Perfect Love - Week 9: “Perfect Love Overcomes the World” - Full Service

Nobody drifts into a relationship with Jesus. We step into it. Nobody drifts into a relationship with Jesus. We step into it. Imagine with me for a moment that you're on a lake, and you're standing on one of two boats, one foot in each boat. Imagine the one boat is labeled self. It's got holes in it and it's sinking slowly. Imagine the other boat is labeled Christ, has no holes, isn't sinking at all. With one foot in each boat, your life will sink just as surely as if you had both feet planted in the boat marked self. [01:03:42] (60 seconds)  #AllInForJesus

The fact of who God is will get you through cancer. Feelings about what's going on around you are gonna overwhelm you. And for many of us, the train is out of order. And so the daily battle that we have, our daily an overcoming faith wakes up every day and says, know who God is. I know what God says. I'm trusting him with me, my past, my present, my future, everything and feelings come and go. But feelings do not drive my train, and feelings do not determine what is true or real. [00:48:40] (34 seconds)  #FactsNotFeelings

Somebody once said that, you know, circumstances are like a mattress. If you live under it, you could suffocate yourself. So we don't belong under the circumstances. But the fact remains though, life is hard and life is full of hardships. And I've come to the place in life where I have learned that there are two kinds of people. There are those who overcome hardship and there are those who are overcome by hardship. Which one do you wanna be? [00:34:01] (32 seconds)  #OvercomeOrBeOvercome

Here's the other one that got me. Cancer cannot reduce eternal life. It reduced physical life. I couldn't feel my face or my feet within the first infusion and it was that way for a long time. But it cannot reduce eternal life. Cancer cannot quench the spirit. The spirit of God working in my life. It quenched a lot of things, but it cannot quench the spirit of God. And cancer cannot lessen the power of the resurrection. [00:36:45] (31 seconds)  #CancerCantQuenchSpirit

These people opened up a bottle pill and in good faith took a pill that they thought was medicine when in fact it was poison. Here's the second lesson of faith that we learned from the Tylenol tragedy. Misplaced faith is hard to detect. Those capsules look just like the other ones. They didn't stick out. The bottles were labeled correctly. Everything looked right. Yet, they ingested poison and it took their lives. So here's the bad news. It is possible for faith to ruin your life. [00:24:43] (32 seconds)  #MisplacedFaithIsDangerous

So I'm just gonna give you a definition. Here's my definition of biblical faith and you'll see it as we work through our passage today. Biblical faith is surrendering all of you to all of Jesus. Biblical faith is surrendering all that you know about you to all that you know about Jesus. In fact, James McConkey put it this way. McConkey wrote, faith is dependence upon God. And this God dependence only begins when self dependence ends. [00:28:55] (33 seconds)  #BiblicalFaithIsSurrender

But here's the good news. God has provided a way for us to check our faith, to make sure we are not on the path of any kind of a tragic misplaced faith. And that's what we've been seeing all through first John. Remember, gotta read first John backwards. The last verse, first John five twenty one, John's like, my little children, keep yourself from idols. In other words, don't place your faith where it doesn't belong. It's dangerous. [00:25:15] (27 seconds)  #GuardAgainstIdols

Faith is tethered to the facts that we find in the scripture. Faith is linked to fact. Wherever the facts go, faith follows. But notice now, feelings are on the end. News flash, my friends, the train will run with or without the caboose. I have to be honest with you because I love you. For some of you here today, your faith is a feelings faith. If you get God bumps, it was God. Really? I can get bumps from a lot of things. [00:47:54] (36 seconds)  #FaithFollowsFacts

So the point is that the crucial resource to help me be an overcomer is the support of a church family, the accountability of a church family. Knowing and being known, journeying with other people, that's how we overcome. Without that, easily overcome. Self destructive patterns aren't going away on your own or you already would have done that. Issues, identity issues, emotional roller coaster, broken damage related, none of that's going away on your own or you would have done that already. [00:41:05] (31 seconds)  #AccountabilityMatters

The spirit of God has a job. His job is to testify, to take the truth of the reality of Jesus and impress it upon our hearts. Let me just say this. That's what's happening to you right now. Some of you here today that you're starting to see the difference between Jesus in the Bible and Jesus who you thought about in your relationship to him or not really, and all that is the spirit of God doing his job. He is testifying to you of the truth of Jesus. [00:57:58] (35 seconds)  #SpiritTestifies

And at that time, a friend of mine had just become a Christ follower and his buddy that led him to faith asked him who we should go to and share with. And they thought of me and they came to my home and and they shared with me the simple good news about Jesus in a way that I could both understand and respond to, and I did. And I promise you, the moment I opened my life to Jesus and gave him my yes, he gave me his spirit who's been with me ever since. [00:58:49] (25 seconds)  #TestimonyTransforms

And one of the things that the spirit does is he moves Jesus from the category of someone you hear about, to more than a historical person, to someone that you want to trust and give yourself to. He's the only one you can trust. No one will ever love you like Jesus loves you. He died for you when you didn't deserve it or want it. No one will ever keep you like Jesus keeps you. No one will ever hold you like Jesus will hold you. No one will ever walk with you and stay with you like Jesus because he knows all. [00:59:25] (33 seconds)  #JesusIsAllYouNeed

By faith, you open up a prescription bottle and you believe that the pharmacist got it right and didn't put the wrong thing in that bottle and you take those pills by faith. By faith, you drive down the road and you believe that that car on the other side is gonna honor that painted line and not just swerve right on over right into you. Or when the light turns green that it's okay to go ahead and drive through. We do these things by faith. [00:27:03] (28 seconds)  #EverydayActsOfFaith

So the reality is, friends, faith really is trusting God's word and acting upon it regardless of how you feel. Now, we need to have a conversation. Because John is like, hey man, I don't want you to have misplaced face, we gotta go there. So I want you to picture in your head, picture a train that has three cars. Go ahead. Ah, forget it. I'll just show you a train with three cars. How about this? Let's let's think this through. Here's a train with three cars. [00:46:40] (35 seconds)  #FactFaithFeelingTrain

And I can only tell you my immediate reaction in the moment, and I was like, alright Lord, you got me. That's been settled a long time ago. If this is how we close the chapter of the story, then so be it. Then I had to do surgery and then on into chemo and radiation and other things. And so they put a port in my in my chest, and I had to sit through four hours of infusion in a chair every other week, [00:35:19] (29 seconds)  #TrustThroughCancer

Alright, everybody. Hey, it's a big morning today here at Von Forrest Church because we wanna take some time and celebrate something real quick. Here at Vaughan Forster, we are a family on a mission together and we wanna celebrate for just a moment our students who just returned from a mission trip in New Orleans. So let's take a moment to appreciate our students. I will have you know, Chad was telling me about the trip and he said that, the students went out. So we have 40 students went on the trip and adult leaders went with them. They were in New Orleans the whole week and they handed out about four or 3,000 door knockers, right, or door hangers, you know, and praying for people, walking around, sharing, just being used by God any way they could. [00:20:00] (40 seconds)  #StudentsOnMission

Nobody drifts into a relationship with Jesus. We step into it. Nobody drifts into a relationship with Jesus. We step into it. Imagine with me for a moment that you're on a lake, and you're standing on one of two boats, one foot in each boat. Imagine the one boat is labeled self. It's got holes in it and it's sinking slowly. Imagine the other boat is labeled Christ, has no holes, isn't sinking at all. With one foot in each boat, your life will sink just as surely as if you had both feet planted in the boat marked self. The only sure place for you to stand isn't one foot in two boats. It's both feet firmly planted in one boat. That is Jesus Christ. The [01:03:42] (70 seconds)