Overcoming as a Church: Embracing the Depths of God’s Truth

Hearts are with you guys. Man. You know, he was always one of the first ones to come up to me after I preached or sang when I first started leading worship and just cheerlead me.

He was such a cheerleader. He just loved to encourage people, encourage people in the Lord, and encourage them into their callings and into what God called them to do. And so I am grateful that he was a man that encouraged me along the way, pushed me into what God has called me to be, and called me to do.

I want to thank him today and honor him today for his love for this house, his love for the people of God, and his family. So thank you, McHenry. We love you. We miss you.

A couple of follow-ups on a few of the announcements. You know, just a couple of really important things. We have our class on Wednesday nights, Engage. Well, this Wednesday night, Joe Durkin is going to be sharing and speaking. So I want to make sure everybody knows, you know, God is doing amazing things through Joe and Angelica and their whole family. God is moving in miraculous ways and places that they’re going, but also here.

I can’t wait to hear what God has put on Joe’s heart. So if you want to hear, come on. We’re having a good time of fellowship, sharing of the word, prayer, and some worship. So, we definitely want to invite you guys to come. I also want to let you all know if you didn’t already know, our musical choir practices are starting today. Yay! If you haven’t signed up yet, that’s okay. You can totally just show up today at 2:30. Yes, 2:30 here in the sanctuary. So, anybody that wants to sing in our musical, we mentioned last week, it’s such a great opportunity to bring Jesus to our community in such a unique way.

It’s a time of the year when people will come into a church, and maybe they would never come into a church, and they get to hear the message of Christ, and they get to experience the presence of the Lord and the love of God. So, if you’d like to be part of it, there’s sign-ups too. There are other things and other ways you can get involved. That QR code that was up there or if you go to the QR code that’s on the back of your chair, you can find the sign-ups for that as well. So it’s a great opportunity.

But I had to make sure I said it today — we’re starting choir practice. So it’s going to be good. It actually feels early but there’s really not very many weeks, so okay, we got this.

Also, Jonathan mentioned the baptism class starting. We are actually going to have a baptism here in the sanctuary on the 13th of October. So, mark your calendars — October 13th, we are going to be doing a baptism. So if you want to be part of that, get signed up. They’ll communicate, and classes start next Sunday. It’s going to be a great thing.

And I’m really excited about next week’s family service. It’s going to be awesome. We have our youth band worship team who are amazing, and we have some strong, amazing preachers that are going to be bringing the word.

Today we’re going to be continuing on in the overcoming church. The Overcoming Church — that is what we are talking about. I mentioned last week that this is going to be a series that’s going to take us a little bit of time. We’re going to be going through this, and I really feel like we’re not supposed to rush this. We’re going to be talking about a lot of different things, but it’s really such an important thing in this day and age that we are in. Why is it so important? Why are we going to be talking about the overcoming church? Because we need it. That’s true.

Do you know that Jesus is returning to the earth? Jesus is going to be returning to the earth. Jesus is returning for a bride, and we need to be ready. There is an urgency. The funny thing is, all of a sudden, we started talking about this overcoming church, and all of a sudden, I’m hearing it in different places and from different friends of ours who are preaching it and teaching about the overcoming church and the end times, and Jesus returning for a glorious church without spot and wrinkle.

You know what we need to be ready for? We need to be ready for the return of the Lord. It’s not a scary thing when we’re ready, and it’s not something that we need to be worried about if we’re disciples of Christ. It’s not something that I have to fret about or have anxiety about because our world today says if it’s unknown, you must fear it. Right. That is what our culture today says: if it is unknown and you don’t know everything about it, it is something that you must worry about. You are going to have so much anxiety about the things that you don’t know. This is what our world says is normal.

But God says you do not need to have anxiety if you trust and believe in Him. We can have confidence as followers of Christ that even though there are things that we don’t know, we do not have to fear them because He walks with us and we are followers and disciples of Christ. As disciples and followers of Christ, I can have surety and confidence in Him who sees it all, in Him who knows it all.

I don’t have to know it all. He knows it all. And when I walk with Him, I walk confidently. And even if I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I don’t have to fear. Even when I walk through uncertain things, I don’t have to fear. Even when the future doesn’t look like what I want it to look like, I don’t have to fear. Even if the future is full of uncertainties and mysteries, the Bible says I don’t have to fear it because we walk with Him. And when we walk with Him, we walk a victorious life. We walk a victorious life.

We want to be a church that is ready. We want to be a church that is an overcoming church. This is so important to us because this church was founded on something that we like to praise as the message of life, which means I can overcome sin in my life through the life that is Jesus, that resides inside of me. I am not stuck in the stuff that I’ve been stuck in. I can find liberty. I can find freedom, and not just for a moment in time, but for my life. I can find full freedom in Christ through the life that He provided for me.

The life of Christ that lives inside of me says, “Greater is He that is in me than he that is in the world.” So even though I may have been influenced, and I may have times that I am still influenced by the worldly thinking and by spiritual things, greater is He that is in me than he that is in the world. This is what an overcoming church is. This is the message of life. This is what life looks like when you follow Christ. I can be an overcomer. I can live a victorious life. I can journey through and find victory in all the places that I’ve struggled. I can find victory, not in my own strength, but in His. Not by might, not by power, but by His Spirit, says the Lord. That is our promise.

That is what this overcoming church message is. It’s about the transforming life of Christ inside of me. We must be a church that is ready and positioned with a repentant heart to hear what the Spirit is saying in our lives. This is important because we want to stand with confidence at the judgment seat of God. Pastor Pat preached a message at our conference and talked about the principles of the doctrine of Christ, a foundation that we walk on. You would learn that in our Spirit School of Ministry. There are foundations. And one of those is that everyone is going to stand before the judgment seat of Christ. I want to stand ready before the judgment seat of Christ.

This is why it is so important that we understand this in this season — the overcoming church. We talk about this, and I think a lot of times we think of it as a corporate word because we’re using the word “church,” right?And yes, it is a corporate word, but it is also an individual word because who is the church? To me? So to become an overcoming church, what makes up the church is the overcomers. We are the overcomers. So as we talk about this and go into revelations, we talk about the messages to the churches and following, and we talk about all of these things.

It is both corporate and individual because you cannot separate them.

You cannot separate them because we are the church, the overcomer. Here’s what the spirit is saying and operates in partnership with Christ in His body, in the authority of God. That is what the overcomer is.

I’m gonna say it again.

The overcomer hears what the spirit is saying and operates in partnership with Christ, which is both the head and the body in the authority of God. Last week, we talked about what the word “overcome” meant. We talked about it being to subdue and to conquer and prevail. We talked about how that word subdue means to conquer, but it also means to bring the land under cultivation.

And that as we walk as an overcoming church, we are bringing kingdom principles into every place that we tread and that we must plant fruits of the spirit. We must plant the principles of the Kingdom, and we must build in the places where God has given us. It is not a competing message. The warfare message and the planting message do not compete.

That it is both in the overcoming church that we must take territory and that we must plant. We must win the battle in our minds so we can understand who we are, so that we can firmly stand on the Word of God and step into the places that God has called us to.

Our hunger for truth is what must propel us into the depths of God’s Word. And that’s what I believe this series is going to be: into the depths of God’s Word. I believe that this House, and I believe that our culture, is done with superficial things. We’re not interested in superficial things, but we want the depth of the truth.

I don’t want a flashy, feel-good Sunday message. We need to understand the depths of the truth of God, because it is through the depths of the truth of God that we actually find transformation in our lives. Feeling good on a Sunday doesn’t do anything for me unless it changes me on the inside. Until the Word of God interrogates my soul and interrogates my life and brings out of it the things that need to come out and brings out from it the things that God has planted in it.

That is the only thing that brings change and transformation, and that is through the Word of God. That is through the presence of God, that is through time with God. And it is in the depths of our time with God that He is going to draw out the deep things within us, that He’s going to satisfy our souls.

You know what? I don’t want to be an unsatisfied soul. There’s some of us that are like, “Oh, you know, going to church on Sunday is great, but, you know, it’s just not enough.” No, it’s not enough. It’s not going to satisfy your soul. It might soothe your soul.

But it will not satisfy your soul unless we go deep into the heart of God, into the truth of God, so that we can be changed from the inside out. God has to put His Word on the inside of us. He’s got to put it on the inside of us so that we can be changed. Because like I said, we’re a church that believes in an overcoming message, that I don’t have to be stuck where I’m stuck right now.

And you know what? I think a lot of times we like to say that some of us maybe have come from some things and God broke me out of those things. But you know what? We are all stuck in some places in our lives. If we’re really, truly honest, we all must live a life of repentance because the life of Christ inside of us will compel us to repent and to find the heart of God.

And in that is where we find the transformation. And I believe that sometimes we want to relegate these things to specific areas, but this is for every single one of us, whether we’ve been in church one day or 55 years. This is for us today to have a hunger for truth that propels us into the depths of God’s calling.

We want all that He has for us. I want all that He has for us. All of it. All of it.

So today, I want to just focus on a couple of things. We briefly touched on it last week, but I believe that there’s a couple of keys as we go through this next season of understanding this message that we must have: two things we must believe and we must heed. I believe these are foundations into what God is bringing us into for this message.

And they’re going to be foundational principles if we will allow them to take root. Some of this might be review for some people. For others, this might be the first time you’ve ever heard it. But what I know about God is I can read the same scripture 1400 times, and He gives me something new every single time because He is alive.

He is a living God, and the Word of God is alive. So I want to challenge us today to get something new and fresh from the Word of God. Because this is a baseline, I believe, before we launch into the depths of the overcoming church, there are a couple of keys here that we must understand and take hold of. Like I told you, I don’t want to fast-forward through this series and these messages because they’re so important. We’ve got to take hold of them.

We’ve got to understand them. So, believing. We talked about faith last week. First John 5:4-5 says, “For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that overcomes the world, our faith. Who is he that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?”

In the Passion Translation, it says, “You see, every child of God overcomes the world, for our faith is a victorious power that triumphs over the world. So who are the world conquerors defeating its power? Those who believe that Christ is the Son of God.”

Foundation of the overcoming church: believing that Jesus is the Son of God.

We define faith as the state of certainty of belief, a complete trust.

The state of complete dependency.

Believe means to entrust completely and to commit your life to.Here is the transcript with the timestamps and “Unknown” removed:

And yes, it is a corporate word, but it is also an individual word because who is the church? To me? So to become an overcoming church, we—what makes up the church is the overcomers. We are the overcomers. So as we talk about this and we go into revelations and we talk about the messages to the churches, and we talk about following and all of these things, it is both corporate and individual because you cannot separate them.

You cannot separate them because we are the church, the overcomer. Here’s what the Spirit is saying and operates in partnership with Christ in His body, in the authority of God. That is what the overcomer is.

I’m going to say it again.

The overcomer hears what the Spirit is saying and operates in partnership with Christ, which is both the head and the body, in the authority of God. Last week, we talked about what the word “overcome” meant. We talked about it being to subdue and to conquer and prevail. We talked about how that word “subdue” means to conquer, but it also means to bring the land under cultivation.

And that as we walk as an overcoming church, we are bringing kingdom principles into every place that we tread and that we must plant fruits of the Spirit. We must plant the principles of the Kingdom, and we must build in the places where God has given us. It is not a competing message. The warfare message and the planting message do not compete.

It is both in the overcoming church that we must take territory and that we must plant. We must win the battle in our minds so we can understand who we are, so that we can firmly stand on the Word of God and step into the places that God has called us to.

Our hunger for truth is what must propel us into the depths of God’s Word. And that’s what I believe this series is going to be—into the depths of God’s Word. I believe that this House, and I believe that our culture, is done with superficial things—not interested in superficial things—but we want the depth of the truth.

I don’t want a flashy, feel-good Sunday message. We need to understand the depths of the truth of God because it is through the depths of the truth of God that we actually find transformation in our lives. Feeling good on a Sunday doesn’t do anything for me unless it changes me on the inside. Until the Word of God interrogates my soul and interrogates my life and brings out of it the things that need to come out and brings out from it the things that God has planted in it.

That is the only thing that brings change and transformation, and that is through the Word of God. That is through the presence of God. That is through time with God. And it is in the depths of our time with God that He is going to draw out the deep things within us, that He’s going to satisfy our souls.

You know what? I don’t want to be an unsatisfied soul. There’s some of us that it’s like, “Oh, you know, going to church on Sunday is great, but, you know, it’s just not enough.” No, it’s not enough. It’s not going to satisfy your soul. It might soothe your soul.

But it will not satisfy your soul unless we go deep into the heart of God, into the truth of God, so that we can be changed from the inside out. God has to put His Word on the inside of us. He’s got to put it on the inside of us so that we can be changed. Because like I said, we’re a church that believes in an overcoming message, that I don’t have to be stuck where I’m stuck right now.

And you know what? I think a lot of times we like to say that some of us, maybe, that we’ve come from some things and God broke me out of things. But you know what? We are all stuck in some places in our lives. If we’re really, truly honest, we all must live a life of repentance because the life of Christ inside of us will compel us to repent, will compel us to find the heart of God.

And in that is where we find the transformation. And I believe that sometimes we want to relegate these things to specific things, but this is for every single one of us, whether we’ve been in church one day, whether we’ve been in church 55 years. This is for us today—to have a hunger for truth that propels us into the depths of God’s calling.

We want all that He has for us. I want all that He has for us. All of it. All of it.

So today, I want to just focus on a couple of things. And we briefly touched on it last week. But I believe that there are a couple of keys as we go through this next season of understanding this message: that we must have two things—we must believe, and we must heed. And I believe these are foundations into what God is bringing us into for this message.

And they’re going to be foundational principles if we allow them to take root. So some of this might be review for some people, and for some of us, this might be the first time you’ve ever heard it. But what I know about God is I can read the same scripture 1400 times, and He gives me something new every single time because He is alive.

He is a living God, and the Word of God is alive. And so I want to challenge us today to get something new and fresh from the Word of God. Because this is a baseline, I believe, before we launch into the depths of the overcoming church, there are a couple of keys here that we must understand and take hold of. Like I told you, I don’t want to fast-forward through this series and through these messages because they’re so important that we have to take hold of them.

We have to understand them. So believing—we talked about faith last week. 1 John 5:4-5—I’m going to read it again. It says, “For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that overcomes the world—our faith. Who is he that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?”

In the Passion Translation, it says, “You see, every child of God overcomes the world, for our faith is a victorious power that triumphs over the world. So who are the world conquerors defeating its power? Those who believe that Christ is the Son of God.”

Foundation of overcoming church—believing that Jesus is the Son of God.

We define faith as the state of certainty of belief, to believe, to a complete trust.

The state of complete dependency.

Believe means to entrust completely and to commit your life to.

Faith is the baseline. It is the entrance point to understanding the authority of God. That scripture says right there, those who believe that Christ is the what? Son of God. Right there, it is announcing the authority of Christ. Jesus is the Son of God. He has all power and all authority as the Son of God. So my belief, which is my complete reliance, complete entrusting, and commitment to His authority, is what will bring about the victorious power to overcome.

It’s the baseline. It is the baseline to understanding authority. We can’t understand authority or power or might until we believe in it.

Seems simple enough, but do we? Or do we like to talk about the power and authority of God as some far-out thing that doesn’t affect my life? And yet, in 1 John, it tells us that our faith in this authority, our faith in Jesus as the Son of God, is what is going to produce the victory in our lives.

Period.

It’ll stop at some point.

It’s a great—

Amen. Amen.

All right, we’re back up a second—revived. That faith is the baseline. We have got to have faith in the authority of Christ before we can even begin this conversation about living an overcoming life. Before we can even have the conversation about becoming an overcoming church. We have to have the complete entrusting of our lives into the full power and the authority of Christ in who He is.

In order for us to even talk about overcoming in our lives. And I think we like to gloss over this because faith is such a foundational part of our Christian walk that sometimes it doesn’t get the emphasis it needs.

But there is an emphasis of complete trust, total complete trust. A complete state of dependency on God. To be completely dependent on somebody means that I have nothing to do with what I do anymore. I am completely dependent. A baby is completely dependent on their parents and other people for life.

And that’s what God is challenging us to come into—a new place of dependency on Him.

That’s not easy for some of us. Maybe it’s just me. I’ll just speak for myself. I’m a pretty independent person. I can do a lot of things. I do need Him, though. He’s right. But I can actually still do a lot of things. Not as many as I can do when we do it together. But I’m a pretty independent person, and this message has been hitting me hard.

And this is why I’m focusing here because I think so often, especially as we’ve matured in Christ, we can become dependent on the giftings of God that are in us instead of being dependent on God.

Because without my dependency on God, I am not in the authority of Christ. Therefore, I’m not in the anointing of Christ. I can walk out my giftings all day long. Because gifts are given without repentance. But if I want to walk in the anointing of Christ and the anointing of God, if I want to walk in the power and the authority of God like we’ve been talking about—having the transforming life of Christ residing on the inside of me—then I must walk

in the authority, believing, putting my full dependency on Him.

That’s what this means. My full dependency. What about the things I do really well? He’s given me gifts. Just don’t have to do it by yourself.

You’re going to have so much greater influence if we do it with Him. And we step into the authority of Christ when we have our complete dependency on Jesus as the Son of God.

It is God’s design for the distribution of His life here on earth. And it brings freedom. It brings liberty. But in order to bring it and to see the fullness of life flow through us, we must understand God’s authority. We must recognize it. We must acknowledge it, and we must come under it. We come under it by putting our complete dependency on Him.

That is how we come under the authority of Christ.

Our certainty in who we are as sons and daughters of God and our absolute confidence—hear me, our absolute confidence in the authority of Christ and our reliance on the Alpha and the Omega, the Lord of our lives—is what will produce the victory. This is what is going to produce the victory. So as we’re going through it and talking about an overcoming church, we have to baseline here: our certainty of who He is and who I am in Him is what will produce the victory in our lives.

It’s imperative. Revelations 1:8 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.” This is who our God is. The beginning and the end, the first and the last, the creator of all things, the one who existed before time and will exist forever and ever.

This is who He is. He is the one that created you. He is the one that put you on the earth. He is the one that has empowered you. This is who He is. And I love this part, and I think we misquote it a lot. I misquote this verse a lot. I like to say, “who was and is and is to come.” But what does it say? “Who is.” Then “who was,” and then “who is to come.” He is. We like to put God into time.

We like to put God into our understanding. And so, without even realizing it, I mix up the order of words to fit my ideas of who God is because “He was, and He is to come,” well, and of course, He is. But no, God says He is. God is the I Am, a present God first and foremost. You see, God lives outside of time, and I believe that the He is, and He is the I Am, is the place that we must focus so much.

We often put our focus on the “who was” and “who is to come.” “God, you were good,” which is fine, which is great. We want to declare His faithfulness. And “I know you’re going to be faithful in the future.” How often is that our prayer? “God, I know you’ve been faithful, and I know you’re going to be faithful.”Here is the transcript with the timestamps and “Unknown” removed:

How about I know you are faithful. I know you are true. I know you are the I Am. I know you are the keeper of my life. I know that you’ve done it in the past. I know you’re going to do it again, but you are it right now. Even when I don’t feel it, even when I don’t see it.

I believe that you are. That you are the I Am, the very present help in time of trouble. That you are the everlasting, the right now, that I can live in the eternity of Christ now, the I Am.

The authority. The authority of God. The Son of God, I Am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.

He says, who is and who was and who is to come. This is the greatness of the God that we serve, and this is the one that we need to put our full reliance and dependence on to be able to walk out the victory that God has for us.

So our two keys: believe and heed. The second key today is to heed. You see, over and over again in Revelation, you hear, and it says it in Revelation 2:7, but many other times it says, “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches.” If we want to live an overcoming life, we must have an ear that hears.

This is our challenge in this season. You see, the word “hear” does not mean just the processing of sound into our brain.

And not everybody that has an ear will hear. It’s challenging us. It says, “He who has an ear…” Who has an ear in here? Come on. Who has it? Okay, yeah. “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches.” See, that word “hear” means to heed. It is not just sound traveling. It means to heed, to pay close attention to, to respond with conformity. That is what the word “hear” means: to pay close attention and to respond with conformity.

To understand, to believe, and to respond. You know, we don’t like in American culture the word “conformity.” Come on.

Maybe it’s just my generation. I’ll take it. We don’t like the word “conformity.” And it has been misused and abused. I get it.

But God is challenging us to hear and to conform to Him.

To heed, to pay attention, and to respond requires something we also don’t like to talk about in our American millennial generations, at least: obedience. You see, if the word “heed” means to pay attention and to respond, then what am I responding with?

So, I’m a mom. And when my boys were young, they didn’t do it really well for me, but they did it really well for him. When he would say something, they would come, they would respond. They didn’t just respond and be like, “Hey dad, what do you want?” They knew what he was saying, and they complied with what he was saying. I will say I didn’t quite hold the same authority at all times.

But as parents, we understand this, right? As parents, we understand that when we say something, we expect them to, yes, use their ears and, yes, have information flow into their brains, and then it requires what? It requires a response. Yes. That’s the question of whether or not the information is going to flow into their brains or not, and how long it might take for them to process all of that information for them to actually turn and say,

But, you know, it’s the same thing here, and God is challenging us. Will we who have ears hear? Will we pay attention? Will we silence the other voices? Will we make it quiet enough sometimes that we can actually hear what the Lord is saying? Will we be able to sort through the mess of noise, the mess of social media, the mess of all the other things in the news to hear what God is saying now? And then when we hear it, will we respond to it?

Will we respond to it? Will we hear? Will we respond? You know, Jesus is our perfect example. In John 5, it says that Jesus said, “I am unable to do anything on my own. I only do what I see the Father doing.”

You know, sometimes we think about Jesus, and we forget about the first 30 years of His life. And how He was still God, but He was not released by God to do miracles yet. Think He saw sick people around Him, think His heart was maybe pulled. But He did not do anything until the Father said. And this can go both ways.

We can ignore what God is doing. Sometimes we can jump ahead of what God is doing because we know, “You know, God gave me this word,” but I’m not listening for His instructions right now. And God’s challenging us not to jump ahead and not to ignore His voice, but to be willing to hear what the Spirit of God is saying.

Being willing to respond to what the Spirit of God is saying.

God wants us to listen. So as we go into this series, I want us to go in with the foundation and understanding that in order to walk into this, we must first believe.

And we must heed what He’s saying. As we dive in and God speaks to you, will you believe and will you heed? Will we come into full compliance and reliance on Him and His authority? And will we step in and respond as God challenges us to respond, to be the overcoming church, the victorious people that Christ has called us to be, to be a people of repentance, to be a people of hunger, eager to listen and to hear what God is saying here?

Amen, Amen.

Amen. I’m really excited about what God is doing with His church. So, you know, be thinking about it. Be studying. We’re going to go to fellowship, eat some food together. So if you’ve never done that before, you’re going to have to discover it, you know, and come hang out with us. But let’s pray. Father, we thank you for what you’re doing.

God, you have our attention. Lord, help us to hear clearly. Help us to follow with courage, Lord. And may we put our trust in you at new levels today. God, just touch everyone that was able to be here today. Those who are listening, Father God, just surround them with your presence and let your Holy Spirit lead and guide. You’re building your church, God, and we’re just grateful to be a part of it.

In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.