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Even when we fail or invite the enemy to the table ourselves, God does not pack up and leave. The Hebrew word for "follow" means to actively pursue or chase down and God's goodness and mercy are aggressively following us. Since we are His beloved we always have a seat at His table.

Replacing fear and worry with God's truth. Victory does not come from consistent anger, waiting for results, pushing on our own strength, it comes from drawing closer to the Jesus. Resisting the enemy requires first submitting to God. You cannot successfully say "No" to the devil's lies until you have said "Yes" to God's truth. We do not fight for victory; we fight from the victory that Jesus has already won at the cross.

Our minds is a garden, we must actively pull the weeds of past hurts and plant Scripture daily. So fix our eyes completely on Jesus. Stop trying to fight in your own willpower; instead, let's learn to live from the victory that Jesus already secured.  In addition, our minds spend more time on the narrowing of the path than on the widening of his grace.

The goal of the enemy is always the same - He wants to destroy you. He wants to start with your mind, breeding doubt and harmful thoughts with the hope of killing and destroying. He started this with Adam and Eve and continues today. Take every destructive thought captive immediately by matching it against the truth of God's Word rather than letting it dictate your mental dialogue. If it doesn’t sound like the Shepherd, don't give it a second thought.

An adaption of the book Don't Give the Enemy a Seat at Your Table by Louis Giglio. This is what we are using for our current Connect Group study.

When life feels more like chaos, I become unglued. Raw emotions bubble to the surface. I react, I retreat. But what do these reactions communicate? What do they reveal about what is beneath the surface?Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount is counterintuitive to how our world operates, upside down. Forging a Real World Faith means we learn from Jesus how to show up in the world, especially when we become unglued.

Real World Faith takes serious resilience. It takes a trust that God will stay by their side when everything points to God turning his back in disappointment. Almost all the great men and women of faith in Hebrews 11 screwed up at something, yet kept their eyes on a gracious and loving God. We can too.

As we continue to Forge A Real World Faith we will be confronted with gigantic problems. Jesus never promised us an easy life when we began to follow Him. When we come up against big problems, what is our response? Too often, we allow these giants to exist in our lives and get used to having them around. Not only that, but we can put all our energy and attention on them and they can seem overpowering. This must stop. By looking at David and Goliath we'll see that overcoming these giants requires us to fight them in a completely new way, the Jesus way.

When we choose to follow Jesus, and commence the forging of a real world faith, Christ leads us deep within ourselves. It’s the beginning of a process in which an interior renovation of our inner space begins. Do we journey inward, or do we try to keep all the things we carry, the issues of our past, the scars we have received, the brokenness we feel buried. Forging means taking that deep dive, recognizing what we carry, and allowing Jesus to do the necessary work of redemption and restoration.

We've all been in the wilderness. But sometimes it's God's hand that drew us to the wilderness. It was God that brought Israel to the wilderness, John the Baptist, even Jesus. And all three came before a major breakthrough. Forging a real world faith is working through the loneliness in the wilderness. God's fulfilled promises are on the other side of the wilderness. But, first there is an emptying of what you brought out of Egypt. Is God enough? He wants to meet us in the wilderness and wants to show us what happens when we have been stripped and have nothing left but him.

Intellectually agreeing with God is only the starting point. True faith reveals itself in our daily habits.  We have a danger of passivity.  A faith that sits still and never takes a risk for God eventually becomes fragile and cold. What does forging look like? What does working it out mean?

Worship of the Lord is our act of defiance against the lie that anything or anyone else could fulfill us other than God - To worship is to offer our best. It is so easy for money to inhabit the place that only God is meant to. When we offer and surrender our finances to Him, we acknowledge that God is God and we refuse to bow down to idols.

Romans 12:1-2 is our anchor...The Message version: “So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him." Your pain has purpose. God is your refuge. Your worship can and will sustain you.

Worship is a posture of your heart and an overflow of the relationship you are cultivating with God. At the heart of worship is the posture of Heneni - Here am I, ALL of me. It is an awareness of God - who He is and what He has done - and then a whole life response to God. In order to live a life of worship, we need to understand that we were actually created TO worship. AW Tozer said, “The purpose of nature is to lead us to the Creator and to worship Him. The purpose of man’s feelings and emotions is to lead to the One who implanted those within the heart of man, to the Creator. Everything in all of creation is to point to the Creator and evoke within adoring wonder and admiration and worship. Wherever we go, we can worship."

Harvest is when we realize, it’s not about us. It’s not about how much we have or don’t have. It’s when we realize that to have a harvest, we gotta become sowers. We got to invest into others, to scatter seeds, to tend to the soil, and see what God might do through our efforts. Today we’re going to hear some stories of people that have been trying their best to embrace it, and to not only examine their own soil, but to begin scattering seeds and see their own harvest in their lives. You might remember the story of the Prodigal Son, the son had made a mess of his life. His harvest was ruin. He wants to make a change and he goes back to his Father whom he’d insulted and disowned.  The harvest is the Father running after the son. The Feast is getting to be home together. Your harvest might begin with getting up and running towards something new, someone new. We invite you to join in our stories of harvest. Jesus told us, there’s so much and we need you in this with us. Let’s harvest together.