeps, it’s just an act so that way he can get into mischief. Learning comes in all different types of ways and situations. We can learn facts, dates, events, methods of solving equations, and much more. Our brain is crazy cool when it comes to the storing of information and retrieving it. But none of this is the type of learning that I want to talk about today.Have you guys seen the movie “Fireproof?”. Man I love that movie, it used to be one of my favorites. Riley watched it so many times that she can almost quote the entire film, and after that many times, it started sliding off of my list of favorite movies. But it’s about this young couple that is facing the struggles that marriage throws at you. As they are facing divorce, the man receives some help from his father in the form of a daily devotional instruction that he is supposed to follow to hopefully help him save his marriage. The reason that I’m even bringing this up is because one of the scenes from this movie is incredibly fitting for today’s lesson. So instead of having me try and describe it to you, Sven is going to play it for us. It’s only about a minute long, so as you’re watching it try and find the similarities that can relate back to us and God. (PLAY CLIP)Before we commit ourselves to another person, place, or task, we often want to know everything about it. It’s fresh, exciting and something that we are looking forward to. We start to revolve our time around this thing until we feel that we have a good grasp on it. We want to know as much as we can so that way we can predict what’s going to happen because we as humans tend to like the concept of consistency. The ability to give us some type of foreshadowing before things happen. Before you spend money on a new car, you want to make sure that it runs like it’s supposed to, otherwise your money is better spent elsewhere. I like the similarities between this movie and our relationship with God. Before we become a Christian, we want to learn how a God who is all powerful and all knowing, a God who has created this earth and everything in it, can possibly love us in a way that’s so personal that it’s something that we’ve never felt before. Everything seems so exciting as we start to open up to the concept of Christianity. Things that we tried to explain as coincidence before, are now having much more meaning behind them. Prayer and talking to God become much more important, and we start looking for the ways the God presents himself in our everyday lives. We devote our time, our money, and our hearts to the Lord because we just can’t seem to get enough of him. We are studying him in ways that we study other people, specifically our spouses. At first we get this sense of perfection. The feeling that nothing in the world is going to be able to slow us down, no matter what the situation is. We go out of our ways, just to make sure that we are making the other person happy. We sign up for church events, we start reading our bibles, we a so excited and vocal about our faith because the feeling is amazing. Just knowing that we have a father in heaven who shows us unconditional love, no matter what we say or do. This is great.Why is it, that this feeling of not being able to study something enough, goes away after we start making it a common routine. Just like in this movie clip, the man tries to learn everything that the woman likes and dislikes so that way he can try and have the best relationship possible with her. But after they get married and committed to each other, this learning process starts to slowly go away, and they settle in to a comfortable spot in which they are both content. Why is it that after we give our lives to the Lord we stop trying to learn what he’s saying to us. After we become a Christian, and get hitched with God, we can compare the similarieties that occur in marriage. Things just don’t seem to be as exciting, or we feel like we know enough about God, that we feel content and don’t need to work as much anymore. Today; instead of focusing on learning scripture or things about the Bible, I think that God wants us to focus on studying him like we used to. Just like we saw in the movie clip, studying God is a lifelong process that will bring our hearts ever closer to his. It’s not something that we should just put in our back pocket and forget about until it becomes convenient for us. Just like a marriage, or any other big type of commitment, there will be struggles with our faith. Life is hard sometimes, and things come up that really make us start to question our faith. Financial problems, death, sickness, pains and weaknesses that life throws at us all the time, sometimes has us questioning just how strong our faith actually is. That’s why we must continue to grow in our relationship with God. Always learning and always strengthening it, so that way when life throws things our way, we know that our faith is strong enough to withhold it. The scripture that was read today comes from Ephesians chapter 4 verses 17-24. I really like how the Common English Version words it. Normally I’m a big New American Standard kind of guy, but not today. It says:“So I’m telling you this, and I insist on it in the Lord: you shouldn’t live your life like the Gentiles anymore. They base their lives on pointless thinking, and they are in the dark in their reasoning. They are disconnected from God’s life, because of their ignorance and their closed hearts. They are people who lack all sense of right and wrong, and who have turned themselves over to doing whatever feels good, and to practicing every sort of corruption along with greed.But you didn’t learn that sort of thing from Christ. Since you really listened to him and you were taught how the truth is in Jesus, change the former way of life that was part of the person you once were, corrupted by deceitful desires. Instead, renew the thinking in your mind by the Spirit and clothe yourself with the new person created according to God’s image in justice and true holiness.”Paul first starts out by saying that we shouldn’t live like the gentiles anymore. Now the gentiles were the people who didn’t believe in God at the time or the “non-Jewish people”. Paul says that they base their lives on pointless thinking, and have bad reasoning for it. Without God, life becomes pointless, useless, and meaningless and it’s frustrating to try and find justification in what we revolve our lives around. If we choose to put something that’s limited by man at the center of our lives, we’ll always be disappointed. If man can create it, man can also destroy it. Paul is saying that God gives us hope for a future in heaven with him. In verse 18 it says that they are the people who reject God and choose to live by their own moral compass. This is when we as human beings start to do “what feels good” for us. It’s easy to stay in this mind set because this is what gives us the most pleasure. In Galations the scripture lists off some of the things that we should look out for specifically. They include: moral corruption, idolatry, drug use, hate, fighting, obsession, losing your temper, selfishness, drunkenness and jealousy. There are temptations our lives that we know are wrong for us, but we just can’t seem to let them go. Why would we want to turn away from things that give us pleasure anyways? It’s easy to stay angry at someone who has wronged us. It’s easy to obsess over the 0-2 Philadelphia Eagles. Well for me anyways. It’s easy to revolve everything around ourselves. But the reason that these are all listed is because they all take away our attention away from God. No matter how much we try, we often find ourselves being comparable to the Gentiles that Paul is talking about. We let sin and temptation control us in ways that we didn’t even know. The scripture goes on to say that we didn’t learn these things from God. It says because we listen to him, and we were taught that the truth is in Jesus, that we must change our sinful way of living. When it says that we were taught the truth that’s in Jesus, it’s referring to the way that Jesus lived his life on here on earth. We were given a role model so that we have something to look back at and learn from. I’m going back to the movie clip that we saw earlier when it says that we are constantly studying, constantly learning how to model our lives to be like Christ because it’s a lifelong journey. The journey doesn’t stop because we as Christians are at the point where we feel comfortable in our way of living; because there’s always something that we can improve on. There’s always something that we can all look back at how Jesus lived, and learn from it. Not a single one of us is ever going to reach that level of perfection that Jesus has given us as the standard, but God isn’t calling us to be perfect. He’s not even asking us to be great. In this scripture all that God is asking from us is that we try and renew our way of thinking. He wants us to clothe ourselves with the new person that in his own image. From the same Galations scripture, Paul throws out some of the things that we should aim to be. There’s 9 fruit of the spirit that we can give credit to our Godly nature. Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, and Self Control. Things that Jesus demonstrated to us, so that we might learn from them. Now we can choose to stay comfortable in our own sinful nature, or we can choose to learn from our own mistakes. To repent and turn away from the things that God didn’t teach us in the scripture. From the things that are taking our hearts, and our time away from God. The last verse says that we need to clothe ourselves with the new self that has been made in the likeness of God. But being able to drop our old self, now that’s not easy. How many of us have had a new year’s resolution? Almost always the new promises that we make to ourselves at the beginning of the year, don’t even make it to February. Just like at the beginning of a marriage, the beginning of our faith, we have all of these big plans on how great things are going to be; but then life happens. As we are trying to wear our “New Self” that is in the likeness of God, we need to remember that God is always right there with us. He’s watching us, rooting for us, that we continue to learn and model ourselves to act accordingly. My God is not the type of God to say “Nah Carter, you got this.” He’s always there for guidance and comfort, but with all of the distractions and temptations that surround us; sometimes we forget that he’s right there. Just like in a baseball game, you can’t hit ball without keeping your eyes on the ball. Or in my case, I can’t hit the ball with my eyes on the ball. My church league team knows what I’m talking about. Or like in golf when you’re lining up for the shot, you keep your eyes on the ball. We as Christians need to keep our eyes on God, talk to him, and learn about him. Don’t settle in and get comfortable with him. As we are keeping our eyes on him, and taking off our old self, we are also learning about the things that are holding us back. So today “L” is for learning. So we’re going to take the time to learn about you God, and also learn about ourselves. Hopefully as we continue to learn, we get our high school degree, work our way to our college degree, the master’s degree, and aim for the doctorate degree; because studying the Lord is a lifelong journey that is so worth it. Please pray with me;Dear Lord, help us to renew our ways of thinking. Help us go back to the exciting type of faith where we just can’t seem to get enough of you. Help us go out of our way, and get uncomfortable so that way we can continue to learn more about you. And if you want to give us packers win tomorrow, I’m not complaining. Amen ................
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