Maintaining and Gaining Altitude

Bethel Mennonite Church – Gladys VA

Ephesians 1:19 – A christian has a connection to God’s power.

It isn’t just important for an airplane to take off, but it also needs to have sufficient power to climb and fly. For the Christian, we need the power of the Spirit to lift and rise against the pull of the world around us.

Satan is very glad, and works silently, to regain lost ground in us. It is easy to “gain altitude” during a time of revival in a persons life, and then to slowly ease back to the trajectory that we had before. Are we maintaining altitude or are we loosing altitude?

In the Christian life when there is more weight in our lives it is much harder to maintain altitude. If there are things in your life, when weights of sin are not dealt with, the power of Christ in our lives is diminished.

Things We Can Not Neglect

Prayer – we all have a lot of things that we need to do, or things that we would rather be doing. We know that prayer is important. We know that it makes a difference in our lives and in the lives of those that we pray for. Paul tells us that we should “continue in prayer, devote yourselves to prayer.

Do you pray? It is a private thing, it is a matter between yourself and God. The neglect of prayer is one of the greatest causes of backsliding. The Bible doesn’t tell us how much time we should spend in prayer, but we do know that it does have a great affect in our lives.

A Nutritious Diet – it is important to partake of the prepared food that is offered in weekly services. Continued growth demands that we get in to the Bible ourselves an meditate. How are we doing when it comes to the quantity and the quality of our daily diet.

Too often we “snack” on the word of God instead of feasting on it. We need the Word of God, we need to spend time in the Word and with the Father. We can face the challenges that we have in life, with God’s help we can set priorities and make/find the time and ways to expose ourselves to the Word.

A Pure Purpose – we are in a holy war against sin. It is a life and death struggle. Galatians 6:7 tells us that the things that we sow will be the things that we reap. True repentance includes the intent to lay the sin aside and return no more. It is a clean break from the sin.

Isaiah 55 – We need to live with a sensativity to sin and the Spirit’s conviction to forsake temptation and sin.

Where are you at?

Are you ascending? Are you descending? Are you struggling?

There is hope. We are homeward bound pilgrims. As such we need to be looking up, hoping, desiring and longing for our home.

May our hope add urgency and meaning and longing to our prayer, our time in the Word, our service, and our witness… as we climb and soar towards heaven.

The power is available to us. God has given us the Spirit of power.

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