Gospel

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Sunday 3/10/13 Pastor Michael sermon Fighting for the Blessed Life Genesis 14:18-24
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God has declared that he wants his people blessed. Jesus said that the thief comes to steal, kill and destroy but Jesus comes for us to have an abundant life. There are things we have to do to get the blessed life. It comes with the conditions of if we do this then God will do that. The blessing of the Lord makes rich and adds no sorrow with it. God will never give us things that cause us stress and sorrow. Many of us bless ourselves and end up with a mess!
God wants to provide a blessing and the blessing does not come without a fight. We have to fight for the blessing just like Moses and the children of Israel had to fight for the promise land. They had to fight some people to remove them off the land they were to possess. We have to be ready to fight because we know what God has promised to us. We have to led the devil know if he comes at us hard we will come back at him harder! We have to fight to obtain what God has for us. As often as the children of Israel were ready to fight for the land, God gave it to them.

In our text, God gave Abram a promise that he would be blessed, he and his seed. There is the Promise and the Process. We never receive from God if we are not willing to be prepared by God for the promised blessing. We need to trust God in the process. There are people we should not take with us during the process. Some people in our lives are to be left at our present level and are not to go to the next level with us. So don’t take them when we start the process/preparation sent from God to receive the blessing/promise.
When we have the blessing, we have the favor of God on our life. God has a blessing with our name on it. GOD HAS A BLESSING WITH OUR NAME ON IT!!!!!! We can get excited because it is coming! The blessing is coming! Every now and then, God will give us a reminder that He is still here by breaking off a little blessing for us while we are in the process for the big blessing. We have to remember that we CANNOT lose the fight because we have God and his favor!

1) Bless the Lord:
We are blessed because we realize that God has blessed us. We must bless God and acknowledge that without God, we can’t make it thru the battle. Some of us here finished college and were not too smart. God passed the exam for us!! Some of us here have not worked in a year but we still got an apartment, still got a car, our bills are paid, still looking good and still eating! It is not us, it is GOD!!!
We have our life, our health and our right mind. Even after people have schemed against us, God has caused them to fall in the hole that they made for us!! AMEN!! We need to thank God for keeping us from danger seen and unseen. Thank God for every little thing!!

2) Releasing the Tenth-the Tithes
Vs 20. Abram gave tithes of what he had. Giving God a tenth is acknowledging that what we have comes from God. AND that we appreciated what he had done. In Leviticus the tithe is holy unto the Lord. The giving of the tenth is a test for us to pass. Giving our tithes to God is saying we are grateful for what He had done for us. If we love God the way we say we love him, we shouldn’t always have our hands open to him asking for stuff. We ought to give God something – the tithes, a tenth. God will bring us thru stuff and then He will look back to see what we do after.
The tenth has significance because it is holy unto the Lord. Malachi 3:10 Bring the whole…all the tithes into the store house. The store house is God’s house, the church. God says to test him to see if He won’t open the windows of heaven and pour out a blessing for us. The blessing will overflow for us once we bring God the tenth, the tithes. Test God!! He will have blessings pour out on us!!
Amen

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