Pastor Wrinkles: Just the F.L.A.C.T.S. Please Pt. 7

     Today we are finishing up our discussion about the F.L.A.C.T.S. of life. If we can just get a hold of these things, I know our prayer lives will be revolutionized. I am believing that this year many of us are going to see it happen as we await the day!

The F.L.A.C.T.S. as we have stated before are just an intentional way of approaching God through:

Faith with a

Listening spirit

Adoring God before everything else

Confessing both the strengths and weaknesses of our situation

Thanking Him for His move in our lives as we recognize it and finally

Supplicating with the Lord in regards to the things HE wants to give us.

    Today of course we are going to talk about supplication.  Supplication is that part of prayer that most of us define as prayer. It is the requesting part of prayer: The “God heal Aunt Joan” prayer, the “God I need a $1000.00 to pay the mortgage!” prayer, the “God protect the missionary in New Guinea” prayer.

         I find people fall into one of two extremes when it comes to supplication. Either we don’t pray for things at all or the only thing we do when we pray is ask for stuff. The Apostle Paul helps us to strike a thoughtful balance with his admonition in Philippians Chapter 4

“Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done.” Phil 4: 6 NLT

  Here Paul gives us 4 practical helps when it comes to supplication:

1. Don’t worry. Pray in your prayer time. Give it into the hands of Jesus and then get your mind off it. Go to a movie. Host a game night. Go to church. But don’t wallow in the request. You’ll only get in God’s way.

2. Pray about everything.  Practice daily giving every area of your life into God’s hands through prayer. Pray about something in every arena of your life every day. And keep a list of what you are praying. Cross things off the list as they get answered. It’s a great faith builder.

3. Be honest about needs. Don’t try to do anything without praying about it first. It’s not like HE doesn’t know. God sometimes just waits for permission to help.

4. Thank him in advance of the answer for the answer!

Which area of the F.L.A.C.T.S. are you working on today?

Pastor Wrinkles: Just the F.L.A.C.T.S. Please Pt. 6

    Over the course of the last several days I have been delivering excerpts from my New Year’s Day sermon to you. The hope has been to strengthen our prayer lives in 2012. To do that we have been discussing coming to God through:

Faith with a

Listening spirit

Adoring God before everything else

Confessing both the strengths and weaknesses of our situation

Thanking Him for His move in our lives as we recognize it and finally

Supplicating with the Lord in regards to the things HE wants to give us.

Today we are going to discuss the spirit of thankfulness.

One of my friends recently made what I though was an accurate, if generalized, observation about Christians. He noted that we tend to be really good at asking for prayer in negative circumstances but when it comes to recognizing the prayers that God has answered and thanking Him for those answers we tend to be a little less enthusiastic. I know his words were a dope slap for me. I am the guy who doesn’t even realize a prayer has been answered until four days after the answer has arrived.

 This year I am determining to do some practical things to increase my own thankfulness in prayer:

1. I am making a list of requests and reviewing it monthly to see which ones were answered

2.  I am going to celebrate daily the good things God has done in my life. I will take time in prayer to thank Him and also thank Him publicly.

3. When God does something I will try to post it to the social networks I use. Are you with me here? Instead of OMG, and LOL, I’m bored, or I ate hamburger let’s fill cyberspace with the little praises and the big praises of God.

Tell me, how do you maintain a thankful spirit?

 

Pastor Wrinkles: Just the F.L.A.C.T.S. Please Pt. 5

   If you are just stepping in on this series, we have been having a discussion regarding Cornerstone’s New Year’s Day sermon, entitled “Just the F.L.A.C.T.S. Please”. If you want to catch the sermon in its entirety go to www.cornerstoneag.net. Follow the pastors corner link to our sermon section and have a listen.

   Today we are discussing coming to God through:

Faith with a

Listening spirit

Adoring God before everything else

Confessing both the strengths and weaknesses of our situation

Thanking Him for His move in oour lives as we recognize it and finally

Supplicating with the Lord in regards to the things HE wants to give us.

      Much has been made of confession throughout the course of Christian history. Some fellowships got it right while others took it to places it was never meant to go. There is much to be said about the Christian discipline of confession in regards to relating one to another; But today I want to talk about our confession to God. Many of us spend no time in confession simply because we think God already knows everything, so why bother. But confession to God should be an important part of every Christian’s prayer life. Listen to these words from 1 John 1:9

“But if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness.” NLT

   So it is necessary in prayer to come clean with God. If you struggle with Christian confession here are some practical steps:

1. Take time to name your sins by name! In your prayer life be honest. Confess your faults to God and ask Him to help you correct them. 

2. Don’t just confess the wrong take some time to confess the positive things that are going on in your life too. This is an aspect of confession we seldom think about and it is an absolutely essential link to building a prayer-life of thankfulness.

3. Confess the promises of Scripture over yourself. Here are a few I use on a regular basis.

“He who began a good work in me will be faithful to complete it.” Phil 1:6

” He who called me is faithful” 1 Cor. 1:9

” He will never leave me nor forsake me” Deut 31:6

 In 2012 let’s determine to become a people who acknowledge the challenges but proclaim victory in all its forms!

Pastor Wrinkles: Just the F.L.A.C.T.S. Pt. 4

We have been talking about the F.L.A.C.T.S. these last few days. That is coming to God through:

Faith with a

Listening spirit

Adoring God before everything else

Confessing both the strengths and weaknesses of our situation

Thanking Him for His move in our lives as we recognize it and finally

Supplicating with the Lord in regards to the things HE wants to give us.

 Today we come to the part of effective praying which involves the adoration of God.

Much of the prayer life should be consumed with worshipping God and coming to an attitude in which He is more important than everything else. The substance of adoration is making God more important than every other thing in life.  And here are some practical steps to achieving that place of worship:

 1.  As you begin your prayer session turn on praise music and sing along. Think about what the words mean. Which words strike a chord with you? Repeat those words several times taking them deep into your soul.

2.     As you listen to the music begin to make up your own words of praise to God. It is awesome to sing someone else’s music to the Lord but even more amazing when you make up your own melodies to Jesus. They don’t have to be profound they just have to be yours.

3.     Take one of the positive  Psalms and personalize it. Psalm 23 is great for this as is Psalm 25, 27 or 91.

How have you strengthened your worship life as a Christian?

 

 

Pastor Wrinkles: Just the F.L.A.C.T.S. Please Pt. 3

What follows is another excerpt from Cornerstones New Year’s Day sermon. To here the preach in its entirety please go to www.cornerstoneag.net follow the pastor’s corner link to the sermon section of our website.

We have been talking about the F.L.A.C.T.S. that is:

Faith with a

Listening spirit

Adoring God before everything else

Confessing both the strengths and weaknesses of our situation

Thanking Him for His move in our lives as we recognize it and finally

Supplicating with the Lord in regards to the things HE wants to give us.

 Having an effective prayer life  involves coming to God with a LISTENING spirit. You see, Ultimately prayer is not about asking God for things. It is about discovering the will of God in a circumstance and coming into agreement with it. Some of our prayer lives are anemic because we spend all our time talking and no time listening.

Here are some steps in learning to listen:

1.     Take the first 5 minutes of a prayer to be still and know that God is God. What does that mean to you?

2.      read the Bible or a devotional for the next five minutes

3.     Take five minutes to ask what the devotional says to you personally. How does it apply to you in your situation? 

 4.     When you begin to pray for things don’t start with the conclusion you desire. Start by asking God what He would do in the situation. What outcomes seem very strong to you? Begin to pray into those things.

What steps have you taken to grow in listening?

Pastor Wrinkles: Just the F.L.A.C.T.S. Please Pt. 2

Over the course of the next few blogs you will be reading excerpts from Cornerstone’s New Years Day message. We will be talking about strengthening our prayer lives in 2012 by coming to God through:

Faith with a

Listening spirit, 

Adoring God before everything else

Confessing both the strengths and weaknesses of our situation 

Thanking Him for His move in our lives as we recognize it and finally 

Supplicating with the Lord in regards to the things HE wants to give us.

Today we are going to talk about approaching God with faith.

For many the area of our prayer life that needs to be changed is faith.

James 1: 5-7 says “If any of you lacks wisdom he should ask God who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. But when he asks he must believe and not doubt, because HE who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed about by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord he is a double minded man unstable in all he does.” 

How do you view God? Do you view Him as the loving and benevolent father who desires to give good gifts to His children or do you think of Him as someone who is out to get you, a “sometimes enemy”, who may or may not have your back. You see faith in prayer and thus answered prayer are directly linked to how we think of and relate to God.

Today I don’t want to talk about how to defeat doubt. I want to talk about how to build faith: If you struggle here are three simple things you can do to build faith in 2012.

1.     Begin to ask God daily for a greater measure of faith. He has the power to increase faith in your life. It is one of the supernatural gifts mentioned in I Cor. 12. So ultimately faith comes from Him.

2.     Begin to challenge your own faith in small ways. When you lose your keys, ask Him to help you find them. Stop throughout the day and ask for help with everything

3.     Join a group of faithful Christians for a Bible study and refuse to quit when it gets hard.

These three things will begin to change the way you relate to God in faith!

What has helped build your faith?

Pastor Wrinkles: Chapter Charts Pt. 50

Huzzah! It’s our jubilee! The chapter charts are entering their fiftieth edition! You really need to join us in this great devotional exercise. It’s three steps to easy!

1. Read the chapter

2. Brainstorm three ideas from the chapter that you could write or talk about.

3. Write down your three ideas as a comment to me!

Here’s what I came up with:

Leviticus chapter 7 sermon topics/titles:

1. Guilt the Ultimate Fat Burner: Lev. 7: 1-10

2. Low Fat and Well Done: Lev. 7: 22-27

3. The Fellowship Connection: Lev. 7: 28-36

Leviticus chapter 8 sermon topics/titles:

1. The Clothes Make the Man: Lev. 8:1-9

2. The Atoners Who Needed Atonement: Lev. 8:14-26

3. Would You Do This To An Original Dior? Lev. 8:30

Your Turn 😉

Pastor Wrinkles: Chapter Charts Pt. 49

Wow! I feel a little like a bouncing ball going back and forth between three studies now. But at least this is a ball which has some good rhythm going. I toyed with the idea of skipping the Chapter Charts this week in favor of “Just the F.L.A.C.T.S. PLease”; But we have been faithful to these little Scriptures nibbles for so many weeks I just couldn’t do it. So if you were grabbed up by “the F.L.A.C.T.S.” don’t worry they will be continued in just a few days. For today let’s turn our eyes toward Leviticus.

Leviticus chapter 5 sermon topics/titles:

1. If You’re Unclean and You Know It… Lev. 5:1-6

2. The Price You Can Afford; Lev. 5: 7-14

3. Ignorance Is Not  a Defense: Lev. 5: 14-19

Leviticus chapter 6 sermon topics/ titles:

1. Personal Responsibility : Lev. 6:1-7

2. Clean Before the Eternal Fire : Lev. 8-13

3. The Sacrifice Is Holy : Lev. 7: 24-30

Now you try 🙂

Pastor Wrinkles: Just the F.L.A.C.T.S. Please Pt. 1

Dear Readers: What follows are excerpts from Cornerstone’s New Year’s Day sermon. If you would like to hear the sermon in its entirety please go to www.cornerstoneag.net and  follow the Pastor’s Corner link to the sermons portion of our website.     

 “If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. ” John 15:7 NIV

            Many Christians are at a loss when it comes to the work of prayer in the walk with Christ.  We can tell God our stories in graphic detail but in the end our prayers do little to change our circumstances. For many, prayer seems like just a  repetition of things we are aware God already knows. We come away from telling Him our story to feel like He hasn’t heard us or worse is annoyed with our telling.

      John 15:7 implies that the problem starts with us. It is our communication problem not God’s.  Envision yourself with the family member who can never tell a story without sparing you the gory details. I think it is sometimes like that in our relationship with God.  Maybe there are days when God  wants to stop us in our much speaking and say to us “Just give me the facts please.”

Or maybe that is “Just the F.L.A.C.T.S. please”.

This is a good day to begin asking ourselves the question “How effective are our prayer lives?”

            The answer lies in how we are communicating. Are we the relative who bends God’s ear but says nothing. Or are we the person who deals in the F.L.A.C.T.S. Are we approaching God as complainers bearing tales of woe or are we coming to God Through: 

Faith with a

Listening spirit

Adoring God before everything else

Confessing both the strengths and weaknesses of our situation

Thanking Him for His move in our lives as we recognize it and finally

Supplicating with the Lord in regards to the things HE wants to give us.

I sense that 2012 is going to be a year of God’s mighty move. That’s not just because God has made up His mind to move but it’s because God’s people are going to begin living and praying forth the word of God in appropriating faith once again by giving God the F.L.A.C.T.S.

More to come Friday…. Join us tomorrow for Pastor Wrinkles Chapter Charts.

 

Heaven Pt. 16

“For the LORD, the God of heaven, who took me from my father’s house and my native land, solemnly promised to give this land to my descendants.He will send his angel ahead of you, and he will see to it that you find a wife there for my son. ” Ge. 24:7 NLT

  Once upon a time I lost my job at Cornerstone. The church was in pastoral transition. Money was tight. The board made the difficult decision to lay off the staff (yep it can happen in churches too).

     I was mad at God. After all He was supposed to be the “Provider”, wasn’t He? He had called me to minister and now it seemed like ministry was drying up.

     Then God shared with me a timeless truth from the book of Romans. In my lowest moments of those days when I asked God why He was allowing the ministry to be destroyed out of my life He came to me and said “… God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable. ” Rom. 11:29

     God showed me that jobs would come and go but the ministry was a part of who I was. Everyone of us is called in some way, gifted with certain gifts that will not be revoked regardless of our circumstances. God will never remove the gift. He does, however reserve the right to create or change the circumstances in which those gifts manifest.

    Like Abraham we may be called out of a land of comfort into what seems a dark place. But that is only an illusion. The end of my story is that God called me out of the church for a season to teach school in the inner city. I had one student and (get this) a Bible study. Turns out God’s people had been praying for Him to send someone to help!

    Maybe you are being called into a change today. It doesn’t mean you are being called out of your gifts. God’s just going to use them differently in the days ahead.

Let’s pray: Dear Lord, I come to you realizing that while your gifts will never be taken away that doesn’t mean my circumstances will remain the same. Lord in all of life’s changes help me to remain constant and intentional. Show me how to use these gifts in all the places You are going to take me. In Jesus name A-men!