Hi Chris Bellton here. Welcome to my podcast where I hope to inspire you to transform the world within you and transform the world around you.

I'm excited to share this message with you today. I pray the Lord ministers to you as you listen.

Hi everybody. How are you doing? Good to see you. This is my birthday last week and thank you. It's too late.

My wife bought me a watch with a compass. I know. I think she really just wanted me to buy a compass but she couldn't figure out how to get me to wear just a compass because I have no sense of direction.

I leave a motel room and I go the wrong way like every time. So weird. So she bought me a compass. So now, at least I know which direction I'm going that's wrong.

Well, grab a hand. We're going to pray. Holy Spirit. Thank you for what you're doing in our lives and in this movement and all over the world.

And we pray for great faith to grow in us today. Jesus name. Amen. I have been sharing a series on how faith in God.

If you were here a couple of weeks ago, you probably have heard that. There are people who weren't here a couple of weeks ago because you had one important things to do.

Well, if I can't motivate you by vision, I'll try shame. You know, one way or another. I'll get you back. But I want to do the second part of this. Have faith in God.

I really am feeling challenged myself in my own personal life to believe God on another level. And I shared in first service that, you know, I have two things going on in my life.

The first one is to get back to the faith that I had when I first believed. And I felt the Lord have a conversation with me out of revolution to where he said, I didn't feel it was harsh, but he said, hey, those deeds you did when you first love me.

I want you to do those deeds again. So I feel like there's this tension. Paul, man, who's with us today. Can we just thank Paul? I just love having him here.

Next, you feel so good that you're here. Paul talks about living intentional in tension. So I feel this tension that I want to on one hand get back to the old gems or speak and do the deeds we did at first.

But then I also feel like that we're laying a foundation to go from faith to faith and glory. Glory. And I want my greatest works to be at this in this second half of my life.

I want to do greater things than I've ever done before. So I feel like there's this tension that I'm living in right now. And one is, you know, do the deeds you did at first when you first believed.

And second is dream for a time, dream for things that you've never seen in your life. And I'm in that tension. And so I want to talk a little bit about, I'm going to do a little review for those of you that weren't here. You held us back. So, I told you again, I'm just being funny.

So why don't you turn to first Timothy one and I want to just talk about the first part of this message is about the fight of faith. And if you were here a couple weeks ago, you heard most of this. But Paul writes to Timothy and said in verse 18,

I entrust this to you, Timothy, my son in accordance with the prophecies previously spoken over you that you would buy them fight the good fight, I'm sorry, fight the good fight, keeping the faith and a good conscience with some have rejected and suffered shipwreck in regard to their faith. And I just like to point out that faith is a fight.

You know, have you ever have been asked like, what do you do when you pray and nothing happens? Well, I can tell you what you don't do, you don't run and hide.

What you don't do is running, you don't, you don't run and complain. But what you do is you keep your faith in the fight, right? So faith is a fight. You're like, I'm not in a fight. Well, then you didn't got no friends.

You know that if you have friends that we are commanded by by Jesus to to mourn with those who mourn and to rejoice with those who rejoice. And if you have a big enough friend group, you always in some fight of faith, it may not be for your personal life, but you're in a fight of faith for someone else's life.

Are you with me? And so I just want to say that it is very normal to be in a fight. Some of us sometimes were like, I don't know what's going on. It's like, it's just like pray and it doesn't happen.

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