ingratitude | Craig T. Owens
Year-End Review (2019 edition)
Ten years ago God called me to pastor at Calvary Assembly of God, and we have so thoroughly enjoyed our time in Cedar Springs! One of the really cool things I get to do is teach an amazing group of people every Sunday. Here’s a recap of the series and messages from 2019.
Boldly Praying—As a general rule, God would like us to pray much more boldly than we typically do. Jesus told us that we could pray mountain-moving prayers, but C.S. Lewis rightly observed, “If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak.”
When Your Walking Is Your Praying
Winning The Unseen Spiritual Battles
What’s Your Knee-Jerk Response To Trouble?
Christ’s Passionate Journey—In action movies, the crucial moment usually is filmed in slow motion. The Gospels do the same as Jesus approaches the Cross. For example, Mark doesn’t mention anything about the birth of Jesus and only gives us one verse to tell about satan’s temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. But he uses nearly 40% of his writing to describe the last week of Christ’s life.
Sunday In Jerusalem (Palm Sunday)
We Are: Pentecostal—Pentecost for over 1000 years was a celebration in Jerusalem that brought in Jews from all over the world. But on the Day of Pentecost that came just ten days after Jesus ascended back into heaven, the meaning of Pentecost was forever changed!
The Empowerment Of Pentecost
Don’t Stop At Salvation
5 Lessons From An Amazing Mother (Mother’s Day)
The Unmistakable Evidence
3 Lessons From A Devoted Dad (Father’s Day)
Is That In The Bible?—Sometimes things that sound “biblical” aren’t actually in the Bible at all, and sometimes they are there but are misquoted.
Is this in the Bible: “God helps those who help themselves”? No. Does Self-Help Get God’s Help?
Is this in the Bible: “Resist the devil and he will flee from you”? Yes, but…. The Devil Isn’t Scared Of You
Is this in the Bible: “This is how you should take Communion”? No. Not How But Who
Selah—When you see this word in the Bible it can mean either a pause from the noise to reflect on something, a preparation for an exciting accent, or a reflective time of consideration. We are working our way through the Selahs in the Psalms.
Awesome God, Awesome Praise
Rejoicing At The Coming Of The Judge
How To Respond To Evildoers
Major Lessons From Minor Prophets—The five major prophets consist of 182 chapters, whereas the 12 minor prophets only have 67 chapters. The volume of these prophets writing may be minor, but their content carries major messages of meteoric power!
A Minor Introduction
A Bizarre Sermon Illustration
Fading Gratitude—Looking back at the history of God’s people in the Bible, there is a distinct up-and-down cycle. I believe their slipping away from God can be directly linked to their forgetfulness. If there is a peril in our forgetfulness, there is also a power in our thankfulness!
Forgetfulness Can Be Fatal
The Carols Of Christmas—How many “old familiar carols” have you heard Christmas after Christmas until the words have almost lost their meaning? If we’re not careful, any song repeated too often can lose the richness of its original intent.
Humbug?!
What Does “Gloria In Excelsis Deo” Mean Today?
We will be returning to a couple of these series in 2020, and we’ll be launching some brand new ones as well. In either case, if you don’t have a home church in the northern Kent County area, I would love to have you join us!
Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: Advent, Bible study, Calvary Assembly of God, Christmas, Christmas carols, gratitude, Holy Spirit, ingratitude, minor prophets, Passion Week, Pentecostal, prayer, psalms, Selah, sermon. Leave a Comment »
Have you ever noticed the up-and-down track record of the Israelites? We see them worshiping God, enjoying His abundance, with their enemies on the run in one chapter, only to see them worshiping idols, barely scraping by, with their enemies closing in on them.
What led to the downturn from freedom and abundant blessing to slavery and scarcity? I think it’s summed up in two words: They forgot.
Asaph captures this idea in the 78th Psalm. And if we’re honest with ourselves, Israel’s history is our history too.
There is a peril in our forgetfulness!
“When we have much of God’s providential mercies, it often happens that we have but little of God’s grace, and little gratitude for the bounties we have received. We are full and we forget God: satisfied with earth, we are content to do without Heaven. Rest assured it is harder to know how to be full than it is to know how to be hungry—so desperate is the tendency of human nature to pride and forgetfulness of God.” —Charles Spurgeon (emphasis added)
When our thoughts about God begin to fade, so does our gratitude to God. When our gratitude to God begins to fade, so does our reliance on Him.
The dictionary defines some important terms:
Ungratefulness—not giving due return for benefits conferred
Unthankfulness—not repaying the blesser with thanks
I don’t think anyone consciously chooses to be ungrateful, but if we don’t choose to actively remember our blessings—and our Blesser—we will become ungrateful. So what if we began to think differently about the definition of gratitude?
Forgetfulness—to cease to think of something
Gratitude—to continue to think of Someone (with that Someone being God!)
When we are continually thankful—when we don’t let our gratitude fade—it keeps God’s blessings at the forefront of our minds. Gratitude—continuing to think of Someone—makes us completely God-reliant.
Moses had a good idea to help us to continue to think of God’s blessings—
Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:7-9)
What if you posted reminders of God’s blessings all over the place? What if you made it almost impossible to forget God? What if you were constantly thinking of your blessings?
Join us for our series called Fading Gratitude during the month of November.
Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: Bible study, Calvary Assembly of God, Charles Spurgeon, Deuteronomy, forgetfulness, gratitude, ingratitude, Psalm, quote, remember, sermon, thankfulness, video, YouTube. 4 Comments »
Overcoming Unbelief Before It’s Too Late
Unbelief can shut down the “Shalom Cycle” that God intends for our lives. Even worse, unbelief can put us on a slippery slope that could be disastrous for our future! So it is vital that we understand what unbelief is, how we can recognize it in our own lives, and the steps we can take to recover from unbelief.
First of all, let me remind you of what the Shalom Cycle looks like—
Quite simply, when we are grateful for what God has already done for us it fuels our trust in God’s future grace to meet our needs.
But when we forget to be grateful and gratitude turns to grumbling, unbelief displaces trust.
A good way to remember how unbelief works is thinking of it as an un-complete faith. An un-complete faith is lacking power to trust God because of one of two reasons:
Either we don’t know there is a promise available to us,
Or we know of a promise but don’t think it applies to our circumstance.
J.C. Ryle pointed out that, “Unbelief has a power to rob man of highest blessings.”
Hebrews 3 shows us that left unchecked and uncorrected, unbelief can turn into disbelief. You can remember this word by defining it as a complete disintegration of faith. Notice in Hebrews 3 how quickly the word unbelieving becomes turns away from God, and how closely associated are the words unbelief and disobeyed (Hebrews 3:12, 19-20).
We need to correct and reverse unbelief as quickly as possible. We do this through capturing our thoughts—or thinking about what we’re thinking about—and identifying three warning signs:
Worrying all the time—God wants you to enter His rest, not wallow in worry (Hebrews 3:11)
Making contingency plans—the Israelites forgot to be grateful and they grumbled instead. The next step (since they didn’t trust that God’s future grace would take them into the Promised Land) was to disobey by concocting a Plan B: “Let’s go back to Egypt.”
An inward focus on self-preservation—we no longer encourage others but think only of ourselves (Hebrews 3:13).
If you detect any of these warning signs, quickly repent (Revelation 3:2-3) and then run to Jesus for help. One of the most honest prayers you can pray—and one of the prayers Jesus answers the quickest—is “Lord, I believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” (Mark 9:22-24).
“Lord, I believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”
Take control of grumbling by gratitude
Take control of unbelief by repentance and running to Jesus for help
Then help others take control of their unbelief by encouraging one another daily
Join me next Sunday for the final message in our 4-part series on God’s Shalom.
Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: Calvary Assembly of God, disbelief, encouragement, grace, gratitude, grumble, Hebrews, ingratitude, Mark, Matthew, Revelation, sermon, shalom, Shalom Cycle, trust, unbelief, video, worry, YouTube. 1 Comment »
The Dangers In Grumbling
God wants to give us His peace. The Hebrew word is shalom and it means a deep tranquility found in a personal relationship with Jesus that is greater than all external circumstances. Sadly, many people block the shalom God wants them to have.
The “shalom cycle” looks like this…
Our gratitude for the things God has done fuels our faith in God’s future grace. That faith-filled expectation serves as fuel for our prayers, and answered prayer gives us even more for which we can give thanks.
But the shalom cycle can break down when we forget to be thankful. My friend Scott Troost says that ungrateful people are usually characterized by—
Being bitter and unforgiving
Constantly attending their own pity parties
Being greedy and covetous for the things they don’t have
Scott goes on to explain how we can stop the grumbling ingratitude from derailing the shalom cycle.
Be thankful for what you have, instead of wishing for things you don’t have (Philippians 2:14).
Keep a gratitude journal of all that God has done for you (Habakkuk 3:2).
Notice how God has given you strength to make it through challenging times in the past (2 Corinthians 12:7-10).
“There’s a huge difference between being thankful for something and being thankful in something. We are to be thankful always.” —Scott Troost
As I talked about last week—we need to think about what we’re thinking about. This is the key to spotting those grumbling, ungrateful thoughts before they derail the cycle and rob us of God’s shalom.
Join us next week for the third part of our 4-part series in which we will be uncovering another way that the shalom cycle can become derailed. Please join us either in person or on Facebook Live.
Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: 2 Corinthians, Bible study, Calvary Assembly of God, gratitude, grumble, Habakkuk, ingratitude, peace, Philippians, Scott Troost, sermon, shalom, thankful, video, YouTube. 1 Comment »