Touching Lives With Dr. James Merritt

As we begin this study, we’re going to start witt the first verse. Anybody who has ever heard this psalm before knows that it is actually not just the first verse, but it is the foundational verse of this passage. Everything else David is going to say in this psalm is built upon the first line in the first stanza, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” (Psalm 23:1). David gives us three reasons why, no matter what happens going forward, faith ought to be in, and fear ought to be out. Worship ought to be in, worrying ought to be out. Prayer to be in, and panic ought to be out. Let’s take a look at those reasons together.

As believers, we have a fire burning in us that is the Holy Spirit. As we live the Spirit-filled life, we are to be shining the light of Jesus to other people. There are things that we can do individually, as believers and together as a church, that will put out the Spirit’s fire and turn out the Spirit’s light. That is why we should not grieve the Holy Spirit by hurting His feelings nor should we quench the Holy Spirit smothering the fire. There is a difference between grieving the Spirit and quenching the Spirit. Here is the difference. We grieve the Holy Spirit by what we do to Him. We quench the Holy Spirit by what we refuse to let Him do through us. To put it another way, we grieve the Holy Spirit by doing what He tells us not to do. We quench the Holy Spirit by not doing what He tells us to do. So in this message, I want to share with you some things we must do, that the Spirit wants us to do, that to fail to do, would quench the Holy Spirit.

God the Holy Spirit loves you and wants what is best for you. He wants to take you only places where you should go. He wants to lead you to do things that only you should do. So the question is, “What are those things that a believer or an unbeliever can do that grieves the Holy Spirit, that breaks the heart of the Holy Spirit? Because, if we love God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit like we should, then we should never want to do anything that would bring them hurt to their heart. In today’s key passage, Paul tells us several things that we must do if we do not want to grieve the Holy Spirit and bring holy hurt to the One that loves us.

Have you ever been in the presence of a Christian that you just immediately knew there was something different about them from the vast majority of other Christians you are with? You could just sense their closeness to God. You could just sense they were filled with God’s presence and God’s power. Maybe you have even found yourself wishing that you could be like them. Maybe somebody has come to your mind right now. The good news is that level of Christian living is not just for the so-called spiritual superstars. You are going to see in this message that it is for everyone. We know that because of something that was written 2000 years ago and who have brought to Jesus through the Spirit of God and lived His life filled with the Spirit of God.

What happened in that upper room to them was a low blow. Their dreams were going up in smoke. Their hopes were being dashed and the world was being turned upside-down. Everything was going wrong. Judas had just left to betray Jesus. Peter had just been told he would soon deny Jesus. Worst of all, Jesus tells them not only that He is going to die, but He is going to leave them. You name it, these disciples felt it. They were depressed, afraid, discouraged, and confused. But Jesus said that the Holy Spirit was so important that it would be to their advantage for Him to physically leave them, so the Spirit could come live inside them. Jesus said we would be better off having the Holy Spirit inside of us than to have Jesus beside us. You read that correctly. We are better off today with the Spirit inside of us than the disciples were with Jesus beside them, and in this message, we are going to learn why that is.

Have you ever thought about the fact that any religion, any spiritual belief that talks about any heaven or hell always talks about heaven being “up” and hell being “down.” You find it all over the Bible. For example, Psalm 14:2 says, “The Lord looks down from heaven on all mankind...” You see, Christmas is really just the beginning of a round trip that Jesus took from heaven down to earth and then took back up to heaven. In the second chapter of a letter that Paul wrote called Philippians, Paul describes this round trip. He tells us in this passage that if we do three things, we too can take the way up to heaven.

Unfortunately, we are living in a world where lying is common, practically expected, and seemingly just the way we do business. But at the end of the day, character is still important, and it still matters. It matters not just morally, ethically, and spiritually, but practically. We began by saying that the foundation of character is integrity. In this message, we are going to learn that the first fruit of integrity is honesty. Integrity is more than just honesty, but there can be no integrity without honesty. There is a man in the Bible who exemplified this trait in an incredible way, and that is Samuel. What elevated Samuel, both in the eyes of God and in the eyes of his people was his absolute, unfailing, uncompromising honesty. What distinguished him was not the high positions that he held, but the honest person that he was.

In our first message of this series, we are going to help those of us who need God to show up in a strong way in our lives, but for whatever the reason He hasn’t yet. We all have those times when we wonder, “Is God asleep? Has He taken a leave of absence? I need God to do something, and I need God to do something now.” In the fourth chapter of a book called Galatians, a man by the name of Paul takes us all the way back, not just to the Christmas story, but what happened before the Christmas story. There are three things we can always know is true about God that should give you, not just peace about your present situation, but patience knowing that God will show up. If you are wondering where God is, what God is doing, and when God will act, let the Christmas story remind you of three things that are always true.

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Have you ever wondered why life is so hard? Why it is such a struggle? Why there is so much suffering, pain, and agony in the world? Have you ever wondered why it is sometimes so hard to maintain a good marriage? Raise good children? Please your boss? Get your act together financially? Have you ever wondered why somebody is always fighting somebody else? It is because there is a war going on. It is a war between two rulers: Jesus and Satan. There are two kingdoms light and darkness. There are two armies – Jesus’ and the devil’s. The reason why everywhere you look there are struggles, suffering, and strife. We have a theological term for that. It is called spiritual warfare. Spiritual warfare is the battle that is being fought in the invisible spiritual world that has visible physical consequences. Every problem that you have outside of you is really a problem either on the inside of you or the inside of the person causing you the problem. So in this war manual that Paul gives us, he is going to share with us

Interestingly, work was not a human invention, it was actually God’s idea from the beginning. The very first command that God ever gave a human being was to work. Adam and Eve had barely taken their first breath when God said to them, “Your job is to be fruitful, to multiply and you are to subdue the earth. You are to rule over it and make it productive.” In fact, the very first time the word “work” is ever used in the Bible is used at the beginning of the biblical story, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it” (Genesis 2:15). Nobody is exempt if they are able from work. Even the Son of God came to do the work that God had given him to do. At the end of his life, Jesus said this, “I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do” (John 17:4). So it shouldn’t surprise us that the Word of God has something to tell us about work and how we should work. With that in mind, Paul showed people then how to live within that economic system a

What would happen if every day of our lives every Christian experienced a power surge? What might happen in the church and what might happen outside the church? I believe our problem is not a power surge; it is surge protectors. There are many things that keep up from really experiencing God’s power. We are too busy. We are too uncommitted. We are too apathetic. We are too bothered if out of our comfort zone. More than anything else we need the one thing a daily basis that Paul talks about and it is, “We need a power surge of the Holy Spirit.” Here is the good news. The Spirit-filled life is not for super-star Christians, pastors or seminary graduates; it is for everyone who claims to know the Lord Jesus Christ. In this passage, Paul tells us three simple things.

There are only two dimensions where we can serve God: time and space. You live for God here and you live for God now. When you die, you go to a place where there no time and there is no space. That is why when it comes to our life, the time is always now. Our life is made up of time. When time is up, life is over. That is why the most important use of your time is spending most of your time on what is most important. Thankfully, God has not left us on our own to sort out how we ought to spend our time and how we ought to live our days on this earth. He has given us specific advice on the best way to use every day and get the best of every moment. You only have a certain amount of time and when time is up life is gone. So, how do we live so we understand that for us the time is now?

Let’s be honest. Forgiveness doesn’t come naturally, and it very rarely comes easily. It may be because of what the word means. The word “forgiveness” literally means “to let go” or “to send away.” It is a financial term that refers to the cancellation of a debt. When someone hurts you or does you wrong, they are in your debt. Forgiveness is your willingness on your own to simply write off cancel the debt. It is the willingness to simply say to a person who has done you wrong and really does owe you, “You don’t owe me anymore.” Sin is a debt that is owed. When you sin against someone you owe them. When they sin against you, they owe you. The only thing that pays the debt off is forgiveness, but when somebody is forgiven somebody has paid. Many of you need to become debt free today. If you will take three simple steps, you can become just that.

One reason I am always concerned about the unity of our church or any church is that the devil is in every church. Another word for “devil” is “diabolos” which gives us the word “diabolic” and it literally means “to split”. The devil is a splitter; a divider or a wedge driver. The first thing he ever did was to split Adam and Eve from God, which is still his number one goal and hobby which is to separate unbelievers from God and keep them separated and to separate us from each other. On the contrary, the very first thing Paul wants to do is to keep us together, but how do you do that? Because we are different; we are diverse. How do you keep diversity and differences from leading to discord and division? I am going to tell you from experience. Nothing is more harmful to the cause of Christ, to the witness of the Gospel, and the influence of the church than a church divided. Thankfully, there is a way to keep it together, and here’s how.

You can tell a lot about your spiritual maturity with God by what you pray for and how you pray for it. But let’s be honest, we don’t always handle prayer the right way. In fact, there are two problems when it comes to prayer: we don’t know how to pray, and we don’t know what to pray for. At times our prayers are like throwing stuff against the wall and hoping it sticks. We are going to learn today that the greatest prayer you will ever pray and the prayer that you will know always makes a direct connect with God is the prayer that comes from God. God always answers every prayer that is according to His will, and any prayer that God tells you to pray reflects His will. We don’t always get what we pray for, but we always get what God wants us to pray for. From Ephesians 3, we get a one size fits all prayer that you can pray for anybody, anywhere, anytime, under any circumstances. Once you read it, you’ll realize you can’t pray a better prayer than this one.

Since the beginning of time, God has had an agenda for the human race. He has an endgame for all of us. In fact, you could really give the Bible a one-word title and just call it “endgame”, but of course even the word “endgame” begs a beginning and a middle because every story has those three components – a beginning, a middle and an end. The story of the Bible and in fact God’s story for you has the same three components.

Psychologists refer to them as “defining moments,” those events in your life that shape the person you have become. We all have them. But there is no defining moment like the moment when someone accepts Jesus and becomes a follower of Christ. So in this message, we are going to study all that happens at the defining moment when someone realizes they need a savior, that Jesus is that savior, and they trust Jesus as their savior.

If you would like to know what the real God looks like, the God who is great and glorious, who is magnificent and majestic, who is supreme and sovereign, you need to look no further than a letter that was written two thousand years ago by a man named Paul who had met this God personally on the Damascus Road. When you read who he says this God is and what this God has done, and what this God is doing and wants to do, the only word you’ll be thinking is, “unbelievable.” It may sound contradictory, but we really do believe in a God who is unbelievable. And in the book of Ephesians, Paul tells us that what God has done for his people is unbelievable, and what God wants to do through His people is unbelievable.

As the runway of life begins to run out, everyone starts to ponder this question...What am I going to leave behind? The two most important things to consider, according to the Bible, are people and influence. Leaving a legacy is about the people you impact, not about the possessions you leave. Leaving a legacy is about the influence you leave, not about the inheritance. You may not be a king like David when you die, but you can definitely leave behind a legacy worthy of a king.