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City Light Church Las Vegas | Jabin Chavez
Gods Plan For Families | Jabin Chavez | City Light Church
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Gods Plan For Families | Jabin Chavez | City Ligh…
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Deuteronomy, chapter 30. Deuteronomy, chapter 30. Everybody say, My heart's open. Speak to me, Lord, in Jesus name. And speak to my friend on my left or right. They really need a word. Amen. Deuteronomy, chapter 30, verse 19. God says, this day I call the heavens and earth as a witness against you. Look what God says that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curses. And because God knows that we can be kind of hard headed sometimes, he says this in case you're wondering. Choose life that you and your children may live and that you may love. Now how do I choose life? Here's how you choose life that you may love the Lord your God. Listen to his voice and hold fast to him. That's how you choose life, by loving God. For the Lord is your life and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I want to talk today about God's good plan for families. God's good plan for families. Father, I thank you today that you have a good plan for every family in this room. Bless every family in Jesus name. Amen. So God does have a good plan for your family. God has a plan for families. God is a God of families. Before God created government, before God established the church, before God set in motion the priesthood, God first created families. Before he built cities, he built families. God is a family God. And God has a plan for your family. God has a plan for your last name. God wants to bring blessing and dignity and strength to your name. I don't know what your name represents to you. When you think back on your name. I don't know if you can only think back on the negative. Maybe you think about addiction or sickness or poverty or divorce or all kinds of issues that, that you bring into the earth that are attached to your last name. But I want to tell you, God wants to bless your name. He told Abraham in Genesis, chapter 12, I'm going to make your name great. That doesn't necessarily mean you're famous. It means that your name now brings blessing. Your name now brings honor and greatness. That when people think about Your name in 40 years, 50 years, 80 years, 100 years, they may not remember your first name, but your last name has now brought blessing to the earth. Come on. God wants to bless your name. Why? Because he's a family God. He's a generational God. God said, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. God has such A big plan for your family that watch this. It cannot be accomplished in your lifetime, but only in your life long line. Wow. That God's plan for you is so big that you cannot accomplish it in its fullness. That's why as Christians, we believe in something called legacy, that we give the gift of our life to the next generation. One more time, let me say that again about legacy. We give the gift of our life to the next generation. We entirely and completely reject the fatalistic view that we just live and die and are forgotten. No, no. We believe we're passing something on. That because of your life, our families are getting stronger, the world is getting better, and the kingdom of God is getting bigger. I want to say this, that in a hundred years, no one in Vegas may know the name Jabe and Chavez. But I promise you, they will feel it. They will feel our faith. They will feel city light. They will feel our obedience to God. I believe in 100 years, Vegas will be better because we're here. Better because of our yes to God, better because of our prayers. I'm talking about legacy. I'm talking about God's a God of family. God has a good plan for your family. I'm going to talk today about the family. Going to talk to parents. I'm going to talk to children. I'm going to talk about God. So here's the first thing. Parents, choose. Parents choose. God said, now choose life. Now choose life. If you could get those three words in your spirit, everything about your life would change. Now choose life. Now choose life. Here's the good news. It starts with the word now. Not. You should have not. Wow, you really screwed up the last 10 years. Wow. You're 60 and you made a lot of bad decisions. No, because God is a God of grace and mercy. He's a God of now. God will never bring up anything from your past that cannot be redeemed. If you are thinking about your past and it cannot be redeemed, it's from the devil. God will. Oh, man. I feel that if God is bringing up something from your past, it's only to redeem it, to sanctify it, and to use it for his glory. Because he's that. He's the right now God. The Bible says today is the day of salvation and that God can actually take every mistake and every pain and everything you did wrong from your past. And he can redeem it, and he can baptize it in the Holy Ghost, and he can bless it and he can break it, and then he can give it away to the world. And he actually uses every part of your story for his glory. Now, God says, now choose life. I've got good news for every married couple in here who. Who's maybe on the rocks right now. You could start right now. To every parent who has a child that isn't serving God. Now, you could choose life. To every. To every family that's going through pain right now. Now. Now. Now. See, the Bible says in Romans 8, verse 1, now, there is therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ. Now, there is no condemnation. So condemnation is the guilty sentence that we had before Christ, and it is the guilty sentence that the enemy wants to put on you. And what condemnation screams is, I missed it, and there's nothing I can do. Conviction, which is radically different. See, condemnation comes from hell. Conviction comes from heaven. That's kind of a bar. Let's just stop for a second. Let's just. Easy. I'm preaching a little too fast because I'm kind of dropping bars and moving on. Is that true? Condemnation comes from hell. Conviction comes from heaven. Condemnation says it's over. Conviction says, I can begin again. And I will not wait another moment. I'm going to start right now. Come on, everybody. Now. No, he's the God of right now. Can we give God praise for that now? And then he says, what do I do with my now? I choose. Which means I have a say. You have a choice. You have a say. And you have a voice in your life, in your family, in your future. Let me remind you that families don't. Do not drift into blessing. You don't. In any area of your life, you don't drift into better. You don't get in the car today, 65 miles an hour going down the 15, and just take your hands off the wheel and go. Let's just see. No, you don't drift. You're going to die, and you're going to kill somebody with you. You don't drift into good. You got to keep your hand on the wheel. Let me just say this, parents, you don't control, but you do got to steer. You can't control everything, but you can keep your hand on the wheel. You don't drift into blessing and health. You choose good and you choose God every day. See, when the family is weak, let me tell you why we're so obsessed with politics. We. Over the last 20 years, why America has become so obsessed with politics. Because the weaker the family, the more we need government. There's people in this room, you, Worship Kamala. You Worship Biden. You worshiped. Oh, man. You worshiped Obama. Some of you worshiped Trump. You just. You pray to Trump. Y' all ever seen that meme where the lady's praying to Trump? She's like, President Trump. If you can hear me, let me tell you why. Let me tell you why. Because when the family's weak and when you reject. When a culture rejects God, they need a new God, small G. It's called the God of government. I worship no man. Now, I got political values. I'm gonna vote my values. I'm politically informed. But there's only one who's worthy. His name is Jesus. And when a nation rejects God, you never reject God and then don't have a God. You reject God and you replace God with a much weaker God. And it's always government. By the way, that's not new with America. It happened with Israel. The only reason a kingdom was established in Israel is because they said, we want a king like everybody else. So anytime you reject God, you need government. Watch. Weak families means more government. And I don't want more government. I'll just be honest with you. Have you been to a DMV lately? I don't want more government. I don't want. I don't want. Been to a post office lately. I don't want more government. But when they're strong families, then we get less government. Now, again, I vote. I'm informed. I've got very passionate political views, but ultimately, see. Okay, let me just. When we believe that lie that we cannot choose, we. We let governments choose for us. But when we choose and when we invite God into our families and into our life now, what happens in the White House, though important, is not nearly as important as what happens in our house. You can say amen or ouch or anything you want, but I'm telling the truth. I'm telling the truth. So we choose the values of our home. We choose the direction of our home. We choose the spirit of our home. We choose the sound of our home. And here's the thing about values. Here's the things about. About spiritual things. They're tangible, and they get passed down. Exodus 29:29. The holy garments of Aaron, they will be his sons, and they will be anointed. In them, that spirit, they'll be consecrated in him. That's values. Who will become the priest? That's worship. Whoo. Let me just start over again real quick. Aaron, what you're wearing, your kids are going to wear one day. They're going to wear your Spirit. They're going to wear your values and they're going to wear your worship. So I got to take that seriously. I got to take my life with God seriously. Why? Because I'm passing my. My kids are going to wear my clothes and I'm choosing. I'm not going to pass down generational curses. I'm going to pass down generational blessing, generational anointing, generational power. Come on. We are choosing different for our families. I'm talking about God's plan for our family. Oh, and parents, we so want our kids to be happy, but we actually need to raise them to be godly. Money can't buy values. Money can't buy a prayer life. Money can't buy integrity. Money can't buy godliness. Money can't buy peace. And I know we want our kids to be happy and I know we want them to have the best. And I know we want to give them all the things that maybe we didn't have as when we were growing up. But please, please, please don't ignore the things that money can't buy. Your kids will be poor if the only thing you give them is money. Oh, I like my sermon today. I'm reminded, Timothy, of your sincere faith. This is Paul speaking to his spiritual son. He said, Timothy, you have sincere faith, but it didn't start with you. It lived first in your grandmother Lois. It got passed down, passed down, passed down to your mother Eunice. And now I'm persuaded lives in you as well as a church. We are passing down living faith to a new generation. And as parents, we must pass down living faith to a new generation. I want to encourage you again, parents, get your kids in city like kids, you will like church more and they will like church more if you have to through throw them in city light kids just like a, just like a sack of potatoes. Just throw them in there. They don't want to go. Who cares? Just throw just. They don't want to go to school. They don't want to brush their teeth. They don't want to eat broccoli. They don't want to go to bed at 8pm you don't care. You just so you just, you grab little Ashley and you go, I'll see you in an hour. And then when little Ashley bites Pastor Candace and you get a text, come get your kid. You just act like your phone is broken. You go, I didn't see. I didn't see see it. I was. Oh, Candace, my little Ashley did that. My little Billy kicked your shin. I Didn't even know. I mean. Oh, sorry. My phone has been on the fritz. Jen, are you telling us to lie? I'm telling you. Get your kids in kids ministry. Let me put it up again. This Wednesday. This Friday. Come on. I need all the youth to be here this Wednesday. I need all the young adults to be here this Friday. Why? Because we're passing down a living faith by. By the way, parents, whenever you're grounding your kids, never ground them from church. Where's Jose? Oh, he's grounded. No, Jose needs to be in church. Praise the Lord. I was always shocked by that. When I was a youth pastor, I wouldn't see a kid not ask the parents. Oh, he's grounded. No, he's got to be in church. So come on, parent, let's. Why? Because we're. Because we actually believe that something is happening. It's called impartation. It's kind of a spooky hooky word, but it's. But it's powerful. We believe something can be passed down. Have you ever. Have you ever gotten around someone and went, never again? Whatever that was. Okay, well, that's the negative. That person had a little critter. Amen. Had a little carrier, had a little passenger. Y' all ever met someone with passengers? You're like, oh, you're not alone, are you? Okay, well, in the same way. In the same way, we. We believe also in the positive. We believe people carry anointings and giftings and spiritual power. That's good. And when we get in the house of God, that stuff starts getting on our kids. Okay, so parents, choose number two. Children, honor. I'm going to go so old school right now, and I'm going to talk about children. Honor your parents. It's like we're going to go back to 1971 right now with this sermon. Honor your father and your mother, which is the first commandment. Now, I want you to notice this with a promise. It's the only of the ten commandments that comes with a promise. I think God had to put a promise because he knew this was gonna be the hardest commandment to follow. Hello. So he had to put a little sugar on it. He had to put a little sweetener on it. He had to. So. So God goes, honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with a promise. So that it. That it may go well with you. Everybody say peace. Come on, one more time. Say peace. That it may go well with you. That you would have peace, that you would have prosperity, that you would have the Shalom of God on your life and that you would enjoy long life on the earth. So God attaches a promise to honoring your parents. Honor is to place value on something, to properly estimate the weight of the thing, to judge it accordingly. If I brought this ring to my jeweler and I said, I want to sell it, they're going to, number one, make sure it's real gold. And then they're going to weigh it, they're going to honor it, and they're going to see what it weighs. And then depending on what it weighs, they're going to give me a value back. To honor is to see the weight of a person. Now let me say a few things because it's going to get quiet because it's gotten quiet all weekend. You can honor someone you don't agree with and you can honor. Okay, get ready for this one. You can honor someone you don't respect, because honor is something on the inside of you that you give away. I can give it if God commanded me to do it. That means I have the power to do it. Because God never tells you to do something you don't have the power to do. So the fact that he says to honor your parents means that by the power of the Holy Spirit, it's there to do. And I don't have to agree with them, and I don't even have to respect their decisions to still choose to be an honorable person. So what does it mean to honor? Number one? It means to forgive. Honoring your parents begins by forgiving your parents. Here's a few reasons to forgive them. Number one, for a lot of our parents who come from older generations, they just didn't know. For a lot of your parents, they would be like, dang, we thought we were doing a way better job because our parents were right. Does that make sense now? I'm not making light of what they did. I'm just saying they didn't know about emotional availability. They didn't know how to process feelings with their kids. They just went, we worked hard for you, and that's all we knew how to do. So I have to be able to forgive them for not knowing, or I have to be able to forgive them for knowing? To forgive is not to justify. It's to let go and say, I'm not. I can't hold on to this because I want to live a long life and I want to live a good life and I want to live long in the land. And I can't do that carrying all of your baggage into my life. So I've got to let it go. Some of you need to forgive your parents who are living. Some of you need to forgive your parents who are dead. You need to go before God and say, God, I'm letting go. I'm letting go. I'm letting that go so that it would go well with me. 2. I have to speak well of my parents. I have to speak well. In other words, I have to see the good and the bad and the ugly of my parents and choose to celebrate the good. Not easy all the time for some of you. So easy. Some of you have amazing, great relationship with your parents. You ought to thank God every day for that. You ought to call them right after this service and pray, be like, omg, my bad. I love you so much. I'm going to send you on vacation. You need to. You need to do that. But for. For some of us that maybe don't have that, you have to still choose. See, honor is choosing to celebrate the good while not getting tripped up over the bad. I'm going to find some good things to celebrate, and I'm not going to. I'm not going to get so caught up in the bad. Even if there's way more bad than good, I'm still going to choose to celebrate. I'm going to speak well. I'm going to rise and call my parents blessed. And here's the key. This is so powerful. As Christians, honoring your parents means choosing to see God's plan. Psalm 139 says, There's a book with your name on it. God's writing a book about your life. This is powerful. There is a book of Sam Coleman in heaven. There's a book of Ethan in heaven. Think about this. There's a book called Jabe and Chavez in heaven. God's writing that story. So God chose. Maybe you would or would not have chosen your parents, but God chose your parents as the vessel to bring you into the earth. And if you were writing the story, you would be like, I wouldn't have put them. And God goes, but I'm writing the story because God knew what you needed to accomplish your destiny. So maybe you wouldn't have chose them. And frankly, maybe they wouldn't have chose you. And they show that sometimes, don't they? And yet I have to trust that I have an author in heaven who's writing a book about my life. And God said, I have. So I'm honoring God by honoring the vessel he used to get me here. My name is for some of you that don't know My name is Jabin, and it means God understands or the wisdom of God. The reason my parents named me that is because they had four children and they wanted five. And their fifth child was a miscarriage. So they felt like we had our five kids. We're good six years later. Hey. So they went, well, I guess. Whoa, surprise. God understands. Now, they did that in a God honoring way. And this is our little special surprise from heaven. But it didn't feel that way growing up. It felt like, you're an accident, right? When your parents tell you what your Name means at 8 years old, and they go, we were done. But here you are, you're like, thanks, dad. And when you have four older siblings, you know what they do, right? You were an accident. You're a loser, right? So you get all this on you. You get all this trauma and all this drama from your daddy and your mama, and you get all this pain, and you get all this. And you get all this feeling of, I wasn't planned. And that put a seed of pain in me. But watch. Watch. It was that seed of pain that made me independent, that made me a maverick, that made me an entrepreneur, and that made me crazy enough to leave home at 19 and never look back. So there was a part of the pain that I needed to get out of a cycle, because we're only looking for good. And you actually have to learn how to celebrate both. So what caused me to plant a church seven years ago was my gift and my thorn. And maybe they're both a gift because it put. It put something in me. It put something in me. So I have to thank God for it. David, rejected by his family. Moses, rejected by his family. Joseph, rejected by his family. And yet the rejection was a part of God's direction to get them to where they needed to go. So I have to. I have to honor what God used to get me here. I see you standing. Thank you for that one person. Are y' all feeling this? I have to be able to go. God's writing a story. And there were some ups and downs that I wouldn't have written into my story. But, man, I feel the anointing right now. But God. God knew what I needed to get me to this stage, to get me in front of you in Las Vegas, Nevada. Solomon and Absalom, two sons of David. They had the same father, but two very different futures. Solomon honored his daddy. Absalom dishonored his daddy. And you have to choose to see through one of two lenses, either the lens of honor or the Lens of dishonor. Now I'm going to tell you. This is up to you. What story will you tell? Let me tell you about King David. Watch this, David. This is how Absalom saw his daddy. The man of war, the man of violence, the adulterer, the absentee. Dad. That's David. Emily, that's David. Psalm 23, David. That's David. Murderer. That's your Psalm 91, David. That's your David. And Goliath, your favorite character in the Bible, he was jacked up. And Absalom, yes, he was. And Absalom could only see him through the lens of his weakness. And it didn't destroy David. It destroyed Absalom. Watch, watch, watch, watch. Look how. Look how his other son saw him. Look how Solomon, the wisest son who ever lived, wise man who ever lived, who never had conflict in. In. During his reign, God gave him peace. Why? Because he was a man of honor. Look at this. Look how he saw Daddy. My daddy's a man after God's own heart. Oh, he's an imperfect worshiper, but he's a worshiper. Oh, he's a sinner, but he's a repentant sinner. He is the sweet psalmist of Israel. He is God's anointed. Solomon wasn't in denial about David's weakness, but Absalom could not see David's greatness. And I have to be able to go, omg. My parents are jacked up. But they're God's vessel who got me here. So I will honor children, honor your parents. Now, here's what happens. I'm going to have the team come when that happens. That's what parents do. That's what children do. Thirdly, here's what God does. God responds. God says, when you do this my way, verse 20, the Lord will give you many years in the land. This is about destiny. This is about God's will. This is about God's plan for your life. When you choose God's way, God chooses to bless. See, we think of God as favoring people. And we think, well, they're God's favorite. He's God's favorite. She's God's favorite. They're obviously just God's favorite. God doesn't do that. God doesn't favor people. He favors his principles. And when people align themselves with God's principles, God favors the principle. So when you choose God's way and when you honor God's way, you get under the spout where the blessing pours out. So I'm Not. I'm not. What is. I'm not chasing, like, you know, I'm not chasing the blessing of God, just chasing God. And I'm just honoring God. And I just want to be doing what God's doing. And then God blesses that. So I want to dedicate my family to the Lord, my life to the Lord, my children to the Lord, my relationship with my parents. I want to dedicate all that to the Lord. And I'm going to live there. I'm going to live under God's principles and precepts. I'm going to live by his word. Word. And God said, what. What I will do for you is I will give you many years in the land. I will. I will bless you. I will. I'll get the wind of heaven at your back so that you're not doing it uphill against the wind your entire life with the wind in your face. No, God said, I'll. I'll get that wind at your back and it will make your life. See, the blessed life is not a perfect life. But listen, it is a lighter life. The blessed life isn't easy, but it is easier because you now have the wind at your back. You've got this unseen force pushing you. And so here's my statement of faith. Here's what I'm believing God for in my life. Here's what I'm believing God for in your life. And if this scripture bears witness with you, I want you to just get behind this verse because I want this to be the cry of your heart. As for me and my household. Come on, everybody. We will serve the Lord. Come on. If that's your desire. Would you give God praise today if that's what you want for your family, for your marriage, for your children, for your future marriage? Come on. I'm gonna serve the Lord. I'm gonna do this God's way. And I believe I'll live long in the land. And I believe it'll go well with me. And I believe God's wind of favor is gonna blow behind me, pushing me forward. Come on, everybody standing. Let's give God a great praise in this house. I believe this for your life.