From the Blog
-
A Counter-Cultural Life
Have you ever noticed how easy it is to drift? No one accidentally becomes more like Jesus. We don't wake up one day more holy, more prayerful, more loving, or more obedient without intentional pursuit. Left to ourselves, we drift. We conform. That word pictures a mold or pattern that quietly shapes whatever is pressed into it. The world has a pattern, and if we're not careful, we'll naturally fit right into it.
In 1 Peter chapter 1, the apostle Peter wrote to Christians living as exiles throughout Asia Minor, exhorting them to live differently in this world because they belonged to God through Jesus Christ. -
A Sacrificial Life
We have a perfect example of others-focused self-sacrificial love in the person of Jesus. If your instinct is to climb your way to fulfillment in life, then check this out. Jesus didn’t climb his way to success, descended to success. If you want to follow Jesus, that’s your path too.
Paul taught the Philippian church that the path to exaltation was to live self-sacrificially like Christ. We can receive the reward God promises us when we follow Christ’s example of self-sacrifice. -
A Surrendered Life
There is a gap in every human heart between what we know is right and what we actually do. We make promises we don't keep. We set standards we don't meet. We know what God says, yet we often choose our own way instead. Many people point to hypocrisy in the church, and certainly there are times when that criticism is deserved. But the deeper issue is not really hypocrisy, it's surrender. Most Christians genuinely want to follow Jesus, yet they find themselves in a daily battle between God's will and their own.
That is why Paul commands believers to "present your bodies" to God. Not part of yourself. Not your Sundays. Not your spare time. Your whole self. Because partial surrender is still self-rule. And as Jesus will show us today, the only way to truly follow Him is through complete surrender. In chapter 9 of the Gospel of Luke, Jesus taught that all who would come after Him must completely surrender their lives for His sake. -
The Prophecy
Simeon was waiting for something, longing for the Messiah. Every single person is living in expectation. We chase what we think will console us, but instead of relief we often find more pressure, more disappointment, and more emptiness. What if we are longing for something far greater? What if, like Simeon, we are longing for the true comfort for our souls? We are all longing for Jesus.
In the Gospel of Luke, Simeon rejoiced when he saw God’s salvation in Jesus Christ. We too can see God’s salvation in Jesus Christ. -
The Receptive Heart
How are you and God? When's the last time you asked that question? And how do you even begin to answer it? If we’re honest with ourselves, sometimes we are all over the place with our spiritual life, aren’t we? Why is there such a variation in how we ourselves feel about our spiritual health from one day to the next? Why is there such a variation in different people and how they seem to be doing spiritually?
Jesus has an explanation for this. In the parable of the sower, Jesus taught that the key to bearing the fruit of the Kingdom of God is a heart that is receptive to the word of God.
-
Doing Life Together
From the very beginning God saw our need for relationship. First the vertical relationship with Him and then the horizontal relationship with one another. We not only do life better together, we are simply built for it.
The last year and a half has exposed this reality as well as any other season in recent history. We spent a great deal of time isolated and even some of the introverts were missing people. The truth is we need God and we need one another. We are created for relationship. We were made to love God and one another. We were made to do life together! -
To Faithfully Respond to Jesus
Will you faithfully respond to the priestly sacrifice of Jesus? And church let me ask you, would you say you’ve had a faithful response to the knowledge and belief that Jesus is the sacrifice for all sins and that he is now your great priest in heaven? Do you know what it means to faithfully respond to Jesus in this way? Because the danger here is if you don’t know what it means to faithfully respond to this news then you're in danger of living out your Christian life feeling distant from God, wavering in your faith, and blocking out the needs of your fellow believers.
In chapter 10 of Hebrews, the author encouraged the Jewish Christians to faithfully respond to the Priestly Sacrifice of Jesus. We can faithfully respond to the Priestly Sacrifice of Jesus. -
The Restored Yes
What if you had your yes on the table–even a radical yes that you had once given God–but then you made mistakes that led you to taking your yes off the table and now you feel distant from God? Maybe you have other relationships that have either become distant or severed because you can’t forgive them or they can’t forgive you?
We can give God our “Restored Yes”, whereby we accept the gift of grace He offers to us to heal our broken past with Him and to take steps towards restoration. As we give God our restored yes, we can pray for restoration in every relationship in our lives. It is only through His grace and power that we can experience this kind of restoration. -
The Reluctant Yes
What if we’re warming up to the idea of trusting God Himself—not just His plan—with our lives, but then He calls us to do something that we feel unequipped for? Something we don’t feel worthy to do? Something we outright don’t want to do? Many of us hear that calling and get stopped in our tracks, thinking of a million reasons why we can’t do something, so time passes and we don’t give God our yes; we reluctantly say no with our actions. In the book of Exodus, Moses wrote how he reluctantly gave God his yes when God called him to free the people of Egypt. We can give God our yes even when we feel reluctant.
-
Why Hypocrites?
If you talk to a few non-believers, it won’t take you very long to hear something like this: “I don’t go to church because the church is full of hypocrites.” In the apostle John’s first letter, he warned against the hypocrisy of claiming to be a Christ-follower without living according to His teachings. We can…