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There are things that come along with being saved, some qualifications. Are you one of the called, chosen and faithful? First you have to be called and believe it or not, everyone has been called. Christ died for you. But just because you are called does not mean you are chosen. There is one main difference, you don’t have to come when you are called. You have to first accept the call to be chosen. After you have accepted the call and are chosen by Christ, you have to be faithful. That is where many of us go wrong. Life with Jesus is a life of testing because you will never grow without testing. Your faithfulness will be tested. There are thousands of other things that accompany salvation but I wanted to zero in on faithfulness today. The average person who calls themselves a Christian go to church only twice a month as opposed to eight times a month. And we wonder why so much bad is happening in the world, it’s because we have no power. We aren’t faithful. We have no strength because we don’t go to church. What are we supposed to be faithful in? We are supposed to love. Love is a decision you make, not a feeling you have . When you are faithful, there will be evidence of your faithfulness.

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Is Christ your Jehovah Nissi? God has a plan for you but He also has some stipulations you have to follow. You have to align yourself with His will. You’re also going to have to fight some battles to receive your blessings. In the book of Exodus, Chapter 17, God told Moses to take the rod of God up to the top of the hill with him and lift it in worship. Whenever Moses got weary he would drop his hands and the Israelites would start losing the battle. As long as his hands were up, things were working out for them in the heavenly. How many of you know that obedience is the highest form of worship? Moses then builds an altar and calls it Jehovah Nissi which means, the Lord is my banner. Do you know what a banner is? It’s pretty much a flag that is waived at the end of a battle. So he is saying, God is our flag! He is high and lifted up! Now, there are some things that we think we know how to do but we don’t. Breathing, walking, sitting are all some examples. Many people seek etiquette classes to fix these. An example in the church is worship. The best place to go to learn about worship is the Bible. Lifting our hands is a form of worship. When we are in a worship service, there is spiritual warfare happening and our worship, the lifting of our hands, is a sign of surrender to Christ.

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Have you received your site at the cross? Some may stop here and think, I was never blind. When you are in sin, you are spiritually blind, so God has to open your eyes at the cross. There are three things Jesus told His disciples to do. First, He told them to deny themselves. Second, take up their cross. Third, follow Him. In this world, we relate to things through time (when), space (where), matter (what) or energy (how). There are two things missing; why and how. Why we are and who we are are missing because God defines that. It’s at the cross that we realize the who and the why of life. The cross is a weapon of mass destruction. It is a way to kill you and make you suffer for a long time. The powerful thing about this is that Jesus knew what He was going to have to go through. Beaten, bruised, tortured and killed. He asked us to take up our cross, not His because His was way too much for us to bare. The dimensions of the cross have meaning. The lateral dimension of the cross is us reaching out to each other, meaning we can’t do it by ourselves. We need each other. Then there is the part that sticks up towards the sky because we need God. Finally, there is the part that sticks down in the ground, that signifies the relationship we have with ourselves which is often the one left untapped. The cross Jesus wants us to carry is not a physical cross. He wants us to love everyone, even those who hate us. Carrying the cross is not easy but it is one of the only things Christ asks of us.

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Jesus asked the twelve men who were the closest to Him, “who do you think I am?”. These are the people who are with Him all of the time. One of His friends were bold enough to speak up and say “You are the Christ, the son of the living God”. Jesus responded to Peter in Matthew 16:18 by saying upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against thee. There is a lot of controversy around this scripture. First, we have to define what we mean by the church because the universal church can’t fit in a building. It is everyone that’s been born into the kingdom of God. Now God calls us to be a part of a congregation, which is the local church. He knows what we need and what that congregation needs from us. I believe that God meant upon the revelation that Peter had is where He will build His church. The revelation was that Jesus is He who has come to redeem mankind from its sins. In that aspect, the only thing that can be wrong with the church is us! We have to show love to our brothers and sisters and when we fail to do that, we can no longer be members of His church, we are no longer the church…