Grace Chapel Knoxville Sermons

We are called to walk by faith and not by sight. We sometimes believe that faith is an action that we have to initiate between us and God, but we need to remember that the first step of faith is recognizing that God has a plan for us. He is looking at us, ready to wrestle though our doubt and grow our faith through His abiding presence.

Every person has a God initiated desire to have a lasting impact on this world. However, we are often held back by comparison, control, and fear. We forget that the calling that God puts on our lives is not something that we have to achieve, but we just need to be willing to abide in Him and trust that He will fulfill His purpose.

The Holy Spirit wants to be an active and integral part of our day to day lives. However, we have a tendency to minimize Him to a doctrine instead of a person. If we are willing to embrace a relationship with Him, He wants to enhance and enrich our spiritual lives through His gifts, fruits, and an active relationship with God through Him, but we must be willing to be vulnerable and give ourselves over to His control.

Some of the Spiritual gifts are more comfortable than others to discuss and utilize, but God has things for us that are beyond what we can even comprehend. This week, we discuss speaking in tongues and prophesy, why they are important to the body, and how we can dive deeper in our walk with the Holy Spirit by praying to receive them.

This week we finished our overview of the Spiritual gifts, and we discussed the roles that God uses to build up the body of Christ through His gifts. As members of the body, we can get comfortable with a gift or role that we feel like we have been designed for, but are you willing and open to ask God what He has for you? The Holy Spirit has so much more for us than we can every imagine, but we have to be willing to let go of our own skepticism and trust that His plans are greater than our own.

The Holy Spirit’s gifts are diverse and exciting. He wants to equip us for our daily interactions and circumstances, but it is important to understand what the gifts are, how we can pray for them, and what they look like in our lives, so that we can recognize His hand at work in us. This week, we continue our discussion of the spiritual gifts with giving, leadership, administration, mercy, faith, and healing.

The Holy Spirit has valuable gifts that He wants to give us, but fear or ignorance can hold us back from receiving them. As Christ followers, we have a responsibility to be open and earnestly seeking each of the gifts of the Spirit to follow His path for our lives and to minister to the rest of the body.

This week we kicked off the New Year as Pastor Jake gave a State of the Church update. It was a time of reflecting on the past year and looking forward to the things that God is bringing for GCK in 2019.

We open the new year by exploring the Jewish celebration of Rosh Hashanah. May we all be open to personal reflection and repentance so we can experience times of refreshing in the presence of Jesus.

In today’s sermon, we finish out the year by reflecting on the life that is available to us in Jesus. Using imagery from the Last Supper, we discuss the power of being chosen and blessed by God in the midst of our brokenness, and the resulting gratitude and generosity that can change our lives.

This week we began a short Christmas series by looking at Jesus as our Humble, Hidden, and Heavenly King. We are invited to approach Him this Christmas with the same mindset as the Wisemen of old, bringing our treasure, our prayers, and our eternal hopes to Him in worship!

The Holy Spirit desires to give us gifts for the purpose of touching lives around us with His love. In Romans chapter 12 we see the way God is calling us to use the gifts He gives. He invites us to walk in humility, step up and take responsibility, and choose to be a part of a community that honors diversity while living in unity.

In this weeks sermon we take a look at each of the fruit listed in Galatians chapter 5. We discuss what the fruit look like in our life and how they all work together to form a fruitful and satisfying life in Jesus.

This week as we explore the fruit of the Spirit described in Galatians 5:22-23, we see that God desires for us to experience His love in great abundance. The fruit of the Spirit is a description of who God is, a list of benefits he invites me to enjoy, and growth in virtues he wants me to share with others. The purpose of the fruit is to taste God’s goodness, to satisfy our hungry hearts, and to spread the gospel of Jesus to a world in need.

The abiding fruit that Paul describes in Galatians 5 is a beautiful picture of what life in the spirit produces. The fruit of the Spirit offers fulfillment for the deepest longings of the human heart, yet is so often missed by many of us. If we can have ears to hear it, Paul outlines the two basic approaches to life that can so often derail our ability to experience the life and freedom that Jesus intends for us to find in Him.

At the fall of mankind, our eyes were opened to our nakedness and inadequacies apart from God, but they were also shut to fully behold his incredible glory and goodness. However, like the blind man in John 9, Jesus wants to open our eyes and heal the blindness of our hearts through salvation and the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit. Hosea 6:6 tells us that the Lord desires mercy and not sacrifice, devotion to God rather than burnt offerings

The Spirit wants to cultivate a relationship with us, but to grow that relationship with Him, we must be listening to His voice and willing to follow where He leads. There are many times when we are distracted by the normal day to day hustle, or fear, but He has an adventure He wants to take us on right where we are, but are we willing to listen and follow where He leads?

Like a farmer, the Holy Spirit wants to cultivate a relationship with us, but in order for things to grow, the conditions must be right. To be the good soil that He calls us to be, we must be willing to slow down, seek relationship, let go of control and desires, and earnestly strive for relationship with Him. Are you willing to listen to what He is saying to you and let go of the control that you hold onto so tightly?

In week 6 of Abide, we begin discussing how to cultivate a personal relationship with the Holy Spirit. Learning to hear his voice in our life is vital to knowing him and walking with him daily. Thankfully, we have several ways to grow acquainted with the presence of the Holy Spirit. Let’s purpose to live with the expectation that God wants to speak with us, by positioning ourselves to listen and respond to him daily.

God has prepared wonderful things for those who love him, and our teacher, the Holy Spirit loves to reveals them to us. However, our reliance on the wisdom of men, and our own pride and arrogance, often keep us from being humble enough to learn from him. The Holy Spirit longs to teach us all that we need, if only we will move from immaturity and pride, toward maturity and humility so we can position ourselves as learners.