Philippians 4:13 I can do all things
through Christ who strengthens me.
Pastor Phil has picked up this Sunday Sermon series of “God
of the Underdogs”, based on a book by founder and
lead pastor of Next Level Church in Fort
Myers FL. – Matt
Keller, with this weeks preaching on the subject of “Our Checkered
Past”.
Everyone whom God wants to use greatly, he first tests
greatly. Replace fear with faith in Jesus. Don’t resent your story. Be thankful
for it. God uses every past that is yielded to Him. Maybe when you look over
your past, you’re tempted to think it has a power to disqualify you. Maybe
you’re ashamed of decisions you’ve made, consequences you’ve suffered, and even
people you’ve wounded or hurt. Maybe you’ve lived with regret and pain because
of your past. Some can relate to a sin-filled past, while others may have been
victims of abuse or broken trust that was no fault of their own. One of the
greatest enemies to our future is the past.
The truth is that we’ve all got a past and all have things
in our past, but God can use them for good. The over-riding truth is that
there’s no past too dark that it will disqualify someone from being used in the
present and the future. Regardless of what forms our pasts take, they’re not too
big or too dark to disqualify us from being used by God now and onward. If you
and I don’t learn how to overcome our past, learn from it and leverage it, it
has the potential of becoming the lid to what God can do through us in the
future. Just as our past has power to hold us captive, so the opposite is true.
Overcoming our past begins with a life-altering moment: a moment when we
realize that how we’ve been living isn’t pleasing to God. We are instantly
brought face-to-face with the darkness in his life, and he was rocked to the
core. What encounter have you had? What’s it look like to you? One moment can
change your life. God wants to change you.
Acts 9:5-6 “Who are you, Lord?” Saul asked. “I am Jesus, whom you
are persecuting,” he replied. “Now get up and go into the city, and you
will be told what you must do.”
Have we seen the gospel story play right out in front of us,
complete with Jesus dying on the cross for our sins and being resurrected from
the dead? When it really has an impact on us, is when we know that we no longer
want to be a “good” person in our own eyes. We know that we want to serve God
with our “whole” life.
I know that the first step in overcoming your past and
leverage it for your future is found in having a God-encounter of your own. Get
alone with God sometime and seek Him in a way that will transform you.
Diligently seek Him and you’ll find him, so ask, seek and knock. Get alone with
God, and allow God to turn your past into something you could leverage for your
future. An encounter moment will look different for everyone. For some, it’s a
conversation they need to have. It’s a moment when we decide “enough is
enough!” The moment when we determine that the way we’ve been living isn’t
working anymore. You will never realize the future God has planned for you
until you have a powerful encounter with God that changes everything! It’s time
to stop living under the weight of your past and be changed by God. People all
around us are hungry for the truth. Jesus came to set the captives free from
bondage to sin, to live to the full.
Jesus said: “Get up!” In other words, Yeah, I had to knock
you down. Yes, your past has taken you off your feet, but I don’t want you to
live that way. One of the biggest tools Satan will use against you concerning
your past is condemnation. Condemnation from your past will tie your hands, if
you let it. So many underdogs are suffocating under it’s weight. It is killing
their godly dreams. It’s killing their productive present, and it’s killing
their potential future. Our world loves to capitalize on guilt and
condemnation. The key is to replace the condemning messages with truth: the
truth of who Jesus says we are. The most powerful way to silence the voices of
condemnation in our lives is the replace them with condemnation in our lives is
to replace them with truths from God’s Word about who we really are, according
to Jesus. The more we know about who Jesus says we are, the less we’ll believe
who our past says we are. The more light we let in, the less darkness can stay.
Jesus intended to take this underdog with a dark past and use him as a servant
and a witness to a group of people who never would hear the gospel otherwise. Jesus’
intention is not just to forgive us of our past and release us from the
condemnation of it; His intention is to leverage our past to impact others.
I'll continue these Sermon and book notes on the next post.
In Christ, Brian
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