Relate Church

So often, we feel like God has forgotten about us. We feel like we are spending all our time taking care of everyone else’s dreams, wondering if God is ever going to bring our own dreams to pass.
Can I tell you that if you’ll be like Joseph, never give up. Keep your attitude right. Trust God. Wait for God. Never stop believing. In fact, instead of getting more discouraged day after day, you decide to be more encouraged. Knowing that with the passing of every day, it just means you are one day closer to God bringing you into your God-given purpose.

If you believe God brought you to this wilderness to let you die, then you forgot who He is.
If you believe God brought you to this prison to rot and die, then you forgot who He is.
The wilderness was the path to the promised land.
The prison was the path to the palace, God’s purpose.
Today is a day that you begin to believe in who God really is. He is God who 
can be trusted. No matter what you are facing. No matter what you are going through, 
begin to believe He is God your deliverer. God your healer. God your provider. 
God who sees you. God your Savior!

Knowledge is like a key. Having keys to bad places is the kind of knowledge we want to avoid. 
If you have a key, you are responsible for whatever it opens. The less keys you have, the less you have to worry about. 
Some people want a master key to know what everyone is doing, and what everyone is thinking. And I say to you, IGNORANCE IS BLISS. You don’t need to know all that. 

 

You can sell your entire future blessing for only one meal.
The feeling of getting revenge, is it worth it?
That one moment of pleasure, for your entire future. Is it worth it?
When your pride gets hurt, someone does something this big to you, and you deserve to do something THIS big back.
Using RELATE will protect your future. Doing relationships God’s way will keep you from trading your life for one measly bowl of soup.

What’s most interesting is while David is out watching sheep, God was preparing him for war, and to be the king of Israel. 
David had spent time with God in the fields and God was going to take him to the throne. If God was faithful in helping him save a few sheep from a hungry lion or bear, then certainly God would be faithful in other ways.

After all that has been said and done in your life, after all the things you have seen people do, after all the pain you have experienced from going the wrong way at times and doing the wrong things, you would think that by now you would have stopped intentionally doing bad things.
Your sin is predictable. What you do to destroy your relationships is predictable if you will start looking at yourself.
Listen to see what you can do.

Listing my threats: Me looking at me, to see how I’m being threatened by the situation or person(s) involved.
In other words, the goal is to begin doing an inventory on me when I’m experiencing negative emotions, finding the area(s) in me that are being threatened.

Elevating others is this:  Putting others first, making me last. Considering others above me, not by putting me down, but by elevating them higher.
When you live a responsible life, going to work, paying your bills, keeping your body in reasonable health, eating reasonably healthy, keeping your mental health, physical health, spiritual health, financial health, that’s a very big step to being a loving person.

Re-routing my thinking is this: When I have a negative emotion, instead of giving in to it I decide to go another direction to seek truth and/or to just forgive.
The battle begins with changing the direction of our thoughts. It’s a choice.
Decide to deal with negative emotions, before dealing with the problem. Then you can fix it.

As we move into RELATE, I wanted to begin by saying, you need to decide now that Making and Keeping Relationships is Your Priority.
Will you decide to be intimate with God? And will you make relationships with humans the priority of your life?
Jesus said this is the ONE THING to get done in your life, as we talked about last week. LOVE. Love God, love people. That’s the will of God.