Speakers Notes:

M.Kasperson Sermon What Circle Are You In  5/28/2016

Today everyone is in a circle, of friends, families, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, WebX, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter on and on it goes.

Why do people like to commensurate?

Same hobbies, same likes, same beliefs everyone has something they like to share with others. What is in us that we get excited when we see someone we haven’t seen, an old friend etc. Why do we do it? What drives us to be who we are?

Today I am going ask a lot of questions to get all of us to see something from God’s perspective, something important to Him and something very important to you.

The question is simple to say but extremely difficult to answer accurately

Here it is:

WHO ARE YOU!!!!

And it’s not that simple

WHO are you really?????

Now I know we think highly of ourselves and have aspirations and goals but after all that but WHO ARE WE ??

What defines you?

What is your salt?

Is your image of yourself stronger than reality??

What is the thing you really want most in life?? I can almost guarantee you the true answer IS NOT GOD!

What is it you really want when your life is compromised???

Do you really know ourselves

I’m going to read you a story from UCG Internet site the place I always ask you to go to learn about biblical truths, here we will learn something else

Here goes

This story is by Joy Jones 1/9/2014 entitled “This Womans Walk”

Life is a funny thing. It shifts and changes with time. The person we were when we started walking with God is often very different from the person that we will have become when our walk comes to an end. That is as it should be. Growth—Transition—Change—Blessings—Loss—Overcoming and Becoming—all of these are threads in the overall tapestry of our walk together with God. My life today, the walk that I want to share, began with a promise. It is a promise that has spanned nearly 18 years now. When all is said and done, I pray it will have spanned the fullness of a lifetime. This is my story. It is the beginning of my walk.

The day that David and I got married, there were quite a few prayers said to God on our behalf and possibly a few wagers made. We were young and very much in love, but from absolutely opposite worlds. I had grown up affluent and sheltered. David had grown up poor and fatherless. We did not fully understand what it would mean to join our two very different lives and backgrounds together and make them into one.

As I walked down the aisle, I naively believed we had already overcome any obstacle that could possibly divide us. In my mind, the biggest hurdle left to cross was simply waiting to say ‘I Do’ and become man and wife. After that it would all be easy… cake.  I did not realize that 'I Do' is only a beginning.  It is not the culmination of a relationship, but the starting point.  The real work is yet to come.  

After we exchanged vows, a moment I had been waiting for arrived. There was a promise that I intended to make to the man standing next to me.  I wanted him to know that my love for him knew no boundaries.  To help me, I used the passage from Ruth 1:16-17 (NKJV).

And I, Joy, say to you, David:
“Entreat me not to leave you,
Or to turn back from following after you;
For wherever you go, I will go;

And wherever you lodge, I will lodge;

Your people shall be my people,

And your God, my God.

Where you die, I will die,

And there will I be buried.  

The Lord do so to me, and more also,

If anything but death parts you and me.”

In hindsight, I wonder if God smiled and shook His head a little bit. He knew what I did not yet understand. The promise I had made to “follow my husband anywhere” was so much more than pretty words meant to create a tender moment. It was a promise—a vow—that I would soon be asked to keep. I quickly came to realize that what I had promised before God and what I had meant before God were two very different things.

Six months into our married life, David was laid off from his job.  The News-Talk Radio Station that he worked for had been sold. His whole department had been let go. While we were trying to figure out what to do, he received a phone call from a close friend who had moved to Montana several years prior to start his own paint and wallpaper company. His company was doing well, and he offered David a job.  

Within what seemed like the blink of an eye, I found myself living in a different part of the country, 2000 miles away from family, surrounded by snow—10 feet high in the drifts. We happened to move to Montana during a record-breaking year of snowfall. Needless to say, I wanted out. I hated Montana. I despised the snow. I despised the cold. I began to despise my husband—the man that I had vowed to follow anywhere. I resented him for asking me to keep my promise. This was not in the training manual.

The day of decision finally came. At a Barnes and Nobles Coffee Shop, sitting across from one another, I told David that I wanted out. I wanted to go home. I did not want to live in this 'new place' so far away from everything that I had ever known. I am not sure what I expected. I think that I thought he would bend. We would leave, and life would go on. That is not what happened. David told me that he was staying—if I left, it was on me. He loved me, but Montana was where he saw us building our life together. He was not going back. Besides, he pointed out, I had promised to “follow him anywhere”. He had it on video-tape.

I wanted to scream at him, “But that is not what I meant! I meant that I would follow you ‘almost’ anywhere—as long as it doesn’t require me to leave anything I love behind—or cost me anything.” This was not what I had bargained for. I was scared. I was angry. I was hurting. I had a decision to make. I had a promise to keep.

I was finally beginning to see what those older and wiser had tried to tell me, but that I had not had the wisdom or experience to understand. “Love, is not just a feeling. Feelings come and go. It is an active choice you make each and every day—despite how you may feel. And a promise that you make before God, does not come with ‘take backs’.”

That was the day that I had to decide who I was going to be. Was I going to be a promise keeper or a promise breaker? Was there a limit to my love—boundaries, mile markers, state borders? Was I in this marriage for the long haul? Was I willing to follow my husband?  Somehow I knew that this decision was a defining moment for me—for my marriage—for who I was going to become.  

Almost 18 years later, I thank God that I decided to stay—to keep my promise. Ours was a rocky start. We had much growing up and growing together to do. But whenever I thought about quitting, I remembered that I had a promise to keep. 

What I have grown over the years to understand, is that a marriage is built day in and day out.  It is built upon the foundation of the promise that we make before God to love one another through better or worse, sickness and in health, in blessings and in sorrows.  Marriage is a covenant that mirrors the covenant that we make with God at Baptism—to join our life to Him and to walk with Him all the days of our life.  

Though my promise to 'follow my husband anywhere' felt like the hardest thing I had ever done, it was so worth it.  Keeping that first promise, helped to prepare me for the days and years to come when I would be asked again and again to keep it. By choosing to love, even in the difficult times, love grew.  Love well tended and well cared for, will continue to grow.  Today I can look my husband in the eye and without hesitation, say to him “Wherever you go… I will follow.”

She said “as long as it doesn’t require me to leave anything I love behind—or cost me anything.”

And she decided who she wanted to be a promise keeper not a promise breaker

Amazing that this moment caused her to see the limits to where her projected personality ended and real person began. Then she decided that’s the important part see made a choice! To make a decision and choose a path

Today I am asking you to see where your expectations for life end and your real life begin because it is not your spouse who is asking you to commit but it is GOD

You know that all powerful, all knowing creator and sustainer of all things including US!!!

Are you understanding that God has chosen YOU!

Eph 5:8 For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light

What does it mean Darkness???

Isn’t that what the world is caught up in now, the natural human state, this age of mankind is coming to an end and we were once living their purpose without truth, without the Holy Days, the Sabbath, without Jesus we were living in real darkness.

But now God is calling us to walk with a purpose

Now we are to walk as children of light so we reflect the coming Kingdom, Jesus Christ in our lives

Eph 5:15  See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise,

What does it mean to walk?

As a child walking starts with faith and encouragement from a parent, God does the same with us but we have to risk, literally step out in faith sometimes against our natural ways that we tested and know are safe?

Circumspectly means your everyday thoughts and actions

It is about HOW we live and what we believe in

Prov 14:15 The simple believes every word,
But the prudent considers well his steps.

We discern the different paths, do we want to be promise keepers or promise breakers? God has promised us eternal life if we follow his steps.

Don't break His promise by choosing from your comfort zone and not the God Zone

You are agreed to be His child and start a relationship with HIM! He brought you here for that purpose

What are we doing to foster that relationship???

 Are we truly looking at all our baggage and pleading for God to help us?

Are we searching every day for every single door God our Father is opening for us??

Remember, it may not be in our comfort zone

And then walking though it in faith?? Kind of like Peter stepping out of the boat to walk on water towards Jesus

Are we truly committed to Gods agenda?? Or to ours?

Let me ask you a simple question.

When you pray

Are you praying that you will carry out Gods agenda for you to glorify HIM?

Or

Are you praying that God gets on your agenda??

I’ve done it, I think we all do it a lot we want God on our terms in our comfort zone, which is not in the Kingdom zone that God wants us to be in faith.

It’s faith when we use it to choose God’s path over our own we decide to be a promise keeper, a child of Light

Jer 10:23 O Lord, I know the way of man is not in himself;
It is not in man who walks to direct his own steps.

We must look for God’s directions and paths in our daily walk

Eph 5:17 17 Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is.

Test things in front of you to see if it is a path from God or from Satan so often things are camouflaged as Godly but is really Satan influenced

I had a job like that God delivered me from

Many of us have experienced similar things, seek understanding as the Bible states

So today I want to move your thinking from your comfort zone to the God Zone

Here is what the God Zone Looks like

Mark 4:  14 The sower sows the word. 15 And these are the ones by the wayside where the word is sown. When they hear, Satan comes immediately and takes away the word that was sown in their hearts. 16 These likewise are the ones sown on stony ground who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with gladness; 17 and they have no root in themselves, and so endure only for a time. Afterward, when tribulation or persecution arises for the word’s sake, immediately they stumble. 18 Now these are the ones sown among thorns; they are the ones who hear the word, 19 and the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires for other things entering in choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful. 

20 But these are the ones sown on good ground, those who hear the word, accept it, and bear fruit: some thirtyfold, some sixty, and some a hundred.”

Let’s be the Good Ground, have root in ourselves and BEAR FRUIT

Gen 17:1 When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am Almighty God; walk before Me and be blameless.

Prov 11:20 Those who are of a perverse heart are an abomination to the Lord,
But the blameless in their ways are His delight.

Matt 19:26 26 But Jesus looked at them and said to them, “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

Here is our family the God Zone

Eph 3:14- 15  14 For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,[a]15 from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named,

Our Family Has a Godly Purpose

Eph 3:11 according to the eternal purpose which He accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord,

Eph 3:19 19 to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Phillip 2:5 Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus,

You can see His plan through the Holy Days and we look forward to the coming Kingdom

So let’s be God’s promise keepers, not the popular religion just plain and God’s children

When we truly know ourselves and what our circle of family, habits, beliefs and practices and future of eternal life

We follow This scripture to stay in the God Zone it is our joy and purpose to everything we do in our daily walk in this world.

 Matt 5:16 16 Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.