Maintaining Your Spiritual Life

Intro: a while back Brother Rushing made this statement about machinery. It will only be as good as the amount of maintenance you put into it. There are many people who have a very rigid maintenance schedule on their mowers, cars, trucks, boats, weed-eaters, etc. They all have long life expectancy because they are maintained. Sister Joyce Easterling was talking about maintaining your healing from the Lord, and this thought came out of that discussion.

Maintaining Your Spiritual Life

1. Maintaining Salvation—

Hebrews 6:1—keep moving—don’t get stagnated. Set new spiritual goals for your life. Don’t settle for just a salvation experience, but continue to grow in the things of God.

Philippians 3:14—pressing toward God

Revelation 3-4—Keeping the first love, staying in love with Christ. Keeping the fire burning in your heart.

2. Maintaining Faith—

1 Timothy 6:12- fight the good fight of faith

Jude 3- earnestly contend for the faith—don’t take false teaching sitting

Down, don’t let error enter into your thinking. Stay alert, stay in the word,

Let the trying of your faith produce good things in your life.

Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God—Romans

10:17

3. Maintaining Forgiveness—

Matthew 6:14—forgive others—as you have been forgiven

Realize the faithfulness of Jesus Christ—1 John 1:9

Realize the responsibility of being forgiven—to whom much is given, much is required—he that is forgiven little, loves little.

4. Maintaining Healing—John 5:14-go and sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you.

Go and offer thyself to the priest---give God the glory.

Give an offering—not that you are paying God for the healing, but that you are giving out of a heart of thankfulness to God.

Lepers—1 returned to give thanks—now we don’t have any scripture on the rest of the lives of these lepers. But it seems to me that the one who came and offered thanks was on the right road toward maintaining a spiritual existence. The other nine seemingly had missed the whole point of God’s healing power in their lives.

5. Maintaining the Holy Spirit—

Don’t quench the Holy Spirit moving in your life—I Thess. 5;19-yielding to the spirit in your life is the main way to keep the fire burning. Paul gives the Thessalonians the admonishing not to hinder the spirit, but let the spirit have his way.

John 4;24—let your worship be full of the spirit of God. Never let worship become routine or theological in nature, but keep the spirit in every worship service.

Be filled and refilled or constantly being filled—Acts 4;31—this is one of the most exciting verses in the Word of God. The people who were filled with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, were all filled with the Holy Spirit here. This means, that we can be continually filled by the Holy Spirit. A constant yielding to the moving of the Holy Spirit is the way of maintaining His work in our lives.

Close: a commercial showed a man with a truck that had over 600,000 miles. It was because of good maintenance. Remember, the engine is only as good as the maintenance that is done on it. Keep yourself in tune, there are already of enough blow ups on the road of life.