Desert Breeze Community Church

People defect from the faith primarily for two reasons: deceived by the pleasures of sin and disillusioned by the pain of suffering. The power of God’s promises breaks the power of sin’s promises and suffering’s perplexities. God is a promise making and promise keeping God!

It’s not the size of your faith but the object of your faith that matters most. Strong faith in a weak object is fatally inferior to a weak faith in a strong object. Get to know the object of your faith (Jesus) and your trust (Certainty) will grow. (Heb11:1; Ps9:9-10; Rom10:17)

There is nothing in this world quite like knowing God & making Him known. It beats anything else I’ve ever experienced! Once you’ve tasted of God’s greatness & goodness you have to want anyone else you care about to experience it too. If you don’t, then what you have isn’t very powerful. We live in a very pluralistic society. You more than likely live & work around people who have very different beliefs from you. How can we be very open about our beliefs & still get along? Only three ways you can respond: 1) Hide who you are in fear. 2) Speak out in a way that provokes anger in pride. 3) Share who you are with gentleness & respect

Fullness of Life and Full devotion to Christ are one in the same pursuit. When we urge people to become fully devoted followers of Christ we are inviting them to a full life of being a character in & a carrier of the great story of redemption through our Savior Jesus with infinite and eternal implications. God is not in the way of your happiness. He is your most satisfying reality!

We must understand that everything we are and have belongs to the Lord for glorifying him by making disciples.

Everyone is hard-wired to worship. It is what we do and who we are. The world is not divided into people who worship & people who don’t worship. It is divided into people who worship created things & those who worship the Creator (Rom1:25).

It is unhealthy to always want people around, and unhealthy to rarely want them around. All of us are inclined to one extreme or the other. Without solitude we are active but shallow. Without fellowship we can be deep, but stagnant. Christlikeness requires both. Silence and solitude is learning how to take a break from the chaos of life to behold the glory of Christ and become whole.

Prayer is an amazing privilege filled with astounding promise (James 4:2; 5:16)! Prayer causes things to happen that would otherwise not happen if we didn’t pray. We have been offered the amazing privilege of engaging with God in such way that we have an astounding promise that our requests can bring to past events in the Universe that would otherwise not happen if we don’t pray. It would be of unbelievable folly to not avail ourselves of this privilege and promise.

Beliefs do not automatically produce changed character. Beliefs must be turned into changed character through spiritual disciplines. Meditation is the key to making a Biblical truth real to our heart and the doorway into a deeper more satisfying prayer life.

Habits of grace are activities that are not about earning God’s favor, or twisting God’s arm, but about putting ourselves in the path of God’s amazing Grace and increasing our capacity to enjoying Jesus so that we can THRIVE spiritually. No spiritual discipline is more important than a regular & consistent encounter with God through His Word that involves not only the convictions of the mind but the affections of the heart.

A person who has been saved by the grace (unmerited favor and divine enablement) of God is going to grow in degrees of godliness (Phil. 1:6; 1 Tim. 4:7) and put their relationship with God in a position to THRIVE. This is done through the nourishment of disciplining oneself by the power of the Holy Spirit rightly motivated to do the spiritual disciplines.

It is one thing to understand the gospel but it is quite another to experience the gospel so deep in your heart that it changes everything about you and becomes the source of your identity, acceptance, security and significance. Do you believe what you believe is really real. The subject of assurance is one of the most important elements in the Christian experience. There is no higher privilege than to be a child of God and there is no greater experience than to know it. Romans chapter eight has a magnificent ending and yet the point is simple: It’s about assurance. The assurance of God Inseparable Love—that nothing can separate us from His love. Assurance of His Inseparable Love is heaven on earth.

These truths in Romans 8:1-30 are so immeasurably spectacular that we will struggle to really believe them, so Paul ends this chapter with five questions of relentless intense Gospel logic to beat us out of our disbelief.

Some Biblical truths can leave you almost speechless and at the same time a little suspicious because it seems too good to be true. Romans 8:1-30 has left Paul almost speechless. He begins our text verse 31 with “what then shall we say to these things?” And yet on the other hand he knows that these truths are so immeasurably spectacular we will all struggle really believing. So, Paul gives us five questions of relentless intense Gospel logic to beat us out of our disbelief. It’s logic on fire!

There is a joy in God that the worst kind of suffering cannot destroy (John16:22; 1Pet1:8; 1John1:4). It’s not the suffering that destroys us it’s the self-pity, bitterness and hopelessness that destroys us. The opposite of joy is not sadness but hopelessness. As Christians we are sorrowful yet always rejoicing (2Cor6:10). The joy God gives doesn’t eliminate our sorrow, it overwhelms it.

Do you have the hope of God that can endure the most severe suffering?

It doesn’t make sense that Almighty God would have children characterized by fear and insecurity. Chronic fearfulness in a believer is often the result of forgetfulness. To the degree you forget who God is, who you are as his child, and what you have been given by His grace is to the degree you will experience fearfulness.

. By embracing the truth about God’s extreme goodness, love & power and at the same time acknowledging our extreme capacity to be hideously sinful, we can begin to do battle with sin.

Paul is writing to Christians in Rome about a completely new life. It is a life in the Spirit. He opens the chapter by saying there is no condemnation and he closes the chapter saying we are more than conquerors. How can we know this is true? What does this all depend on?

Life is a Battle that we can’t lose if we are in Christ Jesus b/c… We are set free from the penalty of sin (v1) through Christ’s work (v3) We are set free from the power of sin (v2) through the Spirit’s work (v4)