Sinners (all of us!) Prayer!

Romans 10:9-10 says that,

“if you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.”

We are all sinners, and we all can say this prayer every day, even those who have already accepted Christ as their Savior (this reaffirms the believer’s acceptance of Christ as our Savior and that we need Him every day, just as we did the very first day we accepted Him as our Savior)

The following is a  “Sinner’s Prayer”

The Sinner’s Prayer (by Dr. Ray Pritchard)

Lord Jesus, for too long I’ve kept you out of my life. I know that I am a sinner and that I cannot save myself. No longer will I close the door when I hear you knocking. By faith I gratefully receive your gift of salvation. I am ready to trust you as my Lord and Savior. Thank you, Lord Jesus, for coming to earth. I believe you are the Son of God who died on the cross for my sins and rose from the dead on the third day. Thank you for bearing my sins and giving me the gift of eternal life. I believe your words are true. Come into my heart, Lord Jesus, and be my Savior. Amen.

If you have prayed this prayer in sincere faith, you may want to copy this prayer along with the Roman’s Scripture above, and put your initials by the prayer along with today’s date as a reminder that you have come to Christ in faith, trusting him as your Lord and Savior.

Pease leave a message below this post to publicly acknowledge your acceptance of Christ to affirm your belief. It is an important step to declare publicly your belief in the salvation of Christ. It helps confirm your commitment to Him and then you will begin to experience how He will change you from the inside out. Praise God if you have taken this step. You will not regret it. I can tell you that Christ has transformed me into a new man and continues to do so, and the joy of this transformation is indescribable! It is better than any worldly reward you can imagine.

Church of Our Savior
Christ is the leader of our church.

Below is Billy Graham’s message of God us LOVE! At the beginning of the video, people testify what Christ has done for them and what their lives were like before they accepted His Love. Later in the video, Billy Graham gives God’s message and then invites people to accept Christ, and people respond because they hear God calling them to Him! They come to the down he stadium steps and accept all that Christ offers them (again, remember, in accepting Christ’s sacrifice for us, we are no longer separated from the love of God because of our sins! That’s it!)

What keeps us from accepting Christ as our Savior and His free gift of GOD’s LOVE? Our own sins inside of us can prevent us from hearing God’s real message. Our sins can even speak so strongly to us that we question and doubt the reality of what the Bible promises us! If we have been brought up with the Old Testament message that God is a punishing God, then we can doubt His message to us that we can be freed of this punishment and God’s anger. That’s why the NEW TESTAMENT is called the GOOD NEWS, because we are FORGIVEN of our SINS. Basically, God allows our SINS to be forgiven and forgotten. THIS IS THE GOOD NEWS OF THE GOSPELS CONTAINING THE RECORD OF JESUS CHRIST’S LIFE, WORDS, TEACHINGS, AND THE MEANING OF HIS CRUCIFIXION AND SACRIFICE FOR US, SO WE CAN BE CLOSE TO GOD, DESPITE OUR SINS!!!!! ONCE WE ACCEPT CHRIST AS OUR SAVIOR, WE BEGIN TO SEE HIS GOODNESS AND MERCY!

Billy Graham is not a perfect man, we know that. He needs Christ too! And that is OK in God’s world. He is still alive at 99 years old. On November 7, 2018, he will become 100 years old. However, his main message that has led so many people to accept Christ as thier savior is the simple message that is biblically based is that God loves us, and forgives us for our sins.

God wants us to come to Him to accept His son Jesus Christ as our Savior so that we can no longer be separate from God. He wants us to return to Him, and by accepting Christ as our Savior, our sins are forgiven and this is THE reason that we are seperated from God. Nothing we ourselves can DO can bring us back to God, except simply accepting Jesus Christ as our Savior in a sincere fasion.

Church of Our Savior
Christ is the leader of our church.

“God is Love” Read it in the Bible!

1 John 4:7-8 King James Bible “And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.”

God is LOVE! We all need His Love and He offers it to us as a free gift! We just need to accept it, and accept Him. It is the start of a whole new life that is absolutely fantastic! We get to pass on His love, too.

 

You Cannot Move Beyond Love!

YOU CANNOT MOVE BEYOND LOVE

M. SCOTT BOREN

“… if I do not have love, I am nothing.” (Paul, in his first letter to the church at Corinth)

A person can love another to the extent that they have been loved. No. That’s not quite right. I think this is better stated as: A person can love another to the extend that they are being loved. Not past tense. Love is not something that can be known as a past reality. It’s a present perfect, and ongoing emanation of God toward us, like a river that never dries up. The degree to which someone knows love is the degree to which they can love. Or to personalize Paul’s point, “If I do not possess love in my inner being as an ongoing knowledge that I am loved and am living in love alongside others, I am nothing.”

Victor Hugo stated, “The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved.” The giving and receiving of love lies at the core of what it means to be human. We search for it. We yearn for it. We hope for it. Just turn on the radio and listen to the top 40 hits. While in most cases, we are “looking for love in all the wrong places,” as the old country song confesses, the reality is that we are all “looking for love.”

One of the things that I find interesting about the typical way that we commonly talk about spiritual growth and discipleship in the church is that the topic of love, that “touchy feely” experience of God’s emanation toward us, is something that we teach to children, “emotional” twenty-somethings, and new Christians. However, Christian maturity means that we outgrow the need for such basic things as God’s love. We assume that the experience of God’s love is like spiritual milk, but as one grows in Christ spiritual meat means that we grow out of the need to talk about God’s love, acceptance, and grace.

On my journey with God over the last three decades, I have found myself being led back to reconsider God’s love for me. The first few times this happened I got frustrated with myself because I assumed that I should have moved beyond such basics. After all, I had dealt with God’s love and grace in my early stages of Christian discipleship. But every time I came back to a fresh touch of God’s love, I realized how much I was shocked by the unexpected unveiling of God’s touch. I began to see that I’m only loved to the extend that God’s love astonishes and astounds me. Otherwise, my thoughts about God are merely a compilation of my best and most godly facts about God.

This means that a disciple of Christ cannot outgrow the need to live in God’s love. There is no higher plane of discipleship than receiving the hug of God.

If God is love (1 John 4:8), then everything about our walk with the Father-Son-Spirit is rooted in and flows out of a knowledge and experience of that love. To try to move beyond it is like telling a basketball player that his development will move him to the point that he will no longer need to do anything with a basketball. He will develop the ability to dribble, pass, and shoot the ball without actually having to touch a physical ball because the game will be so deeply woven into his mind. The actual experience of the ball is no longer required. As a result, the game becomes excarnate, a gnostic experience that leads one to a higher level of disembodied reality.

Too often, we imagine Christian growth that is more excarnate than incarnate. Christian maturity is a mental, disembodied thought process that does not have much to do with our senses, our feelings, or our experiences. God’s love becomes a fact that we can state and talk about in our Bible studies, but we don’t actually know it in a participatory way.

Just as playing basketball means doing something with an actual ball, so too following Christ means living in the actual experience of God’s love for us. If there is no ball, there is no game. If there is no love, then we are not actually following Christ.

This is reprented from the link below, thank you to the author, M. SCOTT BOREN

 

For almost 20 years, Scott has been working with churches to help them develop effective community through small groups that are on mission. He is the author or co-author of eight different books, along with curriculum that has been developed as a part of his responsibilities as a pastor at Woodland Hills Church. Learn more about Scott at MScottBoren.com.

You Cannot Move Beyond Love

CC Image • Courtesy of of Farid Iqbal Ibrahim on Flickr

Christ And His Word – Stay Close!

We are not to be led astray by others who are  following modern day popular culture and popular religion. Be careful about the “New Age” practices. These can become “false Gods” which the Bible warns us about.

New Living Translation: Galations Chapter 4-9

“Those false teachers are so eager to win your favor, but their intentions are not good. They are trying to shut you off from me so that you will pay attention only to them.

Before you Gentiles knew God, you were slaves to so-called gods that do not even exist. So now that you know God (or should I say, now that God knows you), why do you want to go back again and become slaves once more to the weak and useless spiritual principles of this world?”

King James Bible Mark 13

“For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall shew signs and wonders, to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect.”

It is best if we stick close to God and His Word so we are not deceived.

Exodus 15:2

“The LORD is my strength and song, And He has become my salvation; This is my God, and I will praise Him; My father’s God, and I will extol Him.”

Keep strong in Christ Jesus!

Church of Our Savior

Whose praise are you looking for?

King James Bible,  John 12:43

“For they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God.”

All of us can learn from Jesus’ quote when He observes the actions of some people during His time on earth. We can use this teaching as a way to measure our own day to day motivations. Why do we act the way we do? Is our motivation to please God, or are we looking for the praise, approval, or accolades (credit, recognition) from others in our actions? It is a good yard stick to measure our behavior. At times, it may also call on us to be courageous in stepping out from the crowd and saying or doing what God would have us do.

 

 

Welcome!

Welcome to our church’s website.

We recognize that the real relationship to be celebrated and nurtured in our lives is that between the individual and the body of Christ with Christ himself (and The Trinity).

Everything else is secondary. Anything that is man made such as this website, our facebook page, or our physical building is only an aid to this central relationship. It is absolutely fundamental that we do not deviate from this realization, because when we do, we demean our God and what He has done for us and continues to do for us every single day. In fact, taking any of the credit for what God does is a sin that we recognize as human pride. And only when we put God first and foremost in our lives do we come into a proper relationship with Him.  God gives us this direction in the 1st Commandment.

God began the 10 Commandments: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me” (Exodus 20:2-3)

Only God is God. When this concept is fully grasped, and we surrender to His will for us in our lives do we really come ot know freedom under His care and love. We really begin to see and experience how much He really loves us.