Fierce Church

#TrustGodsPlan

“Hey. Part of being god is he knows all the facts, and part of being a creature is I can trust that God knows all the facts. I don't need to, like, fix it. I don't need to figure it out. And sometimes, see, these Israelites, they had just enough information to make a bunch of guesses and not enough information to get anything right. That's often what we have. Doesn't that sound familiar? You got just enough information to have a bunch of guesses and not enough information to get everything right.”

“``But confidence reminds you, no matter what's happening, you're not powerless and God's not powerless. Yeah. Amen. You're not powerless. There's something you can do to glorify God in this situation. There is hope that someday something's gonna change and you can move forward and you can give God praise. You're not powerless and God's not powerless. This is not the end. I don't have to get stuck here. I can go forward into the future and say, God is still good tomorrow just like he's been good in the past.”

#RealEnemyHiddenPlan

“Is it possible that as much as you see online, as much as you see on TV, as much as you see around the world, there are things that are really true and really happening and they're really bad, but there's something else also going on under the surface.Not by the good guys though, by the bad guys, by the enemy of your soul and my soul, by the prince of darkness, by Satan himself. Now, I know some might be like, I don't know if Satan's real. That's okay if you don't know, Jesus knew. He talked about Satan, not just like he was a force, not just like he was like a bad atmosphere somewhere. No, he was a real guy, he's a real personality with a real will and a real evil heart and takes real action on planet Earth. And that real enemy, he's showing us one plan in the natural that we see. But I want to submit to you through God's word, there's another plan going on under the surface.”

#GodLikeSurgeon

“God doesn't want to hurt you any more than the surgeon wants to hurt you. But the surgeon, though they're going to try their best to not hurt you at all, they're willing to hurt you in order to remove what needs to be removed, or fix what needs to be fixed. And that's the way God thinks about it, too.”

#BibleShapesLeadership

“I’m of the school of thought that we really want to be formed by the Bible. I know that in several past decades, leadership principles have been kind of trickling into the body of Christ, which I think is awesome. I became a little bit afraid that I was being shaped too much by Jim Collins and other leadership writers, which great, great principles, a lot of wisdom, but I wasn’t being shaped by the scriptures, seeing that there’s all these leadership principles in the Bible. And so that’s really what this is about.”

#NeedForARighteousKing

“See, when our first parents left the rule of the really wise and really good God and said, no, we'll take it from here. We can do it ourselves. They ran into eventually through their children and children and children and children, all kinds of situations where dumb people are in charge. They shouldn't be in charge. They need a true king, a good king, a benevolent king, a wise king who is in charge of an unshakable kingdom. They need Jesus Christ, which is what the entire Bible is trying to tell us.”

#CreatedForFellowship

“The first reason is because you were created for fellowship with God. Remember in the garden, that's when God created man and woman, they were with him. Like that was his original intent. Because of Christ, we are now able to be with him again. And so it only makes sense. We get the privilege of spending time with God. That was his original heart's desire. So why wouldn't we have time with God?”

#CharacterOverKnowledge

“Let's talk about the final one that I think might be the most important, okay? This is the character study. So it's really cool to study topics in the Bible. But at the end of the day, character is a more important thing than Bible factoids. So it's cool to do a study on whatever topic, but it's even cooler if I'm personally being transformed. And sometimes as Christians, we don't think enough about like, how should I be progressing? in my character in the bible not just my bible knowledge but like i'm actually becoming more like jesus and and to a certain degree we can't we don't we don't we don't see everything the holy ghost sees and what he wants to form in us but we see a few things places that he wants us to like get better and that comes by dunking us in topics that are about character not just to fill our brains with stuff because that puffs up and makes us arrogant this other stuff humbles us so let's talk about this character study”

#QuickScriptureJournaling

“Some of the benefits of this is one you can do it in a really short period of time like it doesn't take a whole lot of time you can go through your five questions through a few scriptures and you're gonna write out just some summary ideas and you put them in your journal wherever you're gonna put them and then you've got them or you can just put them in the notes in your Bible whatever.”

#PersonalTimeWithGod

“Here's the danger I want to talk about tonight before you guys go into a little small group session and then I'm going to come back and teach a little bit more. But just before you guys go into this, we talked a lot about tools. We've talked a lot about things that you can do and the danger is...you're going to see those as kind of levers like if I pull this God will do this if I study the words here God's obligated to show me some treasure he's obligated to show me whatever that's just the wrong way to think about spending time with GodJesus is a person and he wants it, if nothing else, he wants this to be personal. He wants it to be personal time.”

#FaithfulNotPsychopath

“Just like a little child. Saul died because he was unfaithful to the Lord. He did not keep the word of the Lord and even consulted a medium for guidance. Okay. So that's why Saul died. He was unfaithful. So I'm thinking about him. Gosh, he was like kind of a big deal and God picked him out and hand selected him. And then apparently, I remember that he got really weird about David. and ultimately he turns into a psychopath that's consulting witches.”

#RevelationIsNotNews

“When you get to something like Revelation, let me give a little pro tip here. Revelation is not a newspaper. As you look at prophecy people will come and they'll look at this and they'll project today's headlines onto the text and be like, see this is where It happens and they forget that there's already been 2 ,000 years and you could have in any year, any of those 2 ,000, you could have looked at the events of the world and say, see it's right here in Revelation. That's not how apocryphal biblical literature works.”

#RefreshYourSpiritualRoutine

“You have to have enough regularity that it's a little bit predictable. In other words, you know you're gonna have time with God. You have a kind of a protected time in the day where that's actually going to happen. Otherwise, the devil, man, he'll just run you ragged. You'll get there once a month.So it has to be somewhat regular.”

#RejectCulturalPressure

“Are there messages in our culture that are telling me you need to be more, Carter? You need to be more than you are. The way you are is not good enough. You need to be, okay, I know you trust Christ, but you need to be, you need to trust Christ and you need to like be up with all the trends.”

#BuildingFaithStepByStep

“All these nights build on one another so tonight we're gonna talk about kind of some basic stuff about studying God's Word but then the next week we're gonna go a little bit deeper and you're gonna add skills and add understanding as you go so it's okay if you miss something but if tonight seems a little basic some of y'all know you've been to Bible school and you're like I feel like this is basic. It's going to get less basic as we go, but it'll never get over your head, I promise.”

#TrustGodsPerfectWisdom

“In the name of Jesus is not a tack onto the end of a prayer that we can have the outlet to plug into God. It doesn't make it more powerful or special if you just say the words in the name of Jesus. In the name of Jesus means in alignment with his character, who he is and what he has done on your behalf.”

“He found it. And what was that favor? That favor really was, it was God's approval, not because Noah was such a righteous man or because he did so much right. It was because God already knew, Book of Romans tells us because God already knew Jesus Christ would die on the cross, he applied the blood, not only to people that came after Jesus, but people who came before Jesus.”

“But that's not the only way that God stands. He also stands in love over us, so much so that he sent his only son to die for those rebellious sins. His son paid the penalty that you deserve so that we might have life abundantly. That new life is transformational. That is the good news this morning.”

“The word has a power. It blows away the fog of sin. It blows away the fog of compromise. It brings greater clarity and discernment. We're transformed by the renewing of our mind according to God's word so that we'll be able to test and approve what God's good will is, his good and perfect and pleasing will.”