Relate Church

You can actually have a relationship with God in spite of your current condition. God’s grace is sufficient for you. 
He accepts you today, just as you are, if you humbly come to Him and want to grow and want to be better, and want a genuine relationship with Him.

I want to begin today by taking you to what God says is the most important, absolute highest priority of our lives: RELATIONSHIPS.
Not just relationships, but long-term relationships. 
Your thinking, the way you process life, what you believe, what you interpret, what you think about others, and what you think others think about you—all of it affects whether or not you will have long-term relationships in your life.

Spiritually, are you in a foster care program? Or have you been adopted? 
It seems many people who attend church and call themselves a Christian, have only gotten into the Foster Care program, and have not allowed themselves to actually be adopted as God’s child.
Church can be like a foster GROUP HOME for many, instead of it being a home where you BELONG.
GOD WANTS TO ADOPT YOU.

Pastor John reads from Matthew chapters 5-7: Jesus' Sermon on the Mount.

Here’s a principle that I hope each of us can embrace: True faith is based on the REALITY of who God is, what He likes, and what He does.
If your perception of God is skewed, your acts of faith are going to be skewed. Why? Because we do based on what we believe.
We have to remember that we aren’t running after what we like. We have to lay that aside to get to what God likes. 
When Jesus came to earth, He came to show us who He is, what He likes and what He does.

Have you ever been to a junk yard? The owner of a salvage yard buys cars that have been damaged so much that they aren’t worth the money to fix restore the vehicle. So they buy it to tear it apart and sell the parts individually and make a ton of money. 
They don’t buy the cars to restore them, they buy them to tear them apart so that others can be fixed.
God isn’t running a salvage yard. God is in the restoration business. He didn’t buy you with the blood of Jesus to part you out. He bought you to restore you.

Laughter is one of the most important things you can do for your body, mind, and soul. “A cheerful heart is good medicine” (Proverbs 17:22).
There are so many benefits to laughter, that without it, we may be causing great damage to ourselves if we aren’t allowing it into our lives.

Some of you grew up in anything but stability. Your parents didn’t provide a stable family, or a stable place to live. Maybe they got divorced along the way and it was drama all the time.
Or maybe they were an addict that never even tried to get their life together to raise you in a good place.
Let’s do something in your life today that really needs to be done. In the Old Testament, whenever there was a big decision made, or a big experience had, they would mark the place with a stone and write one it. Today, in your heart, set up a stone marker that you can always look at to remind you that from this day forward, your life is going to be focused on stability.

What kind of gifts are you presenting to Jesus as a thank you for His Grace?
The Scripture indicates that we cannot take anything with us, but we can send stuff ahead of us. God has an organization keeping track of your account in heaven. You can make as many deposits as you would like into that account every day.
The work you do to fill your heavenly account is LOVE. 

It takes every Church doing its’ part to make the global body of Christ function properly.
Our part at this point may seem to be small or insignificant, but we are here and doing it. Our presence in the Global Body of Christ matters. We are meaningful. We are significant.