Tools For Living: Part 3 Series

Open with a bit of a review…

Our live are the toolboxes we are given by the Lord. It is up to us as to what we put in them.

Just as the two most basic tools in the toolbox are a hammer and a screwdriver, so the two most common items in the growing Christians toolbox is reading the word and prayer. Salvation, or asking that Jesus become your very best friend is essential to the journey of faith.

We come together to talk again about essentials of our tool box. Some people think you can’t build anything with just basic tools. They figure you need to have all the saws and levels and routers… and the list goes on, but the truth is that you can build some pretty great things with very little.

Faith – The Plan, The Pieces

Pull out the plans and hold them up. Emphasis… not much to them, but some of the best things in life are simple. (a great marriage – old man saying, we stay married.) These pieces here… some of you are noting they are cut… in fact they are cut to the right size… stuff like this is true in live too. In fact, most of life is dealing with the, seemingly random pieces you have and figuring out how to fit them together.

Faith is the key component here… I have a plan, but I don’t know that it will work, I have the pieces, but I can not be sure that it will all work together.

Heb 11:1 says, “1Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”

In that chapter it goes on to talk of how God did incredible things in and through people who had faith… They pleased God, they and their families were saved from certain disaster, they followed the voice of God and found what they did not expect. It was with that the amazing became the norm for living… are you amazed by the things that are coming together in your life and your family? Are you studying to see what the plans are (the word) are you taking the pieces and offering them to the Lord and asking him to show you how to put them together… remember, God doesn’t always intend on chucking that funny piece… God sees it as indispensable in your life.

Hope – The Nails

Ahhh…. The nails… Kinda like the force… if you are not a Stars Wars fan, don’t tune out, you will miss something important here… in the very first Stars Wars movie, Luke Skywalker asks Obi-Wan what the force is and he says something along the lines of… “it is all around us, it is what binds the universe together”… I would say that hope is like that. Obi-Wan had the force in his tool box, but we all have nails… What would this be like without the nails… is would just fall to pieces…

Hope brings far more then just a general idea that things will work out, it is having a confidence that God is working things out and that he often uses us as part of his plan.

Talk about bad and good uses of nails… and bad and good uses of hope.

The bible says things like this about hope…

Ps 39:7 - "But now, Lord, what do I look for? My hope is in you.”

Pr 13:12 – “ 12Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when dreams come true, there is life and joy.”

Our hope should be first in the Lord, in fact, if it is not there first, the Bible tells us that we are in trouble.

If we allow ourselves to give up hope we will, sooner or later, fall into the hands of the enemy… then our lives become far worse then we could imagine at this point.

(at this point the house should be tougher, but it is missing something… that bit of extra – don’t show the one you already did, yet.)

Love –The Decoration

Another thing you may find in a tool box is sandpaper…

Contrast the two houses and how they look…

Emphasis that love is messy and not something that can be defined and planned for… it requires growth, it requires acceptance, it requires more then you can imagine, but he rewards are greater then anything. Sure – it may look funny to others, but what matters is that it is working for you.