FRIDAY NIGHT!!! Let’s Go Get IT! Let’s Pray! Purity 808

To see today's photo, go to mt4christ.org or follow me, M.t. Clark, on Facebook or Twitter. Good morning. Today's photo of the silhouette of pine trees at twilight time comes to us from a friend who has a much better camera than my iPhone and who captured this magical scene at Harrier Hill Park in Hudson, New York, back on July 31st. Well, it's Friday again, and while I always thank the Lord for the mercies of a new day and the end of the work week, this morning's photo reminds me of the sense of freedom and exhilaration that I used to experience over the prospect of Friday night. Back before I knew the peace and joy of the Lord, freedom was defined as doing whatever I want, and happiness was heavily dependent on the circumstances of the moment. And because my happiness was subject to situations I encountered, the anticipation of a good time on Friday night was often better than the actual experiences on Friday night. Don't get me wrong, sometimes, sometimes the times were good, and when the elements of my friends, the laughter, the music, the thrill of the hunt for romance and chemically induced euphoria would all come together and the happiness was such that We never wanted the party to stop, and we wished for those wild nights would, would never end. But you know what? They did end. And for all those good times in my youth of high school and college, uh, where all seemed right with the world of my friends, booze, drugs, and the connections of free love, there was also a whole lot of trouble. And for every magical moment, there were plenty of times of loneliness, strife, and conflict. That resulted in arrests, fights, anger, and broken relationships. Friendships and relationships that were centered around substances and common interests and geography were often exposed as the shallow things they were, or, or were lost when people eventually decided the trouble of those wild nights wasn't worth it anymore, and it wasn't— they weren't as much fun as it used to be. One of the guys I knew when I did recovery ministry shared an insight about our youth that I thought was revealing. He said, in the beginning of our youth, we would get together around some hobby— fishing, boating, motorcycles, sports, or whatever, some activity— and when we would introduce— and then we would introduce alcohol or drugs while we did those things. And, and he realized later that eventually, somewhere down the road, it no longer was about the activity anymore. And often the activity would stop altogether as it increasingly became more and more about the booze or the drugs. That was really true for me. I started going out with my friends at night to parties because I wanted connection. I wanted the acceptance of my peers. I wanted friends. I wanted romance. I wanted a girlfriend. I was a shy introvert, and I discovered that alcohol took the edge off. I could relax and talk to people more freely than I ever did sober. But ironically, just like my friend's insight about how it stopped being about the thing, the activity that people did, for me, it eventually stopped being about making connections as it became more and more about feeling good. By getting drunk or high. The feeling became more important than the people, and they just became a means to an end or obstacles that got in the way of a good time. What started as a search for love connections, a love connection, turned into a selfish pursuit of satisfying my lust and using and isolating myself from others. That was my broken idea of freedom—do whatever I want and screw everybody else. Getting what I want made me feel—gave me temporary satisfaction and fed the idea that I was the captain of my ship and was truly free. But it was a lie. I was in bondage to my selfish desires and all the circumstances, all the hoops I had to jump through to satisfy them. But thankfully, after literally decades of doing what I want, some very bad things happened to me and caused me to search for a meaning to this life that went beyond just satisfying my flesh. I wish I could say that all my searching led me to God and my faith in Jesus Christ, but just like my wild days in my spiritual pursuits, I was looking for love in all the wrong places. I think my searching was an important part of my journey, But I was saved by a "chance encounter" with a gospel radio message that I intended to mock when I stopped to listen to it. But instead, on Friday, March 19, 2010, I heard the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ and said the prayer that made him the Savior of my life. And since then, I increasingly made him the Lord of my life. And he walked with me and pulled me out of the darkness of my former life and through many broken situations and relationships since then, to the point that Christ has become not only my Lord and Savior, he has become my life itself. And contemplating all the roads we have walked together and all the trials and tribulations we have endured together, I have a deep, fierce, loyal love for the Lord. What, what the Word of God says is true, all of it. But the biggest truth about God that means the most to me is that he will never leave us or forsake us. In those years since saying the prayer that gave me a new life, he has been loyal, true, caring, and present. So the search for love and connection that started in my youth has been fulfilled in Christ. I know the love of God, and as far as I am concerned, I have no choice. It's the appropriate response but to praise his name forever and ever and encourage others to trust in him, put their faith in him, and to follow him. Last night, my Zoom men's discipleship group finished the last lesson of the Grace Course, and the only thing left to do is go through the steps to experience God's grace. Which, like the Steps to Freedom in Christ, is a process of repentance, a series of prayers, declarations, and renunciations that are designed to give us an encounter with the Lord where we can resolve our personal and spiritual conflicts to gain our freedom in Christ, or in this case, to experience God's grace. So today I have some of that Friday night excitement again. But tonight I won't be going— I won't be looking to go get it. I guess it was a good time, and as I have indicated, and we didn't always find it. Neither will I be looking to rock and roll. I used to scream that from time to time at parties, but the music always stopped. No, today I'm looking forward to Friday night because I am going to pray pray through the steps to experiencing God's grace. I've never done them before and look forward to being real with God and have the joy of anticipation of knowing that the Lord will use the process and my prayers to give me rest, to give me another experience of his grace as I lay my burdens down and surrender more of my life to him. So as you walk through Friday and into the night, keep walking and talking with God. Man's sense of freedom is usually childish and shortsighted, but when we— but when you come to know the freedom from sin and death that comes from a relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ, you will experience a peace and a joy that goes far beyond even the best of times in your youth. Who knew freedom comes from surrender? That I would ever look forward to a prayer session on a Friday night. But God makes all things new, and if you follow where he leads, he will give you a whole lot of new experiences to show you what living and freedom are all about. He will give your life the love, the meaning, and purpose that you were always looking for. Today's Bible verse comes to us from the New Living Translation Bible Promise Book for Men. This morning's meditation verse is Revelation 1:8, and it says, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end," says the Lord, "who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty." Today's verse, uh, today's verse are the words of Christ, who reminds us that He is God. He has always been and always will be, and He will come again. Our Christian faith isn't a philosophy of life or instructions for living. Our faith is a relationship with the self-existent God of all creation who paradoxically is one but exists in the three persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. If you let that sink in, you might spend a lot of time saying, "Wow!" or falling on your knees praising the Lord. This is big, guys. It is almost too much to bear, to understand. It is just too much. Oh Lord, how can this be? That out of the vast multitudes of people through the world and throughout the ages, you would choose me to be a part of your kingdom. Christ is the beginning and the end, and he is coming back. Everything we know about life and our existence in this universe will be dramatically changed when he comes to reclaim the world that has been broken by sin and he makes a new heaven and a new earth. And we get to be in that number when the saints come marching in. Our simple faith is going somewhere that we simply cannot even fathom. But while we struggle to, struggle to contemplate the ultimate meaning of our lives in Christ, we We can rest because we are his, and he will work all things together for good as he takes us from here to eternity. As always, I invite all to go to mtforchrist.org, where I always share insights from prominent Christian theologians and counselors to assist my brothers in Christ with their walk. Um, today we continue sharing from Clinton Arnold's Powers of Darkness, and we begin chapter 12. Where it says Christ's Final Defeat of the Powers. And so if you want to begin chapter 12 of Clinton Arnold's book and hear about the ongoing hostility and one final rebellion that'll happen, go to mtforchrist.org and look at the bottom of today's blog post and you'll see that resource. Well, it is Friday and we're going to thank God for Friday. And we're gonna thank God. And you know what, um, I, I don't want to paint a picture that, you know, because we're Christians, we don't— we can't go out, we can't have fun, because that's simply not true. But the thing is, we have to be wise. You know, we can, we can find, you know, fun times out there at concerts or clubs or whatever. Dancing and the music are not necessarily evil things, you know. So we can have fun in worldly environments. However, we have to be careful not to be, you know, dragged down, um, you know, out of our freedom in Christ. Um, the great freedom of Christ is we can go and do whatever we'd like. Um, but, you know, we know what's good and we know what's, uh, what, what'll, what'll hurt our, hurt our relationship with, with God and hurt our, hurt our souls. So we avoid sin, you know, we sin less. We're not perfect, but we, you know, we try to walk in the truth. We try to walk in the Spirit because that's one thing I discovered in my walk is I was actually able to go out and enjoy some, you know, music at a bar, at a bar, at a place where they were serving alcohol, but I didn't drink. And just enjoyed the music for a while. But if you remember from your wild days, if you ever had any, I would think most of us have, that the night starts off one way and then somewhere in the night things get a little wild and things get a little crazy and sometimes things go south pretty quick and people get angry and people get stupid and things happen. So we try to avoid that stuff, you know. So, and that was the— my experience, you know. You could see people getting inebriated, and you realized, okay, I think it's time to go. And I did go, but I enjoyed it for what it was and felt, felt alive and felt good about it. But how much more alive do I feel because I, you know, I'm gonna, uh, gonna go through this process and lay some burdens down. That's the thing about coming to the Lord in prayer and, you know, unloading your heart is you feel free afterwards. You feel that, you know, you feel that joy of confession and knowing you're forgiven and accepted by the Lord and that you're being real in front of him. And that's what the Steps to Freedom in Christ do, and that's what these steps to experiencing God's grace are intended to do, to unburden ourselves of these things. It's an act of repentance where we come before the Lord and make ourselves right with him. And, you know, that's why we don't walk around in sin, because, you know, as Christians, you know, we can see that the Word of God, you know, indicates that all the wild things we used to do were wrong. We knew they were wrong. We used to lie, we used to, you know, connive, we used to drink. Hate to say it, guys, drunkenness is, you know, prohibited in the Bible, which is like the paradox of paradoxes. So, you know, for me, it was never, you know, having a, you know, I, I, to drink and not get drunk was the paradox that I just couldn't do. You know, I didn't understand why you would drink without getting drunk. That's how broken I was. But we have liberty. So if you, if you wanted to have a beer or a glass of wine or whatever, that's within. See, God gives us freedom, but we have to be smart about how we use it. So we can enjoy a beverage, but if it slips into drunkenness or bondage, um, that's when we're in trouble. So me, I avoid it altogether, um, you know. And that's one thing that came out in the grace course last night that I taught is the fleshly pull, um, you know, when it comes, we're to recognize that whatever it is, the temptation is an actual, you know, it leads to bondage. You know, we could give in to something that's not good to— good for us and know that we're forgiven, but the thing is, we're, we're, and we're, we're entering into bondage, and, uh, that's, that's where the enemy lives, and he he loves to oppress and accuse us. So, um, we avoid that. So, um, that's all I got to say about that for today. As always, I encourage people to check out the Freedom in Christ teachings I've done, uh, on the podcast. Victory Over the Darkness, The Bondage Breaker, and Freedom in Christ are all available on the podcast and our YouTube channel. Um, and also I encourage people to check out our Bible study discussions that we do with Arthur and Susanna Cinquatti. They're called Bible Study with with the Sankatis, and they're available on the, on the blog, the podcast, and the YouTube channel. In fact, on YouTube, we're actually— since 2022, um, we have video, uh, of our discussions. So if you actually wanted to watch us, um, you can do that too. Um, but that's it. You know, I encourage a life of discipleship because we can find our freedom in Christ and we can find the meaning and purpose of our lives and navigate through life, uh, to overcome time and time again through our faith. And that's, uh, that's why we, we do the blog, we do the podcast. And, you know, um, I've experienced the love of the Lord and, uh, his presence in my life for over 10 years now. And, um, I can tell you it's better when you follow him. You know, claiming your forgiveness and grace and living and acting like a fool, it hurts. It's painful. You know, it might hurt to change, but the Lord will help you. And after you've changed, you can stay in your freedom and claim more freedom in different areas of your life. So we encourage that. You can do it with the Lord. So go get it. You know, it's Friday night. Um, get real with God. You know, the world's entertainments are temporary and, you know, usually stupid. And, uh, you know, pursue meaning and purpose through pursuing the Lord. That's my one piece of advice always: seek the Lord. So seek him and you will find him, and he will change you and transform you, and you will have the peace and joy that come from walking in Spirit. So let's pray. Lord God, Heavenly Father, thank you for another day in your kingdom. Thank you for another Friday, Lord. Uh, we worked hard and we're looking forward to the weekend. Um, although I have to work Saturday, but you know what, that's good. Uh, you know, you've given the opportunity to get increased income as, uh, as they have me working 6 days this week. Um, so we thank you for that, Lord. We thank you for all the people listening today, Lord, who faithful to follow you. We pray for their, their prayer requests to be answered. We pray for you to be with them as they go about their day. And Lord, we pray for you to bless them and pour your grace upon them, that divine favor to, uh, to lead them in their life with Christ. Lord, we just pray, as always, we pray for your, your protection and your guidance as we walk through another day. We, we pray that you open our eyes to all the things you want us to see, whether it's the beauty in the world or something we desperately need to see in order to avoid pain and suffering. Um, open our eyes, show us the way, and, uh, lead us into the things you want us to do. Lord, help us to be the best people we can be in the situations that you put us in, in our jobs and our families and our relationships. Lord, help us to, uh, be a light in the darkness, to give people hope and a meaning and a purpose by, by pointing to you. Um, Lord, if we do nothing else, let us, let us represent you. Um, let that be the good work that we do every day. Lord, we thank you, we praise you, and we love you. And we pray all these things in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen.