by Antonio Moreno

If you are a child of God, meaning you have given your life to Jesus making Him Savior and Lord, then it is time to move forward one day at a time to fulfill your God given assignments.  If you haven’t made Jesus Savior and Lord, now is the time.  Confess this scripture with a repentant heart:

Because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. (Roman 10 9-10)

If you decided to pray that prayer, congratulations and welcome to the family of Christ.

I was born again and accepted Christ in 1994.  I remember that day like it was yesterday. (You can read my testimony here.)  Twenty-six years have passed and it seems that my hunger for the Lord has recently taken a new direction.  Because of God’s grace, He pointed at the very core of my being to trust Him fully and to move forward one day at at time to the finish line.

I believe that you are ready to move forward as well.  The Lord’s return for his church is imminent.  The message that I am going to share with you is one the Lord shared with me.  This message stirred me up and changed my perspective on following Jesus.  This is what I want to stand for from now on.

We all come to cross roads in our lives where we feel stuck, we feel like there is more to life, or we could be doing more in general.  Maybe you have asked when God would give you more.  But you have also had that small doubt.  Am I truly ready for you to give me more Lord, truly ready?  Will God ask me to do something that I really don’t want to do.

God isn’t worried about whether you will comply or won’t comply.  He already knows you are ready because God equips us to do His will.  His questions is whether we will accept the task that He has in store for us or if God will have to pass it onto someone who will be obedient to Him.

Maybe you haven’t been tasked to do anything specifically for God and you are tired of waiting for Him to move.  However, you are tired of living your own life according to your own plans and agendas.  If you are tired of the wait, take a moment to examine yourself to see if you are truly ready for the next step.

If the last paragraph sounds a lot like you, then this message is for you.  Get ready to experience God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit’s power like never before.

Are you ready?

Let’s read Matthew 3:13:

Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him.

Not a lot to that verse.  Pretty straight forward.  But there is so much packed inside of this verse.

When Jesus was baptized, He left the natural world, and He left everything that this world has to offer behind Him.  Yes Jesus was God, but on this Earth, Jesus is fully man.  Jesus is just like you and me, and He had a choice to make.  Would Jesus follow His will and the feelings of His flesh or would Jesus follow God’s will and what His spirit told Him to do.

When Jesus’s foot left the ground and entered the water of the Rive Jordan, He chose to deny Himself and give up all of His human rights to His Father.  Every thought and every action from that moment on belonged to God.  All of Jesus’s rights and all of Jesus’s own interest now belonged to the Father.

Jesus chose to deny Himself and die to self.  Jesus was fully surrendered to the will of the Father.  He gave everything He had to the father and fulfilled the reason why He was sent to the earth.  Jesus was to be the Savior of the world, the Alpha and the Omega.  Jesus changed his identity and surrendered to His will to the Father when He stepped into the River Jordan.

What about us?  What river are we asked to enter? What do we need to do to deny ourselves and fully commit to the will of God?

We need to do two things.  The first is to surrender.  To surrender means to repent and confess that we are sinners, and we admit we need the blood of Jesus to cleanse us and the forgiveness of Jesus.  We need Him to become our Savior and Lord.  We have to surrender every part of us, spirit, soul, and body, to Jesus so He can become the true Lord of our lives.

That’s simple enough, right?  You are saying I’ve already done that.  Here’s where most of us get stuck in our walk with Jesus.  It’s not talked about as often as it should be in the church, but it is our next step after we accept Jesus.

And he [Jesus] said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.  (Luke 9:23)

Jesus is saying that we must deny or reject anything in our life that does not support a lifestyle that fully follows Jesus and is obedient to His every word.  You must take your old lifestyle and nail it to the cross, let it die, and then you can follow him.

The second step we have to take is to deny ourselves, pick up our cross, and follow Jesus every single day of our lives.  Jesus must fully become Lord of our lives, and we must be obedient to what He is asking us to do every day.  We are to do away with our old flesh, our old nature and be obedient to Jesus and what He asks us to do.  Obedience changes our mind and how we act towards others and what God asks us to do.  Our spirits are renewed when we are baptized, but our minds are not.  Obedience helps to renew our minds.  We still have the same sin nature that we were born with inside of us, and this sin nature still tries to oppose God.  We have to work on renewing our minds

Paul tells us in Romans that we have to make the choice to follow Jesus and to renew our minds:

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.  (Romans 12:1-2)

Renewing our mind and denying ourselves is very important to following Jesus.  We can’t stay on the same path we’ve always been on just because it feels comfortable to us.  Jesus tells us in John 15:5 that we can do nothing to please God apart from Jesus. I want to stress the word NOTHING.  Our sin nature, our flesh, still wants to rebel against what God asks us to do and we have to use the power of Jesus to overcome that rebellion.  Without the power, we are weak and easily succumb to the temptations that the devil throws our way.

Once we decide to fully surrender and fully deny ourselves, we can work on our true calling, becoming a disciple of Jesus.

We will get into what being a disciple of Christ looks like in our next post.