Practical Faith: Recent Episodes
Rev. Dr. Nicholas A. Cash
Practical Faith is five minutes of fuel for following Jesus in your everyday life! With short, bite-sized episodes, Practical Faith offers helpful tools, free resources, and encouragement to assist listeners from all walks of life to actively follow the example, teachings, and practices of Jesus in their own everyday lives.
We’ve been talking about how to clarify and pursue some dreams for our lives together with the Lord in really practical ways. Today, I want to offer just a few concluding thoughts to help you pursue your dreams together with the Lord – remembering that He designed you, Heloves you, and He knows the good plans He has for you.
Imagine that you were standing in a large room, like a big auditorium or gymnasium. You are standing in one corner of the room, and your dream of where you want to be is at the far corner of the room. That dream may be something for your spiritual life, or your home or family, or your career, or some other hope or wish or goal you have... But you can’t reach it from where you are. It’s all the way across the room. You’ve got to map out some steps to get there. What are 2-3 clear, measurable, attainable first steps that will get you on a path towards your dream?
God’s journey for us in life rarely looks like a straight line arrow. It often looks more like zig-zagging line with lots of twists and turns along the way. Some of this is our doing; some of it is His; and in His sovereign mercy, He is weaving it all together into an amazing tapestry of faithfulness. Where we sometimes get into trouble in walking with the Lord is when we put our expectations about HOW our desires are going to be fulfilled ahead of the God who intends to fulfill them. We see this happen in the Bible with Abram.
There’s an important distinction between having clear goals vs. having just good intentions. All the hoping and wishing – and, even praying – in the world isn’t going to amount to anything if I don’t DO something about it. You have a vision for your future. You can see where you want to go. You’ve identified some simple, initial steps you can take in the right direction. And guess what? You are now a small step or two closer to realizing your dream of becoming more like Jesus!
What’s your dream? What are you dreaming about with God? What are your hopes for yourself? for your character? your family? your future? your legacy? These are ALL great things to have a vision for in your life with the Lord. Depending on the size of your dream, you might be just 10 steps away, or it might be 50,000 steps away. But once you envision with the Lord where you want to go with Him, and you start taking steps forward on that path with Him, you will be getting closer and closer to actually achieving that future in the Lord that you have envisioned for yourself.
Today on Practical Faith, I want to lead you in a short exercise of dreaming with God about your future. You can do this wherever you are right now: in your car, at home, at the gym, wherever. For just a couple of minutes, we are going to talk and think about and practice dreaming together with God, who said, “I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you hope and a good future.”
Today, we are wrapping up our short series on the topic of “Discipleship at Home,” and I want to address one of the most common objections I hear around this topic, and that is this: “It’s too late for me. I missed my chance. My kids are grown. I wish I had known about all this stuff earlier...”
Welcome back to “Practical Faith” – where today, we will continue in our short series on the topic of “Discipleship at Home.”
Today on “Practical Faith,” we'll introduce a short new series on the topic of “Discipleship at Home.” The way we grow is by practice. Family devotions for us through the years have been full of trial-and-error, starts-and-stops, and starting back over again. It has not been perfect, but we have tried to remain intentional and consistent in practicing some form of family discipleship together throughout those years. The Lord has been gracious to us. Our kids have been patient with us :-) It’s messy and imperfect, but two steps forward and one step back is still forward progress – and practice makes progress!
If you’re like me, then, we don’t want to do what only we can do in our lives. We certainly want to give our very best – but frankly – if this is just a human effort producing human results… then, what’s the point? But the hunger and the ache and the yearning of our souls is, “Oh God!, please come – please come – and do what only You can do among us!”
Persecution affects about 200 million Christians around the world today. Imagine the amount of faith in Jesus, and courage from His Holy Spirit it must take to live in a place where your neighbors or the government are openly hostile toward your faith in Jesus… You and I have the opportunity to pray courageous, faith-filled prayers now for our persecuted brothers & sisters around the world!
God has purposes for you in this generation – purposes that He has called you and equipped you and prepared in advance for you to fulfill. Our loved ones – our friends and family – our everyday connections in the world – they are hungering for the grace, the truth, the deliverance, the victory, the identity and purpose which we all know they are only going to find in Jesus. And Jesus is saying to us what he said to the man healed in Luke 8, “Go to your home. Go to your loved ones back home! Go home to your own people and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how He has had mercy on you.”
God is already at work in the life of every single one of your unsaved friends. Every single one of them! And He is inviting you – He is authorizing you in the Name of Jesus – He is sending you! – to join Him in that miraculous work. Within the past 10 years in the U.S., a whopping 83% of all new church attendees came to church because someone invited them – either to a Sunday service, or to a small group gathering.
God has purposes for you to serve right here – right in your very own town – among your very own generation, just like He had for David in the Bible...
To become like Jesus, we’ve gotta do three things: do things the way Jesus did them; pray in the ways that Jesus prayed; and believe like Jesus believed. Today we’ll talk about believing like Jesus believed. Believing IN Jesus is of utmost importance. Eternity literally hangs in the balance of it. But it is just the starting point of a life of following Jesus. To become like Jesus, we’ve got to believe like Jesus believed. And His faith in God was an active faith. Jesus believed the words of the Father enough to act upon them. In order to become like Jesus, we’ve got to believe like Jesus believed.
Becoming like Jesus means doing things the way Jesus did them. It also means praying the way that Jesus prayed.
To become like Jesus, we’ve gotta do three things. We’ve got to do what Jesus did, pray like Jesus prayed, and believe like Jesus believed. So first up is: Do what Jesus did. Sometimes, as followers of Jesus, it can be cool to actually do things the way Jesus did them...
The Eternal Son of God – God, who made us in His image – He descended from heaven to earth and become like us in every way except sin. He made us like Himself. And then, after we messed it all up, He Himself became like us, so that He could enable us to become like Him again...
In the Book of Acts, we are amazed by the miracles we see there: miraculous healings… resurrections from the dead… angelic deliverances from prisons… All these amazing things happened! But there is a danger for us in thinking that these are the only things that indicate the supernatural in the Bible. That these kinds of miracles are the reason the early Church flourished and grew. We tend to put signs and wonders like these up on a pedestal. And in so doing, we relegate all the rest of the Spirit’s supernatural work in us as being ordinary, unimportant, and unremarkable. This is a mistake I make when I read the Book of Acts, and when I look at my life and the world around me...
The term “supernatural” simply means, higher than what is natural, above what is natural, beyond the natural. The supernatural is the work of God, fueled by the Presence and the character of God. Today, we will look at Acts chapter 2 and invite the Holy Spirit of God to awaken us to the supernatural in our lives...
When Dianna and I were chaplains onboard the Mercy Ship, I had a discipling relationship with a crew member onboard. He was a great guy – brilliant mind, fun personality, loved his wife and kids – loved and served the Lord faithfully! He had smoked his entire life, and he wanted to stop. And one day, he asked my advice...
In Mark chapter 12, the opponents of Jesus set a trap before Him. And, honestly, it’s a brilliant trap. It should’ve worked. Here’s how it went – it says, “Later they sent some of the Pharisees and Herodians to Jesus to catch him in his words. They came to him and said, 'Teacher, we know that you are a man of integrity. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are; but you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not? Should we pay or shouldn’t we?' ”
A dear loved one has just received terrible news, experienced a sudden loss, a diagnosis, a betrayal – and they turn to you for help. How do you comfort a person in those first critical moments of a crisis? In the previous two episodes, we talked about leaning on your Experience and practicing Empathy to support and comfort your loved one in crisis. Today, we’ll talk about the Equipment you have at your disposal: What resources do you have available to share with your loved one in crisis?
What is this person feeling right now, and how can I comfort them in this difficult moment in their lives? Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person.
How do we help the people closest to us when a sudden crisis arises in their lives? What do you say? What do you do? How can you help a loved one during their first painful moments of a crisis in their lives? Your three main resources for supporting your loved ones in their moment of crisis are going to be your Experience, Empathy, and Equipment. Today, we’ll focus on your Experience.
I want you and me to understand that our status in eternity fundamentally changed when God adopted us into His family! Your identity changed, your name changed, your inheritance & future & rights all changed! Somehow, in some heavenly way, your spiritual birth certificate was updated to show Almighty God as your adopted Father! And in that moment, it was decreed in the courts of heaven that you are now a child of God – an heir of God – and a co-heir with Christ.
I want you to think about prayer with me in a different kind of way today: Prayer is disruptive. Prayer is how we bring Jesus into our world. In a way, it is an arrival of the Spirit of Christ into the moment in which the prayer is taking place. Prayer is disruptive, in the best kinds of ways!
Every mighty movement of God started with a call for His people to pray. Prayer revives the hearts of God’s people as it prepares our communities for God’s love, grace, and Word to be spread. Prayer-walking involves us personally taking our prayers to the very places where we desire to see God’s Presence manifested and our prayers answered.
More than 75 percent of individuals who come to know Christ have experienced salvation as a result of a direct relationship. Oikos is a Greek word that is found many times in the New Testament that can provide tremendous insight and revelation to our prayers and evangelism. Oikos defines an individual’s primary base of relationships and their relational sphere of influence. This includes one’s family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, and most frequent contacts.
Resurrection is God’s specialty – He brings dead things to life. It's who He is. It's what He does! The Resurrection of Jesus changed everything. It represents THE pivot point of history – everything swivels – everything swings into a new direction when the Living Jesus stands up and walks out of the grave, victorious over death...
We often talk about Jesus in the past tense – maybe because we read about His mortal life on earth in the history of the Bible. But because of the Resurrection, Jesus lives today. Have you ever considered what that really, logistically means? Jesus is a current, living person. Jesus is a present reality – in the world, and in our lives. Jesus was – yes. But also – Jesus is! And that is because of the Resurrection...
Do you remember the use of the word "non-essential" from covid times? Many people in 2020 were informed – by email, or phone, or in-person – that they were considered “non-essential.”
Friends, you and I are not what we do. Our worth is not rooted in our jobs. Our value lies in Something far deeper and more eternal than our occupations...
If God has called you to something in the past – whether it was to faith in Him, or to a particular task, or to a person, or a place, or a direction – and you responded with a "no" to Him... If God was leading you to forgive someone, or to trust again, or to let go of something, or to pick up something else – but you said "no"... If God was telling you to empty your hands, or to release your grudge, or to believe in His goodness again – but you refused... You can change your mind. There's still time. You can turn to Him, trust in Him, and obey what He said. There's still time to say "yes" to God.
A friend recently asked me a piercing question that I want to share with you. He asked me right after I had shared about a multi-year journey of breaking free from an addiction earlier in my life. As we talked, I shared with him that the tide-turners that God used in my life to set me free were: #1-telling others, and #2-Scripture memory...
“Listening prayer” is pursuing the purposes of God by meditating on the Word of God & words of God. Praying to God is great! He wants us to share all our thoughts and feelings with Him – all our needs and desires with Him. But we should also allow Him the opportunity to speak to us. It’s important to create space in our lives to listen to God – time that prioritizes His words and His voice over our own.
The hope of the resurrection changes everything! Lisa Williams joins us today to share on the topic of the resurrection, and how it can impact our everyday lives as followers of Jesus.
We’ve all felt it. A dilemma with no good solution. A situation that has you perplexed, stumped. You’ve tried everything you can think of, and you’re stuck... What if you could separate yourself from the thick of the issue for a moment and evaluate it objectively, in the third person? What if I told you... you can! Here's how:
Today we discuss the second of three questions we can ask our Father God, which can help us discern His will and pursue continued growth in Him as His children. If you want to grow in some life-role or virtue in your life, ask God in prayer and listen for His answer: "What would someone who is better at this life-role or virtue than me be doing?"
I'd like to offer you three questions to take to God in your prayers, which if you will ask them of God regularly, and allow Him time to respond, they will produce spiritual growth in your life. The first question is this: “Father, what do You think/feel about…"
Last time, we introduced the term "lament" as a Biblical expression of our grief directed to God. Today, our guest speaker Lisa Williams will show us the four elements of a lament: Turn, Lament, Ask, and Trust. Psalm 13 will be our example to help us understand how to lament according to the Bible.
Our guest on today's episode of The Practical Faith Podcast is Lisa Williams! Today, Lisa shares with us on the Biblical language of lament, what it means, and why it matters.
As people of faith, we can sometimes feel like we have to check this bias at the door. As if faith and reason were incompatible, mutually-exclusive worldviews. But they are not! Today, I’d like to appeal directly to this bias of logic, reason, and science, particularly as it pertains to the historical reliability of the Bible.
Let’s consider something for a moment: why did God choose to relate to us as Father? His creativity is unlimited. e literally could have chosen any kind of relationship that He could think of to relate to those rescued & redeemed by Christ, and He chose that of Father & children. This is not a metaphor or a figure-of-speech. This is literal – this is who He is, and this is who we are. In the Lord’s Prayer...
Christ shares His own eternal inheritance with those He has saved – and the inheritance He shares with us is so much more than physical properties and possessions. It is amazing to realize all that we inherit from God through Christ Jesus...
Today, I want to invite you into the lawyer’s office. But don’t worry! You’re not in trouble – in fact, quite the opposite! This is the office of a lawyer who determines the rightful heirs to an estate. This lawyer’s job is to follow the mandates of a written will, and to distribute the rightful inheritance of the estate to the legal heirs named in that will. Now in this metaphor, we can consider the Bible to be “The Will of God” – and for this episode, I have woven together a few significant teachings from the Christian Scriptures to provide a basic but powerful “will” for us to understand...
Most of the Bible was written to be understood literally, describing historical events that actually happened. There are some parts of the Bible, though, that were written in figurative language; they are poetic or didactic in nature, describing an indescribable God using the limited words we have, and using allegory to teach us about ultimate reality in Him...
Did you know that the truest things about you are the things God’s Spirit says about you? And if I could condense those things down into one, single word, it would be this one: BELOVED.
The following is a prayer I wrote in a moment of unique clarity with the Holy Spirit. I had just realized that it takes so much - so much! - for God to really have all of my full attention. It’s a hundred little things that I’m embarrassed to even say right now... All these layers upon layers of external and internal distraction... In this moment of clarity and realization, I scribbled the following prayer to God in my journal:
We see pain, and experience suffering... We see tragedy, despair, death... We don’t have to pretend like these realities are not difficult. The circumstances of unpredictable life take their toll on us over time. So what’s the answer? What are do we do? Today, I want to talk about telling somebody.
Today, we finish up a multi-episode series looking at the Jesus Way of Discipleship. This was the theme of a spiritual life retreat my family attended a few years ago with a pastor, counselor, and speaker named Barry Brown.
The second phase of the Jesus Way of Discipleship is “FORMATION.” The wilderness is a sacred space of formation in the Scriptures. The wilderness is where God sends His best. It’s where God takes His people to FORM in them the new identity that He gave them at their baptism. The wilderness is where Christian character is formed...
I am excited to get to bring you a guest on today’s episode of “Practical Faith.” Lisa Williams is a gifted young minister, worship leader, and writer, and she has a unique calling to grief ministry. Lisa loves serve and support and journey with people who have experienced a loss in their lives. And today, Lisa will share with us about the important role of grief in the life of a Christ-follower.
Welcome back to “Practical Faith!” Over several consecutive episodes, I am sharing with you some of the notes and insights I took away from a wonderful spiritual life retreat I attended a few years ago. Our retreat speaker was a man named Barry Brown, and the retreat theme was “Following Jesus and Becoming Like Him.”
Thomas à Kempis, in his book The Imitation of Christ, said, “Choose one thing to learn from Christ each year, and soon you will be like Him.” So, what is the next step for you? What’s your next 'one thing’ that God is calling you to focus on this year to become more like Christ? If you do this, then in a few years you will “soon be like Him”!
Let’s reset our view on this together: there is a big difference between a bribe and a reward...
YOU are all strategically positioned – by the Lord Jesus – in homes, in schools, in businesses – for Kingdom impact in a way that pastors and missionaries like me long for! We wish we could have the impact in people’s homes, schools, and businesses that you all have!
Callings from God are not ranked. Some are not better or more impressive or more important than others. What is most important is humble obedience. Faithfully serving God right where you are is the very highest calling.
Jesus wants to meet you in your place of pain, your place of failure, of disappointment. He wants to meet you there so that He can deal with it and heal you there.
Today's episode is in response to a listener's question: What do you do if you've prayed about something for a long time and just can't sense any clear answer or direction from the Lord?
Today I'll share with you a statement that was sent to me from a moral relativist – this is a person who opposes the idea moral absolutes – and the response I sent back.
Following the prayer model provided by Jesus in Matthew 6:10, I decided to let that sentence be a template for my prayers, replacing the words “on earth” with other personalized places and locations that I wanted to specifically ask for God’s kingdom to come and His will to be done:
Given my life circumstances, it is likely that I will die someday as a result of consumption or entertainment... This prospect is beginning to eclipse my fear of persecution and martyrdom.
Today I want to address four common questions to help you in leading your family’s daily devotional times. The goal is not perfection, but progress – and practice makes progress.
When our kids were 9, 8, and 5, Dianna and I decided to make our family vacation into a family spiritual retreat by adding a special devotional experience into each day. Here's what we did:
In today’s episode, I will provide a sample one-week plan that you can use to guide your family’s daily devotional time on vacation. Each day will include simple instructions for training your kids how to spend meaningful time alone with God, followed by age-appropriate questions for debriefing your experiences together afterwards.
With just a little extra planning and intentionality, you can also make your family vacation into a family spiritual retreat.
There are as many different routines for one’s devotional life as there are followers of Jesus! My hope here is to provide one example that might help spark you to develop your own personalized routine.
If you don’t have any idea where you are on this journey of redemption & salvation – and you just kind-of checking Jesus out – and you are just exploring to see if this faith-in-Jesus thing is for you – that’s okay! That’s great, actually – just keep on exploring. Jesus Himself invites you to!
Today, let’s look at the alternative to sanctification: what if we are “only justified”? What of those who “get saved,” but then don’t really do anything else? Aren’t they still saved?
The life of walking with Jesus, learning from Him, listening to Him, practicing obedience, learning to live by the power of His Spirit – it’s a lifelong process known as sanctification. It's hard work, but so worth it!
So here we are, in this in-between time. For those of us who have trusted in the saving work of Jesus on our behalf, we live between new birth – and earthly death. And some days, it is so hard. And other days, it is more amazing than we ever dreamed possible! What’s going on? Why does it feel like this? What's happening in the Christian's life between salvation and heaven?
Salvation is so much more than just forgiveness from sin and the hope of heaven. Salvation through Jesus certainly includes those wonderful things – but it also includes so much more!
Do you want so badly to be wholly devoted to Jesus? And yet, you constantly feel like you are at war with temptation and sinful desires? I know I do. What can we do about it? How can we close the gap between who we are and who we want to be?
In the previous episode, I challenged our younger listeners to get to know God NOW, as early as you can! On today’s episode, I want to talk about how to do that. How do you get to know God, personally?
There is a repeated theme all throughout the Bible that I don’t want you to miss. And this is it: don’t wait until you’re all grown-up to get to know God personally, for yourself. Don’t wait until you are an adult to become a passionate and fully-devoted follower of Jesus! You don’t have to wait!
God knows each one of us, personally and individually. You are not distant from, unknown to, or forgotten by God; You are remembered & personally known by Him. He holds you very close in His heart!
The Almighty God and Creator of the universe is not a cold, distant, and impersonal God. He could have kept Himself hidden from humanity if He wanted to, but instead, He has made Himself known to the world! – most perfectly through the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of His Son Jesus, and then in the Holy record of the Christian Scriptures known as The Bible.
There is a huge difference between actually knowing God vs. only knowing information about God. But God is knowable! He has made Himself known to humanity in a variety of wonderful ways, and we can know God...
Things for us drastically change when the real-but-distant God becomes close, personal, and known to us in a relational, friendship kind-of-way...
Today, we will wrap up this series on fasting and its role in the life of a Christ-follower with just a few suggestions for you to consider and a few precautions for you to be aware of as well:
Fasting is never a stand-alone activity. If you were to search out every instance of fasting in the Bible, you would find that fasting is always accompanied by prayer, or some other means of connecting oneself more deeply with God.
Recently on “Practical Faith,” we defined what fasting is and looked at why it is practiced. Today, let’s look at what fasting is NOT:
Today we are looking into examples of people who fasted in the Bible to discover why God’s people fasted in the past and what that means for us about fasting today.
Today on “Practical Faith,” we begin our series on fasting and prayer, and our goal for today’s episode is to answer the question: “What is fasting?”
Spiritual activities like prayer and fasting are a "means of grace" – that is, they are ways, channels, avenues – through which God’s gracious goodness can flow into our lives.
Today PF, I want to tell you a love story. This is a real-life story of two God-loving people who, even through mistakes, sought to listen to and honor God as best they could in their daily decisions and found true romance through sacrificial love.
My hope is that these words would give you fresh lenses for seeing all that Jesus is, and has been, and could be, in your life through faith.
Over these next two episodes of “Practical Faith,” I want to share with you a bit of my own personal testimony of faith in Jesus...
As a working parent, you only get so much focused time with your kids each day. However, you are the only Mom or Dad your children will ever have. They need you, they need your undivided attention, and certain moments are more significant in their day than others.
Nothing compares to the depth and richness of authentic Christ-centered community. Those who have experienced it know it’s unmatched value. They also know that it does not come without loyal, mutual investments of time, energy, and emotion among its participants.
Turning from a life lived apart from faith in Jesus and toward a life of believing He is who the Bible says He is – that is just the beginning! That’s just the first step...
As far as historical documents go, the Christian Scriptures by far surpass the nearest reliable historical documentation in both quantity and quality. No other records in the history of humanity come anywhere close to the number of real, certifiable manuscripts of the Christian Bible.
How do we know that everything in the Bible is true? How do we know that Jesus did all the things that the Bible says He did?
Our faith isn’t about us – it’s about the thing we are putting our faith in. In this case, our faith is not in our own strength or abilities, but in the nature and character of God.
“Faith is living as if the promise of God for the future is certain and the power of God for the present is real.” – Dr. Gary Cockerill
Ephesians 6:16 says, “Take up the shield of faith with which you will be able to extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.”When I recently read this verse, I thought, “how is faith like a shield?”
So often in life, we don’t know what to pray for. Particularly when the circumstances seem overwhelming , we come to God, and we are… wordless. Flip open your Bible to the Psalms, and you will find 150 sample prayers that hundreds of millions of believers have lifted up to God over thousands of years.
John Ortberg: “If a person wants to grow spiritually, what would your advice be? Where should they start?” Dallas Willard: “Do the next right thing you know you ought to do.”
God calls each one of us to do lot of different things – big and small – all throughout the course of our lives.
James 5:16 teaches us to confess our sins to one another and pray for one another. We need each other. We cannot battle our sin alone. But I submit to you that confession and prayer within the community of faith does not have to wait until sin has already occurred...
Today, I have a question for you to consider, followed by a story to share. Here’s the question: should I do good, even if I have the wrong motives?
The best gift we can give someone is passion for the Word of God! Whether it’s our own kids, our friends and families, our coworkers, or someone we’re discipling...
Meghan Gross leads us in a brief reflection on the brevity of life, and asks, "What if we daily lived with the recognition that life is short and death is real? Because if we really know that we are going to die, we’ll change the way we live."
Today’s episode comes courtesy of Meghan Gross, recorded in 2019 when she was a Church Leadership major at LaGrange College and was completing an Internship in Pastoral Leadership at Christ Community Church in Columbus, Georgia.
Last night, I sat down and wrote my wife a letter, and something quite unexpected happened. I found that in the act of focused thinking about her, I found myself adoring and desiring her more and more! These focused moments of concentrating on and listing out all of her amazing qualities, her character, her personality – I was falling in love with her all over again!
Several places in the Bible, we are instructed to “put on Christ.” Have you ever wondered what that actually means? How do we “put on Christ” in our lives?
There are multiple different modes of prayer, and they can all be employed regularly in our lives to create a more diverse and complete relationship of communication with God.
Confession time: I do a bunch of unreligious stuff in prayer. Sometimes I speak to God in real, raw, unfiltered ways that I wouldn’t ever be able to speak to another person. But all these unfiltered, unreligious things I do – with God. In prayer.
How do we corral all our scattered thoughts during prayer? I have five suggestions here that can make the reality of distractions in prayer easier to manage:
Oh God... what if all I do is raise “good” kids?! Do I want good kids, or do I want faith-filled kids? Do I want polite kids, or do I want Spirit-led world-changers? Do I want well-behaved kids, or kids who know and love Jesus with all their hearts and minds? I know we don’t have to choose – we can have both – but, Lord, in my parenting, have I focused more on behavior and conduct rather than faith and recognizing the fingerprints of God all throughout my kids’ world?
“I don’t know if God is real,” he said. He was 9 years old. Such honesty. Such genuine, pure, honest thought, verbalized. No pretense. No past animosity towards the church, no legalism or any of the other things that people wrongly blame God for. Just pure, honest doubt. But for a moment, I panicked on the inside.
It was my very first missions arrival ceremony; I should have been out with everyone else, cheering on the beginning of a new field service... Instead, I was down in my office with the door closed, experiencing a significant spiritual assault...
Have you ever wondered why God sent Jesus to the place and time that He did? Why Galilee in the 1st century? And what that means for us - why God chose the times and places of our lives that He did?
The Bible is a mine whose treasures can never be fully and completely exhausted; I love the new insights to be gained every time it is opened! As followers of Jesus, we delight in the Word of the Lord, for from it flows help, health, encouragement, instruction, solution, challenge – and life from the Author and authority of life.
A solid Christian marriage is one of the most spiritually impactful institutions there is: a man and woman who are committed to loving and honoring each other in the Name of Jesus for the rest of their lives is extraordinarily powerful for the glory of God and the expansion of His Kingdom on the earth! On today's episode of Practical Faith, I want to share 6 more pieces of practical marriage advice that Dianna and I like to give to married couples on their wedding day.
Dianna and I have been blessed through the years to be able to do some marriage mentoring with a number of wonderful couples ahead of their wedding days. We’ve spent many hours together with engaged couples – talking, sharing, laughing, praying, answering questions – exploring God’s best for Christian marriage together. We’ve done Biblical studies with couples, and book studies using a variety of great Christian curriculums and resources. For their wedding ceremonies, I like to share a few last words of practical encouragement and challenge with the couples as they embark on the wonderful journey of marriage together. What follows are 5 pieces of practical marriage advice that I like to share with couples on their wedding day:
Today we will look at the second necessity of leadership, which is, attentiveness. Applied in the home, we as men (as husbands and fathers) must have an active awareness of the current status of our family and to know the needs of each family member in terms of spiritual direction.
If you have anyone living in your home who looks to you for any level of care, then you have a sacred calling and commission from God to be the spiritual leader of your home. There are two primary necessities to spiritual leadership in the home, and today’s episode of Practical Faith will be about the first: which is initiative.
Have you ever walked a labyrinth? A labyrinth is winding one-way path marked out on the ground or through a field. Christians have been using labyrinths for centuries as a way to engage in “contemplative prayer” (which is sort of a fancy way to say "a beautifully relational conversation with God").
What's is God's will for our lives? What is our assignment from Jesus? To stay attached to the Vine, so that His life can flow through us and produce fruit in and through our lives. If a branch is separated from the Vine, it can’t do anything. It produces nothing.
When our circumstances in life change – like when we move to a new town or a new job or a new school, or our best friend moves away, or there is a tragedy or some other big change comes in our lives – often the first thing we question is the will of God: What does God want me to do now? What is God’s will for my life?
The basic foundations of a consistent time alone with God are to get alone; choose a place; set an appointment; and make it a habit. Once you are alone, you have your spot picked out, you have your time picked out – then what? What can you actually do to make your daily time alone with God special? Here are ten more ideas to get your creativity going!
Today, I want to share with you 10 ideas of things to do during your time alone with God. Remember last time we talked about the basics: get alone; choose a place; set an appointment; and make it a habit. Once you’re there, though, what do you actually do when spend a few minutes alone with the Lord? Here are 10 ideas:
Spending time alone with God is not about completing a task or fulfilling some legalistic spiritual requirement. It is about nurturing the relationship with your Father and Savior who loves you and wants to share more of His heart and Spirit with you, as His beloved child. It is about abiding in Him and in His love (John 15) so that His life can flow into us, fill us up, and flow through us.
Jesus promised to be with us forever. And He fulfilled His promise by sending His own Spirit to be with us, forever. Emmanuel. May God bless you with His Presence, purposes, power, provision, and peace this Christmas.
In Matthew 18, Jesus was asked “who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?" He then called a little child forward to stand beside Him – what was it about the child that you think Jesus was referring to? What qualities does a 4-year-old have that is important to the success of relationships?
Jesus shows the connection between relational and behavioral holiness in a dramatic and unprecedented encounter with a group of lawyers eager to rightfully exercise capital punishment upon a criminal condemned to die in John 8.
Relational holiness takes precedence over behavioral holiness. Ephesians 2:8-10 says, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God…. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” So not only is salvation itself an indescribable gift of grace, but also the very abilities to obey God, do good works, and produce fruit – these all come only by grace as well, through our resurrected relationship with Him.
As a father, it is more important to me that my kids talk to me than that they never disobey me. The most valuable thing to me for my children is the honesty, intimacy, and constancy of our relationships together. Their behavior matters, of course. But our relationships together matter more...
All throughout the Bible, God calls His people to holiness – “be holy as I am holy." But what is holiness? Is it being perfect? Is it never sinning? Or is it more than that? It is critical for us to have a right understanding of what God’s call for human holiness is all about, and this is what I see in God’s Word: it is an invitation into His divine intimacy.
In today’s episode, we will highlight two key assurances the Bible provides in 1 John to help us as followers of Jesus to know that we can be certain of our relationship with God and of our standing before God.
Practicing sin is different than committing a one-off mistake. Practicing sin is different than giving in to a single moment of weakness. Jesus’ life of sinless perfection is the ideal to which we are to aspire. As we are born of God, we take our nature from Him, and thus, we aspire to His righteousness by practicing it.
Today, we will wrap up our multi-episode look at John chapter 9, and the example we have in the man that Jesus healed of blindness. This man barely knows Jesus, but his life has been transformed by Jesus, and so he shares his simple faith with boldness.
We all have a story to tell. If you have been saved and redeemed by Jesus into the family of God, then you have a story to tell! Don’t be scared off from sharing your faith just because someone may ask you a question that you cannot answer. And don’t be afraid to honestly admit what you do not know.
One of the primary fears that can keep us from sharing our Christian faith with others is the fear that someone will ask us a question about Jesus, or God, or suffering, or anything – and we won’t know the answer. There is grace for this, and if we make an honest mistake, God is big enough to handle it.
An honest “I don’t know” is an asset in faith-sharing, not a liability. Don’t be afraid of it. We have permission to admit what we do not know or fully understand about Jesus. The man we meet in John 9 is not hindered in his ability to share his faith by what he does not know, but he was empowered to share what he DID know with confidence, because it was rooted in an undeniable, personal experience with Jesus!
Stories like the one in John 9 give me great hope, because they encourage me that anyone can share their faith effectively without having to be an expert in Christian apologetics.
Psalm 136 provides us with a simple template for composing our own, personalized Psalm of worship to God. I want to invite you to think with me – to imagine with me, from your own personal experience of the goodness and faithfulness of God in your life...
Are there any specific moments or instances in your own personal history for which the Lord is worthy of worship? Of adoration? of thanksgiving through song? In today's episode, I want to do is stoke your imaginations and fuel your memories for praising God for His past goodness, deliverance, and provision for you!
If you were to put your own experience into a song of worship to God, what kinds of things would you want to say? What kinds of blessings and deliverances and provisions from God would you want to commemorate with your song?
Today’s episode of “Practical Faith” will be a creative one – I want to invite you to use your imagination as we talk together today about some of our personal favorite songs of worship, and what about them makes them favorites...
In today’s episode, we will see these two primary characteristics of God – His holiness and His love - working together in His relationship with His people. God disciplines those He loves.
I see a lot of God’s character in my grandfather - particularly his love for his family and his devotion to doing the right thing, even when the right thing hurts. There is a section in the Bible between the Psalms and the New Testament where we see these two characteristics of God – His profound love and His devotion to doing what is right and best even when it hurts – we see these two characteristics of God demonstrated among the people of Israel and the nations that surrounded Israel. This section of the Bible is known as “The Prophets”...
We were not meant to be dead-ends for the work God is doing in us. That work that is flowing into us should also flow out of us - where appropriate, and where it can benefit another present or future follower of Jesus - Tell Somebody!
The story of Immanuel (God is with us) that is found in Daniel 3 is amazing! And it reminds us of an essential truth: God is not just faraway up in heaven, wishing you the best. God does not stand outside of your pain and injustice. He is right there, in the flames, with you. He is standing right beside you in the heat and the smoke and the fires of your life.
Have you ever heard the story of the disciples of Jesus, who were stuck out on the sea in their fishing boat in the midst of a violent storm? The winds were so fierce and the waves were in such tumult, that they thought they were going to die! And where was Jesus? Look back at Mark 4 – where is Jesus in this story? He is right there with them. He is in the boat with them. And He speaks from within the midst of the storm: Peace. Be still. And the winds, and the waves, they obey His voice.
Today’s episode is pure fuel! If today, you are in need of some encouragement, please turn up your dial and focus in, because I want to share some words of encouragement with you in your everyday followership of Jesus.
As followers of Jesus, we need Leviticus, and here’s why: it is very difficult for us to understand Jesus without understanding Leviticus. It is hard for Christians living in the 21st Century to fathom the depth of Christ’s sacrifice for us and for our sins without understanding the sacrificial system that is so thoroughly explained in Leviticus.
What if the thing God wants to set us apart from is our separation from Him? Holiness sets apart. And holiness seeks to separate us from our apartness from God, drawing us into ever more intimate and communal togetherness with Him. Holiness sets apart; holiness draws together.
We grow in holiness as we obey in faith, which requires effort. Effort does not mean we "earn" our salvation - effort simply means we are active (not passive) participants in our own salvation journey. He does the saving! And we are to actively cooperate with His saving grace at work in our lives.
Growing in Christ could be compared to language learning. Have you ever tried to learn a new language? It takes more than lectures and books and memorization. You can’t just learn a language - it’s got to get in you, and that requires immersion...
John chapters 14-16 are Jesus’ biography of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit’s chief attribute is holiness, and it is clear from Jesus that He wants His Holy Spirit to live with us and dwell in the hearts and lives of His disciples. And that includes us.
God’s expectation of us as followers of Jesus is that we would be holy. However, only God alone is holy, and we are incapable of holiness on our own. How then does God work in us and with us to make us holy in Him?
Everyone on planet earth needs a mentor, coaching them along toward their next stage of growth or maturity. Even professional athletes have trainers and coaches, helping the best in the world get better! This applies to Christian discipleship as well. No matter how old, mature, or experienced you become, you always need someone in your life challenging you to take that next step in your faith development.
I bet you’ve felt it, too. In the midst of even the best circumstances or the worst, maybe you’ve had the sense that something fuller, deeper, stronger, more pure, more whole, more complete is out there than either the temporal junk or the wonderful euphoria we are currently experiencing. If you’ve ever felt that way, you’re right.
Knowing who Jesus is, who He is not, and why that distinction matters helps us understand what it means for us to follow Him and to be His disciples.
In Mark chapter 8, Jesus reveals to His disciples for the first time that He, as Messiah, would have to suffer and die. But this did not fit into their boxes of who Jesus was supposed to be and what He was supposed to accomplish as Messiah. Jesus then leverages this crucial moment to clarify for His disciples how they had been thinking wrongly about Him, and why that matters so much.
Jesus is interested in who you say that He is. Not just your parents, or your church, or your denomination, or your friends, or your co-workers. YOU. Who do you say that He is?
The people of Jesus’ day had all kinds of opinions as to who Jesus was, and the people of our day have all kinds of opinions as to who Jesus is. But the question He poses to each of us is, "Who do YOU say that I am?"
Some may have a negative reaction against recited prayers because they can feel unoriginal and insincere. But it is important to remember that the Bible is filled with beautiful prayers that we recite all the time.
Many Godly Christians have gone before us – many who walked closely with God and shared an intimate relationship with His Spirit. Some of them wrote down their prayers centuries ago, and our relationships with God can be enhanced by their examples and experiences today.
Holy Spirit-infused rituals are tangible ways that God gets hold of us, reorients us, and empowers us to be his image-bearers. In the Sunday morning worship service, we are training our minds, our spirits, and our bodies – we are training our whole selves - for the ongoing (day-in, day-out) worship of God.
Worship is supposed to be about what we our offering to God: our heart, our attention, our openness to Him, our response to His guidance. But sadly many churches have turned worship into a Christianized form of public entertainment. And some church leaders have, in a way, trained their people to expect a show. We’ve come looking for a performance – we want to be impressed – so when we’re not, we leave thinking, “I didn’t really get very much out of that…”
This is what Christians are called to do: to go to pain – to run towards places of hurting – and to bring whatever tools we have – our testimonies & experiences – our God-given talents & skills – to offer people hope in Jesus – in person – with both our words and our lives lived among them.
When my strategies fail, when my willpower gives way (for the millionth time), when the enslaving power of my pet sin kicks my meager solutions in the teeth, I am left with nothing but naked faith. Bare, unassisted trust in the Deliverer.
The center for religious life has always been the home. Unfortunately, many Christians believe it is God’s purpose that the Church function as the main formative influence in the spiritual development of the family. But nothing in God’s plan [not even the Church] was ever intended to replace the home as bearing primary responsibility for imparting Christian values and insuring Godly nourishment and growth for each family member.
1/6th of the American population attends public school. If God is calling you to missions in America, there is a 15.7% chance that He may be calling you to teach (and maybe coach?) at a public school near you.
Nick discusses the influence and impact of Richard Stephens, a man who lived faithfully and led with Christ-centered integrity for 50 years in the automobile industry.
Dianna Cash provides some simple instructions on how to practice listening prayer in your daily time alone with God.
Last time on “Practical Faith”, I discussed the hardships of life in community, and this time, I want to talk about the tremendous beauty and joy and growth that only life in community can produce.
Community life is hard. Life is easier and less complicated when we are insulated from community. Community life means we all share in the hardships and difficulties of our common community life, together. And it’s hard! But it is also more beautiful and valuable than we could have ever imagined before we experienced it..
Philippians 2:12 is an interesting Bible verse. It says, “Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling”. Today, I wanted to dive a bit deeper into the meaning of this verse and how it applies to our everyday lives as followers of Jesus.
Spiritual formation is not just an individual pursuit, but it is something we do together. You are not just an assistant in my journey, and I in yours. We are co-journeyers – we are traveling companions as fellow followers of Jesus!
The message of the Bible about the Christian life is that it is OURS more than it is just "mine" and "yours." Our spiritual formation, our journey of discipleship. Together. The reality that the Bible is more addressed to “you all” than to the individual “you” will forever change the way I view “my” spiritual growth versus “yours."
In the past, I have mistakenly viewed discipleship as a primarily individual pursuit. Until now. The writers of the New Testament emphasized the communal nature of spiritual formation: most of Paul’s references to “you” in his writings were not to an individual or singular “you”, but to the corporate and plural form of “you."
I wonder: how many precious and wonderful moments have I missed out on personally experiencing because I was too busy “sharing” them for the world to see? Instead of being a fully-engaged participant in the moment itself, I’m merely an observer of the experience... But every so often (or maybe even more frequently) there are things that God wants us to cherish as a sacred and special moment in our hearts and memories. Maybe some experiences are just for us, our loved ones, our community, our families…
Jesus taught His disciples to keep prayer simple. In Matthew 7:7-8, Jesus makes three statements about prayer. We discussed the first of those 2 statements on the previous episode... Today, I want focus in on the 3rd statement, which is: “Knock and the door will be opened to you… to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”
Prayer is simple - or at least it should be simple. God made it to be simple; we tend to make it overly complex. There are no magic words for prayer. There is no secret formula to prayer. Just talk; just listen. Just like you would in any other conversation. Jesus gives us a simple understanding for prayer in Matthew 7:7-8...
When your inner self-speech is filled with accusation and condemnation, it is caustic and corrosive to your soul. Instead, let God’s Spirit dictate your inner monologue. His thoughts about you are life-giving, life-strengthening, life-expanding!
Guilt and shame are not from your heavenly Father. Neither are condemnation or accusation. But sadly, these are the common feelings in the life of a disciple struggling to live and love like Jesus. But they are not from God...
As we become more like Christ, we don’t just dissolve into carbon copies of Him... In Him, we become more fully and completely and perfectly ourselves that He intended us to be – individually, specifically, reflecting the character of Jesus in the unique lives He has given us.
Here are 6 practical strategies for safe-guarding your marriage against developing any kind of extra-marital romance...
God’s best for us is not that we see how perilously close we can get to sin - without technically sinning. Our goal should not be to remain just technically pure. The question should be, “How close to Jesus can I be?” And this goes for every issue in life, not just a dating relationship...
The Holy Spirit of God gives life first to our BEING, and then to our DOING. I think this can be one of the most challenging and difficult aspects of Christian living. It’s not that our spiritual activities don’t matter. What we do as Christians is quite important. The point is this, though: what we do is secondary to WHO WE ARE. Our identity as God’s beloved, redeemed, adopted children - into whom He has poured His own Spirit! - is primary. Then, our doing can (and should!) flow out of our being.
We’ve spent several episodes talking about Bible memorization – the importance of it, how our brains are wired for memorization, tips for how to actually memorize Scripture. Today, I want to talk about the WHY, and I want to let God’s Word speak for itself as to why it is so vital to memorize it...
The human mind has an incredible capacity for memory. We remember song lyrics, birthdays, phone numbers, cooking recipes, faces, names, TV show theme songs, movie quotes – it goes on and on – and we want to leverage that same ability to memorize God’s Word.
Today’s episode of Practical Faith is directed toward couples, whether married, engaged, or dating. I want to share with you a simple plan for daily devotions together with your spouse, fiancé, or gf/bf.
I met with a lot of frustrations in my spiritual journey in that first year after I fully committed my life to Christ. But then I began to experience extraordinary life change and tremendous spiritual growth once I started memorizing Scripture. Jesus teaches us in the story from Matthew 12 that when you remove the bad from your life, you have to put good right there in its place, or else the bad will come rushing back in to fill the void with even more detrimental force than it had when it left!
Memorizing Scripture is one of the very best things we can do for our spiritual health and growth. But – it can be intimidating! I have good news for you though: I bet you already know more Scripture than you think you do! The fact is, we all memorize tons of information all the time! We all have a LOT more committed to memory than we realize...
I truly surrendered my life to Jesus at age 17. In the year that followed, I faced many frustrations in my new walk with the Lord, and the most tremendous change came when I met a young man who introduced me to the power of Scripture memory...
We frequently talk about “our Lord-and-Savior, Jesus Christ”. Well, for me, the truth is, when I was 9, I did ask Jesus to be my “Savior”. But I didn’t really ask Him to be “Lord” over my life until I was 17. When I did, the tone and direction of my life drastically shifted...
Today on Practical Faith, I want to share a few tips with you that has helped our devotions to be more engaging and effective for our family. At our house, we do this about 3-4 days a week, and our devotions last for about 15-20 minutes each day. We typically do it over dinner or lunch, depending on the day of the week and what activities we have going on that day...
Today on Practical Faith, we’ll wrap up a series on Family Devotions at Mealtime. So far, we’ve talked about singing a short song of worship; reciting a classic Prayer, Creed, or Scripture passage together; reading & talking through a few verses from the Old & New Testaments; and reviewing a few simple questions-&-answers on the Christian faith known as a catechism. Today, we will focus on the final element of our family’s mealtime devotion together – and that is family prayer...
In today’s episode of Practical Faith, we continue talking through the Family Devotions routine we use at our house over mealtime. My intention is not that you would copy these instructions exactly, but use them as a way to begin thinking about how you could integrate spiritual nourishment into your family mealtime routines.
Over the next three of episodes of Practical Faith, I want to provide deeper explanations of each of the simple elements of Family Devotions at Mealtime. I am hopeful that these explanations will answer any questions and calm any fears that you may have about beginning family devotions with your family around the dinner table.
When Dianna and I created our Family Discipleship Plan together, our kids were 7, 6, and 2, and we decided to have a major part of our plan revolve around our daily family mealtime together. We made a decision to reserve dinner as a sacred hour for our family, as often as we could, to gather around the table with the expressed purpose of connecting with each other and with God (and, for eating food together, of course!).
Some weeks were better than others, but over the years, I would say we average between 3-4 days a week of actually sharing in this special family meal together with family discipleship as a primary component of the meal. Today, I will give you a sneak-peak into the mealtime routine that we have developed...
What’s your plan for praying with your kids? How and when do you actually do it? Moms and Dads want to pray with their kids, but can struggle to pinpoint exactly how & when to do it each day... I struggled myself as a younger parent – I would do it several times a month, but it was just scattered & sporadic – I didn’t have a real solid plan like I would’ve liked, and I heard similar sentiments from other parents...
When I was a younger man with very young children, I loved God & I loved my family, but I knew little about being the spiritual leader of my home. If you had asked me to describe the specific role God had given me as head of my household, I probably would have stammered through a nonspecific response that offered little in the way of practical application... I needed a plan to help my disciple my family to become obedient disciples of Jesus...
What’s your next step? When we entrust our lives to Jesus and submit ourselves to His will, we set out on an exciting, lifelong journey of walking with and growing with God! But we rarely stop to identify a strategic path for our own growth...
If we will take the time to ask God to help us select specific targets to shoot for – for the next month, or year – your next step in your journey with Jesus – then you will know where to aim, you can measure your progress, AND you can celebrate the steps you take forward toward that goal with God!
Picture in your mind an archer’s bow and a quiver of arrows. Now, in the sport of archery, what you aim at is obviously quite important! But in our journey of faith with Jesus, we often just shoot our “spiritual growth” arrows quite aimlessly. Instead, let's determine our targets before we fire our spiritual growth “arrows” from the bow. In our spiritual lives, it is important to talk with God and ask Him to help us set our targets for spiritual growth first...
Trusting God completely means having faith that He knows what’s best for your life. Why doesn’t the tree in Jeremiah 17 worry in times of drought, while the bush can’t even SEE the blessings when they come? Because the tree has sent its roots down deep, to where a more eternal source of nourishment is located...
Trusting God is an act of worship. Psalm 147 tells us that even though God created everything - and He certainly takes pleasure in all of His creation - His greatest joy comes when we place our complete trust in Him. After wrestling with this for a season, I felt like God was saying to me, “Nick, stop trying to figure Me out. Just walk with Me in obedience and get to know Me. And I will give you understanding.”
Hebrews 11 is like the Hall of Fame for Biblical heroes. Some have even called it the "Hall of Faith." These people trusted in God, not because their lives were perfect and pain-free. Quite the opposite! They chose to trust in God in & through & because of & in spite of the challenging circumstances in their lives...
Jeremiah 17:7-8 says, “Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord and whose confidence is in God. He will be like a tree planted by the living streams of water, which sends down its roots beneath the stream. He will not fear when the heat comes, nor despair in the year of drought. His leaves will always be green, and he will never fail to produce fruit in season.”
The phrase “Like Trees Planted” has been significant in my life with Jesus. It summarizes my goal in raising my own children in the Lord, and in serving other Christians as a pastor. It is also what I chose to name my web site of free discipleship resources online: LikeTreesPlanted.com. The foundational Scripture for this phrase is Jeremiah 17:5-8. This Scripture demonstrates the desired outcome for people’s lives as they follow the Lord and cooperate with Him in faith as He is forming Christ-like character in their lives...
Fasting and prayer remind our physical bodies that there is another more important appetite – a hunger and a thirst for God. To fast is to give up something in your life to make more room for God. Fasting is about starving the flesh and feeding the spirit. When you fast and pray, you starve out the sinful desires within you, and you indulge the spiritual hunger for God within you.
Have you ever experienced a failure in life that you thought disqualified you from being loved by God, accepted by God, used by God? What do you do? When my own son makes a mistake, when he sins, what do I want him to do? As his father, what do I desire from my son after he makes a mistake? 1-be honest – talk to me about it, 2-take responsibility to make it right, and then 3-move on, confident in my unchanged love for him, approval of him, and delight in him.
In previous episodes, I’ve highlighted 7 essential Scriptures related to failure and falling INTO God’s loving, restorative grace. In today’s edition of Practical Faith, I’d like to continue discussing the concept of falling forward by focusing in on one of the Bible’s most amazing stories of redemption: Jesus’ beach-side breakfast with Peter in John 21:1-17.
The reality is, we all fall. So, what is most important is how we respond to falling: Do you fall away from God’s love? Do you fall away from your faith in Him? Or do you fall into Him, into His grace, into His redemptive abilities? Do you fall back upon your faith in His transforming power? Today, we will talk about what to do, and how to respond, when you fall or fail as a follower of Jesus.
When my kids were learning to walk, one of the very first things I taught them was how to fall. Knowing how to fall is crucial for good, confident walking – for walking without fear of falling. Like children learning to walk, we are going to fall. How does our heavenly Father want us to respond to and deal with falling? In today’s episode, I want to talk about how to fall in such a way that gives us confidence for walking with Christ.
We learn from Job 1:6 and Zechariah 3:1 that the name “Satan” actually means “accuser”. Shame comes from “the father of lies...who was a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44). Jesus reminds us that “there is no truth in [Satan]” and that he “comes only to steal, kill, and destroy” (John 10:10). The accuser of our souls achieves his murderous purposes for us when we accept his condemnation of us before God as our own. But Jesus sits in the place of honor at the right hand of God and defends us before the Almighty! Jesus repels the accusations of Satan, and we are vindicated in Christ before God!
The feelings of guilt and shame do NOT come from your loving, heavenly Father! Neither do condemnation or accusation! Sadly, these are common feelings in the life of a disciple striving to live and love like Jesus. But they are not from God. I disappoint myself constantly, and I project my own feelings of disappointment, disdain, and disgust onto God, as if that must be how He feels about me - how He sees me. But this is a projection of my own sinful, finite nature onto Him who is sinless and infinite! This is a horribly unBiblical and distorted view of my loving Heavenly Father that I fall into all the time! Do you make that same mistake?
Through the thousands of years that have gone by, the millions of stories that have been told in Christendom, and the billions of people that have walked the earth; from the Garden of Eden to the present, God has been the same God, and His Words have remained through it all. Isaiah 40:8 – “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands forever.” The God we sing about and pray to is the same God who created the universe, who penned the Bible, who walked on water, died on a cross, and is worshiped by angels in heaven! God’s Word is steadfast, constant, dependable, time-honored, proven by history, not some fad, and will still be here long after our lives and all fads and this world have ended.
The Bible is a miraculous book: the Almighty, the Eternal God & Creator of the universe and everything that exists – He revealed Himself and His will to mankind. He inspired specific individuals to record His revelation of Himself and His will, and those records have been preserved and passed down and translated into our own languages so that we can read and know the nature, the character, the heart of God, and the plan of God for our lives today. It’s amazing!
The Bible is the most amazing document in the history of humanity. No other document has been preserved and passed down so perfectly – not even close! The Bible is the autobiography of God. It is the record of Him, His character, His activities with and through mankind, and His plan for the complete restoration of creation. It is the guidebook for our life and faith as believers. As such, it is worthy of our highest attention – our deepest excavating! Today, I want to share with you 11 Bible facts that every believer should know. This is basic Biblical Literacy 101! Enjoy!
My wife can fall asleep in seconds. But it takes me 20-30 minutes, even when I’m exhausted! How do you redeem that time? What can you do with those moments - which are sometimes fearful, sometimes frustrating - that pass between turning off the light, and drifting off to sleep?
Today we tackle the big question of trust in God: How can we know God is trustworthy? Titus 1:2 tells us that “God cannot lie”. How can we know this is true? When the Biblical writers used the word hope - and they did so quite a lot, 180 times throughout the Bible! - they were referring to something they were absolutely certain would happen. There was no doubt in their minds that what they were hoping for would happen, because of Whom they were hoping in...
Hope in the Bible is not just wishful thinking; it is a future certainty based on the promises and character of our faithful promise-keeping God! According to 2 Corinthians 1:20-22, every single promise God has made is “Yes!” in Christ! How do we know this? How can we be sure? Because God has put His own Spirit in our hearts as a deposit to guarantee what is to come!
Biblical hope is real. It is sure. It is certain. It is guaranteed. Biblical hope is not like modern hope. The way we talk about “hope” today is nothing like the “hope” the Biblical writers spoke of. We use hope just to describe our wishful thinking. We use the word “hope” when what we really mean is that we “would like” for some particular thing to happen. We have no assurance that the things we are wishing for will actually happen. This “hoping” is based on nothing more than our own sense of preference. But when the Biblical writers spoke of hope, they had a completely different idea in mind. Their sense of hope was not based on their own desires and wishes, but in the faithfulness demonstrated by a trustworthy God...
Our lives are completely tied to our phones and our social media accounts – so much so that, if we are not careful, they will rob us of having any alone time with God. We have to be intentional to disconnect from the world – for just a few minutes each day – in order to reconnect with God. Here are 5 practical ways to do that...
Focused time alone together is the essence of any quality relationship. Now, I’m not anti-technology. I am SO thankful for phones and the internet! These things can be tremendous blessings, but sometimes, I have to lay aside the blessings of God in order to enjoy and commune with God Himself. On today's episode, I will share two simple ways to disconnect from the web in order to reconnect with God.
What is the #1 thief of our intimacy with God today? I would say that my relationship with God - that constant connection with Him - the intimacy I get to share with my Heavenly Father - is the most important thing in my life. If you’re listening to this, I bet you would say it’s pretty important to you, too. So, for me, it’s worth identifying and examining the things in my life that I allow to steal my time away from God...
Today, I’d like to answer the question: “Is the Old Testament really relevant to my life as a follower of Jesus today?” Our understanding of Jesus - who He was and what He was about - is directly linked to our understanding of the Old Testament! As followers of Jesus, it is essential for us to understand that the OT and the NT are inseparable. They are one volume - one book - one story - one continuous unbroken narrative of God’s redemptive work among mankind. In today's episode, I'll explain how.
In my late teens and early 20’s, I had quite a full, fun, and fulfilling life as a Christian. I liked going to church, playing music for God, and praying with friends... Then, I would read in the New Testament about the disciples’ sufferings for Christ, Stephen’s martyrdom, John the Baptist’s beheading, John’s exile... Paul and James both write repeatedly about “sharing in Christ’s sufferings”... I would read these words and think to myself, according to this, following Jesus should be MUCH harder and more painful than I am currently feeling!, and I would begin to feel guilty for the amount of enjoyment I was getting out of following Christ! Today's episode will help reconcile these duel realities of joy and suffering in following Jesus.
Today, I want to share with you a super-practical way to read your Bible that will help multiply your understanding of God’s Word. The Bible is made up of 66 smaller Books, and together they tell one Big Story, with one primary theme: God redeems. But we oftentimes lose sight of the unified Story of the Bible in our varied attempts to read it... How can we help ourselves understand the stories of Scripture as and when they happened, and appreciate the one Big Story that God’s Word is trying to tell us? In today's episode, I'll suggest one way how!
I have seen many students, peers, dear friends – even faithful Christians – who get stymied in their discipleship journey, simply because they felt they could not take the next step forward. Today's episode will help you get beyond that stuck place...
Discipleship is progressive, not stationary. It’s dynamic, not static. Active, not passive. The path of discipleship is a continuous journey of moving progressively forward – from one point on the journey onto the next – not haphazardly, but purposefully – following the leadership of Jesus’ Spirit - step, by step, by step...
Discipleship is not something we merely stumble upon, accidentally... Or like we wake up one day to be happily surprised that we somehow – inexplicably – resemble Christ! No, discipleship is a process that requires daily exercise. It is a constant practice that results – over time in cooperation with the Spirit – in maturity. In today's episode, we will look at one Biblical example of this...
I used to feel bad that I did not have some magnificent testimony of divine rescue... I did not come to faith in Christ in a prison cell or after decades of substance abuse... For many Christians, there was a single moment of life-change – a specific day of clarity – where the “light switch” of believing in & following Jesus drastically changed in their lives from “off” to “on”. For me, my conversion to Christ didn’t happen like that. I came to faith slowly, over the course of years. I know many other Christians like that – who stepped into belief – and released control of their lives to Christ's Lordship – slowly, over time...
The Great Commission of our Lord is to go and make disciples, not believers. The most important number in the Church today – the most critical statistic – is not the number of people who attend, it’s not even the number who believe in Jesus. The Bible tells us that even demons believe! The most vital gauge of the health, strength, and longevity of the Church is only this: the number of disciples being made...
In the previous episode, I explained how I personally interpret 1 Thessalonians 5:17 “pray without ceasing”. In this episode, we explore what would it look like to “never hang up the phone receiver on God,” but to always stay on the line, ready for communication, whether speaking or listening. Hear are 7 strategies that I have personally used to try to pray continuously...
1 Thessalonians 5:17 instructs us to “pray without ceasing”. How is this possible? Can it even be done? YES! The concept of “praying without ceasing” is not about logging hours on some cosmic time sheet, hoping we can eventually reach that perfect score of “24/7”. Pray without ceasing is about a mindset – a heartset – towards continual communication with God. This episode of Practical Faith explains how!
In this episode of Practical Faith, I share my prayer for anyone who is seeking to grow in their followership of Jesus. It is rooted in two Scriptures – Psalm 1:1-3 and Jeremiah 17:7-8. Listen to my prayer, and pray along with me! Then take a moment to read and to meditate upon these two Scriptures, and think: what prayer emerges out of your heart as you meditate on those words?
You CAN follow Jesus successfully! I used to feel constantly defeated in my walk with the Lord. But following Jesus is not about perfection; it’s about persistence. The phrase “practice makes perfect” is incorrect. Really, it’s “practice makes progress”. The successful Christian life is not about maintaining sinless perfection all the time. It is about a faithful life direction, pointing toward God, journeying forward, making steady, daily progress with Him.
Welcome to the first-ever episode of "Practical Faith!" With short, bite-sized episodes, Practical Faith offers practical tools, free resources, and encouragement to help listeners from all walks of life to actively follow the example, teachings, and practices of Jesus in their own everyday lives.