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Follower of One : Missions For The Rest Of Us


A show for marketplace Christians to energize and encourage you to live out your faith every day, right where you are. Begin your day with Christ-centered ideas to share your joy with those around you. Add in weekly interviews with other like-minded Christians so you can share in their joy and learn how they make Jesus visible in their workplace every day.

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Jul 5, 2022

If I give something away, is it gone forever?

 

Hi, I'm Mike Henry Sr. with Follower of One. Thanks for joining me again today on the Follower of One podcast. This is our episode number 709. Thank you for being a part of the Follower of One podcast, you might even check out our online community where we try and encourage one another to live our faith on a daily basis. That community is at https://community.Followerofone.org. We've been talking for a day so far about abundance, and we will be talking a little bit more about it because I read a book called The Abundance Mentality by Mick Schovanec and Sean Copeland. And I just wanted to get us thinking about the things that God gives us, that we can freely give away, and this passage in Ephesians 3 is a great challenge in that area.

 

Yesterday, we talked about the beginning of this passage and how we are strengthened with this abundant power that comes from the riches of Christ glory. Today, we'll go a little further. I'll begin by reading at verse 14 and we'll read through verse 17. "For this reason, I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. That He would grant you according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your heart through faith and that you being rooted and grounded in love may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth."

 

It's hard to stop at any passage in here because Paul kind of strings this into one long sentence, but today I wanna focus on the phrase "that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith." You see faith is the beginning of all of this. Many of Jesus' miracles, and I say many because I can't think of them all offhand, but I believe most of Jesus' miracles required someone to do something first. Before He fed the 5,000, someone gave five loaves and two fish. Before He healed certain people they had to reach out their hand or the friends lowered their friend through the roof. There was always an action that took place first.

 

We are called to act because our faith is part of this equation. Jesus has made what we believe about Him part of this formula. And we experience the abundance when we trust Him. It's not easy to trust Jesus, and think if I give something away that I may receive more later and I may not even receive that in this life, but God's keeping score; that's why we don't have to.

 

Our job is to let Christ dwell in our heart through faith, and then we can take the things that He's given us and use them to serve others. This whole passage doesn't really end. It's this one long strung out thought where Paul goes into chapters four and five of Ephesians and talks about how weird to live as people who love others and who serve others. That's the calling we have as believers. It begins with this knowledge of God that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith. We have Christ living in us when we trust Him, when we point our lives to Him, and when we begin following Him, we get the Holy Spirit.

 

Christ dwells in our hearts through faith, and we get therefore rooted and grounded in love, we'll talk about that some more tomorrow. But today let's know that our faith is step one. We have to trust Jesus enough to study His word and to listen to Him and do what He says. It's not natural to us. We're naturally fallen because Adam chose to sin and we have chosen to sin. We live in a broken world.

 

But we can begin to turn that tide and step into the abundance that Christ has for us by trusting Him and following Him. Who are you following today? I wanna encourage you to point your life to Jesus. Punch in, say "here I am," and ask Jesus to put you to work. And then the ideas that He gives you that line up with scripture, figure out a way to do them. You'll bless the people that you work with and you'll make Him visible in the world.

 

Thanks so much for being a Marketplace Minister, and thanks for considering how to live your faith on a daily basis. Our world needs it. And if you want to practice this with some friends, join us at https://community.Followerofone.org.

 

Thanks very much.