Every single one of us need to change course from time to time. It could be that we get on the freeway, we made the wrong decision to do that. We need to get off. We need to get back on. We need a course correction. We need a course change. Friends, listen. There’s no greater challenge to the Christian life than what God puts forth to us that our lives need a course correction.
It’s normal. It happens in other areas of life. Can it happen in your life? The answer to that is absolutely yes. The Lord wants you and I to live honestly, transparently, and before God and his people. And that can be very encouraging. However your life has ever gone before in the past, God wants to change your life.
And to live fully for Jesus, to walk with him is a walk with God that will not only change your life and the decisions and the actions that you make, it will affect those that are around you. So listen friend, to die to self is to live for Christ. That’s pretty dramatic, but it’s pretty awesome what God decides to do. True transformation requires that you and I give up our old ways by handing them to the Lord Jesus Christ.
So in this message, we are going to look at a deliberate deliberate response to how we can change course. So friends, grab your Bible right now and let’s get into our message titled It’s Time to Change Your Course. Let’s go. Romans 14, Romans 15, Romans 16. A great section of the scripture that is speaking directly to the believer about their walk with God, making it real because everything about Jesus is real.
And um in that the reality and I think the authentic faith of a true believer cannot be denied. When I say things like that, I think of the man Steven. Remember Steven in the book of Acts? Steven was a man that was full of the Holy Spirit. You really don’t know much about Steven, but his great moment of the uh of the hall of of faith, I I would say, of course, is when he was uh guilty of loving Jesus, guilty of proclaiming Christ.
It’s interesting to note that where Steven was stoned to death for his witness of Christ, being full of the Holy Spirit, what did he do? He proclaimed the gospel. And one of the eyewitnesses to that, he was actually the man orchestrating the stoning and the killing. He’s the man responsible was a guy by the name of Saul, a Pharisee from Tarsus, a Jew who no doubt Steven’s stoning to death, Steven’s last words, I see the Lord standing at the right hand of God the Father.
And Stephen uttered those words just as Jesus. Father, do not hold this against them. Forgive them. Isn’t that amazing? That’s big grace, people. You can’t do that with human power. And Paul saw that. And I’m convinced that that led to Paul’s great conversion on the road to Damascus. That had to be haunting him and preparing him all along the way. A great witness.
So church, getting real with God and man requires us to know who we are. And it means that we must together love first. And he starts out when he tells us in verse 7, “For none of us lives to himself and no one dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord. And if we die, we die to the Lord.
