Series: Clean Sweep Week 2 (Got God) 02.19.06

“What’s holding you back from God?” Is it television, myspace.com, your cell phone, IM, your friends or even your family? Now I’m not saying family and friends are not important, but I am saying there is something more important than these things. Listen to what Jesus said when he was asked what the most important thing that we as humans had to do.

Matthew 22:37-39 – He said to him, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

So remember first God, second family and friends. But I’m not here to say reject your family and become a priest or a nun. I’m telling you that your relationships with your friends and family will become stronger if you put God first in your life. And today we are going to talk about why we need to put God first in our lives. So I compiled a list of 3 things that only God can guarantee you. And I could have listed more, but I feel that these three are going to be important.

He Guarantees Peace of Mind
– Matthew 6:31-34 – So do not worry and say, ‘What are we to eat?’ or ‘What are we to drink?’ or ‘What are we to wear?’ All these things the pagans seek. Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom (of God) and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides. Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself. Sufficient for a day is its own evil.”
– Here we have Jesus telling his disciples, “Don’t worry about your clothes, your food, don’t worry about tomorrow because God will give you what you need.” So we need to believe in God, we need to believe that God loves us and as the passage from Matthew tells us, “If you put God in your life and focus on getting into heaven, then everything else will be taken care of.” How great does that sound? All we need to do is focus on getting into heaven, living the way Christ wants us to live and basically God will take care of us.

He Guarantees You Freedom

–Genesis 2:16-17 – The LORD God gave man this order: “You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden except the tree of knowledge of good and bad. From that tree you shall not eat; the moment you eat from it you are surely doomed to die.”

– You are free to do what you want, you are free to be who you want to be, you are free to do anything in the world…BUT…BUT…before you go crazy doing what you want remember with every action, with every decision there is either a good consequence or a negative consequence. God gave Adam and Eve this order; however, and because of free will they had the ability to make the choice. Unfortunately they made the wrong choice and it has affected us all. This is why freedom has big responsibilities. If we didn’t have free choice, if we just did what we were told we wouldn’t have to worry about what decisions we were told to make. Don’t worry if this seems tough, because we’re going to talk about how we can affect others in a more positive way. Probably the easiest way to do this is to bring God into our decisions.

He Guarantees You Purpose

Mark 1:17-18 – “Jesus said to them, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Then they left their nets and followed him.”

Jesus continued to go out and call people to follow him. He called out people like you and me and even some people you wouldn’t expect like prostitutes and tax collectors. But God doesn’t stop there, it’s not as if he isn’t calling people to follow him anymore, every day God is calling you to follow Jesus’ steps. And you follow Jesus’ steps by fulfilling the purpose that God gave you. What am I talking about? God gave you a reason to live, we just need to find it. I want everyone to really be honest here, but how many of you have ever thought or asked yourself, “What is the meaning of life?”
I want everyone to tune into this blog the next six weeks because we will be discussing this question in depth. Next blog message will be from 2/26/06 when we discuss, “What’s the point to life?”