Marching Through Madness Lance Ryan

Just like any other relationshop that we have, our relationship with God needs to be a two-way street.  We cannot simply receive his forgiveness and not give forgiveness to those who commit sins against us.  The Bible is very clear, we must forgive others in order to receive forgiveness from God.

Experts say that we live in a time where our mental, physical and emotional health take more of a beating than at any other point in human history.  That is why we need to remember that we are not the sins that we have committed and we are also not the sins that have been committed against us.  We need to learn to embrace the forgiveness from God and we need to learn to forgive ourselves and others as God has forgiven us.

God has called us to be completely different than the world around us.  To stand out.  We should do that in hopes of people wondering WHY we are different and WHAT had happened to make us different and most importantly WHO has made us different.God can and will transform you into a being that spreads his holy world all over the world.

Almost every single decision that we make in our lives is based upon joy.  Whether that is our personal joy as we look out for our own well-being, the joy of others as we do things for them or the joy of the Father as we follow his will and we follow his word and callings within our lives.  This week we will centre in on what makes God joyful and what makes us truly blessed here on Earth.  Perhaps, not shockingly, it runs counter culturally to what our flesh and the world call us to seek and desire.

I think that many of us spend at least part of our walks with Christ thinking that life should become easier or that we will find a community or a group of friends that will help us with all of our problems after we become Christians.  The reality though can be quite the opposite.  We go through life wondering why we need to put ourselves into dirty situations and why we wind up in tough circumstances still, or even more, than we did before we became Christians.  This week I want to talk about why we should be happy and even feel privileged when we find ourselves put into those dark places and those tough situations because those are generally the places where God wants us to be and God needs us to be the most.

Because two of the topics that I talk the most about when it comes to Christianity are spiritual warfare and hearing from and talking to God I often find people have a non-starter there and they either are not confident when they hear the voice of God or they claim that they have never heard the voice of God.  This week we are going to talk a bit about the back and forth that is ongoing conversation with God because it is certainly something that the enemy attacks and our relationship with God is ultimately the main thing that the enemy wants to destroy.