Ascent Community Church Podcast

It is innate in us to be receivers. You see that in every kid, we love to receive. But what does it take to shift to a joyful heart to give, rather than to receive. If we only focus on the obligation and the rule, we will never get to a place of cheerful giving. We must believe that the only way we can get to cheerful generosity is to recognize a life of truly following Jesus.

Even when we fail or invite the enemy to the table ourselves, God does not pack up and leave. The Hebrew word for "follow" means to actively pursue or chase down and God's goodness and mercy are aggressively following us. Since we are His beloved we always have a seat at His table.

Replacing fear and worry with God's truth. Victory does not come from consistent anger, waiting for results, pushing on our own strength, it comes from drawing closer to the Jesus. Resisting the enemy requires first submitting to God. You cannot successfully say "No" to the devil's lies until you have said "Yes" to God's truth. We do not fight for victory; we fight from the victory that Jesus has already won at the cross.

Our minds is a garden, we must actively pull the weeds of past hurts and plant Scripture daily. So fix our eyes completely on Jesus. Stop trying to fight in your own willpower; instead, let's learn to live from the victory that Jesus already secured.  In addition, our minds spend more time on the narrowing of the path than on the widening of his grace.  

The goal of the enemy is always the same - He wants to destroy you. He wants to start with your mind, breeding doubt and harmful thoughts with the hope of killing and destroying. He started this with Adam and Eve and continues today. Take every destructive thought captive immediately by matching it against the truth of God's Word rather than letting it dictate your mental dialogue. If it doesn’t sound like the Shepherd, don't give it a second thought.

An adaption of the book Don't Give the Enemy a Seat at Your Table by Louis Giglio. This is what we are using for our current Connect Group study. 

When life feels more like chaos, I become unglued. Raw emotions bubble to the surface. I react, I retreat. But what do these reactions communicate? What do they reveal about what is beneath the surface?Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount is counterintuitive to how our world operates, upside down. Forging a Real World Faith means we learn from Jesus how to show up in the world, especially when we become unglued.

Real World Faith takes serious resilience. It takes a trust that God will stay by their side when everything points to God turning his back in disappointment. Almost all the great men and women of faith in Hebrews 11 screwed up at something, yet kept their eyes on a gracious and loving God. We can too.

As we continue to Forge A Real World Faith we will be confronted with gigantic problems. Jesus never promised us an easy life when we began to follow Him. When we come up against big problems, what is our response? Too often, we allow these giants to exist in our lives and get used to having them around. Not only that, but we can put all our energy and attention on them and they can seem overpowering. This must stop. By looking at David and Goliath we'll see that overcoming these giants requires us to fight them in a completely new way, the Jesus way.

When we choose to follow Jesus, and commence the forging of a real world faith, Christ leads us deep within ourselves. It’s the beginning of a process in which an interior renovation of our inner space begins. Do we journey inward, or do we try to keep all the things we carry, the issues of our past, the scars we have received, the brokenness we feel buried. Forging means taking that deep dive, recognizing what we carry, and allowing Jesus to do the necessary work of redemption and restoration.