PREVIOUS SERMON  (sorted accordingly,starting from recent )

We have now come to the realization that part of the problem why we cannot receive and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ is our inability to reach out unto Christ with sincere and true faith believing that He is truly our Saviour, God coming Himself unto us to save us. We are exploring how the very first beatitude spoken of by Lord Jesus saying– ‘Blessed (happy, [a]to be envied, and [b]spiritually prosperous—[c]with life-joy and satisfaction in God’s favor and salvation, regardless of their outward conditions) are the poor in spirit (the humble, who rate themselves insignificant), for theirs is the kingdom of heaven!’ as seen in Matthew 5:3 –does not refer to material poverty as most people thought but refers to in reality to spiritual poverty. What we need is a willingness to face and recognise our spiritual bankruptcy, our being bereft spiritually and ask for help from the Lord Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit Who alone is given the divine authority to fill us with the Holy Spirit of God or in other words Who alone can awaken Christ in our worldly rendered passivity and dwarfed personal spirit. In today’s passage, as Lord Jesus Christ went along the road on one occasion, a crowd jostled and milled around Him and then a woman with a serious physical issue of blood condition came timidly through the crowd and touched His cloak or dress. Instantly she was healed. Lord Jesus aware that power had gone from Him, turned and said to the crowd, “Who is it who touched Me?” as seen in Luke 8:45. The disciples were incredulous amused that He asked this. They saw the crowd milling around Him and pressing on Him from all sides, and they just could not understand His reason for saying, “Who is it who touched Me?” But Lord Jesus having the fullness of the measure of Christ in Him knew the difference between someone pressing close to Him in a crowd and someone who touched Him in order to be made well, healed and whole. There is a great difference between jostling and touching Him. Jostling means to push, elbow to elbow push, or bump against (someone) roughly, typically in a crowd. Every week thousands go in and out of our churches, join in activities, sing the hymns and choruses, listen to the sermon; in reality they jostle and mill around Lord Jesus but they are never making any genuine reach out to touch Him. I wonder, am I speaking now to someone who is just jostling like this? Do you go to church regularly, mingle with the worshippers and, to a certain degree, enjoy the atmosphere of spirituality and worship just jostling–but never touching Lord Jesus? This is so with us today where many people go to Church jostling without touching the Lord Jesus, so from now onwards don’t just keep jostling; try to reach out and touch Lord Jesus Christ. Touch Lord Jesus for forgiveness, touch Him for inner cleansing, touch Him for power over temptation, touch Him for victory over fears and everything that stands in the way of your being blessed by God. Cease milling and jostling around in Church and reach out and touch Lord Jesus–today. From this teaching here we realize that the reason why we are not receiving our needs and desires with regard to our numerous problems solved by the Lord Jesus is because we are not sincerely and truthfully reaching out to touch the Lord Jesus Christ with all our heart. So find out what your distractions, hindrances and obstacles are and beg, asking the Lord Jesus to help you remove them so that you can be able to touch the Lord Jesus and receive whatever you want or desire from Him!

We are saying that the first step to good spiritual and mental health is to realise that we function in the way God intended only when Lord Jesus Christ is received into the centre of our lives. But to do this; which is receiving Christ in your life requires on our part a realisation of our spiritual poverty –a willingness to empty our hands of whatever we are holding or worshipping and reach out with those empty hands to accept Christ. Life has been defined as ‘a response to environment’. You and I live physically when we respond to our physical environment by breathing in oxygen, drinking fluids and eating food. When that response is shut-off then we die physically. Take a plant, for example: how does it live? By being proud, self-sufficient, unrelated and unresponsive? No, it lives by surrendering, adjusting, receiving. This might stretch your imagination a bit but suppose, just suppose, a plant tried to live by asserting itself, by ignoring the environment in which it is placed, by refusing to absorb moisture from the soil. What would be the result? It would quickly die because it lives only while it responds to its environment. The plain truth of what Lord Jesus is saying in the first of the Beatitudes or Be- attitudes is that we thrive as we humbly choose to give up the idea that we can make life work on our own, and allow Him God to flood our lives with His presence and power guiding us with His Word and expecting implicit obedience from us. A highly cultured and wealthy woman, after reviewing her life, once said, ‘I have everything –and nothing.’ Everything in the way of comforts and riches –yet emptiness of heart. To find contentment and happiness is to find Lord Jesus with a ready mind and heart to follow as He leads. But we will never find Him unless first we are willing to surrender our pride and foolish wisdom.

Here we are again with the words receiving and believing in Lord Jesus Christ, do we honestly and sincerely receive and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ or are we hypocritical about it? Being hypocritical about our receiving and believing in the Lord Jesus is part of the reasons why we do not succeed in many of the things we ask and seek in His Name. We do not have a firm surrender with a very strong believe hold on the Lord Jesus Christ with a total unwavering trust that does not waver no matter the situation, that is why once we are confronted with life challenges and we call and wait upon Him few days/weeks and it appears that what we want or desire is not coming immediately as we hope and want it, we face elsewhere and start trying other means, that is our hypocritical nature and unless we put a stop to this attitude, we can never be serious with the Lord God Almighty and He can never be serious with us too. We are seeing that the first step towards spiritual and mental health is to give or surrender ourselves to God implicitly and receptively. When I am willing to acknowledge within myself that I do not have within me the resources, power and strength to experience true happiness and contentment that only Christ gives: and decisively open myself to Lord Jesus’ help, His assistance and trust in Him then, like in the case of the disciples that we talked about the other day in their various ordeals of life only then we will reach the place where we were heading in life. We should not consider it strange that entrance into the kingdom of God begins with our sincere receptivity of the Lord Jesus Christ. Does nature itself not show or indicate that is where all life begins, from receptivity? For instance all the seed sown in the ground needs to use their God given inbuilt receptivity to receive warmth, moisture and nutrients from the earth-soil before they can germinate, grow and produce flowers or fruit. Life that doesn’t begin and follow the principle of receptivity just doesn’t begin, somehow along the line it will fade off and die. The scientist who does not sit down to reflect on this undisputable facts before any other thing else, and is not prepared to give up every preconceived notion and examine the evidence carefully, will learn nothing. Such a scientist has to know that they don’t know in order to know. The first law of life is receptivity, and that is also the first law of the kingdom of heaven because it is through receptivity that the Lord God designs to supply us who are united with Him with everything He wants you to receive from Him, receptivity serves like the umbilical cord that joins mother and child for effective nourishment of the child in the womb. Receptivity is your ability and willingness to take-in or accept information or ideas that nourish your soul. Look again at the words of today’s text: ‘Yet to all who did receive Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God’. How do we get the right to become children of God? First, by receptivity –‘to all who did receive Him’. At the very threshold of God’s kingdom we are met with the challenge of self-emptying in other to become receptive. Have you made your own personal response to this challenge, the challenge of empting yourself so that you will be filled in Christ? If not, do so today. If you are unwilling to sincerely empty or surrender yourself in Him then, sadly, nothing else can follow. If you are willing, then everything else will follow.

From this verse, it is clear that our knowing the divine things of the Lord God Almighty is one thing but the zeal to practice and sincerely act accordingly and really do or carry them out in our day to day life is what really matter most. As we zealously practice and act accordingly by really doing and carrying them out in our daily life is, as we have been saying where contentment comes from, that contentment is not something we can create but is a by-product of something else, then how do we open ourselves so that we can experience that deep inner contentment? That is what we will focus on now. As we keep focusing on contentment, joy, happiness and satisfaction in life on earth, we must not lose sight that all of these is centred on the Lord’s Beatitude or you call it Be-attitude! Listen again to Lord Jesus’ words: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ as seen in Matthew 5:3 saying ‘Blessed (happy, to be envied, and spiritually prosperous-with life-joy and satisfaction in God’s favour and salvation, regardless of their outward conditions) are the poor in spirit (the humble, who rate themselves insignificant), for theirs is the kingdom of heaven!’. There are those who say that this phrase should read, ‘Blessed are the poor.’ Notice that there is a difference between blessed are the poor and blessed are the poor in spirit. Their argument is based on Luke 6:20 which says: ‘And solemnly lifting up His eyes on His disciples, He said: Blessed (happy—[a]with life-joy and satisfaction in God’s favor and salvation, apart from your outward condition—and [b]to be envied) are you poor and [c]lowly and afflicted (destitute of wealth, influence, position, and honor), for the kingdom of God is yours!’ know that the two passages are addressing two different life conditions, so do not think that they are the same, No they are not! But in this first beatitude on the Mount Lord Jesus is not thinking of material poverty, but spiritual poverty. Look again at Lord Jesus’ words: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit (my emphasis). The word for ‘poor’ in the Greek is ptochos –a word that is also used of those reduced to begging, those who are dependent on others. But here in Mat. 5:3 it implies a voluntary life style of emptying of our inner being, in other words living a simplicity life that does not emphasis ostentatious life-being in order to receive something of greater benefit. We could read Lord Jesus’ statement like this: ‘Blessed are those who are dependent in spirit’ –that is, those who are willing to be dependent on God to fill them with His life and grace. Because it is only when you are filled with the life and grace of God that things will work out victoriously and progressively for you according to God’s will and purpose in life on earth otherwise, you are on your own doing your own will and mistakenly calling it God’s will! Lord Jesus’ first prescription, then, for inner happiness and contentment is giving ourselves to God so that He will fill us with His life and grace. This reverses the usual advice on how to experience joy and contentment, which generally begins with the words ‘take’, ‘assert’, or ‘affirm’. Which prescription brings real contentment? I have no hesitation in saying it is the prescription of Lord Jesus. Contentment begins with sincerely and honestly giving ourselves completely over to God in total surrender giving His Will first priority. It is very essential in life for us to humbly acknowledge that we cannot find true blessed life through our own efforts. So we need help –God’s divine help and assistance!

Oar often acts as rudder, which is a device used for steering and manoeuvring a vessel. They are located normally at the stern behind propellers to produce a transverse force and steering moment about the ship centre of gravity by deflecting the water flow to the direction of the foil plane and when the oar struck against something very hard, it broke with a snap- straining at the oars. Last week we said that almost everyone longs for their lives to be full of joy and satisfaction. When our Creator created us His intention was that we would be content. And the contentment Lord Jesus makes available is unlike every other kind of contentment that we may experience in this life. However, it’s important to be aware that true contentment is not something you manufacture, but something you receive. In reality you cannot generate contentment in your soul any more than you can generate love. Despite the wide use of the phrase ‘make love’ or ‘making love’, strictly speaking this is not possible. You can express love, you can even make pretence of love, but you cannot create or make love. It is the same with contentment since you cannot create or make contentment. Contentment, literally defined is a state of happiness and satisfaction and contentment is flirtatious: being flirtatious, that is having the tendency of being attracted to someone else, if you follow or chase after contentment without having the potentials that leads to contentment which is being hardworking, zealousness, consistency and focus, contentment eludes you: but once you turn from contentment and interest yourself in something or someone else with those potentials and you may win or attain contentment. There is no escaping the above phenomenon in life if you want to get or attain contentment: it is a law of our very being as far as contentment is concern. Scripture and our modern-day psychologists are one here, and the experience of millions in contentment confirms this findings or law of our being. Some of the most miserable people in the world are those who are bent most on finding contentment. So because contentment is not obtained by chasing or going after her directly, the individual ends up losing it! In the passage before us today we see that the disciples were ‘straining at the oars’, rowing in the dark and getting nowhere. Whenever you find yourself “straining at the oars”, God calls out to you – into the midst of your storm – into the midst of your fears – into the midst of your weakness – into the midst of your pain – “It Is a journey of faith”. The account in John’s Gospel tells us that when the disciples took Lord Jesus into the boat, ‘immediately the boat reached the shore where they were heading as seen in John 6:21 which reads “21 Then they were quite willing and glad for Him to come into the boat. And now the boat went at once to the land they had steered toward. [And immediately they reached the shore toward which they had been slowly making their way.]”. This is how it is with contentment. When we strive to achieve it we ‘strain at the oars’. But when we let Lord Jesus in, we are at the place where we were heading.