The Master‘s Class, LifeChange Church Wichita

HOW TO BE USED OF GOD (Hebrews 11:32-34)

Would you like God to use you? I mean, would you really, or are you afraid of what God might ask you to do?  Are you willing to say to God, Lord I want you to use me wherever, whenever, and however, you want to use me?  Let’s go a little deeper, when you die, will people remember you as a servant of God, someone who impacted others for God?  In other words, will it make any difference that you lived? Will your story be that He was born. He lived. He died. You draw your breath, you draw your salary, you exist to live, you live to exist, and that is all?  I wonder if there are a lot of us who will not really leave any vacancy when we go. Will it make any difference that you lived? What is your life really, ultimately, counting for?  Is it counting for God?  If that is what you want, then who are the kinds of people that God uses?  Does God use mighty people to do mighty things for Him, or does God use common people to do His work?

Click on the link above to hear a message on the characteristics of the people that God uses to do mighty things to accomplish His will on this earth.

This is a live recording of The Master’s Class Bible Study at LifeChange Church Wichita, KS.

Amen.

A DYNAMIC LIFE OF FAITH-PART II (Hebrews 11:8-13)

Without faith it is impossible to please God. You will never succeed in your Christian life without believing God.  Faith is the mark of a Christian. Christians were called believers before they were called Christians. It is our chief duty to believe God, and in order to believe God, then you must hear from God.

How can we hear the voice of God?  The Bible tells us that God speaks to us by His Son.  So, how does God do that?  The Bible teaches that we have three things. We have the written Word of God. We have the mind of Christ, and we have the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Now, the wonderful good news about having these three things to hear from God, is that it gives us such an advantage over what the Old Testament prophets had to hear from God.  You see, these Old Testament characters, before they had the Bible, before they knew what we know by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, they had to wait for God to break in with some open revelation, some vision, some ecstasy. We don’t have to do that.

Listen, don’t just miss this Biblical truth by nonchalance. We have the inspired, inerrant written Word of God, and we have the mind of Christ, and we have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit of God, all speaking to us and sharing the will of God in our lives.  You have such an advantage today in being able to know the will of God.  You don’t have to guess at the will of God, you can know the will of God.  You can have the confidence to say to God as you pray, “Lord, this is Your will, and I thank You for it, and I stand on it.” 

How can you have this confidence?  You can have it because you have the written word of God, the Holy Spirit of God, and the mind of Christ.

Click on the link below to hear a message on how to have a dynamic life of faith that pleases God.

This is a live recording of The Master’s Class Bible Study at LifeChange Church Wichita, KS.

A DYNAMIC LIFE OF FAITH-PART I (Hebrews 11:8-13)

Charles Haddon Spurgeon said, “Little faith will bring your soul to heaven, but great faith will bring heaven to your soul.” How would you like to have great faith?  If you are a Christ follower, then I trust that you do.  When you came to Jesus Christ, God enrolled you in the School of Faith. Life is the classroom, the Bible is the textbook, the prophets and the apostles are the professors, and Abraham would have to be the Dean in the School of Faith.

Our message today is on the dynamic life of faith that Abraham led.  Hebrews 11:6 says, “Without faith, it is impossible to please God.”  This means that if you want to please God, then you must have faith.  If you please God, then it doesn’t matter whom you displease, and if you displease God, then it doesn’t matter whom you please.  There is no way to please God without faith.

Do you want to serve God?  Then, your chief duty is to believe Him. The supreme evil is unbelief. Unbelief is the source of all other sins.  Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden because they did not believe the Word of God that had been given to them. The Christian life, according to Hebrews 10:38, is to be lived by faith. The Bible says, “The just shall live by faith.” 

Now, I am telling you as clearly as I can that without faith it is impossible to please God. You will never, ever, succeed in your Christian life without believing God.  Not just in God, but God’s Word collectively in the Bible, and God’s Word that He has given personally to you.  

Click on the link below to hear a message on how to have a dynamic life of faith that pleases God.

This is a live recording of The Master’s Class Bible Study at LifeChange Church Wichita, KS.

Amen.

LET GOD SIT IN THE DRIVER‘S SEAT (Proverbs 3:5-6)

There is a popular bumper sticker out there that says “God is my Copilot.”  Well, if that is true in your life, then you better swap seats.  God needs to in the driver’s seat of your life.  We all like to be in control of our lives, but if you are to know God’s will, then you must let God be the one who chooses your way, not you.  You see, finding God’s will is not something that you are to figure out in your flesh.  It is not a puzzle that we need to figure out.  God is not leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for us to follow.  No, instead, we are called to trust in the Lord.

Someone once said, “To know the Lord Jesus is to love Him. To love Him is to trust Him. To trust Him is to obey Him. To obey Him is to find God’s will for your life. And to find God’s will for your life is to be blessed.”  The Word of God says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not unto your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy paths.” No ifs, ands, and buts about it. If you let Almighty God choose the way, control the way, confirm the way, and clear the way, then you will know the will of God for your life.

Now, let me just give you some very practical advice and I want you to think about it. The way to know the will of God for your life is to do the will of God immediately and in all things. In all your ways acknowledge Him. Don’t wait till tomorrow morning. I mean, starting now! Number two: Obey Him in the small things; then the big ones will take care of themselves. Everything big is made of little things. “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much.” (Luke 16:10) 

It’s hard to steer a ship that’s not moving, that means that God can’t steer a life that is not moving towards Him. I want to repeat again, the way to know the will of God for your life is to do the will of God immediately and to do it in all things. Obey Him in the small things; then the big ones will take care of themselves.

Amen.

TO KNOW THE WILL OF GOD (Proverbs 3:1-6)

Each of us, as a believer, is seeking the will of God for our lives.  We ask, are we doing what God has planned for us?  Are we touching the people around us with the gospel message of the cross?

As husbands, are we prayerfully leading our families in the path that God has chosen for us?  Are we the spiritual leaders of our families?  Does our family even know that we think about the will of God for the family?  Do they ever see us praying?  Do you pray together as a family seeking God’s will?

As wives, are you the prayer warrior that God wants each of us to be, but so often it is the wife and mother of the family that fills this role?  Does your family know that God is the one making the choices in your life?  Can they see God in the way you conduct yourself on a daily basis?

As married couples are you walking in the same direction, yoked together, pulling in the same direction, with your eyes on God?  Are you both surrendered to God?  Not just committed, but completely surrendered to the one, true, living, almighty God of all creation.

How to decide when and where to move in the work of Lord?  That is always a crucial question facing those that would do the Lord’s work.  Certainly, for most believers, the most difficult part is separating the desires of our own heart from the desires of the Lord.  Sometimes they coincide, sometimes they do not.  

Seeking the Lord’s will is something each Christian should be doing on a daily basis.  

Finding the Lord’s will is the result of quiet, careful, meditation on the Word of God with a surrendered heart.

So how do you know which way is right?  You start by asking yourself whether your heart is in a condition that can even hear the will of God?  In other words, are you speaking from a surrendered heart that is fully obedient to God?  If your heart is not surrendered to God, if you are not obedient to God’s Word, then you cannot know the will of God.  

Then, have you prayed and asked God to reveal the sin that is in your heart, and then confessed and repented of it?  If there is unconfessed and unrepented sin in your life, that sin will keep you from hearing God’s will.

Isaiah 59:2
2 But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear.
KJV

In my experience, this is the single biggest block between the prayer of the believer and the answer from God.  Many people want to live in sin, knowingly, and then expect God to ignore it and act like it doesn’t exist.  That will not happen.  God knows every sin, in every dark corner that you have placed it.  If you want to know the will of God, then you must first confess and repent of your sins.

Next, ask yourself, have you prayed about the question and then listened for God’s response, or have you simply told God the answer you want to hear?  

Then ask, is what you want meeting the purpose of Christ for this church being here, or for you still being on this earth?  Will it bring lost people to know Him?  If it doesn’t, then you need to rethink, and change your desires.  

Are you willing to accept God’s answer, whatever it may be?  You cannot know the will of God by intuition, or based on past experience, you must be willing to pray and accept God’s will, or it will never be revealed to you.  Why should God reveal His will if He knows you will not accept and be obedient to it?

Now, we have been talking about how to have God’s wisdom in our lives.  We need God’s wisdom in order to discern God’s will in our lives.  Our study over the next couple of weeks will be on how to determine the will of God in our lives, and the very first thing we must do is to make Jesus Christ your Lord and Savior.  You cannot know the will of God unless you have made the Holy Spirit the president of your life, not just a resident in your heart, but the president of your life.  Then, once you are saved, once you have completely surrendered to the Holy Spirit, the very next thing you must do is to be obedient to the Word of God.  You must obey God’s commandments.  In order to do that, then you must have God’s Word hidden in your heart.

Click on the link below to hear a message on how to determine the will of God for you life.

Amen.

ARE YOU PREPARED? (Proverbs 1:10-19)

Are you prepared?  Well, prepared for what?  In these days of unrest there is a whole group of people who are called “preppers.”  They have go-bags that are at the ready to grab in the event of an emergency, be it a hurricane, a riot, or some other cataclysmic event.  Those bags contain food, camping equipment, and tools for survival without all of the support that we have in our society, like electricity, grocery stores, hospitals, gas stations, and even the internet.  They are prepared to face a crisis event.

So, how you respond to the question of Are You Prepared depends on what you need to be prepared for?  Is it a crisis event, or is it just to go to work today, or to school to take that exam?  

Our message today is going to ask the Christian believer Are You Prepared to go out into the secular world?  This message is for every believer, young or old, rich or poor, educated or not.  For you to live a victorious Christian life you have to be prepared to face a world full of temptation and sin.  This is especially true of our children as they get to the age where they will enter the world.  But even though this message seems to be directed at our children, the principles that Solomon describes are just as applicable to adults.

One of the primary responsibilities of a Christian parent is to prepare their children to go out into the world and live a life that honors and glorifies God.  Now, every parent wants their child to go out and succeed, but a secular parent and a Christian parent should have different definitions for the word succeed.  The world looks at success in terms of wealth, power, happiness, and a family.  

A Christian looks at success as finding fulfillment in always being obedient to the will of God for their lives.  Now, wealth, power, happiness, and a family, may, or may not, come for the Christian, but if they do, they are simply due to the grace of God, not because of anything that we have done.  Our trust is in the love that God has for us, and the certain knowledge that He will provide everything we need, and much more than we deserve.  

If your trust is in something other than God to provide for your needs, like your own hard work, then you are not prepared to do God’s will for your life.  This is true because it impacts your priorities.  If your priority is to provide for your needs, then those needs will always come before your work for God. 

Other than making sure your children know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, teaching them this concept of duty and service to God is the single most important principle that we can give them.  It is to be more important than teaching them how to read, to write, to dress themselves, and to be polite.  All those things are important, but without God, and without a desire to serve God, they will be easy prey for the world.  

Click on the link below to hear a message that asks the question Are You Prepared to go out into the secular world?  

Amen.

MAKING EXCUSES TO GOD (2 Samuel 19:32-39)

Have you ever made an excuse to God to explain why you didn’t want to do something that He asked you to do?  God says “Keith, I want you to go witness to that big guy over there that is decked out in motorcycle gang leather and chains.”  I look at the man, at the long beard, the ear rings in his ears, and then I look back up at God, and say “Well God, he looks pretty busy right now, and I am pretty tired, I sure don’t want to have a long conversation right now.  You know God, the more I think about it, I am not sure I am the right person for the job.”  

Did you ever try to talk God out of making you do something like that?  It never works out, does it?  In fact, after you have been a Christian for a while, you learn to just say “Yes Lord, thank you Lord, I love you, Lord,” and then you go do whatever He wants you to do.  Things work out a whole lot better when we don’t make excuses and just be obedient to God. 

When I think of Biblical characters that gave excuses to God, the person that comes to my mind is Moses when God told him to go back to Egypt and stand before the Hebrews and Pharaoh.  Moses said things like, “Listen God, I’m not good enough.  I don’t have all the answers.  People won’t believe me.  I am a terrible public speaker, and, I am not qualified to do that.”  Making excuses didn’t work for Moses either and in Exodus 4:14 we see how God reacted when it says that “the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses.”  God got tired of the excuses and sent Moses on down the road.  

Then, I think of a shoe salesman named Dwight L Moody that God called, or Billy Sunday, a professional baseball player.  God called both to be great evangelists, yet both had to wonder “Why me?  I am not qualified to do that.  I don’t know enough to do that.”  Yet, they both responded, and God used their faithfulness to reach millions.

Well, today’s lesson is about one of those men in David’s life that put on a good show to start with, but then just made excuses when David asked him to do more.  The man’s name is Barzillai.

Barzillai uses a whole list of excuses to not go with David, and he eventually looks at David and says, "I'm not going, David, and that's the end of it. There's Chimham here; he wants to go, take him." And David did. He said, "All right, Barzillai, please yourself, have it your own way. I wanted you to help me run an empire. I'll never ask you again. Good-bye. Come on, Chimham, come and take this old man's crown."

And that is where the Holy Spirit leaves him—where David left him, heading back for the rut that would soon become his grave.  Make no mistake, there is a limit to how many times the Holy Spirit will listen to your excuses before He says, “Ok, please yourself.  I wanted you to help me to bring the gospel message of Christ to a lost world, but you said no.  I will never ask you again.”  

Ask yourself, how many excuses have you given to God at this stage of your life, whatever that is, young or old?  I just can’t imagine that anything could be worse for a child of God than for the Lord Jesus, at last, to simply leave a person to himself.  Then for that believer to face, one day, the judgment seat of Christ and see someone else take their crown.  

Click on the link below to hear a message on what it means when we tell God, “I will go a little way for you Lord, but I am not going all the way.” 

Amen.

TO DO A GOOD THING THE WRONG WAY (2 Samuel 6:1-11)

David was a man that God loved in a special way, and David loved God in a special way, as well.  In our message today, David wants to be the kind of king that God wants him to be.  In order to do that, David knows that he needs God’s power, he needs God’s anointing, and he needs God’s presence. 

Now, if you want to have, and to know, the conscious presence of the Lord in your life, then there is the holy reverence towards God, and the things of God, that you must express.  The reason that some people do not know the conscious presence of God is they have lost a holy reverence for God. We see an example of that in the way that David tried to move the Ark of The Covenant into the city of Jerusalem.   David’s first attempt to bring the ark in was lost because he did not express a holy reverence for the things of God. He became careless in the things of God, and his carelessness led to a great calamity that day.

The interesting thing here is David is following the way of the world rather than following the Lord. Now, God had said clearly, specifically, and plainly, how the ark was to be transported, but rather than transporting it as God had said to transport it, David starts out to do a good thing the wrong way, and what he’s doing is just simply disobeying the Lord.

Now, we can have the presence of God in our church and we can have the presence of God in our lives, but if we do, it’s going to be God’s way, not ours. You know what’s wrong with so many churches today? They’ve learned from the world, and they’re following the ways of the world. In fact, the world is conforming the Church more than the Church is transforming the world. We are being conformed by the world rather than being transformed by the Spirit of God, and it’s amazing how the spirit of this world has crept into so many churches.

When we choose to follow the way of the world, we are disobedient to God.  What follow’s our disobedience of God?  God’s displeasure with us, and then comes discouragement, and then comes defeat.  

Click on the link below to hear a message on how if you want to have the conscious presence of God in your life, then you must have a holy reverence for God, and the things of God.  You cannot lay profane and unholy hands on the things of God by being disobedient to His Word.  We need a reverence for God, for holy things.  We ought to be on our face before the thrice holy God of Israel. We ought to tremble in the presence of God.

Amen.

THE PURPOSE OF PRAYER (John 17:1-23)

Today’s message is on prayer and it comes from chapter 17 of the Gospel of John. This is a prayer of the Lord Jesus. It is a deep and profound prayer. In times like this, a time when great numbers of people are dying from a disease, a time when great persecution of God’s people is taking place, a time when there is doubt and fear about what is happening in the world, prayer is the most important thing in a Christian’s life. It is prayer that prepares us for anything. It is prayer that allows us to be prepared to face any fear, any tragedy, any persecution. The best preparation for anything is to pray.

The purpose of prayer is that God will be glorified. Prayer prepares us to do what God would have us to do. Then, when we do what God would have us to do, God will be glorified.

If you wish to learn the purpose of prayer in a Christian’s life, then I can’t think of a better way to do it than to eavesdrop on the Son of God when He prays. Imagine that, we get to hear the words of the Son of God as He prays. What a privilege that is.

Click on the link below to hear a message on how prayer can take you through any tragedy, any trial, in order that you might finish the things that God has for you to do.

HOW TO HAVE YOUR PRAYERS ANSWERED-PART II (John 14:4-6)

Prayer is a privilege that is granted to a believer by a loving God. Prayer is such a powerful privilege because prayer can do anything that God can do. Prayer is unlimited in its power because prayer brings God into action. Effective prayer is essential to any believer if they are to live a victorious Christian life.

In today’s message we talk about six things that you need to do if you want your prayer to be heard by God. If you want your prayer to be answered by God.

The first thing we have to do is to Pray in the name of Jesus. When we pray in the name of Jesus, we have His authority. His power of attorney. Which means we must have His approval on anything we pray in His name, and we must be praying to bring honor to Jesus. Jesus will not allow you to use His name if He does not approve of what you are praying for.

The second thing is that you must pray in the Spirit. It is very important to understand that if you want your prayers answered, then you must not only be saved, but you must also be Spirit-filled. To be filled with the Holy Spirit means that you have fully surrendered your life to the Holy Spirit. He is the president of your life, not just a resident in your heart. You are not just committed to the Spirit, you are fully surrendered to the Spirit.

The third thing is that you must Pray in obedience. It is foolish to pray and to ask God to answer your prayer if you are not obeying. If you want God to hear your prayers, then confess those sins that you have regard for, and He will be “faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

The fourth thing is to Pray in the Will of God, your prayer must be in the will of God. The way to pray in the will of God is to be surrendered to that will, to want that will, to listen to that will, and to do that will.

The fifth thing is to Pray in Fellowship. If we are out of fellowship with somebody else, if we have an unforgiving spirit in our heart, then we are out of fellowship with the Father.

The sixth thing is to Pray in Faith. Someone once said that “No prayer has ever been answered that was not a prayer of faith. No prayer of faith has ever been unanswered.” If you pray in the name, if you pray in the Spirit, if you pray in obedience, if you pray in the will of God, if you pray in fellowship with the other saints, then you will find yourself praying in faith to God.

Click on the link to hear a message on how to have God answer your prayers. This is not about earning your answer, for it is God’s grace all the way. We do not command God, He commands us. This is about preparing yourself to have your prayer heard by God, and God answers the prayers He hears.

Amen.