Fielder Church Sermons

Our pride poisons our faith because it causes us to attempt to use God for our own purposes. We can turn believing in God and His power into a means to make us God over Him. The gospel of Jesus should humble us, knowing that God-in-the-flesh had to bleed and die to save us from the stain of our sin. That truth should make us humbly appreciative and faith-filled that God can move on our behalf even when we don’t deserve it. That humble faith makes the impossible possible.

We don’t trust God to meet our needs, so we use and exploit other people to meet those needs. There is nothing on this earth that compares to our greatest need. Our need for salvation. When we put our complete trust in Jesus and obey His call to surrender, He shows us how much He sees us and loves us through going to the cross on our behalf, overcoming death, and giving us eternal life.

Pride is white noise in this loud world, as everyone fights to be on top. But pride stands against the kingdom of God, and Christians must have no room for it. It opposes the very character of Christ. The resurrection shows the power of the humility of Christ on the cross. When we fight against the world’s favorite spice, pride, and instead live in the salt of humility, we gain power to change the world itself. But this can only happen when we confess our pride and let Christ cast it off of us.

Our physical eyes struggle to see Jesus for who he really is, so we don’t trust him as we should and thus miss his power in us and through us. When we pray, we get to see Jesus for who he is, the crucified and resurrected King of glory who owns this universe. That sight gives us the faith to trust in Christ, and that faith to trust in Christ releases his supreme power in our lives.

We tend to look at the kingdom through the eyes of the world, when we should look at the world through the eyes of the kingdom. We cannot expect kingdom power through worldly sources. Kingdom power comes from kingdom living. Jesus modelled for us at the cross that power comes through sacrifice, not strength. When we trust Christ’s ways and love his kingdom and not ourselves, that’s when we experience Christ’s power most fully on earth.