Monday, August 27, 2012

Walking In Love

Hello,

Wanted to share my recent message on Walking in Love from 1 John 4:7-12 and 1 John 5:1-5 that I had the privilege of giving at the Forest Grove Campus of Sonrise Church.

I'm sharing this with the prayer that if you have the chance to listen sometime that it ministers to you in some way because you are Loved by the Father and you are called to also in turn walk obediently in love!

You can go to this link and it should be as of today, the first message you'll see as part of the 1 John series. www.isonrise.com/forestgrove.

Or you can listen to it via the embedded player below in the post or scroll down to the right of this blog and you'll see the sermon player there.

 


Blessings, rlk

Monday, August 13, 2012

Don't Quench The Spirit

We live in a day and age where the Word of God and His Spirit, Our Great Helper are devalued - sadly even within many churches today.

The fact is that The Word and The Holy Spirit really go hand in hand in the life of the Believer. Why, because the key to living a Spirit-Filled and Spirit-Led life is taking God's Word and actively living it out in your life. The more your life is saturated with God's Word the More Sensitive you can, should, will become to The Spirit's leading.

We can and do sometimes ignore the messages we hear and just the reality we know tell us that we need The Word of God daily in our lives because, "I've heard this before". Well maybe you need to actually hear and do something about it this time!?

We can also do things; we can make decisions that cause us to in essence sort of "dull" the voice of the Spirit in our lives. We can also blatantly ignore The Spirit's leading.

You and I need to actively seek to be walking in the Word and in The Spirit and I think today's devotion is a great reminder from a trusted devotional "My Utmost for His Highest".

Take this to heart and actively seek God's Word and direction for the Word and the Spirit each day! Stop trying to do things on your own because to be truly honest this thing called life, sorry but you don't really "got this"! You need His Word and His Spirit to truly live and more importantly live for Him!

Check out the below.

In Christ,
Your Brother and Servant,

rlk
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"Do not quench the Spirit" —1 Thessalonians 5:19
By Oswald Chambers

The voice of the Spirit of God is as gentle as a summer breeze— so gentle that unless you are living in complete fellowship and oneness with God, you will never hear it. The sense of warning and restraint that the Spirit gives comes to us in the most amazingly gentle ways. And if you are not sensitive enough to detect His voice, you will quench it, and your spiritual life will be impaired. This sense of restraint will always come as a “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:12), so faint that no one except a saint of God will notice it.

Beware if in sharing your personal testimony you continually have to look back, saying, “Once, a number of years ago, I was saved.” If you have put your “hand to the plow” and are walking in the light, there is no “looking back”— the past is instilled into the present wonder of fellowship and oneness with God (Luke 9:62 ; also see 1 John 1:6-7). If you get out of the light, you become a sentimental Christian, and live only on your memories, and your testimony will have a hard metallic ring to it. Beware of trying to cover up your present refusal to “walk in the light” by recalling your past experiences when you did “walk in the light” (1 John 1:7). When-ever the Spirit gives you that sense of restraint, call a halt and make things right, or else you will go on quenching and grieving Him without even knowing it.

Suppose God brings you to a crisis and you almost endure it, but not completely. He will engineer the crisis again, but this time some of the intensity will be lost. You will have less discernment and more humiliation at having disobeyed. If you continue to grieve His Spirit, there will come a time when that crisis cannot be repeated, because you have totally quenched Him. But if you will go on through the crisis, your life will become a hymn of praise to God. Never become attached to anything that continues to hurt God. For you to be free of it, God must be allowed to hurt whatever it may be.