OUTLINE:

A Grateful Heart Is a Blessed Heart

Blog - 4/16/21

Guarantees to Hang Your Hat On
  • God loves you
  • Salvation is eternal (once saved, always saved)
  • Christ rose from the dead
  • Believers are fundamentally changed at salvation

Things that are NOT guaranteed
  • Your lifestyle, earthly blessings
  • Others will love you, or even like you
  • Your good health
  • This church/pastor
Are blessings “yours” to demand or are they God’s to give?

Synthesize
Ps 50:12b ...for the world and its fullness are mine.
Ps 50:14a Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving...

Self-Induced Misery
It's when we think we have the RIGHT to demand such things as permanent blessings that we place ourselves in bondage to poor expectations!

Your joy is intrinsic to your abiding in the sphere of God’s love.

Synthesize the following...
1Ti 2:4 [God] desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
1Jn 4:8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

Your joy is intrinsic to your abiding in the sphere of God’s love.

Ps 16:11
You make known to me the path of life;
in your presence there is fullness of joy;
at your right hand [where righteousness is] are pleasures forevermore.

Our Joy Made Full
God never says that we are to derive our joy from temporal blessings alone. That is a worldly trap. Our joy is transcendent! (Col 3:1-10).

Eph 5:10-11
and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.

Transcendence
When you mature to the point, spiritually, that your joy is divorced from temporal blessings, then you are delivered from the self-induced prison that most Christians seem to live in.

Your joy is intrinsic to your abiding in the sphere of God’s love.