We are so excited to receive and be blessed by God’s word on this first Sunday in the glorious year of New Beginnings.

In line with the theme for the month, Pastor taught on the subject of emotions, she made us understand that we are not our emotions and we should not be like those who have so identified with their emotions and feelings that they think they have to always be that way, in the word, Jesus through his words and actions gave us the idea that we can always effect a change and when we got born again, we received power, that is, the ability to effect changes.

Pastor also reminded us that Jesus is the Lord of our lives and that includes our emotions, this means we must begin to express our emotions and live our lives the way he wants us to. We read from Proverbs 4:20-23 where he instructs us to attend to his words and to incline our ears to his sayings, there are so many people saying so many things but God wants us to pay attention to him and his words instead, he goes on to tell us that his words are life and health to our flesh, this means the words of others that do not originate from God are death and can affect the body negatively.

Pastor charged us to mind what we pay attention to this year, to guard our hearts with all diligence, to be careful about what we expose ourself to and what we take in knowing that what we see and hear can affect our body and our life, we saw in verse 23 that out of our heart comes the issues in life, when we need anything in life, what matters first is what we have inside our heart. Jesus said that a good man brings forth good things out of the treasures of his heart proving that our heart contains treasures and so we must be careful to guard them and not along the wrong things in because what we will bring out in time of need is what is in our heart.

Pastor admonished us to spend time with the word, because in doing so, we’ll be no different from the word, he tells us in James 1:18 that we are born of the word and that makes us the first and the best of his creatures, then he goes on to tell us how to conduct ourselves; to be slow to speak, swift to hear and slow to wrath, no matter what we think about ourselves, once we got born again, the word of God became our personality and as we accept that to be true, we are changed to begin to walk in that reality.

Pastor instructed us to not compare ourselves with others as this has been a source of depression for many, she charged us to instead keep God’s words in front of our eyes so that we will always be full of faith, concious that God has a plan for our lives and aware that there is a time for everything, we learnt from the life of John the Baptist, he worked no miracles yet Jesus affirmed him as the greatest of all men born of women at the time, if he had compared himself with those that had gone before him and done what he didn’t do, he would have been wrong.

In rounding off the message, Pastor charged us to fight to guard our heart and the treasures in it, to ensure to keep everything else away from forcing their way in.