Clearing Your Spiritual Inbox of Junk Mail
Replenish: Principles for Cultivating a Healthy Soul! • Sermon • Submitted • Presented • 52:43
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Call to Worship
Call to Worship
In the Presence of Jehovah
Welcome
Welcome
Wayne Sullivan
What a beautiful day to be gathering together in the house of our Lord with all of God’s people the Church! Are you genuinely excited that you are able to come together and gather together, freely, without oppression, to worship our Risen Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ! I sure am!
The events of this past week have simply reminded me that our citizenship is in heaven. We are simply on a journey through this land. If it feels like a long, tiresome, weary journey, then remember this little nugget from our Savior before we commence our worship this morning.
29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.
30 But even the hairs of your head are all numbered.
31 Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.
Don’t be weary, fear not what is happening in this culture, Christ has promised us these things would happen. Rejoice! Rejoice! He is with us every step of the way. He will be victorious in the end. And guess what? He values each and everyone of you more than you can imagine.
Never lose sight dear children, the reason we are seeing all these bad things happen in our world today is because Christ is setting the stage for His triumphant second coming to rescue His Bride, the Church. He is coming to establish His Kingdom, yet mankind loves darkness rather than light.
We are those who dwell in the marvelous light of the presence of Yahweh, Our God!
May we all pray the prayer of Psalm 139:23-24 in our hearts throughout this year.
23 Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts!
24 And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!
Old Testament Scripture Reading
Old Testament Scripture Reading
Wayne Sullivan
A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom his son.
1 O Lord, how many are my foes! Many are rising against me;
2 many are saying of my soul, “There is no salvation for him in God.” Selah
3 But you, O Lord, are a shield about me, my glory, and the lifter of my head.
4 I cried aloud to the Lord, and he answered me from his holy hill. Selah
5 I lay down and slept; I woke again, for the Lord sustained me.
6 I will not be afraid of many thousands of people who have set themselves against me all around.
7 Arise, O Lord! Save me, O my God! For you strike all my enemies on the cheek; you break the teeth of the wicked.
8 Salvation belongs to the Lord; your blessing be on your people! Selah
New Testament Scripture Reading
New Testament Scripture Reading
Stephen Nobles
13 Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
14 As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance,
15 but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct,
16 since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”
17 And if you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile,
18 knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold,
19 but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.
20 He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you
21 who through him are believers in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God.
22 Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart,
23 since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God;
24 for “All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls,
25 but the word of the Lord remains forever.” And this word is the good news that was preached to you.
Prayer of Invocation
Prayer of Invocation
Wayne Sullivan
Songs of Worship
Songs of Worship
All Hail King Jesus
As The Deer
Victory in Jesus (426 - All verses)
Sermon Series: Replenish: Principles for Cultivating a Healthy Soul!
Sermon Series: Replenish: Principles for Cultivating a Healthy Soul!
Series Recap:
Last week we began our new Sermon Series: Replenish: Principles for Cultivating a Healthy Soul!
The goal of this series of sermons concerns regaining our confident courage, our powerful proactivity, and our victorious vigor for our Lord, as we recognize that our soul, like our bodies, daily burns through the nourishment that the Lord provides as our soul pants for Him, like a deer pants for streams of flowing water (Psalm 42:1). Daily our soul is being drained of energy as we undergo various spiritual battles.
Therefore, we must seek to replenish our soul by swinging the pendulum of our spiritual life back toward the care of our soul, back toward spiritual health. In this series of sermons, I am offering you six principles that can help you to practically care for your soul as you apply these six biblical truths.
Last week, we covered the first principle of soul care: The Principle of Priority. From Matthew 6:33, we discussed the importance of seeking first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. We learned how to get our souls focused each and every day as we put first things first, as we invite the Lord to be the most important priority of our day and our week.
Today
Today, we are going to look at our second principle of replenishment that can help us cultivate a healthy soul.
I have titled today’s sermon, “Clearing Your Spiritual Inbox of Junk Mail.”
In today’s sermon, I hope to share with you a biblical principle that will help you get your life current with the will of God. Today’s principle is the principle of transformation. We will be in Paul’s epistle to the church in Rome, the book of Romans, the twelfth chapter. We will look at verse primarily at verse 1 and 2.
If you have a copy of God’s Word please turn there now and stand in honor of the reading of God’s Word. To understand the context of the Scripture, let us begin our reading today in Romans 11:25.
25 Lest you be wise in your own sight, I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery, brothers: a partial hardening has come upon Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in.
26 And in this way all Israel will be saved, as it is written, “The Deliverer will come from Zion, he will banish ungodliness from Jacob”;
27 “and this will be my covenant with them when I take away their sins.”
28 As regards the gospel, they are enemies for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers.
29 For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.
30 For just as you were at one time disobedient to God but now have received mercy because of their disobedience,
31 so they too have now been disobedient in order that by the mercy shown to you they also may now receive mercy.
32 For God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all.
33 Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!
34 “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?”
35 “Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?”
36 For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.
1 I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Prayer for Illumination
Spiritual Inboxes
Are you Suffering from Information Overload?
Are you Suffering from Information Overload?
We all have at least one physical inbox in life. It may be as simple as mailbox. You could have multiple mailboxes, as well as email inboxes, task manger inboxes, calendar inboxes, etc. Some of us have a lot of different inboxes in life.
Sometimes those inboxes can be more than we feel we can manage, especially during election seasons when more paper is wasted than any other time of the year. Am I right? Can I get an Amen on that one?
Seriously though, it can be overwhelming to keep up with all the information that is flowing at us on a daily basis. I know some people that have over 50,000 unread emails sitting in the email inbox. Others have piles of unopened mail laying around, because they have gotten behind on processing all of that information in the busyness of life.
Here is the problem: Lying in those piles are often very important pieces of information that can easily be lost amidst a ton of junk mail that should go straight to the trash can, but often times it doesn’t.
Spiritually speaking, our soul has an inbox as well. It is called our body, which includes our minds. Our body collects all of the information that comes at us each day. It records not only how physically tired and achy our bodies may be, but also how spiritually malnourished we may be as well.
There is a lot of information that comes at our bodies on a daily basis outside of our mail and email. Some of that information is very important, but it often gets lost in the pile with all the junk mail.
Spiritually speaking, a lot of Christians have filled their minds with so much of the world’s junk mail that it doesn’t even seem to be worthless anymore. Their lives never change. They continue to experience the same malnourishment spiritually, but they don’t understand why?
The things that I call junk mail, God calls unholy. Unholy relationships, unholy choices, unholy video and images, unholy attitudes, unholy actions. When we realize that we really do want to find what is important in life; you know, what is true, what is good and acceptable and perfect. When we are looking for what is important, we often discover that it has been lost somewhere in the pile of junk mail.
God has already told us where to go to find what’s true and righteous and perfect, but we have to let the Holy Spirit guide us. The problem we face is that we are suffering from information overload. The Holy Spirit is being quenched by all of the junk mail we have allowed to become a part of our daily lives.
This is why all the statistics report that on issues like biblical knowledge, marital faithfulness, broken homes, debt accumulation, addictions to alcohol and drugs, and issues with pornography and sexual immorality and the list could go on and on. On all of these reports, Christians are no different than non-Christians.
Is that what God’s Word calls us to? To be no different than the world system? Absolutely not!
The Bible says..
1 I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
Paul is about to make a two very strong and persuasive arguments for how to keep your spiritual inbox free of junk mail.
Before he does, he reminds us of why we should seek to offer a reasonable service of worship to our Lord.
“I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God,”
The word appeal, has been translated as to urge, to exhort, to beg. It comes from the same word that we get one of our words used to describe the Holy Spirit, “the paraclete.” Our word, parakaleo, carries the idea of a brother standing alongside of someone to offer them comforting counsel or advice. Here, Paul is standing alongside of his Roman brothers, he puts his arm around them and gently says to them “brothers, by the mercies of God.”
What does that mean? Romans is written to a group of believers who are living in the middle of the governing authority of the world system. All most anything was permissible in Rome. These believers, in a sense, lived in the thick of the junk mail culture of their day.
Paul has spent the majority of his letter, the first eleven chapters in fact, laying out the doctrine of the faith. In that doctrine, he has revealed the goodness and kindness of God. He has shown the Roman church the mercies of God. Which he summed up in the closing verses of chapter eleven, which we read a few moments ago.
Because of the great mercies of God revealed in the first eleven chapters, Paul begins to exhort the brothers on how to ethically and practically live out that doctrine, live out the gospel, in the midst of their pagan culture. He will spend the remainder of the letter sharing this practical application of his inspired teaching.
Before he embarks on this practical training, he wants to lay out two great endeavors we should pursue that are based around the principle of transformation.
The first way that we can clear our spiritual inboxes of junk mail is to....
1. Consecrate Ourselves in Reasonable Service to the Lord.
1. Consecrate Ourselves in Reasonable Service to the Lord.
1 I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
Paul’s primary focus in this verse is that we learn to rightly use our physical bodies. Namely that we learn to present them to God as a sacrifice.
Unlike the animal sacrifices of old, this sacrifice is ongoing. To present our bodies as a living sacrifice is to consecrate ourselves to the Lord. This requires that we set ourselves apart for God’s purposes, not the world’s and not our own.
This sacrifice has three descriptions,
Living - It is a continual, ongoing sacrifice given over and over again each day throughout our lifetime here on earth. It is to be done with willingness, not out of duty or compulsion. Someone once said, “The problem with living sacrifices is that they keep crawling off the altar!” Since that is true, we need to help each other to daily offer our living sacrifice to Christ. That is why the Christian life is best lived out in community with other believers.
Holy - Our sacrifice should be a holy sacrifice. We should set ourselves apart from the worldview that is prevalent in our world and should instead adopt a purpose and lifestyle that is based on Scripture and leads us to living a Christlike life. Our lives should be an offering that is pleasing to the Lord as it is dedicated to His purposes.
Acceptable - Our sacrifice should be God-honoring and therefore acceptable to Him. In the Old Testament, sacrifices had to be offered without blemish or defect, they had to be of the best quality, and most importantly, they should have never been used in the service of a false god.
“Which is your spiritual worship.”
The word spiritual is a translation of the word, logikos. In keeping with the idea of godly conduct, spiritual is a good way to translate that word, but it has also been translated as reasonable by a few translation. The word really means, “in keeping with the nature of a thing.” It means rational, reasonable.
Based on all that God has done for us, it is rational, yes reasonable even to offer our lives in spiritual service to the King of kings.
Ephesus, consecrate yourselves to the reasonable service of the Lord this morning and every morning. Understanding our purpose in life, can help us to get rid of the things that don’t fulfill that purpose. It can help us to learn to stay on top of our spiritual inbox, by trashing the junk mail that attempts to drown out what is reasonable and right.
The second way that we can clear our spiritual inboxes of junk mail is to....
2. Be Transformed by the Holy Spirit Rather than Being Conformed to the World.
2. Be Transformed by the Holy Spirit Rather than Being Conformed to the World.
2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Paul presents us a choice between two alternatives.
Alternative One
We can allow ourselves to be molded and shaped according to the pattern of our world from the outside in.
or,
Alternative Two
We can allow God to transform us from the inside out by the renewing of our minds as the Holy Spirit illuminates the Word of God in our soul.
The first alternative is a negative choice.
“Do not be conformed to this world.”
sy-sche-matizo - The schemes or patterns.
The word used for world is not really a word for world. It is a word that means “eon, era, or age."
Paul is saying, “stop letting the schemes or patterns of this current age define and mold you!” Before the Fall of man to sin, the world was in perfect harmony with God. It was a reflection of his goodness, righteousness and love.
Unfortunately, in our fallen state, we are part of a world system that is ruled by darkness, evil, selfishness, greed, violence, and untruthfulness. In our world, men love darkness rather than the light of God’s economy.
The principle of transformation in Alternative Two tells us that it doesn’t have to be that way. It gives us a positive choice.
As believers in Christ, we have been regenerated to newness of life through the Holy Spirit’s application of the word of truth to our soul. If we cooperate with the Holy Spirit by renewing our mind regularly by reading and praying through the Scriptures, then He will continually transform us more and more into the image of Christ!
But know this: we cannot transform our own soul; only God can do that. The principle here is about working with God to keep the clay of our soul pliable and moldable in His skillful hands.
This is the heart of our spiritual life: Our life is a battle ground.
Pastor C.D. Mallory of the early 20th Century once said,
“Oh, what a battle-field is this world to the child of God! How difficult so to live as not to conform to its maxims, its spirit, its fashions, and its follies! How difficult to determine how far the world is right in its practices, and how far it is wrong, to find the just line which separates innocent compliance from sinful conformity! How difficult to use the world and not abuse it, to prosecute our lawful callings without drinking in a carnal and sordid temper, to come in contact with ten thousand evils and not catch their dreadful infection!
“Who is the best protected amidst these innumerable perils? He that has a prosperous soul, a soul habitually swayed by the principles of grace and bound in close communion with Him who is the source of all strength. Being thoroughly "transformed by the renewing of his mind,” he readily proves, amidst the various emergencies of life, "what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God,” and finds it easier than all others to comply with the divine injunction "be not conformed to this world.”
Church, our inbox is the place where important messages of change can come into our lives, but if it remains cluttered by the junk mail of the world, we can miss out on what God wants to do in our lives.
Conclusion
What Junk Mail do you have in your life right now? What have you been allowing to come into your soul? If Jesus were inside your mind today (and He is) wouldn’t you ask Him if He were comfortable with the contents of your life. Would He feel at home in your soul?
This passage and these questions weren’t meant to condemn you, they were meant to bless you as you examine your life and see if there be any wicked way within. As you clear out the junk mail, the truly important will rise to the surface and you will be blessed and honor and glorify your merciful God.
Go home, and devote a couple of hours to reviewing two things: Review your schedule and your expenses. They will tell you how much junk mail you have allowed in your inbox.
What Junk Mail do you need to delete from your life today?
Invitation
Join me in prayer
Hymn - Softly and Tenderly 312
23 Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts!
24 And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!