MY KING

My King..
Is the King of the Jews
The King of Israel
The King of the ages
The King of glory
The King of ALL Kings
And the Lord of Lords

He's enduringly strong
He's entirely sincere
He's eternally steadfast
He's Immorally graceful
He's impartially merciful

He's a sinners savior
He's the center piece of civilization
He's unparalleled
He's unprecedented
He's the fundamental doctrine of true theology

He supplies strength to the weak
He's available to the tempted and tried
He sympathizes and He saves
He strengthens and sustains
He guards and He guides
He heals the sick
He cleansed the leapers
He forgives sinners
He delivers the captives
He defends the feeble
He blesses the young
He serves the unfortunate
He regards the aged
He rewards the diligent
He beautifies the meager

He's the key to knowledge
He's the wellspring of wisdom
He's the doorway of deliverance
He's the pathway of peace
He's the roadway of righteousness
He's the highway of holiness

His life is matchless
His goodness is limitless
His mercy is everlasting
His love never changes
His word is enough
His grace is sufficient
His reign is righteous
His yoke is easy
His burden is light

He's indescribable
He's incomprehensible
He's invincible
He's irresistible

You cant outlive Him
You cant live without Him
The pharisees couldn't stand Him,
but they found out they couldn't stop Him
Pilate found no fault in Him
Herod couldn't kill Him
Death couldn't handle Him,
and the grave couldn't hold Him!

THAT'S MY KING!

S.M Lockridge

The Exchanged Life

What is "The Exchanged Life?"

In a nut shell, the exchanged life is Christ living His life through us, rather than us trying to make life work through our own efforts and resources. It is made possible by the believer's union with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection
(Romans 6-8).

God created man with certain essential, or basic, needs. Among them are the need to be loved and accepted and to have value and worth. The moment you are born, you are driven to get these needs met. The unique ways in which you try to meet your basic God-given needs for love, acceptance, value and worth is your "flesh."
Your particular versions of flesh are the unique ways that you have lived by and depended on to meet your needs. Your flesh "patterns" were developed based on the messages that you received about yourself as you were growing up. These messages helped form your "identity."

It is you trying to meet your needs independent of Christ with the only resources you have available to you: your mind, will, emotions and your physical body. The flesh is the primary thing that hinders us from knowing and experiencing the victorious Christian life. Living in the flesh is also known as the self-life.

Because we are all born in Adam, born without the life or God in our spirits and thus spiritually dead to God, we are forced to live out of our resources. As a result of dealing with the impossibility of getting our needs met, we are driven to make up for this deficiency. The desire to have our needs met is so great that it consumes our energy; we become solely focused on that longing. We become thoroughly and intensely self-centered in our quest for love, acceptance, value and significance.

The final result of being born spiritually dead is the loss of identity. We were created to have the life of God within us, (in our human spirit) yet are brought into the world without it. Therefore, our very reason for existence is not apparent to us. We are born in a condition of not knowing who we are, but being driven to find out.

There are only 2 kinds of inner life, Adam-life or Christ-life (Romans 5:14-19). All of us are born with Adam-life; a spirit without the life of God. It was the life of God that Adam lost in the garden. Therefore, our sins are not our only problem, but rather the dead spirit within. The blood of Christ washes away our sin, but it does not wash away the Adam-life.

How can this inner life be changed? Our dead spirit is not to be patched up but put to death and exchanged for a new life. That inner dead spirit cannot be changed. It has been exchanged. Galatians 2:20 states, "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me."

This is what happens when a person is born again; he receives the life of Christ. He is no longer the same type of human, possessing Adam-life, but is a child of God, acquiring the life of Christ, and thus a new creation, and one with a new identity.

We believe the Scriptures that Christ was crucified for us. Do we not also believe the same Scriptures that teach we were crucified with Christ? God has created something completely new inside of you. This is a spiritual reality, not just positional truth. That is your true identity.

"If anyone wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it." Jesus says the way to life is through death, and if anyone is to follow Him, they must deny self.

HOW CAN I KNOW GOD?

What is Christianity? Some say it is a philosophy, others say it is an ethical stance, while still others claim it is actually an experience. None of these things really gets to the heart of the matter, however. Each is something a Christian has, but not one of them serves as a definition of what a Christian is. Christianity has at its core a transaction between a person and God. A person who becomes a Christian moves from knowing about God distantly to knowing about him directly and intimately. Christianity is knowing God.

“Now this is eternal life; that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” John 17:3

Why do I need to know God?
Our desire for personal knowledge of God is strong, but we usually fail to recognize that desire for what it is. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love or first think of some foreign country or first take up some subject that excites us are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning can ever really satisfy When we first fall in love, when we first marry, when we finally break into our chosen field, when we at last get that weekend house—these Breakthroughs arouse in us anticipation of something which, as it turns out, never occurs. We eventually discover that our desire for that precious something is a longing no lover or career or achievement, even the best possible ones, can ever satisfy. The satisfaction fades even as we close our fingers around our goal. Nothing delivers the joy it seemed to promise.

“Many of us avoid the yawning emptiness through busyness or denial, but at best there is just a postponement”

There are several ways to respond to this

By blaming the things themselves
By finding fault in everyone and everything around you. You believe that a better spouse, a better career, a better boss or salary would finally yield the elusive joy. Many of the most successful people of the world are like this – bored, discontented, running from new thing to new thing, often changing counselors, mates, partners, or settings.

By blaming yourself
By trying harder to live up to standards. Many people believe they have made poor choices or have failed to measure up to challenges and to achieve the things that would give them joy and satisfaction. Such people are wracked with self doubts and tend to burn themselves out. They think, “If only I could reach my goals, then this emptiness would be gone.” But it is not so.

By blaming life itself
By giving up seeking fulfillment at all. This is the person who says, “Yes, when I was young I was idealistic, but at my age I have stopped howling after the moon.” This makes you become CYNICAL; you decide to repress that part
of yourself that once wanted fulfillment and joy. But you become hard, you stop hopeing for anything at all and you can feel yourself losing your humanity, compassion, and joy.

By blaming and recognizing your separation from God
If there's nothing in this world that will ever satisfy me, then it means that I am made for something beyond this world.

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it that does not mean that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. CS Lewis

By seeing that the emptiness comes from your separation from God, and by establishing a personal relationship with him

In order to form a personal relationship with God, you must know four things

Why we are here
God created us and built us for a relationship with him. God made a good beautiful world filled with people who share in this life of joy and peace by knowing, serving, and loving god and one another.

What went wrong?
Instead we chose (and re-affirm daily) to center our lives on ourselves and on the pursuit of things rather than on God and others. Because humans were created to live for him (to worship), we can’t eliminate him without choosing some other object of ultimate devotion to give our lives meaning.
So we cling to idols, centering our lives on things that promise to give us meaning but drive us and enslave us : success, relationships, influence, love, comfort, and so on . This is the very root of all SIN, its not only breaking the rules,( a violation of law) but its building our identity our sense of worth on anything,(even a good thing) other than GOD( a violation of love)

What does that mean?
To live for anything else but God leads to breakdown and decay, as it removes us from the very source that sustains and supports us. When a fish leaves the water, which he was built for, he is not free, but dead. .We once had the world we all wanted- a world of peace and justice without death disease or conflict, but by turning from God this has lead to the disintegration of creation and the loss of peace within ourselves, between ourselves and in nature itself .War, Hunger, RACISM,POVERTY,INJUSTICE and Death are all symptoms of these

Worshiping other things besides God leads to a loss of meaning. If we achieve these things, they cannot deliver satisfaction, because they were never meant to be “gods.”They were never meant to replace God. Worshiping other things besides God also leads to self- image problems. We end up defining ourselves in terms of our achievement in these things. We must have them or all is lost; so they drive us to work too hard, or they fill us with terror if they are jeopardized.

What puts the world right?
EVEN THOUGH God lost us he determined to win us back He entered history in the person of Jesus in order to deal with all the causes and results of our broken relationship with him. He first lived a perfect life, loving God with all his heart, soul, and mind, fulfilling all human obligation to God. He lived the life you owed—a perfect record. Then, instead of receiving his deserved reward (eternal life), Jesus gave his life as a sacrifice for our sins, taking the punishment and Death each of us owed.

By his sacrificial life and death he both exemplifies the life we must live and rescues us from the life we have lived. By his resurrection he proved who he was and showed us the future — new bodies and a completely renewed and restored new heavens and new earth in which the world is restored to full joy, justice, peace, and glory.

What you must do

Repent
There first must be an admission that you have been living as your own master, Worshipping the wrong things, violating God loves laws. “Repentance” means you ask forgiveness and turn from that stance with a willingness to live for and center on him.

Believe.
Faith is transferring your trust from your own efforts to the efforts of Christ. You were relying on other things to make you acceptable, but now you consciously begin relying on what Jesus did for your acceptance with God. When we believe and rely on Jesus' work and record (rather than ours) for our relationship to God, his healing kingdom power comes upon us and begins to work through us. Christ gives us a radically new identity, freeing us from both self-righteousness and self condemnation. This liberates us to accept people we once excluded, and to break the bondage of things (even good things) that once drove us. He puts us into a new community of people which gives a partial, but real, foretaste of the healing of the world that God will accomplish when Jesus returns

Receive
Pray after this fashion: “I see I am more flawed and sinful than I ever dared believe, but that I am even more loved and accepted than I ever dared hope. I turn from my old life of living for myself. I have nothing in my record to merit your approval, but I now rest in what Jesus did and ask to be accepted into God’s family for his sake.”

When you make this transaction, two things happen at once:
1)Our sins are wiped out permanently, his perfect life record is transferred to our account you are adopted legally into God’s family.
2)The Holy Spirit enters your heart and begins to change you into the character of Jesus.

Follow through
Tell a Christian friend about your commitment. Get yourself training in the basic Christian disciplines of prayer, worship, Bible study, and fellowship with other Christians.

Had to answer three questions for a youth audience on the subject of doubt Here were my answers:

What is doubt to you?
Doubt is a very powerful force in the life of a Christian. Galileo called doubt the father and pioneer of invention Doubt is not the opposite of faith; the opposite of faith is unbelief. Doubt is at the half way stage between unbelief and faith and has to decide between the two.
The presence of doubt is not the problem the critical issue is what we do with it when it arises The point is that Jesus, he’s not worried about it, in fact he welcomes it .In mark 9 a man comes to Jesus one day and confessed to his struggle with doubt, but Jesus didn’t see his doubt as a sign of unbelief but of faith because of his willingness to bring his doubts to Jesus and lay then at his feet


How do you deal with doubt?
A diver who catches fish for exotic aquariums, mentioned that the most popular fish is the shark, reason being that a shark can adapt its size to its environment its in, put it in a tank and its size can be contained to fit inside ,where as release it into the big wide ocean and they can grow up to 4 m long. What are the environments that contain doubt and release faith?
Praise -praise is the language of victory, praise is the language of faith. God inhabits the praises of his people (It literally decentralises doubt and centralises God)
Prayer- Prayer is the key that unlocks the biggest doors of doubt.
People- Holy spirit, friends, leaders.

All these three environments help me to doubt my doubts, bring perspective and create forward movement in my life.

Can you have doubt and faith at the same?
Absolutely. Where you find one you will find the other. Doubt is a great breeding ground for faith to be born. The key is that when doubt comes don’t let it paralyse u, but use it to propel you forward towards a life of faith and discovery in God People who God used greatly in the bible,Abaham,Moses,Jeremiah,Elijah, Peter, all had doubts but also lived great lives of faith Because they didn’t see them as only a struggle, but a springboard towards greater things.

What ever you are facing, what ever the issues are in your world , the challenges that you are up against I want to encourage you, don’t give up get down , but get up and go for it. God has empowered you and I to doubt our doubts, and live a life of faith and hope. Yes The future is uncertain, but with God on our side we can move toward it with confidence, shape the future and be the difference the world needs to see

Dan Kimball's The emerging church

Dan Kimball's The emerging church: Vintage Christianity for New generations

MODERN CHURCH vs EMERGING CHURCH

MODERN = Evangelism is an event that you invite people to.

EMERGING = Evangelism is a process that occurs through relationship,trust, and example.

MODERN = Evangelism is primarily concerned with getting people intoheaven.

EMERGING = Evangelism is concerned with people's experiencing thereality of living under the reign of his kingdom now.

MODERN = Evangelism is focused on pre-Christians.

EMERGING = Evangelism is focused on post-Christians.

MODERN = Evangelism is done by evangelists.

EMERGING = Evangelism is done by disciples.

MODERN = Evangelism is something you do in addition to discipleship.

EMERGING = Evangelism is part of being a disciple.

MODERN = Evangelism is a message

EMERGING = Evangelism is a conversation.

MODERN = Evangelism uses reason and proofs for apologetics.

EMERGING = Evangelism uses the church being the church as the primaryapologetic.

MODERN = Missions is a department of the church.

EMERGING = The church is a mission.

Book review

Some thoughts form John Bevere's book "Breaking intimidation"

Chapter 2 "Two extremes"

• Two extremes that will throw a believers life out of balance
• The first extreme is pursuing power: the second extreme is false humility .The proper balance is found in the life of timothy,who cultivated godly character rather than pursue power and stirred up his gift rather than than have false humility
• As Christians character should be our first priorityand pursuit. What our Heavenly father looks for is not power ,its character.its a sad fact that many in the church pursue the power and anointing of the spirit while sidestepping the pursit of godly character.
• 1st Corinthians 1 instructs us to pursue love and desire spiritual gifts" .However we have perverted that command . We pursue the gifts and the anointing and just wish for the fruit of love in our lives.God is love and until we walk in love we will not attain his nature .
• Some Christians will travel great distances -hundreds of miles to go to miracle,prophetic or anointing service but they are unwilling to deal with the anger ,unforgivesness or bitterness in their own hearts,This is evidence that the emphasis is on power rather than character.
• The spiritual manifestations at these services may be of God but we have to deal with the inner man too.the unwillingness to deal with the inward has opened up many people to deception.its wonderful that people are so hungry for the power of God ,but lets not neglect purity of heart
• We have seen many ministers fall.But the didn't fall when they committed their first act of immorality.no they began to fall earlier-the day success in ministry became more important than their intimate relationship with God. Jesus said blessed are those who are pure in heart,for they shall see God(matt 5.8) .He did not say 'blessed are those who have a successful ministry.he said without a pure heart you will not see God!
• The apostle Paul highest goal was to know him (Phil 3vs 8-10) before the power of the resurrection .Judas cast out devils,healed the sick,and preached the gospel .he even left his business to become disciple but where did he end up?
• The goal of a Christian is not the power of God or ministry its to know Christ. When we are intimate with god we will reproduce what he intends .The people who know their god shall be strong and carry out great exploits (Dan 11:32)
• Pauls sole ambition was to know him (Phil 3:8-10) Moses said Show me your way that I may know you (Exodus 33:13).David cried out ,One thing I have desired that I may dwell in your house all the days of my life,to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple(ps27 vs. 4) And again "my souls thirsts for you;my flesh longs for you
• Some people quage their spiritual maturity by their ability to prophesy or flow with the spirit , as if they think that's a stamp on their character. yet we need to remember gifts are given and not earn .A donkey spoke and saw into the realm of the spirit. A rooster crowed three times and convicted Peter. Does that make these beasts spiritual?
• Jesus said that many will call upon the Lord and expect entrance into his kingdom,only to be denied.They will have done miracles,cast our demons and prophesised in his name .But he will answer Depart from me ,you who practice lawlessness!(Matt 7:23). The anointing of God is not his approval .Saul prophesised after God had rejected him (1 Samuel 19:23-24) .Caiaphas prophesised while his one goal was to kill the son of God(John 11 49-51)
• We must have gods heart to obey his will without it we will walk in a merely a shadow of his anointing. Paul measured Timothy's virtues by the purity of his heart and the faithfulness of his service .We must also set this standard before us and allow the holy spirit to accurately weigh us .
• Its more important to pursue a right relationship with god than a formula to move in his power