John K. Jenkins Sr - 10 Spiritual Blessings - Part 1

Praise the Lord! This is the day that the Lord has made, and we are rejoicing and glad in it. Thank you for joining us wherever you are in the world. I am grateful to the Lord for allowing us to see a beautiful day. Today, I will be ministering from Ephesians chapter 1. I’m beginning a series that will take several Sundays, but I want to talk about ten spiritual blessings that God gives us. There are ten blessings mentioned in the first chapter alone, just in the opening verses, and we want to take a moment to look at them. This will be a powerful and profound help for your life, so get your Bible, paper, and pencil ready. It will be a word that will change your life. God bless you! Now, Ephesians chapter 1 — I want to start reading at verse number 3. No, I want to start at verse 1. Can I start at verse 1? Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, to the saints who are in Ephesus and faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace by which He made us accepted in the Beloved. Amen! Amen! You can be seated.

I want to talk to you today because I have a concern that in our church community, people are getting excited, thrilled, and motivated over receiving blessings. Unfortunately, the blessings that they are excited about are carnal blessings. We are getting excited about new houses, new cars, clothes, jobs, spouses, girlfriends, and boyfriends. My prayer is that God will make us more excited about spiritual blessings. That 's what I want to start with today. This series will take me several weeks to get through, but I want to focus on ten spiritual blessings. I remember watching Oprah one time when she gave out cars-she said, «And you get a car, and you get a car, and you get a car,» and the people went hysterical, even though some of them wouldn 't be able to drive the car because they didn’t have the money to pay the taxes on it. They were excited about the car even though that car would eventually end up in a junkyard. When God gives us blessings, they will last for eternity, and that’s my prayer. I pray that God would make us a people who are not just excited about carnal blessings. I don’t want us to be a church where people come and prophesy some carnal blessing, and you just get crazy and excited, but you have no excitement about the spiritual things that God makes available to us. We need to put everything in proper perspective. Amen! Thank you, all five of you, for that amen right there!

Let me set the stage for what I want to talk about. The Apostle Paul writes to the church in Ephesus in this book of Ephesians, and what he says to the church in Ephesus is profound and powerful. So much so, that this church becomes a dynamic, vibrant, life-changing community- changing church. Their lives were changed, and the community was changed. They were a dynamic church, and that’s what we want. We want your life to be changed; we want the community to be changed. I think it’s sad for a community to have tons of churches yet nobody’s life is being changed. This church was so dynamic and powerful that in the book of Acts, throughout the book of Acts, it talks about the things they did and accomplished. They became a dynamic church because they received instructions from Paul, and they followed them.

For example, they laid hands on people and cast out demons. You all live with demons; you need to be casting them out! Don 't accept a demon; don’t let the demon stay in the house-cast it out! That 's what they did. They laid hands on demons and cast them out. They were so changed that the people in the church went home and got rid of things in their houses that were contrary to the Scriptures. You' ll notice how the amens got a little lower on that point right there. No, really! They got changed to the point where they went home and burned books and magazines they shouldn’t have had. Tonight at 6:30, we’re going to have a magazine-burning service. There won’t be anybody here, but that’s what they did — it was powerful! They were so profound in their impact on the community that the church people stopped going into stores to buy things that were contrary to the teachings of the Word of God. You all do know it’s the church people who keep the pornography industry going, right? If you all say amen together, nobody will know that you have a subscription to it. Did you all say amen together? It’s the church people that…