There is so much that I always want to convey in my messages and sometimes I feel that there is no way to fully describe what I am feeling or all that God has laid upon my heart. I will do my best to try and to pass these thoughts along to you and believe that the Holy Spirit of God will stir up your heart while you read this message. Now, where to begin? There has been much that I have meditated on recently regarding the body of Christ and what we are supposed to be doing as believers. It helps that this morning in service, Pastor went over some of the same things that my husband and I had been talking about the night before (last night) and other nights over the last few weeks. There are so many in the body that just go to what they believe is church on a Sunday morning without realizing that the building is not the church. We have been cultivated to believe that the building is the church when in reality we are the church that God has placed on this Earth. We are the temple of the Holy Spirit and God dwells within each of us that have accepted Him as our Lord and Savior. One of the many scriptures that points to this is Galatians 2:20.

The fact is that we are a new creation when we are born again and we are not to be like we once were, we are to be changed into His likeness ever pressing onward to become more like Him. Are we doing this? I would say that the majority of God’s church is not. We have this western mindset that says, if we wake up on Sunday and go see the Pastor preach and impart the message then we are good until the following Sunday. I would say to you, NO we are not. We are not to be a body that goes to a building on Sunday, mistakenly calling it the church, and listen to a message but never being changed. It is up to you to press in and seek God. A lot of times God will speak to me by giving me visuals, a lot of the times He seems to show me things in parables. So, that is the way that I teach, it just makes sense to me. Envision a house, you build a house and it is beautiful and everything is the way that you like it but over time you get busy with other things. After a while you find that you get up, you go to work, you come home and you rest but then you start the same routine all over again the following morning. After a while, things around the house become in disrepair because you are not periodically checking things and fixing them as they start to fall apart. Before you know it you have a whole slew of things that need to be fixed. I would propose to you that if you think about it, that is our life and our Christian walk. It is our job to maintain the upkeep of this structure. We need to be constantly working on areas that get out of sync and that start to fall apart.

I know that when I was saved and born again that God totally changed my life and my way of looking at things because I was constantly in His presence. I also know that over time, we tend to let other things get in the way of our time with the Lord and then we wonder why things are so out of whack. Well the reason that they are so out of whack is because our priorities shifted. We have to be spending time in the Word and in Prayer in order to grow closer to the Lord. It is just like any other relationship that you have in your life, it takes work. I would challenge you that in this new year, stop relying on your Pastor to feed you and start feeding yourself. Start reading your bible, if you are already doing it ask God if you should be doing it more, press in and start praying more. Talk to God every chance that you get and let Him move on you and change you. God wants to talk to you, I don’t know if you are under the assumption that He doesn’t but He does want to spend time with you. Everything that He has done since the Garden of Eden has been to get back to walking in the cool of the day with you, His creation. Just realize that the more you seek Him, the more you will find Him, but just sitting in a service on Sunday morning is not going to give you the results that you desire. You have to work at anything that is worth having and I promise you, He is definitely worth having. I also promise you that no matter how much you want to be in His presence, He wants that even more. He longs for time with you. Why in the world would you deny the one that gives you eternal life the opportunity to spend time with you when all He has ever wanted was for you to come to Him? I leave you with this thought, how tired have you been with the way things have gone wrong in your life in the last week, months, and years? Isn’t it about time that you changed your perspective? Determine within your heart and mind that this will be the year that things change and that this will be the year that you no longer rely on someone else for your relationship to grow but that you will take the steps needed in order to have your own relationship.