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Finding God in a Challenging World 1: Obstacles to Finding God - Ephesians 2:1-2
By Steve Jeantet | April 26, 2007
<Context> This is the first of a three message series entitled, Finding God in a Challenging World, delivered at a weekend retreat for a college/young adult group.
Part 2: God Reveals Himself in Christ || Part 3: Blessed Be Your Name </Context>
Intro
- Thank you for inviting me to be with you this weekend
- I’m very excited for the privilege of sharing your getaway with you
- Intro Kim – married July 31 of last year
- Teacher at Greenwood Lakes Middle in Lake Mary
- About Me
- Full time grad student
- Work 25 hours per week
- Married
- Christian stuff (church, Bible studies, QTs, etc)
- And nice to have a social life every once in a while too!
Transition
- That’s how I come into this weekend – after a week on the run
- Maybe you arrived here tonight feeling the same way
- School, family, work, church obligations and more
- Wondering how to keep all those plates in the air
- Asking question – how do I find God in the middle of all this?
- That is the topic we are going to discuss this weekend…
- “Finding God in a Challenging Worldâ€
Promise for this weekend
- Before we get into this idea of how to find God, let me start with a promise
- God wants to be found!
- Listen to these words from Jeremiah 29
- “you will seek me and find me…I will be found by youâ€
- context of this passage
- Israelites just taken captive into Babylon
- Thought their world was crumbling around them
- Wondering where was God in the midst of all this
- And he gave that great promise – “I will be found by youâ€
- Here is the promise – God wants to be found
- He’s not hiding – he hasn’t disappeared
- He’s waiting to be found
- This weekend, I give you this promise – God is here
- And He wants to be found
Pray
- Let’s thank God for this promise as we start our time together
Transition
- In order to begin our search for God, have to ask the question…
- Why can’t we see Him now?
- If God wants to be found, then where is He?
- What’s getting in the way of us finding Him?
Obstacles to Finding God
- The Bible lays out 3 major obstacles that keep us from God
- These come out of Eph 2:1-2
Devil
- We have an enemy that is fighting against us
- We want to know what keeps us from God?
- One reason is the devil is fighting with all he has to keep us from God
- Let us not underestimate his power
- In this passage, he is called the “ruler of the kingdom of the airâ€
- He is very real and wants nothing more than for us to never find God
World
- Have you ever felt like a fish trying to swim upstream?
- That’s b/c, some ways, you are
- The whole world is headed one direction – and wants to take you with it
- But that’s not the road that leads to God
- If we want to find God, we need to recognize the world isn’t going to help
Self
- The final of the 3 obstacles is ourselves
- We get in our own way of finding God
- In fact, we have each decided that we don’t want to find God
- That we would rather be our own god
- The Bible has a word for that – sin
- Sin is, at its core, us saying to God “thanks, but no thanksâ€
- In effect, it’s like giving God the finger
Recap
- Why can’t we find God?
- Because we have an enemy fighting against us
- Because the world is headed in the opposite direction from God
- Because we have sinned and told God we were going to do it our way
Conclusion
- I started tonight with a promise to you
- That God wants to be found
- But we need to be honest of the obstacles in our life that keep us from God
- So, I would like to give you 2 questions to reflect on tonight….
- What is the biggest obstacle that keeps you from God?
- How have you tried to overcome that obstacle yourself?
- Let me close tonight with my 2 favorite words in the whole Bible
- “But Godâ€
- immediately after laying out these obstacles that keep us from God
- we read these great words
- God wants to be found…so much so that He is going to overcome our obstacles and get involved personally
- And that is what we are going to look at the rest of this weekend
Topics: Ephesians |