Deciding to Follow Jesus: A Transformative Journey

"Because here's the bottom line. All of our lives. All of our lives are made up of the decisions we've made along the way. So wherever we are right now, the biggest contributing factor to where we are right now is the decisions we made that brought us here. Now, you say, Pastor, I couldn't, you know, things happened that I didn't know about. I couldn't plan for. Of course, we all have stuff that happens in our lives. But here's the key. You can't control what happens to you, but what you can control is how you decide to respond." [00:23:52] (34 seconds)


"Now, I want you to understand something. I want to give clarity here. A lot of you are sitting here thinking, well, I did that a long time ago. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you did and you did good with that for a while. And then you kind of fell back a little bit from that. Maybe you did. But what you really decided. It was not necessarily to follow Jesus, but maybe to follow other Christians. How they were doing and what they were doing. Thinking that you were following Jesus." [00:25:07] (29 seconds)


"You can believe that the Bible tells you the truth about Jesus and not really surrender to following Jesus. I heard another. A teacher used this phrase a long time ago, and I, I've adapted it from my life, adopted it for my life. And it's something you might want to think about too. And it's ask yourself this question. Are you covered in the dust of your rabbi? Now, what that means is a rabbi is a teacher. What was Jesus most known as? What was the title? They use most for him teacher rabbi." [00:26:16] (34 seconds)


"Peter answered, You are the Messiah. Different translations translate Messiah different ways. Messiah means Deliverer, Anointed One, Savior. So Peter is saying, We believe you're the one that was promised by God that he would sin to be the Anointed One of God, the Savior, the Deliverer of his people. That's the testimony of Peter and who he says that Jesus is. Verse 30, Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him. Now, people often get confused about that. But Jesus had a mission that he was on." [00:31:09] (38 seconds)


"Now, Jesus is not flawed, but the church is always going to be flawed, because flawed people need Jesus. And everybody has sinned and has those flaws. I love how this all got started when people started coming to see Jesus and hear His teaching. Then Jesus ascended back to the Father. He told the apostles to wait in Jerusalem. As He was going back to the Father. And He said, wait here until you're empowered by the Holy Spirit. Then you're going to become my witnesses for me, right? To call people to me." [00:45:01] (35 seconds)


"Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, the one that they crucified, the one that God has made both Lord, and Messiah. You get baptized in the name of Him, Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins, and there's a promise connected to it, you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. So here's an amazing promise, that if you would repent, which means to turn from your past, turn from your sin, turn from the mistakes and the failures of your life, turn from those things, and decide to be baptized into Christ, here's what's going to happen, God gives you the forgiveness of your sins, and He gives you the Holy Spirit Himself, and He wants everybody to understand." [00:50:29] (47 seconds)


"Part of connecting with Christ is becoming His disciple, joining other disciples in the growth process of being transformed by learning and following His teachings. Go back to Acts chapter 2. Those 3 ,000 that were baptized, you remember, that were added to their number that day? Look at verse 42, the very next thing they did. They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, to fellowship, to breaking of bread, and to prayer. They devoted themselves to the spiritual disciplines that will allow them to grow up as Christians." [00:58:39] (36 seconds)


"Now, steps two through four only happen if we do what I have here for number five. I'm going to close with this real quick. It's come and die. See, the only way we're going to move from the crowd to the family, to the disciple, to the place where we're serving, to the church, is if we're willing to come and die. come and die first. And when it says come and when I say come and die, I'm talking about dying to self. You die to yourself. That's the only way you're going to be willing to go through this whole process to become the servant that God has called you to be, because it requires you to stop living for yourself. To do that." [01:07:01] (50 seconds)


"When you die to self and you embrace that. In Romans 6, verses 3 and 4, there's a beautiful passage there that talks about the picture of those who came from the crowd. They've heard, they've made a decision about Jesus that they want to follow after him and accept what he's done for them on the cross. He's talking about those who made that decision. He says in verse 3, don't you know that all of us who were baptized into, Christ Jesus, were baptized into his what? Death. We were therefore buried with him through baptism into what? Death. In order that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. There is no new life without crucifying the old one, friends." [01:10:00] (52 seconds)