Staying Fixated on Jesus (Sunday May 4, 2025)

Pastor Giby Raphael

How many of you can praise God for the testimonies you've already experienced in your life? And how many of you are praising God in faith for what He is doing right now, even when it’s not fully clear? Now here's the big question: Can you praise Him in advance for what He’s going to do in your life next week, next month, or even next year? Hallelujah! Because we serve a God of testimonies—the God of the impossible!

Now I want us to look together at Hebrews 12:1–2. This is one of the most powerful conclusions in the New Testament. The author—some say it’s Paul, and I personally believe it is—writes, “Since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus.”

Church, if you miss this, you miss everything. This is the final instruction: Finish your race! It doesn’t matter how you finish it. You can crawl. You can limp. You can walk. You can run. You don’t have to come first. But you’ve got to cross that line. That’s all that matters—just finish your race.

Before giving that instruction, the author gives us the reason why. That’s what chapter 11 is all about—it defines faith and then lays out example after example of people who ran before us: Moses, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Gideon, David, Samuel. They didn’t live perfect lives. Some of them did some very foolish things. But they finished their race. If they could do it, you can do it too. That’s the message.

But here’s something important. The author says it’s okay to glance at these people. Glance at their lives. Glance at their testimonies. Glance at their victories. But don’t fix your eyes on them. Don’t fix your eyes on Moses. Don’t fix your eyes on David. Don’t fix your eyes on Abraham. Fix your eyes on Jesus.

There’s a difference between glancing and fixing. When I drove here this morning, I glanced at so many things—houses, cars, signs—but I didn’t fixate on anything. It’s okay to look around. But when it comes to your spiritual race, your eyes must be fixed on one person only—Jesus Christ.

Why do you worship God?

If your praise is based on who He is—then it’s unshakable. You worship Him not because He answered your prayer, but because He is God.

Now why is that so important? Because if your praise is based only on what God has done for you—or what you’re expecting Him to do—you might be disappointed. That’s the truth. You might not get what you asked for. You might not get that healing when you want it. You might not get that breakthrough in the timing you expected. You might get persecuted, mistreated, rejected. Hebrews 11 even talks about those who were stoned, flogged, and wandered in deserts. So if your praise is only based on what God does for you, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

But if your praise is based on who He is—then it’s unshakable. You worship Him not because He answered your prayer, but because He is God. You worship Him not because you got that promotion, but because He is worthy. That’s the deeper revelation God is calling us to.

Many people treat Sunday like spiritual insurance. They show up because they need God’s help on Monday. They tick the box and say, "Okay God, I showed up. Now help me through the week." But let me tell you something: God is not just your emergency contact. He is your Father, your Redeemer, your Friend. He deserves your worship not for what He gives but for who He is.

David said, "I’d rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked." Why? Because he knew the joy of God’s presence. Joshua stayed behind in the tent of meeting even after Moses left. Why? Because he tasted something in God’s presence that nothing else could offer.

If you can learn to draw your joy from the presence of the Lord, you become unstoppable. Because the world didn’t give you that joy—and the world can’t take it away. Everything else dries up. Human love, money, success—it all has limits. But His presence is a reservoir that never runs dry.

Now let me bring it closer to home. Some of you are saying, "Pastor, I’m trying to fix my eyes on Jesus, but I can’t find Him. I’m praying. I’m fasting. I’m doing everything I can. But I don’t see Him." Let me take you to John 6. The crowd was looking for Jesus after He fed the 5,000 and walked on water. They finally found Him and asked, “Jesus, where were you?” And what did He say? “You’re looking for me not because you saw the signs, but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.” In other words, you’re not seeking me to know me—you’re seeking me to get more bread.

That hit me hard. It’s a question we all need to ask ourselves: What kind of hunger do I have? Do I want more of God—or just more from God? Do I seek His hand—or His heart? Fixation on Jesus means loving Him for who He is, not just what He can give.

Let me tell you about Gideon. God called him a mighty warrior, and he said, “Who, me?” He needed sign after sign. Even after the Spirit of the Lord came on him, he still asked for confirmation. But God was patient. And God taught Gideon something powerful—how to fixate on the unseen.

God stripped Gideon's army from 30,000 to 300. And He didn’t even give them real weapons! Just a trumpet and a torch in a jar. That’s not a strategy for war. That’s a lesson in trust. God was saying, “Gideon, I’m teaching you to trust not in what you see, but in who I am.”

2 Corinthians 4:18 tells us to fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. It sounds crazy. How do you fix your eyes on the unseen? But that’s faith. And when you do, something powerful happens. Paul says we are jars of clay with a treasure inside. We may be hard-pressed on every side—but we’re not crushed. Perplexed—but not in despair. Struck down—but not destroyed. That’s the power of fixation on Jesus.

You fixate on your boss—you’ll be disappointed. Fixate on your spouse—you’ll be disappointed. Fixate on your finances—disappointed. But fix your eyes on Jesus—and you’ll never be shaken.

I want to close with this: Even if He doesn’t give you what you ask for, He is still worthy. That’s the kind of faith that pleases God. That’s the kind of faith that separates the seekers from the lovers.

Church, this is the invitation: Let’s go to the next level. Not just coming to church for blessings—but coming to church because we love Him. Let our hunger be to know more of Him. Let our worship be for who He is. Fix your eyes on Jesus. Amen.

Worship That Pleases God (Sunday Apr 27, 2025)

Worship is a key subject in the Bible. However, when we speak about worship these days, we often have a picture about worship that is not exactly what is in the Bible. Often when we speak about worship, we think about a structured, time of corporate singing. The more I look at scripture, especially in the new testament, I realize that it isn’t any of those things:

1. It isn’t singing

2. It isn’t a corporate activity

3. It isn’t structured

You might be able to sing as a group in a structured worship at a meeting, but that is not the definition of worship in itself.

God created man to worship Him. There is an innate tendency in us to worship. If we do not worship the true God, we end up worshipping someone else or something else.

Jesus warned his disciples saying about a type of people in Matt 15:8, quoting Isaiah 29:13, he said:

“These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is based on merely human rules they have been taught.”

Jesus taught about the kind of worship he desired to the most unlikely person. He was in an area called Sychar in Samaria and there, He waited at a well. And a Samaritan woman came to draw water. She was not only a woman, she was also a Samaritan, considered an inferior race. She was also a person who was living an life of questionable morality. In those times, a person of her background was considered too low to speak to for a Jewish rabbi. However, It is to her that Jesus expounded the type of worshippers that the Father is seeking.

“Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.  God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

John 4:23-24

Example 1: Abraham

In studying scripture, the Bible has a principle of first mention. The first mention of the word worship occurs in Gen 22:5: “ He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.”

Abraham told his servants who accompanied him and his son Isaac to Mount Moriah that he and Isaac will go to the mountain, worship and then return to them. Remember that this was Isaac the son of promise, for whom he waited about 25 years. Abraham’s future was also centered around Isaac. However, in his obedience to the command of God, Abraham was willing to set aside everything that he held dear. Abraham’s worship was pleasing to God for several reasons:

1. He surrendered his will to seek God’s will

2. He submitted to God in faith

3. Trusted that God knew and will do what is best for him

For these reasons God was pleased with the worship that Abraham brought to Him.

When we have not enough for our needs, when situations around us are challenging, when we are not sure how to face the storms in our life, when we do not feel like singing and praying, when we still offer our praise to the Lord, it is a sacrifice that is pleasing unto Him.

Example 2: The Sinful Woman

The second instance we are going to look at is from Luke 7:36 onwards

A woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume.  As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.

In John 4, we saw that the theory of worship was offered to a woman of questionable character. Here, the practical worship that Jesus loved and praised was a sinner, the town prostitute. She found out that the teacher was in the house of a pharisee and came to Him. She knelt down and began weeping and wetting his feet with her many tears. She then wiped them with her hair, kissed his feet and anointed them with expensive perfume. The Lord loved this expression of worship for

1. Her worship came from an overwhelming sense of gratitude & indebtedness to God

2. The woman brought what was expensive and gave it unto the LORD

3. She broke it only unto the LORD

She was so grateful for the LORD’s acceptance and forgiveness that she could not stop weeping. If we come before Him with self-righteousness we can never worship God. True worship always recognizes our utter sinfulness and His perfect holiness. Our melodious singing and skillful playing of instruments will not bring glory to God. But the heart that is aware of the Lord’s mercy and forgiveness can worship him in a broken voice and a noise unto the Lord. His forgiving grace is the central theme in our worship.

She brought the alabaster jar of perfume and broke it unto the LORD. She brought something that was costly and lavishly spent it on the LORD, not thinking about the cost. True worship forgets the cost and focuses on the Master. And in brokenness, like the jar was broken, we ought to offer our worship before the LORD.

The Place for Singing

The Bible certainly speaks about singing, even in the new testament.

In Matt 26:30, “When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.”

Before going into the Garden of Gethsemane at the last night before He was crucified, Jesus and His disciples are recorded to have sung a hymn.

In Acts 16:25, “About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them.”

Beaten, punished, chained, and kept in the innermost prison, Paul and Silas started praying and praising God through the singing of hymns loudly.

In both these instances we hear about very trying external circumstances and Jesus, our LORD, and Paul along with Silas sang unto the LORD. These are the only two instances in the New Testament where singing is recorded to have occurred other than in heavenly scenes in the book of Revelation. Maybe the LORD wanted to make a point about true worshipful singing.

Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs

Ephesians 5:18-20

Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Bible encourages us to speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. To sing and make melody in our heart to the LORD. This is an instruction given to all of us. God is pleased when we do that!

The parallel passage in Colossians 3:16-17 says this:

Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Paul is encouraging believers to teach and admonish one another with the wisdom through the psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing with gratitude in our hearts to God!

Singing enables us as a group in unison to learn scripture, say words of adoration to God, declare our beliefs, encourage one another, and make declarations loudly to creation and to do all that in one voice. It’s a powerful and very useful tool, as long as we do it from the heart in a way that glorifies God. And in everything both passages strongly emphasizes that we give thanks to God. Thanksgiving is a very important part of our worship and our singing.

Finally, I want us to look at these two portions:

1. the verse in Ephesians 5:18 before the verse we read says be filled with the Spirit and

2. the version in Colossians 3:16 says “let the word of Christ dwell in us” – Jesus said, “Sanctify them by Thy truth, Thy word is truth.

Essentially these two portions are telling us to worship God in Spirit and in truth.

The key in worship is to know who God is, understand His person and His character, and we fall before the LORD with the awe of that understanding and we cry out unto Him, “O LORD, my God!” with a deep sense of our sinfulness and His holiness and our need for Him. That is true worship that pleases God.

May the Lord enable us to worship Him in a way that pleases Him.

The Uniqueness of Our Savior (Sunday Apr 20, 2025)

This is a time when the world remembers the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. Let me just say that there are very few people in the world that do not believe in the crucifixion of Christ. There is no time to speak about the abundant details available about the existence of Jesus the first century as a historical person, but let us just say there it is an undisputed fact among neutral historians. The resurrection of Christ, however, is of great importance, but also a greater sense of division.

Jesus, the Lamb of God

If I were to ask you, who Jesus was/is, I will hear a variety of answers. Son of God, Savior, Lord, Redeemer, The Promised Messiah, the King of Kings, Lamb of God.

When I say Lamb what comes to mind. an innocent, very cute animal. That's true. But the lamb had a very special in minds and hearts of people in Israel at that time. 

For centuries, the Hebrew people or the Israelites had a practice called Passover. It was first conducted at the time of Moses, about 1400 years before Jesus when God delivered the people of Israel from captivity in Egypt. They held it annually to commemmorate this event. During this time, they would sacrifice a young lamb that had no physical blemish and sprinkle the blood as instructed by God. By doing this they identified as the people of God and God forgave their sin. Once, a very well known prophet at that time, he was known as John the Baptist, saw Jesus and remarked, "Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world."

When the people of Israel heard that, they might have got a clear picture of what Jesus was in the world to do.

The God of the Bible is a holy God. It is something that is so unique. The Bible teaches us that angels are constantly worshipping God saying, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord." He is so holy that anything unholy cannot enter into His presence.

We live in a sinful world. I know that honest people do not claim to be without mistakes or wrongdoing or what the Bible calls "sin." Any fault, any mistake, any action, any thought, any word, any attitude that is morally wrong is sin before God. When there is sin in us we cannot enter God's presence. The Bible identifies the fundamental problem with this world as originating in "sin" and the resultant "fall" from God's grace and presence. As long as this remained, there is no way to approach God and be united with Him, which is God's purpose for mankind.

This is where Jesus Christ's life and work is important. Jesus is the Son of God who came into this world because God in His wisdom knew that we would not be able to get rid of our sin, even if we wanted to. A perfectly just God sent His Son into this world as a sacrifice for mankind's sins. It was not a pretend death for Jesus, but a real death upon the cross as a sacrifice for our sins. The perfect love of God met with the perfect justice of God when Jesus died for our sins.

The most famous verse in the Bible is John 3:16. For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. God does not want us to sacrifice our lives in the sense of dying for Him. What He requires of us is to believe in what He has done for each of us. He sent forth His son on our behalf.

We all have sin in us, some of it is expressed and some of it is hidden, waiting for an opportunity. When we repent of the sin in us and put our faith in God's ability to forgive our sin because of what Jesus has done for us, He saves us from the punishment that we deserve for our sins. That's 

Why is Jesus so special? Why is His death so important. Why is His life so important? It is because He stands unique in every way.

The Uniqueness of Christ

1.Uniqueness in His birth

Very unusual circumstances surrounded the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. The most important of these is the fact that Jesus was born miraculously, of a virgin in Bethlehem, a town of Judah.

The author of the Gospel of Matthew, one of the disciples of Christ, remembered that more than 700 years before Christ, prophet Isaiah wrote about this.

14 Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

Isaiah 7:14

2. UniqueNESS in His Teaching

When Jesus began teaching, He spoke of things that the world had never heard of. It was not good teaching; it was revolutionary. We are not shocked when we hear about it. But imagine at a time thousands of years ago, when might was right (it still is, in many cases), that someone stood up and said that those that desired to lead must be a servant of all, that we ought to love our enemies, bless those who curse us, do good to them that hate you, and pray for those who despitefully use us and persecute us. And He showed that He did the same.

3. Uniqueness in His Life

No ruler, or teacher, or leader in the world with the exception of Jesus ever claims to have lived a sinless life. But the Bible declares that boldly. Jesus lived a completely sinless life. His life was open in front of his family and his disciples. In spite of seeing him up close everyday, none of them saw anything improper in Him ever.

“Which one of you convicts Me of sin? If I speak truth, why do you not believe Me?

John 8:46

Praise God for He was the perfect, sinless sacrifice ffor each of us.

4. Uniqueness in His death

600 years before Christ, prophet Daniel wrote this:

“Know and understand this: From the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven ‘sevens,’ and sixty-two ‘sevens.’ It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench, but in times of trouble. After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be put to death and will have nothing.

In 457 BC, in the 7 year of King Artaxerxes, he gave a decree to Ezra to rebuild Jerusalem’s courts and appoint magistrates and judges and enforce God’s Law and the king’s law, to bring back

From there 483 years later is when Jesus was crucified. Adjusting for how calendars worked then, this might have been to the exact month.

Imagine being accurate about a prophecy that was made 483 years ago. Imagine that something said 230 years before American regained independence comes true. It is that dramatic an event. And only the eternal wisdom of God could accomplish this. Haellelujah!

5. UniqueNESS IN HIS RESURRECTION

What is resurrection? There are many people in history thought to be dead it came back to life. It could happen for any number of reasons. They could be wrongly identified as being dead. Or could have been a fabricated story. However, if it was not true, there was one group of people who would know for sure that it was a fabricated story, a lie. The disciples witnessed this life-changing miracle first hand.

Let’s take a look at them for a second. They were ordinary people, uneducated, blue collar, working class, no-nonsense men. They met Him, they were changed by Him, they believed Jesus was the Messiah. Jesus taught them for years what He had come to do in direct and indirect ways, they did not really understand it. They thought Jesus would lead a rebellion against the ruling Roman kingdom and would restore the Kingdom of Israel. At Jesus’s death, they had lost all hope. They were distraught. Everything they had been living for had come crashing down in a matter of hours. Just 5 days before, they accompanied Jesus when He entered triumphantly into Jerusalem riding a donkey just as it was prophesied by Zachariah.

Zach 9:9 “Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

And now, their leader, their teacher, their master was killed. It was over. Or so they thought!

Even before Jesus was killed, they ran away and even denied knowing Him. They were fearful and despondent. Then came the resurrection. On the third day, Jesus was raised from the dead by the power of God. He appeared to Mary, and then to the disciples. They were not joyful initially, they were in disbelief! In fact one of them was so suspicious that this was a prank that he had to put his fingers into the holes in the hands of the LORD to make sure that it was the same person. He had seen His Savior’s hands and feet pierced. There was no more doubt in their hearts. And the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead changed them forever. That encounter completely transformed them. The resurrected Christ then spent 40 days with His disciples and ascended into heaven.

When they met the living Jesus, they were ready to follow Him and live for Him.

When they met the resurrected Christ, they were ready to go wherever He sent them and die for Him.

This 180 degree transformation of a scared bunch of people from being afraid for their lives to being witnesses who gladly gave their lives to be tortured and killed for the sake of their LORD is testament to the fact that God is true and Jesus truly resurrected from the dead.

Today, we serve a Risen Savior. Like it happened to the disciples, let the encounter with the resurrected LORD change us so much that our lives will be transformed by God forever. Praise the Lord!