"Becoming Fully Committed" Series

“Making A Difference” – Pt. 2

“Becoming Fully Committed”

It is often times a funny thing being a follower of Christ. When you are fully committed to God and fully committed to His leadership in your life things sometimes happen that are beyond your control. But it is through these leadings of God that amazing and incredible God things take place.

Recently I was sharing with the leadership of our church a Sunday speaking schedule that I had made up back before we even had our first service. I mean, this schedule of topics was going to be carved in stone and couldn’t be changed for anything. I mean I thought it was a sure thing and to change it would be wrong.

Well, as I have said, when we follow Christ fully and turn our lives over to God’s leadership, God tends to carve out the path for our lives and He has a way of seeing that we go that way. So, God’s bulldozer crushed that schedule that I had almost carved into stone, as He begins to carve out the path for South Shore.

As many of you know, we had been planning on doing a series entitled, “Questions for God” in which we were going to look for God’s answers to some tough questions in life. We still may do that series, someday, but God has other plans for us now.

The well-known speaker and author Charles Stanley once said that his church began to be effective when he started to listen to God and the leading of the Holy Spirit and not Himself. Well, I fell as though I find myself in such a spot. I thought that I knew what God would have me to speak on for this year, but I guess that I was wrong. So we are beginning this series, actually we began last week, entitled, “Making a Difference”.

As a church, we are embarking on a new adventure; an adventure that will have us grow closer to God and closer to each other and most importantly will allow for us to make BIG changes in our lives and the world around us for God.

So there is a lesson to be learned here from my life, always trust God over yourself! I believe we talked about that a few weeks ago.

Friends, amazing things happen to you and in your life when you are fully committed to God, and I believe that God is going to do big things among us and to us and through us as a family here at South Shore.

Last week we talked about making a difference in the world around us by sharing with others good news of God’s love and grace. We were challenged to be world changers for God, and I hope that many of you began to make an impact in your world by investing and inviting and sharing God’s love & grace.

Today we are going to talk about being fully committed to God and His leadership in our lives, and in the future we are going to expound on some of what we hear and learn today. So before we begin, let’s ask God to clear our hearts and minds and allow us to focus on Him and His word and to teach us today. Let’s Pray.

Within the Bible we find some pretty amazing stories, lives and instruction. Included amongst these the Bible contains documentation and stories about the wisest and smartest man whoever walked the face of the earth and his name was Solomon. God gave Solomon great knowledge and God also gave Solomon great wealth. So Solomon was the wisest and wealthiest man to live.

What is interesting about Solomon is that even though God blessed him immensely, he did not remain faithful and committed to God. Solomon loved women and so he married many of them, 700 to be exact plus 300 concubines. But God warned Solomon about these foreign wives that he had. God said in:

1 Kings 11:2 – “ You must not intermarry with them, because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods.”

But Solomon refused to listen to God and did his own thing and married these foreign women. And, as usual, God was right.

1 Kings 11:4 says, “As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods and his heart was not fully devoted to the Lord his God, as the heart of David his father had been.”

1 Kings 11:6 says, “So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the Lord; he did not follow the Lord completely, as David his father had done.”

As I read these verses and the story of Solomon’s life I am reminded that we, as followers of Christ, need to be fully devoted to God. If we want to do what is right and live life to its fullest and make it work right, we must be fully committed followers of Christ. We need to be people who accept God’s leadership of our lives and be willing to let Him lead.