🎉 Celebrate Jehovah Jireh

Let’s take a moment to celebrate Jehovah Jireh—the God who sees and provides.

🔥 Vision for 2025: Engage with God + Engage Your Faith

This year we are going after:

The Detached ❌

The Drifted 🌊

Those who Don’t Know 🙈

We're called to be active participants—not just spectators—in our faith journey!

🟢 Engage

This Contender series is about "Fighting for Your Faith."

God doesn’t just hand out callings—you contend for them.

There is no such thing as a Sunday morning Jesus.

📖 Jude 1:3–4

Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.

📚 Greek Breakdown: Contend

• Epi – over, upon, or against

• Agōnizomai – to contend, struggle, or fight with strenuous zeal

• Epagōnizomai – to contend with great intensity

Contending for the faith = engaging in a vigorous and committed defense of our faith.

💡 Grace & Identity

Grace keeps us free from condemnation AND transforms us.

Grace is the inspiration of God’s love upon the heart with the outward expression of His power upon my life.

⚠️ Misused Grace

Many churches preach: 'Come as you are, stay as you are.'

Grace does not give permission to sin but the power to walk in righteousness.

We must not conform Jesus to our truth—we must be transformed by His truth.

🛑 You Can’t Contend If You Don’t Know Who You Are

We can’t contend if we don’t understand what Christ contended for on the cross or who we are in Him.

🧰 Instruments of Righteousness

Romans 6:11–13: So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.

🎸 Tuning Our Lives

If someone 'played' your life like an instrument, what would come out?

Would they hear Jesus or would they hear bitterness, gossip, lust, etc.?

🔍 Who Are You?

Romans 6:11 – 'Consider yourselves dead to sin…'

Consider = logizomai: to take inventory or account

Logizomai also refers to taking an inventory of a bank account. Therefore, if I were to look in my bank account and see $4,000, then there’s $4,000 in my account, nothing less, nothing more. God sees NO sinfulness in you—only righteousness, forgiveness, adoption, and new life! Your old self was crucified with Christ!

👓 Identity Check

We still struggle with sin because we see ourselves through our old identity.

Our identity is shaped by:

• Knowledge (experiences)

• Kinship (who raised us, where we come from)

🧬 When You Don’t Know Who You Are…

You become a chameleon or a confused thermometer—changing based on your surroundings.

But God calls us to live by revelation, not reaction.

Sometimes God leans into our foolishness to awaken our identity.

📖 Isaiah 43:1–5, 7: But now, thus says the Lord, who created you, O Jacob, And He who formed you, O Israel: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by your name; You are Mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow you. When you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned, nor shall the flame scorch you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior; I gave Egypt for your ransom, Ethiopia and Seba in your place. Since you were precious in My sight, you have been honored, and I have loved you; Therefore I will give men for you, and people for your life. Fear not, for I am with you… Everyone who is called by My name, whom I have created for My glory; I have formed him, yes, I have made him.”

🛡️ We Are Contenders!

We must live as the Bible says we are—not as the world shaped us to be.

Greek: Instrument = weapon, armor

Even if we feel untuned, we are still righteous in Christ.

🌸 2 Corinthians 2:14: Now thanks be to God who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and through us diffuses the fragrance of His knowledge in every place. For we are to God the fragrance of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.

🌬️ Diffusers of the Gospel

Greek: phaneroō – to make visible what was hidden

We are God’s fragrance—His diffusers—to the saved and the perishing.

📢 We Are Christ’s Witnesses

Matthew 28:19–20: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

Acts 1:8: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

Witness = martys (martyr)

⚰️ Alive in Christ = Dead to Self

Romans 6:12 – “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

In order to be alive in Christ, we first had to die.

✝️ Matthew 16:24–25: Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.”

🎯 Final Charge

Church—it’s no longer our lives we live for. We’re His instruments.

We’re under new ownership—submission means being under His mission.

His mission: Go into all the world 🌎, be His instrument 🎸, His diffuser 🌬️, and His witness 📢.