Speaker: Bill Simpson

We can hold on when we’re hurting because glory is on the way. We can trust God to work it out because we are sheltered in His grace as He works all things together to make us more like Jesus. He weaves His way & His will for His supreme glory & our ultimate good. You.

To get through your groaning, focus on the glory to come.

We are heirs of God but the full benefits of this will not be poured out on us until eternity. Our present grief prepares us for promised glory. Now we are to share in the sufferings of the Savior. Since Jesus suffered, we should be prepared to suffer ourselves. Suffering doesn’t get the last word. The story of God ends with glory! Because we suffer with Him, we will be glorified with Him.

Do you know who you are? You are not what you do, what you are doing, or what you’ve done. You are not what’s been done to you. What you do doesn’t determine who you are, who you are determines what you do. Therefore, you are who Christ says you are.

Jesus, our King, our Priest came to serve us. The lesson of the Lord’s Supper is the bread and wine. The bread represents Jesus’ body that was broken for us.

Only through the truth of the Gospel can we undo years of lies, undo the damage and wrong thinking about who we are, what we’ve been created to be, and replace it with what we’ve been promised through Christ Jesus.

The Gospel is the power of God in your life—the way God reverses the corruption of sin & repels the power of Satan from you. It’s the antidote that keeps death from eroding your life & the shield that keeps Satan from manipulating it. Paul is urging the Ephesians to take the things he taught them about God and cover every part of them with it … The way we keep the corrupting influence of the enemy out of our lives is by establishing every part of our life—our hopes, dreams, failures, worries, fears, relationships, disappointments—on the Gospel. The flip side is that whatever part of you is not established in the Gospel—whatever part is not saturated in the Gospel is subject to manipulation of the enemy against you.

You won’t coast your way to spiritual victory… If you don’t have a plan, you are not setting priorities, choosing relationships & growing intentionally… you’re dead. We are either killing sin or being killed by it.

We are created for God, and when we are one with God, our hearts are satisfied & filled. When we rejected God, we lost that essential, life-giving, soul-satisfying relationship. We found that our souls were starving; we felt naked. We know we’re missing something. We may not even realize what it is, or how we got to this place, but we know we’re searching for something.