The Peace of God Will Be with You when the Mindset of Christ is in You

And one of the principles I have learned to live by in the Christian life is this.

Every unwanted circumstance carries with it an unexpected invitation for us to become more whole and more holy together.

In other words, things that we might not want in our lives give us invitations for how we can get closer to God and become more like Christ.

I look back a year ago, and we were doing the construction at our pond sanctuary and the new next-gen room and parking and all of that, and we were no longer allowed to be in our sanctuary.

That was an unwanted circumstance, but it brought with us this unexpected opportunity to get to worship in the beauty of creation and and what incredible services we could have outside last year.

Never forget, we were studying Psalm 23, one of the most well-known texts of the Bible that says, the Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.

Going word by word, verse by verse, In our outdoor service, we came right to verse two that says, he makes me lie down in green pastures and he leads me by still waters.

He restores my soul.

And what a gift that was.

Somebody who got baptized at an earlier service, that was their first Sunday at Crossway.

And God has transformed their lives since that moment.

And I know he's done that in so many of our lives.

And so I pray today, as we are out here in our God-bathed world, remembering that earth is drenched in God's affectionate satisfaction, that he loves you, that he is with you, and that he is good.

And I hope and pray today as we continue to study our book of Philippians that it allows all of us to have a little bit more peace that we have been longing for.

We're going to look at verses 8 through 13 of Philippians chapter 4.

We'll wrap that up next week and it's been a great study.

But as we get into the word today, I want to ask two questions to each and every one of us.

First, how's your thinking these days? Think about your thinking for a moment, your thought life.

Is it positive or negative? Is it pointing you in the right direction of your life or maybe is it disempowering you? Are you thinking about things intentionally or are you allowing distraction to take over? Think about your thinking.

How might God be inviting you to think the way he would want you to? Then here's the second question.

How content in life are you right now? Let's say on a scale of one to 10, 10 is like you could not be more content.

It's just like all of your teams won their championship this year, like it's as good as it gets.

And one is like you would prefer every single thing in your life to be different than it is.

What number would you rank yourself? 10, one, somewhere in between.

Well, I believe your answer to question one, how's your thinking, how's your thought life, will directly impact how you answer number two, how content or not you are.