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Positive Written Sermons is a FREE service of Positive Christianity to those ACTIVE IN CLERGY MINISTRY to ease your burdens in ministry. Each positive sermon is non-denominational; feel free to tailor to your denominational needs, or personal style. We consider our sermons to be 90% complete; they await your personal stories and anecdotes.
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There is a home that is over 100 years old. On the living room wall is a picture of the family in the front yard sitting under the trees. The trees are quite different from today, they are small in the picture. They are not the giant, massive oaks that are now in the yard.
There is a lot of truth in a tree. A tree is lush at the top. It has leaves. A healthy tree goes far out and gives you shade. But any gardener will tell you that if you water or fertilize the tree, you have to circle exactly the top branch line on the ground, and that is where the ends of the roots are. You cannot see the roots, but they are there. A tree is identical on top to what the root system is underneath.
It is the same with us. There is a root system and a foundation in your life. It is a very real, powerful foundation. The Bible calls this the tree of life. If you have a solid root system that is totally grounded and one with God, you will bloom on the top of your life.
You will stand up to the winds of your life; you will stand up to the winters of your life; you will stand up to anything that comes into your life, because you have a strong foundation in God.
Recently, a dog was seen taking off in a yard, going seemingly 90 miles per hour and treeing an animal. Have you ever seen an animal treed? The animal runs up the tree to get away from the dog since the dog cannot climb up the tree. You have to wonder what the animal is thinking. “Here I am up in this tree. Boy, oh boy, is not my life bad! I have this crazy mutt down there barking away and he won’t let me down. I wonder how long I’m going to be up here.” There are a lot of times when we feel treed in life. If we want to get out of the branches, we need to go to our roots in God.
Our Bible talks a great deal about the tree of life.
In Genesis 2:9, it says, “Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden … ” Now, this is at the beginning of the Bible.
Then it moves on and talks about the tree of life all through the Bible.
In Revelations, it says, ” … through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river, is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” [Revelation 22:2].
Let us go to Revelation and talk about a promise that is given to you.
I read from Revelation 21. “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.” There is always a new earth with a new heaven. Where is heaven? Jesus said it is inside of you. There can be a hell inside of you, too, that can be found when we let the lower human nature take over and rule us but heaven is inside of you waiting to be found. And when there is a new heaven – an expanded heaven – there is a new earth. Earth is the realm of manifestation; it is what you experience outside of you. That experience though, is determined by what is inside of you. When there is a new root system, there is a new manifestation of the branches and the leaves. When you are rooted in God, your whole life blooms with the fruits of the Spirit. There are at least 12 God-given gifts that are yours for the developing.
“For the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”
[Now, listen to this because these are the promises that are spoken to you, directly, on what you are going to receive if you follow this path of Jesus and if you come to the attainment of Christ consciousness.]
“And I heard a loud voice from the throng saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals.'” That alone is a revelation. The home of God is WITH you. It is with you. It walks with you. It lives in you. If we spend our life looking outside of ourselves, we are looking at the leaves instead of the roots.
“He will dwell with them as their god; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will sip every fear from their eyes.” There are many times when we have tears in our eyes, in a manner of speaking. Some are depressed. Some have real challenges that they are dealing with.
Many people are hurting, and you may be here for a healing. You are in the right place. You can have a healing from God. God is very active and real in your life. And it does not come from me; it comes from God directly to you. I can get it just like you can get it, but, the whole message of the Bible is you can get it. You can have it. It is already been given if you will accept it. The accepting is the attainment, and the new root system for your life.
“Death will be no more.” I have lived through many deaths in my life, and so have you. I have had many things that have died in my life. Have you ever felt like a part of you died, or a dream die? Where you are hurt so badly that you did not know how you were going to bring it back to life anymore? Maybe it was a relationship; you have to find new life and find it abundantly, in that moment. When you do, there is a real spiritual power that comes from your roots.
You know that God is with you; that God is not outside of you; that God is walking with you. You know that you could not have done it; God did it through you.
“‘Mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.’ And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new’; also, he said, ‘Write this for these words are trustworthy and true.’ Then he said to me, ‘It is done!'”
It is done right now. It is done for you. It is absolutely done. It is complete, when we accept.
“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. Those who conquer will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they will be my children.”
What do you conquer? How do you go about conquering something? There is only one person we need to conquer, and that person IS ourselves. That is the biggest challenge in my life.
I wish I could tell you that it was a one-time thing, now we are conquered forever, and we will live on easy street from now on. Life is multifaceted. And therefore, there are countless levels of the human that must be conquered, and re-conquered.
Some come here with worries and fears, and you do not know how to stop them. They are just trying to conquer you; they are trying to destroy you. You have got to conquer that little voice that is inside of you, or it will conquer you.
I do not believe that we can conquer that voice on our own; we need deep roots in God. We have to consent to that magnificent power of God coming through us.
Also, we must get positive friends who believe in us and believe in what we can and God can achieve, not in what we cannot do.
Revelation goes on commenting about the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, the murderers, the fornicators, etc. To lead the orchestra, you have to turn your back on the crowd.
You have to pick up the baton and lead. You have an orchestra inside of yourself, and it is your thoughts. You need to lead. You need to stand up and say, “I’m in control. I’m not standing here alone, because God is with me. I am going to create beautiful music for my life!”
In verse nine, it states, “Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and said to me … “
First of all, let’s talk about the seven plagues. Seven is the spiritual number for completion. We have all had plagues in our lives, whether it is a common cold we are trying to get over, something that is gone wrong in a relationship, or the time we were fired from our job. It was something we had to overcome in our lives, and we did overcome it. To have it in a bowl means to have it contained. It is not running wild anymore. Where does it run wild? Where does it live? It lives in our minds if we let it. We have to evict it. We have to say, “NO more! Get out of here! You are not allowed in the apartment house of my mind. I pick the tenants, and the tenants are now only God thoughts.”
“And said to me, ‘Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.'” This is talking about the church, the wife of Jesus Christ. But it is not talking about the church in the way we think about it. It is not talking about the walls and windows and stained glass and the lectern, or the ritual of humankind. It is talking about something that is much higher than church dogma; it is talking about spirituality. Spirituality is my wife, and it is your spouse too. Spirituality should be so mated with you that there is a perfect union so that there cannot be any separation, so you cannot tell where you stop, and God starts.
Why do they call Jesus the Lamb? In olden times, if you had sinned greatly, and you wanted to atone for your sins, you would have asked to bring me your finest animal. You do so, and you come to the altar, bringing your finest animal. We go over to the stone altar, and they went through a religious ceremony where they talked about taking your sin from your life and putting it in the life of the lamb. Then they slayed the lamb, and it ceases to be. It was then believed that your sins would cease to be.
Actually, though, to truly follow Jesus we have to slay the sin inside of ourselves. We cannot even allow it to be only in the life of Jesus Christ, the Lamb, who died for our sins. We have to allow new life to come inside of us by following Jesus.
An example, a man decided, saying, “I am not going to work on myself any more. I am not going to change. I am just going to allow you to do it for me. I am going to come and fall at your feet, and I know that you are probably going to be crucified and I will allow you to take the hit for me.”
Spiritually we cannot hide behind another. Often, we try in different aspects of life and business.
If I am truly to follow Jesus, I have to take up my own cross; crossing out the false beliefs in my own mind. I cannot allow you to do it for me; I cannot allow the lamb to do it for me. I have to take responsibility sometimes, someplace, somewhere, and become all that I am meant to become.
Taking responsibility though does not mean doing it alone; it means connecting with my root system, just as Jesus connected with His.
Life is to become all that you are meant to become. Life is not for standing back and sitting down and watching others. Life is for standing up and getting into life, and fully living it. That takes responsibility. When we do this, we find that life becomes a lot easier, and we find that we have the new Jerusalem coming down inside of us, from the top of consciousness itself, to the bottom of our human mind.
“And in the spirit, he carried me away to a great high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of the heaven from God. It was the glory of God and a radiance like a very rare jewel, like jasper, clear as crystal. It has a great, high wall with twelve gates … “
How would you enter into the city? You would enter into the city by way of a gate. This means a perfect receptivity to spirit, inside of you. There are twelve gates. In Bible symbology, twelve is also a number of spiritual completion.
“At the gates [are] twelve angels … . And on the gates are inscribed the names of the twelve tribes of the Israelites; on the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates. And the wall of the city has twelve foundations … “
Twelve foundations of your life provide a root system: a foundation to hold you up. These are the twelve foundations of humankind. The 12 God-given fruits of life according to many theologians are Love, Faith, Will, Life, Order, Wisdom, Strength, Imagination, Power, Understanding, Zeal, and Elimination.
I invite you to spend separate days in prayer asking for the gifts of the fruits of the Spirit, taking them one by one individually, and meditating on the full spiritual meaning of the gift. Work to develop this, and all fruits will become manifest in your life.
If you are living, manifesting every one of these twelve foundations, you will have a new Jerusalem. Jerusalem means “habitation.” There will be a new habitation inside of you, a new place that is beyond anything you have ever seen before.
“The angel who talked to me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city and its gates and walls. The city lies foursquare, its length the same as its width.”
It was a cube. If you were to go into the Jewish temple, you would find a cube too. It was the holy of holies. They believed it was the place where the presence of God was.
“He measured the city with his rod, fifteen hundred miles, its length and width and height are equal.” [This equals about 375 miles per wall.] “He also measured its wall, one hundred forty-four cubits.” [This is seventy-five yards.]
Revelation then speaks about the streets of pure gold. Have you ever heard ministers talk about heaven with its streets of pure gold and the jewels. It talks about the twelve jewels and the twelve different colors of the jewels next. But this is not a heaven experience. This is not an after-death experience for you. It is an experience of attaining spiritual consciousness. The dimensions of the walls talk about how this is big enough to hold everyone. It is big enough to hold you. It is talking about a majesty that can occur inside of you, and outside of you also. It talks about how the gates are made of one solid pearl – “the pearl of great price.” You enter in, you pay for the passage by giving up your old lower life (the great price).
You will hear many people talk about how they are waiting for the new Jerusalem, that the new Jerusalem will come, someday. I tell you that it does not come to you, but through you. You have to consent and allow this to occur and it will. It is waiting. It is already there. We just have to fully enter the twelve gates and allow it to happen, and it will.
The new Jerusalem is the presence of God. I ask you now to see this inside of your mind’s eye, not as a dream but as a reality in your life.
You have a solid root system right now. Perhaps your life is waiting to bloom. Take care of the roots and the rest will take care of itself.
Let us pray.
Dear God, I pray that my root system is fortified. I pray for a spiritually enlightening experience. Dear God, I rise above difficulties. I allow the tree of life to be totally manifested in me. I have a balance in my life, inner and outer. My life can be adorned with precious jewels – the pearl of great price – a mind that is filled with well-being, emotions that are filled with joy, an energy system of my body that is filled to the brim with power. I consent now to the new Jerusalem becoming manifest in my life. God, You are now with me, and God, I am now with You … Amen.
PRAYER / MEDITATION__________________________
The presence of God is here, and it becomes very tangible inside and outside of you as you pray.
The presence of God is here, something you can touch, something you can feel, something that is thinking through you, something that is radiating through you giving you a new energy, vitality, and zest for life. The presence of God is here.
The Mind of God, which created the universe, directs you to beautiful living. Your decisions are right and good, for the Lord of your being is your light.
In Jesus Christ, you find the true light that brings understanding and Divine direction. In Jesus Christ, you find the love that satisfies and fulfills every need. You are a spiritual being surrounded by God’s love, and all is well.
Rest in the silence of prayer …
Today, in prayer, everyone here is together, spiritually. You are here, decreeing the goodness of God in your life and in everything that is a part of your life. You have faith in God, and you have faith in God’s love. Through faith, God’s love blesses and makes right all that concerns you. You are calm and poised in God’s love. God’s good is magnified and multiplied in your life. You are peaceful and relaxed. You have, inside of you now, the knowledge that God’s Spirit of harmony, order, and understanding – at work in your life. Your mind, your body, and your life spiritually respond to the Sprit of God within you. By God’s power, all things are made right.
Rest in the silence of prayer …
You are going across a threshold of a doorway, a gate into a new consciousness. All things are made new within this new realm of thinking and living. You are made new.
There is an activity here that is happening. It is happening spiritually. It is not your imagination. Your mind and your heart are open to the infinite love of God. The activity of this love is establishing peace and order in your life. God is here, and the loving Christ spirit rules supreme in your life. Your mind, body, and affairs are serene and harmonious.
Rest in the silence of prayer …
I am one with God. You are one with God. We are one with God, and we are one with God’s good. Through God’s power, your life is blessed with order and peace. You now accept a new world order for yourself. Your life is under the rule of Divine order. Your business, your career, is under the rule of Divine order. Your relations are under the rule of Divine order.
The way you feel in your mind is under the rule of Divine order. The way your body is responding to your thoughts is under the rule of Divine order.
There’s a new level of energy that is manifested in you and through you. The activity of the living God is gently moving through you now, with its quietness, gentleness, and peace. This tangible presence of God can be felt.
Rest for a moment, in the silence of prayer …
In the name of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, I decree peace and order in your world. In every aspect of your life, I decree a new level of peace manifesting now from this prayer. I pray for a Divine outworking of everything that is troubling you now, because you are not alone. God is with you, and the great outworking of Divine order is taking place.
There is a constructive, unifying power of Divine love expressing in your life. There is a harmonizing and blessing that is happening in your life. The love of God is harmonizing and blessing your life, now. Say that silently inside yourself: The love of God is harmonizing and blessing me, now …
We pray, this day, in Jesus Christ’s name, accepting these blessings, knowing without a doubt, totally accepting the belief that these things are already true about your mind, your body, and your life.
Thank You, God … Amen
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