It’s all about God

June 5, 2013. It is time to put up or shut up. Put up your most prized possessions. Give them over to the Lord. Watch Him use them over and over again to advance the Gospel to the world. Until you have given everything, you will never know total fulfillment. God wants your heart, your mind, your will and your emotions. He will take your body and with it He will do wonders to behold. Go anywhere and do anything under Holy Spirit guidance. You are going to see things you never imagined you would see.

Take my sins, dearest Lord, as you desire, . . . Take my impurities, my quarreling, my disobedience, my laziness, my unkindness, my impatience, my thefts, my lies, my angers, my intemperance, my avarice, my horrible pride.

Take all these sins and faults and cleanse my soul with a single drop of your precious Blood – and teach me to love your will.

I am yours, Lord, and I belong to none but you; I love you more than my own being, more than myself. I am not my own. I am wholly yours, your other self.

Now this from www.sermons.com ;

2 Timothy 2:1-7
Introduction
Alexander the Great and a small company of soldiers approached a strongly fortified walled city. Alexander, standing outside the walls, raised his voice and demanded to see the king. When the king arrived, Alexander insisted that the king surrender the city and its inhabitants to Alexander and his little band of fighting men. The king laughed, “Why should I surrender to you? You can’t do us any harm!”
But Alexander offered to give the king a demonstration. He ordered his men to line up single file and start marching. He marched them straight toward a sheer cliff. The townspeople gathered on the wall and watched in shocked silence as, one by one, Alexander’s soldiers marched without hesitation right off the cliff to their deaths! After ten soldiers died, Alexander ordered the rest of the men to return to his side. The townspeople and the king immediately surrendered to Alexander the Great. They realized that if a few men were actually willing to commit suicide at the command of this dynamic leader, then nothing could stop his eventual victory.
If you claim to be a born again believer in Jesus Christ this morning, are you committed to Him, to give Him you life?
If I as a husband am faithful to my wife 75% of the time (that is more than half), am I a good husband? What would be required of me to be a good husband? No less than 100%! So how can I consider myself a good Christian, one who is sold out to God without giving Him 100% of me? It can not be done.
Today, we want to see what it takes to go all the way with God. If I give God my all what does it take of me?
Read Scriptures: 2 Timothy 2:1-7
I. If I am going all the way with God I will endure hardships along the way.
Vs. 3 “Endure hardship with us like a good soldier of Christ Jesus”
Some people may want to serve God but until they make that conscious decision to go from “I want to serve God” to “I will serve God” they will never endure the hardships of being a Christian.
What will happen to the person who says “I want to serve God” is that they will travel comfortably along the Christian life until something comes along that is a real hardship and instead of enduring it- they run from it.
Take for example Peter. I believe that he was a “I want to serve God” type of guy until the day of Pentecost and then he became a “I will serve the Lord.” He saw the wind and did not endure through it. He was in the courtyard and could not proclaim he was a follower of Christ. After Pentecost, he endured the hardships.
You may be sitting here today saying to yourself- I can not do that- endure what ever comes along my way because I am a Christian. I can not either but there is help for us.
2 Corinthians 1:8-10 “We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us,”
I will endure