Treasure Hunt
// October 28th, 2009 // No Comments » // Youth Service Messages
This week we started a series on the treasures of God, this first message is about what it takes to find those treasures…
Jeremiah 6:16 (NLT) So now the Lord says, "Stop right where you are! Look for the old, godly way, and walk in it. Travel its path, and you will find rest for your souls. But you reply, ‘No, that’s not the road we want!’
The word translated as old is a word that means: old, concealed, hidden, perpetual, eternal, timeless, from eternity. Maybe the path that we are on is not the one that was created by God, but a path that was created by man. We need to look to the Word of God and see that the roads we are on on the right ones.
Jeremiah 18:15 (NLT) [My People] have deserted me and turned to worthless idols. They have stumbled off the ancient highways of good, and they walk the muddy paths of sin.
God never intended for his people to live in sin. It’s time for us to stop accepting mediocre Christianity from ourselves. It is time for a generation to take up the call of God to find the old paths, and the way that we find the old paths is by using the road map, the Word of God.
Ignorance is no excuse! We need to begin to dig for the truths of the Word and apply them to our lives.
Church should not be about just meetings, it is about being a movement. Don’t be someone who comes to church and gets touched by God, but not changed. We need to be people that come to church to get fueled up, then go out and use those experiences to touch others and share the love of God with them.
A movement is something that impacts a society, such as the civil rights movement, these were people who were no longer willing to live life the way “it’s always been.” They decided to challenge the rules that suppressed their rights as equal human beings. Our movement is not about breaking human laws, but about challenging the spiritual world around us. Our movement is about destroying the works of the devil.
If we want to be a movement, we need to find the treasures of God. Those treasures are the gifts that God has put in our lives, and those gifts are not there just for our own benefit, but so that we can reach others with the Good News!
Matthew 13:44 (NLT) "The Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure that a man discovered hidden in a field. In his excitement, he hid it again and sold everything he owned to get enough money to buy the field—and to get the treasure, too!
When we were kids we dreamed of finding a map to buried treasure and what we would do if we found that treasure. As Christians we dream of the gifts of God, but we never get out our map and uncover the treasure. God has treasures for us, but we get caught up in our earthly treasures.
Matthew 6:21 (MSG) It’s obvious, isn’t it? The place where your treasure is, is the place you will most want to be, and end up being.
If your treasure is in relationship with God, then that is where you will find yourself wanting to be. What are the treasures in your life that are more important than God? What things end up distracting you from spending time with Him? One of the devil’s greatest tricks is to get us busy with stuff. He gets us distracted by all the busyness of the world around us and we end up at the end of our day realizing that we failed to give God any of our time.
We need to begin to look to the Word first for our instruction. The Word is the map to the treasure; the treasure is the Word working in our lives. We must follow the map to the treasure then do the necessary work to uncover it. We need to value the treasures of God more than the treasures of this world, or we will never reach them.
This generation wants to experience God, not just hear about Him, but they will only be reached by a generation that has the willingness to work to uncover the treasures of the Gifts of God. We need to get desperate to see the gifts of God in our lives.
Matthew 5:3 (NLT) “God blesses those who are poor and realize their need for him, for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.
The word poor here means like a beggar, We need to be like beggars coming to the table of God. We need to be desperate to find everything that he has for us, and we need to be unstoppable.
Luke 16:16 (NLT) "Until John the Baptist began to preach, the laws of Moses and the messages of the prophets were your guides. But now the Good News of the Kingdom of God is preached, and eager multitudes are forcing their way in.
Matthew 11:12 (NKJV) And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.
If we begin to press in and cry out for more, God will give it to us. We need to stop looking at ourselves as a Church meeting and start being a movement. We can’t be a movement if nothing moves.
