Are You ready to Make a Difference!

Ephesians 4:17-19

Happy Birthday Pastor Josh!

Are You ready to Make a Difference!  I want you to believe that we can make a difference for Christ as a church. We are a team and as a team we are here to have fun and let the world know we love Jesus.

In April 1969, the Beatles released a song Get back JoJo, I don’t know if you are familiar with these lyrics:
Jojo was a man who thought he was a loner
But he knew it wouldn’t last.
Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona
For some California grass.
Get back, get back.
Get back to where you once belonged.

JoJo’s was a bar that Linda McCarthy liked to go to in Phoenix Arizona. It simply was about getting the bars atmosphere back to what it was. Linda had Paul write the song because she wanted her hangout spot like she had once envisioned it. I’m not advocating going backwards as the song suggests because that spiritual stupidity, but I'm actually advocating going forward as Paul is. If we are going to make a difference for Christ then #1 no one can be a loaner anymore…#2 we can never go back to what we once were. We can never go back to the life of sin we were once saved from. That’s what Paul is telling us in the next few verses…

“So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more.” Ephesians 4:17-19 (NIV)

Paul had just finished describing the need for the body of Christ to mature so that they could grow up into the Head, Jesus Christ. I shared with you the importance of developing both our vertical relationship with Jesus and our horizontal relationships with others. (Love God-Love People…mature believers learn to do both excellently) But now Paul is going to change course a bit. He is warning his readers not to return to what they were like before God reached down into their lives and made them part of his family. You’ll remember that Paul had previously described that way of life at the beginning of chapter 2:
“As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.” Ephesians 2:1-3 (NIV)

That certainly doesn’t sound like the kind of life anyone would want to return to, but obviously Paul had some concerns that some of his readers were in danger of doing exactly that. When Paul writes “you must no longer live as the Gentiles do”, he is exhorting his readers to never go back to the kind of life they experienced before they committed their lives to Jesus Christ. It wasn’t easy then and it’s not easy now to live a life totally devoted to Christ. Although Paul’s writing is not exactly a “how-to” manual on how to avoid getting “back to where we once belonged”, he certainly gives us enough insight about how that can occur that we can develop some principles that we can apply to avoid doing that. Although I’m sure there is much more here, over the next few days we will look at some principles that will either make us or break us...you are loved!