Transforming Truth (audio): Recent Episodes
New Bridge Church
There can be no biblical study on the end of the age without some concentrated emphasis on the man known as the Antichrist. This individual may already be living among us and making his way toward power. The Bible is not vague about identifying what type of man this will be, how he will rise to power, who will be controlling him, and what he will do once he has secured global authority and rule. As modern Christians keep a watchful eye on present global governments, religious trends across the planet, and what is occurring in Israel as we approach the end of days, we are able to see that many things are presently converging which will serve to set the stage for the arising of the Antichrist. While we have no doubts concerning his ultimate destiny, we should all be sobered and prepared for what he will unleash once he comes into power. Jesus Christ will decidedly defeat and destroy him, but before that occurs, he will bring unprecedented trouble to this planet.
It’s the elephant in the room: sometimes Christians’ breakthrough doesn’t arrive when we want or in the way we had hoped. Sometimes all the faith in the world doesn’t make it happen. Sometimes, that thing we were convinced would happen in six months doesn’t happen in six years…or more. What is God doing when He clearly isn’t doing what we had hoped He would do? Why would He delay our breakthrough? Most of us have wondered this at some point, and ancient account from the life of Moses helps us understand what might be occurring behind the scenes when we thought God would move like a cheetah and He seems to have chosen to move like a turtle.
There are at least two things that all Christians need to experience in their walk with God: His intimate presence and His holy power. Yes, we need the voice of God and the fire of God to mark us as individuals, families cites and churches. This message takes two biblical snapshots separated by about 1500 years and shows us how God sometimes operates with those who have positioned themselves by faith to hear His voice and receive His fire. You may be surprised to learn that sometimes the fire hits before we hear His voice, and sometimes the voice speaks while we wait for the fire. Which of these two seasons might you be in right now - waiting on the voice, or waiting on the fire? Or are you presently experiencing both?
Jesus taught much about the time right before He would return to planet earth to establish His coming Kingdom. One of the clearest marks of His teachings (and of the writings of the Apostles) reveals the emphasis that vast amounts of people will simply (and dangerously) be unprepared when He returns. Sadly, there will be no second chances for these people. Even more sadly, many of these people will seemingly be close to the Kingdom…but not actually in the Kingdom. In the parable of the lanterns and the oil - also known as the parable of the Foolish Virgins - Jesus speaks with urgency about not putting off becoming prepared for His return. The lack of oil in the lamps provides a symbolic picture of one aspect that is of particular importance for us as we approach the return of Christ. What might be represented by a lantern with no oil? What is the warning we need to discern and heed as we prepare for Jesus to return to earth?
One of the clearest appointments mentioned in scripture is the day of reckoning which all Christians have with King Jesus. Individually, one by one, every child of God will stand before the gracious, merciful and kind King who will then evaluate the eternal worth of the lives which we live don earth. Jesus promises reward for all who lived for him. Interestingly, while salvation is equal and free, rewards are not. Salvation is freely given through faith in Christ, but rewards are all earned. How we are living for Christ during this present life actually merits or forfeits eternal reward. This is incredible motivation for all Jesus-followers to live proactively for eternal things with pure, spiritual motivations. This message places before us that moment when we stand before the One who loves us most, and we then find out how much our lives mattered for his glory.
Most Christians think of salvation as a singular event which occurred for them at some point in their past when they repented of their sin and placed their faith in Jesus Christ and His sacrifice for them upon the cross. This is where they experienced His forgiveness and were brought into the family of God by God’s grace. This is a valid way of viewing the moment of salvation, yet many do not understand that this was merely the beginning of them being saved. That event describes the moment of their justification, but did you know that there are two more components of what the bible describes as the salvation of a human soul? In this message, we will learn more about all three components that take place for the believer along the spectrum of salvation. We begin with justification; we continue in sanctification, and we conclude with glorification. All three of these elements comprise the full redemption of the sinner as God brings them into the fullness and finality of the salvation bought for them by the blood of Jesus Christ.
Wandering from God is no small thing. Drifting away from Him is a scary thought. Running from God is even worse. There is something about the tendency in a Christian to allow distance between himself and God that should sober us up. It can happen at times without us even noticing it. We awake one day to discover we have lost our joy, our peace, and our sense of identity and purpose which we once enjoyed in Jesus. God is actually much more concerned about this type of thing than we are. That is why He sometimes works in purposed and painful ways to bring us back to Him in nearness, trust and obedience. This message highlights such a time in the life of King David. In a different place, David would write, “It was good for me to be afflicted. Before eI was afflicted, I went astray.” May those who receive this message awaken before the affliction arrives. May they return before God’s hand strongly brings them home. May they listen to His voice so that they do not experience His tightening grip. Now is the time to consider if there is distance between us and the One who loves us the most.
The vast majority of Christians live with an eager expectation of Jesus Christ returning to earth. This is our blessed hope. This event will begin the vindication of His holy name. Yet, Christians hold to different views concerning how and when the return of our King will take place. Many believe that Jesus will return and rapture the Church before the beginning of the Tribulation period. Because of this, they do not live with much concern about what happens during the awful time period decried as the Tribulation. This message shares a deep concern that those who believe in a pre-trib rapture are not Biblically informed. Where does the Bible teach a secret catching away of the Church that prevents the elect from the reign of the Antichrist? Practically speaking, if the pre-trib rapture theory is not true, is it reasonable to be concerned that many are not prepared to endure the unparalleled difficulties that belong to the Tribulation which are recorded in Scripture? This message presents a biblical framework for a post-Triublaitonal rapture, and is filled with practical exhortations for believers at the end of the age to prepare for the trouble to come. In the end, we must remember the all-sufficient grace of God who knows how to preserve His people in times of warfare.
Human beings are awe-factories. We are hardwired to give our worship to something. Realistically, the vast majority of people give their awe to things that are not worth it. We worship beauty, pleasure, money and fame. Sometimes we make idle of good things like family, a work ethic, disciplines and serving. When we get still and quiet in heart-searching seasons, however, we rediscover that what we are really hungering for is the presence and glory of God. It is true that we cannot be satisfied until we find our satisfaction in Him. This is our highest hunger: the presence and glory of God. This message harnesses the words and actions of Moses to help us reconnect with our own desire to know God at the deepest level. By now we know that nothing less will satisfy our highest hunger.
There are just some things that only a mother can understand. Carrying a baby, birthing that child and then doing her best to raise the one entrusted to her is a never-ending labor of love and letting go. A snapshot story of one woman and her son from an ancient book of the Bible reveals the rich yet challenging realities of motherhood. The roller coaster ride of emotion as a mother is called to lay her heart’s longing - and later her heart’s breaking - at the feet of God captures our attention. In the end, her story reveals her to be a woman of relentless trust and authentic emotion. In her story, we uncover the stories of countless other women who are also called Mom.
Sometimes, the Lord releases a right-now prophetic word from the eternally-true written Word. This message from Amos 9 is the public release of a private prophetic word Jeff received on March 3, 2022. As Holy Spirit opened Jeff’s spiritual eyes to what He is offering His people in this season, Jeff discerned quickly that this word was given to be shared with anyone who would receive it. Those committed to a Word and Spirit representation of Christianity will be receiving a new, fresh release of Kingdom wine that will shift and accelerate normal seasons of ministry harvests. This is not a word for years down the road - this is already happening.
Just how saved are we? Most people want to know where they are going after they die - and most people know by now that Christians are very confident that you can be 100% sure that you can know that you are going to heaven. But why do Christians hold that level of certainty? Is it supported with Scripture? There is also the question of what happens to those who “get saved” but then slide backwards from their original commitment to Jesus. Some wonder if there is a specific sin - or a specific amount of sins - that we can commit and consequently forfeit salvation. Ultimately, is the matter of our eternity in God’s hands or is it left to us? All of these issues have objective answers. Yet, none of them are able to be rested upon until we come to a greater rest in God’s extravagant grace.
We live in some heavy and often depressing days. Threats of another World War, a struggling economy, impossible gas prices, racial strife and constant political hostility - this is the culture we awake in each day. If we are not careful, the nastiness on the outside can creep inside. We have to push back hard against fear, worry and the clouds of dread. In Psalm 42, we read the inspired words of someone who refused to give in to the season of gloom. His hunger for the presence and power of God was His strongest weapon. From his words, we learn how to fight back against the darkness outside of us so that it never finds its residence inside of us. It’s time to talk to your own soul with words that bring victory!
Everyone gets in trouble. Honestly, we are born into trouble the moment we take our first breath. The book of Job says that “man’s days are filled with trouble.” Because of this inescapable reality, we often find ourselves in need of rescue. And God is a specialist in countless types of rescues! This message takes the testimony of King David in a season of his own gut wrenching pain and tribulation. How he prays, trusts and waits helps us know how to anticipate the rescue of God to find us when we are in over our head. Don’t waste your time of trouble - respond like David and watch God begin to move on your behalf.
All Christians desire to honor God by understanding His will for their lives and then faithfully living it out. Some of those very same Christians struggle to have confidence that they are rightly discerning God’s will. They can become anxious in times of decision making - What do I do? Where do I go? How do I respond? What does God desire? While these anxious moments about discerning His will are born from a sincere desire to do the right thing, it is nonetheless a heavy weight if we do not know how to trust what we believe is His voice. Scripture is actually filled with many verses that state, “this is the will of the Lord…” If we can obey the clearly revealed will of God in scripture, then we are powerfully positioned to know God’s will that isn’t addressed in Scripture, This Truth Shot episode helps us to be best positioned to hear the voice of God, recognize it and obey it with confidence.
Most of us came to faith in Christ by hearing some version of the Gospel that included an offer for us to ask Jesus into our hearts so that we can go to Heaven when we die. While God certainly uses evangelistic pleas like these to bring people into the Kingdom, we discover later that becoming a follower of Jesus has less to do with us going to Heaven when we die and more to do with Heaven coming to earth in us while we are still alive. Sometimes, we just need to revisit what the Scriptures say about what we have RIGHT NOW as those who are saved, born again and redeemed. The right-now realities of the faith shape the way we live once we understand them and believe them. Christians, let’s not make the mistake of waiting to get to Heaven before we embrace all that God has provided for us in His Son, Jesus. It’s not about transportation to Heaven. It’s about transformation in us as we grow in knowing our Savior.
In Georgia, Transforming Truth’s home state, the largest piece of granite in existence rises high above the earth. Stone Mountain just appears like a big rock to most, but it not only rises high above the ground, most of it is underground and cannot be seen. This giant piece of rock sits unchanged year after year. Hard as granite, gray and cold and totally immovable, Stone Mountain is a permanent fixture in the Georgia landscape. It just sits there, never changing. Christians, if they are not wise, can become just like this. Immovable, unchangeable, cold and hard, with most of what they are made of lying well beneath the surface. This message takes Paul’s words to a younger Timothy and calls us all to get going, keep moving, never stop growing and live with the spiritual heat and fire which God has given us. When we get stuck in our journey, we need words like this to remind us who we are in Christ and not waste another day in an idleness that makes no sense for the followers of Jesus.
Most people think about what they wear at the beginning of the day. We dress for school, work, the gym, or maybe a ballgame or job interview. When special occasions arise, we are more intentional about what we put on. A fancy dinner, a costume party or a dance require us to be a little more thoughtful about our attire. The United States armed forces all have strict requirements for how military dress is displayed. Did you know that God’s word teaches us all how to dress for the occasion when it comes to spiritual war? God expects us to put on the proper battle gear so we can fight well and win. This familiar passage from Ephesians 6 calls us all to check our armor and discern if we have put on what it takes to win the battle against the intensifying forces of darkness coming against us.
If there in one singular topic that we almost never hear sermons on anymore, it is the subject of Hell. It was once normal for a congregation to hear something about the dangers of eternal hell in their pastor’s sermons. Not anymore. Our culture has no tolerance for such things. Yet, as uncomfortable as modern Christians seem to be at the mention of this reality, the teachings of Scripture remain unchanged. Those who die outside of faith in Christ will spend eternity separated from Him in that place which Jesus described as utter darkness and tormenting flame. Moving forward in our study of the end of the age, we focus in this message on that forever and final separation of the believer and the nonbeliever. Jesus Christ made it clear: a punctuation of the coming series of events will include the banishment of unsaved humans to the place of eternal punishment. It’s uncomfortable…but it is true. We must remember this. And me must not fail to warn people of this.
Resurrection is not just a theme for one Sunday each calendar year in churches. Resurrection is the core component of the Christian life. This singular event is what separates Christianity from religion. It is the emerging of Jesus from the borrowed tomb which shatters the finality of death and opens up an entirely different realm of existence to all who trust in Him. The message of Resurrection Sunday is one of extremes: hopelessness, death and fear are violently moved away by the power of life and victory. Jesus rising from the grace forever establishes that there is never a need for hopelessness for any of us who are placed in Him. His victory truly becomes ours forever - both in eternity and this present life.
The Church needs to get one thing straight and leave it settled forever: Jesus Christ plainly declared that nobody can predict the hour nor day of His return to Earth. Anybody that tries to do so is dishonoring Him. The sensationalized predictions of the date of the Second coming are not something Jesus signs off on. Yet…Jesus did say MUCH about the season surrounding His return. He also taught quite a bit about some precise things we should expect once that season begins to unfold. In this message, we will take a look at what is going to be happening on earth just prior to the season in which Christ returns. Jesus connects this future season to one in the very distant past which caught humanity by surprise. Why does Jesus connect these two events? Because He does not want for the future generation to be unprepared like that past generation was. This message is a call to quit staring at the prophetic clocks and instead start preparing our lives for His return - no matter how near or distant that may be.
Perhaps the least understood office of five-fold leadership in the church is the office of prophet. Who are these people and what exactly do they do? Some wonder if they even are still valid in the Church - are they? What does the Bible say about the call and function of prophets? Some may be surprised to hear that not all prophetically gifted people are meant to hold the office of the prophet - how does this work? Partnering alongside apostles, teachers, evangelists and pastors, the prophet is an incredible gift to the Church in every generation. Yet, Scripture seems to mention false prophets just as often as true prophets - how can we tell the difference? This five-fold series message opens up a wealth of Scripture to help us understand the call and commitment of God’s prophets. It will also likely help some who listen to conclude that this calling from God rests upon them.
When it comes to how God has designed His Church to be led and cared for, He places the Office of Apostle first in line before the other four offices. It is not that Apostles are better than the other four, as we know that all the 5-fold offices have equal validity. It is simply that God has ordained for Apostles to be the tip of the spear in Church structure and government. This message asks and answers the question if true Apostles still exist today. We will also see scripturally what Apostles do, how God equips them, and what happens when they faithfully discharge their God-given assignments. Apostolic leadership was crucial in the early Church. This message will help us to see why we still need apostolic leadership today, and what happens when we follow their spiritual leadership and authority in the Kingdom.
While many Christians engage in ceaseless debate about the precise timelines of the return of Jesus Christ, there is a danger of them debating the event more than they are personally preparing for it. God did not release revelation about the end of the age in order for his people to fight about it. God wants our understanding of the return of Christ to be received as both a source of warning and a source of joyful hope. The words from Jesus in Matthew 24 serve primarily as a warning. He wants all mankind to be prepared for His return. While the majority of people on the planet remain unconcerned about Jesus returning as Earth’s King, those who have bowed their knees to Him in faith are called to think often and deeply about how this earth-shaking event is to be impacting our lives right now in this present day. Everything is about to change. Are we living as those who are prepared and expectant?
The Second coming of Jesus Christ is the future event that all Christians long for. Apart from this drastic occasion, the Christian can never be truly satisfied to the fullest. We are blessed. We are empowered. We enjoy the gift of life and all that it contains. Yet, we are not perfectly content until the moment arrives when we see our King. This is the blessed hope of the Christian life, and it will not be denied us. Having said that, before Jesus returns, things will become very dark on planet earth. In this next section of the Olivet Discourse, Jesus prophesies some very dark storms which must arise before He returns. These events will shake the planet in ways that Jesus declared would be the worst days humanity has ever experienced. Why is it important that we understand these things? So we may be prepared in heart, mind, spirit and soul for them when they occur. Be sobered as we learn about the coming storms and how to be ready for them.
Often lost in all the activity surrounding the other five-fold office is the Office of the Teacher. Apostles have the thrill of Kingdom adventure. Prophets hear and see the secret things from God. Evangelists rescue the souls of men. Pastors love, lead and protect the sheep. And then there are the teachers. What is so supernatural about the art of teaching people God’s truth? Far more than meets the eye. In 1 Corinthians 12:28, teachers are listed third in rank in the Church right behind apostles and prophets. Teachers impart the weaponry of wisdom for warfare. Teachers are God’s tool to open our eyes to His self-revelation. Teachers impart to us the biblical truth and principles for victory. Teachers take the sublime and impart it to us in ways that we can hear, understand and align ourselves with eternal truth. As we approach the end of the age, teachers will no longer be hidden in a classroom with a handful of saints who choose to go deeper. God will promote the teacher of the Word to a prioritized status as deception in the world continues to arise. Teachers are our guides into maturity, wisdom and power from God.
Most churches in the modern day Western Hemisphere are led by a person with the title of Pastor. The pastor is responsible for providing visionary direction. The pastor is expected to win the lost and make them into disciples. The pastor is paid to visit the sick, marry the engaged, bury the deceased, counsel the struggling, resolve conflicts, study the Word and preach it with skill, mentor and lead the church staff, and pray without ceasing. The Church in the West thinks of a one-stop-shop type of leader when it uses the term Pastor. Yet, God actually never endorsed this type of thinking. God’s blueprint for the Church does not include the notion that a pastor is to provide everything the local church needs. Is it any wonder that church members often find themselves disappointed in their Pastor? Is it any wonder why pastors frequently burn out and quit. The problem is found in our lack of understanding about what God actually gifts a true pastor for, and what He expects them to do. The solution to the problem is for pastors and churches to embrace what the Bible teaches about the office of the Pastor. As we continue our series on 5-Fold Ministry, it is time to realign with the biblical presentation of what a Pastor really is, and how he/she is to fulfill that calling in the plan of God for the Church.
Countless people have stepped into the Kingdom of God after responding to the ministry of the Evangelist. Among all of the 5-Fold offices, the evangelist lives with the passion of bringing the message of the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ to those who do not yet know Him. An evangelist’s heart is centered around the burden to see lost people brought into the Kingdom of God through repentance and faith. These precious Christians believe emphatically that God can save anybody, and thus view all people as souls in need of Jesus. The evangelist helps the Church to see and feel the heart of God in highly valuing every single human soul, and they remind us all to share the Gospel proactively. As they serve in local churches with the other four offices of 5-Fold ministry, these people serve to equip and train church members to share their faith effectively. Jesus himself was the Evangelist who came to seek and to save those who are lost. More than anyone, the evangelists in the Church help us to never forget this part of the heart of the King.
For a very long time, local churches have been operating under a less-than-biblical leadership paradigm. When answering the question, 'Who leads the church?’ most people will quickly give the answer, “The pastor!” Yet, this answer is incomplete. This answer is not even necessarily correct. This question and it’s hasty answer has gone unexamined for far too long. What does the Bible actually say about how God has designed His Church to be humanly led? Is the office of Pastor the God-ordained one-stop-shop for everything needed to lead a local church? This series of messages begins with an eye-opening glance at the foundational passage that reveals God’s blueprints for how He leads His church. If our design is not aligned with the Bible, two things will happen: the flock will become confused and frustrated, and the pastor will burn out soon enough. When local churches take initiative to develop a biblical framework for church leadership, beauty flows from the design that God has ordained, and the Head of the church, King Jesus, advances His mission with love, harmony and power.
Would it surprise you to know that the Jesus’ original disciples had questions about the end of the age? The ones who lived side-by-side with Jesus were startled one day when He made an alarming statement about what would happen in Jerusalem in a short time. This conversation led to them asking deeper questions about the full establishing of His Kingdom on earth. The details Jesus shared with them went mostly over the heads. We, however, have the ability to examine what Jesus said and apply His answers in a way that makes it crystal clear that we are extremely close to the final fulfillment of what He shared nearly 2,000 years ago. While Matthew 24 is not all that the scriptures say about the end of the age, these words are certainly the strongest jumping-off point in this series of messages that will equip us to live as those who are properly discerning the days.
One component in the believer’s trust of God is that the believer has learned to look to God, expect from God and wait upon God to fully impart all of the believer’s material and spiritual needs. Yes, faith and spiritual growth never graduate us away from the place of a trusting dependence upon the Father to meet ALL of our needs and FULLY satisfy us. The predominant theme of eternity is the glory of God as the all-sufficient Lord who cares for His people. The journey of faith calls us to believe that truth now, and to live this present life with the awareness that the eternal Kingdom (with all of its keys) is already active. The Father is true, strong, committed, creative and swift in covenant to love us, to provide for us, to guide us and to protect us. The big-picture of the Christian life is that we are increasingly convinced of the goodness of God and His willingness to pour that goodness on our behalf. He is able, He is competent, and He will fulfill all that He has promised to you.
The Book of Genesis declares that God made mankind in His own image. It seems that we humans have been trying to return the favor ever since. What is it about us that seeks to view God through self-created lenses that actually distort His character? Why do we have a tendency to dilute the character of God down to us - how we think, how we respond, how we feel about others? Why must we insist on shrinking God down to be just slightly above the way we are? God is wholly different than us, and part of understanding the big-picture of Christianity is to know God’s ways and to conform to them. This message highlights several specific attributes of God, and brings us great comfort and reassurance that He is exalted far above the ways of humanity. His grace, mercy, patience, power and love are abounding towards us. Even non-believers benefit from these characteristics of God every single day. All of humanity needs to awaken to the glorious character of the God of the Bible.
Have you ever considered that God might call you to be one whom He uses to raise up an altar to His glory in your generation? Do not be too quick to push that thought aside. Gideon was the last person you would have called to enter into a life of tearing down false altars, raising up new ones in their place, and initiate a move that would crush the enemies coming against his people. In this present generation, the eyes of the Lord are seeking those who have enough loyalty to Him to obediently expose and bring down false altars before which people have been bowing for too long. He is also imparting courage to men and women to raise up new altars - from their words, their works and their ways - so that His glory might once again be central among His people. Some who hear this message need to receive this assignment form God as we approach the end of the age.
There is a difference between being religious and being a Christian. There is a difference between being spiritual and being born-again. There is a difference between owning a concept of a higher power and living in faith toward a real and interactive God. All across the land, there are multiple millions of worshipers. We are all worship-factories - giving our hearts, minds, wills and lives for something greater than ourselves. But most people rarely stop to consider what they worship. Even fewer ask themselves why they are worshiping that thing, that idea or that person. This is nothing knew. In Ancient Greece there was an altar built to The Unknown God. Paul came across this altar one day and seized the moment to take this awareness among the people that there was a God whom they didn’t know, and he made known to them the God whose name is Jesus Christ. In our secularized culture, we can and must do the same. We can make known to the ignorant the God of the Bible.
Have you ever heard of the Coming Delusion? When Christians speak of this aspect of future events, they are usually referencing what is written by the Apostle Paul in 2nd Thessalonians chapter 2. Many of those Christians make the mistake of making the Coming Delusion synonymous the great deception of the Antichrist and/or the great apostasy from the professing church at the end of the age. These things are not exactly the same, and it is important to our understanding of the End Times that we understand how they are different but also interconnected.
Every Christian begins his or her journey with a commitment of some sort to Jesus Christ. It is impossible to become a follower of Jesus without…well…actually following Him. We all said Yes to the Son when we began. The Scriptures actually reveal that a genuine commitment to Jesus which results in authentic salvation will be evidenced by an ongoing commitment that endures. No Christian is perfect, but we are all proven as genuine followers by our continuance by faith with Christ. This life of following Him is called discipleship. In these final verses from Luke 9, Jesus is painfully clear that He summons all of His followers to live with His Kingdom as their highest loyalty. His words reveal that He never offered humanity a salvation that did not include progression as disciples. Those who begin with Him will end with Him. His words here highlight three common obstacles that get in the way of those who seemingly began well from finishing well. If we continually overcome these tests of loyalty, we should have deep assurance that we are truly His.
Most Christians understand and embrace the expectation from God that we are to trust Him and obey Him. A regularly disobedient Christian simply does not make spiritual sense. While we all fail to perfectly obey God at all times, the normal bend of the Christian who walks in the Spirit is that of an obedient life. Yet, there is a type of obedience which God hates. More than once in His Word, God denounces this type of obedience to those who say that they belong to Him. What could move God so strongly about a human display of obedience that He would thunder to those obeying, “I hate what you are doing!”? It is important that we learn the answer to this question because we certainly want to examine our own lives to see if anything like this is happening. The ancient words through the Prophet Isaiah will help us to investigate, discern and change our ways in any place there is need. Obedience is good and holy. But it can also be evil daw worthy of rejection.
One of the greatest needs of people today is to grasp the big picture of the what, how and why of God’s Kingdom. Religion presents duties, demands, rules and requirements and places them upon people. Very rarely do we find churches, ministries and leaders who slow down to ensure that God’s people actually understand the big picture of what it means to belong to Him. Apart from the big-picture context of why we trust, love, obey and serve God, Christianity just feels like another heavy, empty religion. This series from Psalm 145 will place the character, worth and glory of God right back in the center of our Christian lives. From the big-picture clarity, all the other things begin to make sense.
The story of Issac in the Book of Genesis is one filled with drama. When his daddy, Abraham, laid Isaac on an altar and was willing to sacrifice him to God, the stunning incident must have impacted Isaac for the rest of his life. Interestingly, Isaac followed in the footsteps of his daddy in many areas - both good and bad. Yet, when it comes to building his own altars of worship to God, Isaac was seemingly unwilling to model the faith of his own earthly father. This message highlights the reality that each of us must come to our own understanding and encounter with God before we can truly worship and sacrifice unto Him with a genuine faith. Our parents' altars, our spiritual leaders’ altars, or our denominational altars won’t suffice for us. We need to build our own in meaningful worship to God. Isaac’s first altar helps us to see when it’s time to start building our own altars in our individual journeys of faith.
In the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, we find the language that establishes the concept of separation of Church and State. In summary, this amendment prevents Congress from either establishing by law or prohibiting by law the expression of religious beliefs and practices by the citizenry of the United States. Americans are free to worship as they choose. Increasingly, how the First Amendment plays out in our culture is being questioned. When churches were deemed nonessential by the government during the initial Covid pandemic, we all witnessed the diverse opinions about where the government could and could not regulate worship. Does the Bible help us at all concerning the issue of what to do when the worship of God is hijacked by government? While specific instructions to us on how to respond are not found in this passage of scripture, 1 Kings 13:1-10 may reveal some helpful components of what it looks like when human government seeks to modify God’s altars of worship. May be wise to discern what is taught here. This will be very important in immediate seasons to come.
Jesus left no rooms for doubts about His approach to stale religion. Consistently He warned religious people that their priorities, traditions, prejudices and addiction to the familiar was costing them greatly. Their spirits are stale. Their souls were running dry. To make matters worse, Jesus indicted them for reproducing their empty religious ways in the lives of others. He did not come to join them. Jesus intended to exchange dead religion for new wine. Any commitment to clutching old wineskins would result in the people missing what Jesus came to pour out. When God ordains a time of refreshing, the old has to go so that the new can come. This message both enlightens and motivates us to part with all our old wineskins and anticipate that new wine from Heaven is already being poured out by the Spirit.
Spiritual family is not just about coming together and enjoying one another’s company. While quality time is certainly one of the Kingdom love-languages, God also ordains that Christians partner together to advance His mission. There are battles to be fought and one. There are callings to be answered and obeyed. And there are mountains to claim and to conquer. From the Old Testament figure named Caleb, we can learn what it looks like for a faith family to wait, to war, and to win. All three of these prized components must remain active in any healthy church or Christian organization. Enduring until the end in the center of God’s will is the means by which we al bring Him glory together. It s also the only way for us to receive the inheritance He has appointed for us.
When the clock gets down to the final minutes, our instinct is to make sure that we are ready for when that final buzzer sounds - we know then that the game is over and the score in final. There is something about a deadline that seems to sharpen our focus on what is most important. For modern followers of Jesus, there is a tendency to wrongly think that the end of the race occurs when we die, therefore many Christians live to maximize this earthly life. We try to work hard, get an education, succeed in a career, raise a family, earn lots of money and retire with wealth at the earliest possible convenience. Many who do this successfully believe they have won. But have they? This message reminds us that the place where it is determined whether or not our lives truly mattered is at the Judgment Seat of Christ where Jesus himself will fully analyze and reveal the value of our earthly lives. Many will be saddened to learn that their “successful” lives did not amount to much in the eyes of the King. If we live with this divine appointment in mind, we will be ready to receive a reward from our King when we stand before Him. If we fail to remember this unavoidable moment, we will suffer loss and forfeit our reward.
Altars in the Bible are most often places where a believer raises up a standing memorial connected to some encounter they have had with God. In one instance, God moved upon Joshua to build Him an altar - but Joshua was sobered and careful to do so in a precise manner that he knew would honor the Lord. What can we learn from God’s instructions about how this altars to be built? If altars represent a surrendered and sacrificial life today, we need to take an intentional look at the clear instructions He gave about how Joshua’s altar must be built. Here’s a hint: God wanted something kept off the altar, and He commanded that something be engraved upon the altar. So must it be with the altar of our own lives as we live to honor Christ.
Abraham is the only person called “the friend of God” in the entire bible. Many follow. Many serve. Many worship. But God said that Abraham was His friend. One component of Abraham’s friendship with God is seen in his committed lifestyle of building altars at important moments where God revealed Himself to Abraham in new ways. Abraham made time and took the effort to throw down markers where his relationship with his God went deeper. Abraham learned the value of worship and sacrifice as the means to go deeper with God. From his story, we can discover four altars that we also must all build in our own lives. Friendship with God is not limited to building altars - but it cannot be absent of building altars either. If these four altars are built by us, we are well on our way to enjoying God in similar ways that Abraham enjoyed Him.
Jesus' longest recorded prayer is found in John 17, and it focuses heavily on one primary component: the unity of the Church. The Apostle Paul declared in Ephesians 4 that there is only one faith and one Church. How is it then that Christians are known for being some of the most divisive, fractured and contentious people? Why do we fight so much among ourselves? Those called to build Kingdom bridges seem more inclined to construct Kingdom walls. How do we guard the truth of the Gospel while still allowing for differences of opinion, possible interpretations and sincere representation of all that God’s Word says? And what is our heart posture to be towards those who want nothing to do with our Gospel message? How are we to treat them? In one short passage from Luke Chapter 9, we find Jesus’ own disciples fumbling His ways three different times. Jockeying for position, seeking to control those who serve Jesus differently, and calling for judgment and destruction upon those who say no to their message - is this what Jesus came to instill in us? We all know the answer, but we clearly need to hear it again in this season before Jesus returns.
We might assume that if God entrusted to us the leading of the greatest revival in history, then we would be thrilled to watch it unfold. Widespread repentance leading to mass salvation and a ceasing of cultural sins - who would not want to witness this? Well, the ancient prophet Jonah was appointed to lead a massive revival in Nineveh and, when the entire city turned God, Jonah was anything but pleased. In this glimpse into the life of Jonah we are able to see how God works against our internal bias, our hidden prejudices and our sinful sense of superiority. God wants to bring all people to Himself, but how do we respond when a person or people group that we do not care for experiences the blessing of God? Jonah is about to find out that God is no respecter of persons…therefore we should not be either.
What if someone told you that the greatest singular revival that has ever occurred on earth came through the message of a prophet who did not want any results? Well, if someone told you that, you would be hearing the truth. Jonah’s second chance from God was met by Jonah’s obedience, but not his enthusiasm. Fortunately for the people of Nineveh, God had a desire to see them delivered, so He worked on their behalf in spite of His servant’s bad attitude. This message reveals the magnitude of God’s love for the lost, and the lengths He goes to in order to bring them into His family.
Any honest Christian will admit that somewhere along the line they have encountered a stubborn issue in their lives in which it is/was difficult to experience lasting victory. We have weaknesses that are unique to us. Some of us struggle in one particular area even though we have total breakthrough in a hundred other areas. What are we to make of the occasional reality that a certain sin recurs in our lives? Words, attitudes and actions that do not align with God’s Word and ways have to go – but what are we to do when they don’t? In this message, Jeff walks the listener through Romans Chapter 7 wherein Paul explains what happens in our lives when we are struggling with a recurring sin. Many Christians make the mistake of learning to live with recurring sin. Others defeatedly succumb to the despair that they will never get free. Listen to the precision of teaching here which explains what all is in play and how we can all get free.
We all know that the glorious event known as The Incarnation of Christ has been somewhat overshadowed in our generation by the cultural presentation of Christmas. While we should be grateful that, for one day each year on December 25th, the entire lost world at least gives a token nod to the birth of Jesus, we who actually follow Him cannot stop at merely viewing Christmas as a sentimental holiday season centered around decor, food and gifts. The birth of God’s Son was the most monumental event to ever take place up to that time. When Isaiah prophesied about the Son of God being given to humanity, his message was to shake all of history. A child was to be born, Isaiah declared, and a Son was to be given. In this message we explore the prophetic majesty of the birth of God’s Son. We unpack what it means for Him to be called Wonderful, Counselor, Everlasting Father, Mighty God and Prince of Peace. So, let’s take a moment to step away from the tinsel on the tree, the lights and the wrapping paper, the cider and the sleighs...and let’s retrace our steps to that moment when eternity came into time and the Savior of the world was born.
There is one moment in the Gospels where a few of Jesus’ disciples got a rare glimpse of who He truly is as God’s Son. This encounter on the hillside was one of the most supernatural events in the New Testament. In no other place do we find the Son, the Father appearing in the company of Moses and Elijah - all before he unprepared hearts and eyes of three of the disciples. How would you respond if God opened your eyes as He opened a portal to glory? There is much for us to learn from this supernatural scene on the mount of transfiguration. Encountering glory calls for a very measured response from us. Don’t assume you would know how to honor His presence and dignify the experience.
God makes plans that He doesn’t always fully disclose at the beginning. Sometimes He chooses individuals for this plans. Sometimes He chooses tribes or naitions. Sometimes, God does it all by Himself. Every now and then, however, God appoints a city. Yes, the infinite God of the cosmos sometimes assigns prophetic destiny to a singular city on planet earth. One of those cities that God chose to harness was the city of Bethlehem, whose name means “house of bread.” This message traces the prophetic and historical significance all the way through Scripture and up to its crowning moment as the birthplace of the Incarnate son of God who would be born as a baby to eventually rule as the King of all creation. Bethlehem is a city of prophetic significance.
Two ancient verses from a fiery prophet unlock some of the most priceless substance about the meaning of Christmas. Isaiah’s words from chapter nine of his prophecy remind us of exactly who Jesus is and what His eternal mission has always been. We cannot afford to get twisted in the tinsel and lost in the lights this Christmas. We are so close to the second coming of Christ that we must slow down and deeply consider what was prophesied about His first coming. His titles mean something. The prophecies mean something. The promises hold something for all who believe. A new world is coming and it will be ruled by a new King - new to this generation that is, but ruling and reigning in Heaven since eternity past. Jesus is our Christmas joy.
It is no small thing that God has anchored the eternal destination of every human soul to how they answer the question, “What do you believe about Jesus Christ?” While there is an immeasurable amount of additional truth that carries weight in the Kingdom of God, one’s eternity hangs on the answer to this singular question. So, who is Jesus Christ to you? More importantly, who did Jesus declare that He was, and do we believe that? While Christians are free to disagree about many things concerning our faith and practice, the issue of Jesus Christ - who is He, what did He accomplish, what does He require of us - is not up for debate. We must get the issue of the identity of Jesus right before anything else can matter.
Faith gets us into the Kingdom of God. Shockingly, that is also the moment where some truly saved people stop living by faith. They trust Jesus Christ is Lord, believe by faith that His death and resurrection provide them eternal life…and then they start right back living according to their own wisdom, resources and desires. This could not be farther from the plan of God for the life of each Christian. This message reveals how God calls every believer to intentionally structure their lives so that they must live by faith. We are to seek, listen, receive and obey the will of God in every life-season. When we do, we live out an adventure that brings God great pleasure and glory. Churches are to do the same thing. Every local assembly is to intentionally press in to the Lord to learn His vision for them. Then, together, they press in to His plans as He leads them forth into their established purpose in each generation. In the end, we learn that the christian life includes faithing ourselves forward.
Spiritual family is not just about coming together and enjoying one another’s company. While quality time is certainly one of the Kingdom love-languages, God also ordains that Christians partner together to advance His mission. There are battles to be fought and one. There are callings to be answered and obeyed. And there are mountains to claim and to conquer. From the Old Testament figure named Caleb, we can learn what it looks like for a faith family to wait, to war, and to win. All three of these prized components must remain active in any healthy church or Christian organization. Enduring until the end in the center of God’s will is the means by which we al bring Him glory together. It s also the only way for us to receive the inheritance He has appointed for us.
There is a certain type of season wherein a certain type of person experiences a “timeout” from God. For Jonah, running from God had led to disastrous consequences, but God was not content to allow Jonah to end his story in tragedy. Jonah was sequestered by God in the belly of a fish in order to gain understanding about the most important things in life. What Jonah eventually discovered is that God is merciful to rebels and is eager to offer all of us second chances.
In America, Christmas time is almost exclusively sentimental. We meet. We greet. We eat. We spend. We give. We receive. Decorations are pretty and the Christmas songs are sweet. Only among Christians is the actual meaning behind this holiday kept in focus. Sadly, for most in America, Christmas has lost its biblical substance and prophetic edge. Yet, when we read the words of the Apostle Paul in Galatians 4, the enormity of God’s prophetic pop behind the incarnation of the Son of God can stun us. In this message, we move right past shallow sentimentality and find ourselves squarely rooted in the divine plan of the ages. Why did Jesus come when He did? What does the phrase “fullness of time” mean? Should we consider the first coming of Christ and dare not consider ahis second coming? This is our prophetic glimpse at Christmas.
What would you say if you reached the conclusion that God seemed to be calling you to fulfill a nearly impossible mission? You would need faith to say Yes. What if that same impossible mission was to help a people group that you considered to be your enemy? You would need a lot of humility to say Yes. What if God did not seemed to care what you felt about those people or the calling He laid at your feet? You would need deep obedience to say Yes to the call. Jonah, that rebellious, prejudiced prophet had none of these things, therefore he told God NO. This message goes deep into our hearts to help us see how we respond to the authority of God when He commands us to trust and obey. Jonah would learn the hard way the danger of digging in our heels.
God sets the universal calendar. God decrees The Who, The What, The When and The Where of all occurrences in His Kingdom. When the Al mighty sets His intentions on a people, He will see His plans through the end. In the ancient Book of Jonah, God marks the wicked people of Nineveh with an evangelistic bullseye. He wants to save them. Because of this, God also marks a Jewish prophet named Jonah, whom He plans to send with His message of repentance. From these two determinations, we learn so much about the merciful heart of God and the rebellious heart of humankind. This is the first of five messages in a mini series of teachings from the incredible life of Jonah. Pay close attention to learn what it looks like when God stirs the pot.
The warnings in the Bible about false prophets are not subtle. They are not inconspicuous. They are not infrequent. Both Old and New Testaments hold for us numerous cautions about the existence and activities of people who claim to speak on behalf of God but do not. No other passage of Scripture has more focus on this crucial issue than Jeremiah chapter 23. God Himself is doing all the talking as He pulls back the curtain on false prophets in the ancient Israel. From what God says, we are greatly equipped to mark false prophets in our own generation and to avoid ever coming under their dangerous influence.
Jesus taught much about the time right before He would return to planet earth to establish His coming Kingdom. One of the clearest marks of His teachings (and of the writings of the Apostles) reveals the emphasis that vast amounts of people will not be prepared when He returns. Sadly, there will be no second chances for these people. Even more sadly, many of these people will be close to the Kingdom…but not actually in the Kingdom. In the parable of the lanterns and the oil - also known as the parable of the Foolish Virgins - Jesus speaks with urgency about not putting off becoming prepared for His return. The lack of oil in the lamps provides a symbolic picture of one aspect that is of particular importance for us as we approach the return of Christ. What might be represented by a lantern with no oil?
Jesus doesn’t waste any time when He calls someone to follow Him in Kingdom mission. He recruits, empowers and then trains us as we go. Kingdom living is full of on the job training. This scene from Luke 9 reveals Jesus pouring into His followers, and then requiring them to pour into others. Questions about finance, material resources and trust all arise as Jesus commands His followers to accomplish what cannot be done in the power of the flesh. They have to see the unseen and believe for the impossible. This is what it looks like to learn Kingdom math. In the end, their release resulted in a massive receiving and every single need was met. It is to be the same with us as we follow and serve the Son.
If spiritual family is going to be lived out in a way that pleases God and enriches us, there is a non-negotiable ingredient that must remain near the top of the list of our shared priorities: HUMILITY. Jesus modeled humility every day of His earthly life in His relationships, His conflicts, His ministry to others and in His submission to the Father’s will. We cannot fail to do the same as we follow Him. This message unpacks a famous passage in Philippians chapter two, known as the kenosis passage. Watch how the most glorious human who ever lived, Jesus, operated in such depth of humility that from His intentional selflessness a provision of everlasting life flowed into others. We must live similarly if He will impart that life to others through us - and He will!
The Gospels contain many rapid-fire chapters where Jesus seems to move with intensity, speed and elevated purpose as He leads His disciples. Luke Chapter 9 is a record of moments like this in the life of Jesus and His followers. As the Son of God, Jesus begins to recruit and release followers to come near to Him for the purpose of advancing the Kingdom. Much of what He initiated then is still occurring today through the ministry of the Holy Spirit filled Church. This message begins to open our eyes to what it looks like for us to wholeheartedly follow in the steps of the Son. Kiss convenient, comfortable, status-quo living goodbye as you depend your YES to the leadership of the Lord. Jesus is calling us all to step up in identification and to step out in trust.
When you mention the concept of spiritual family to Christians, you will find that many people have different ideas about what that might look like. For some, it means quality time and deep relationship. For others it means providing discipleship and mentoring. Still others think of providing acts of kindness and material care for others. Some believe spiritual family is all about pooling resources to fulfill a mission. But what does Scripture teach about how spiritual family flows? This message helps us all to get a panoramic view from the earliest days of the Church about what spiritual family is to be. God has called us to a spiritual AND functional oneness. It will never happen on accident, so we need to commit together to the direction that the Lord has established for all Christians in every generation.
Hezekiah knew by this time that his enemy was ruthless and relentless. Accusations, threats, blasphemies and psychological warfare had all been released by the wicked ones who opposed Hezekiah’s godly mission. Now it was go-time. The enemy needed to be dealt a final blow by the people of God so that they could resume the worship and work assigned to them by Him. What would Hezekiah do in the final stages of the collision between himself and the king of Assyria? He would fight in the Spirit, partner with God in prayer, welcome angelic help, and stand still to see the salvation of the Lord against his enemies. From his ancient approach to warfare, we modern believers can be strengthened in our own commitments to wage warfare against Satan and his demons to send them running from the territory assigned to us by God for His own glory.
It is undeniable that God allows for extreme circumstances to find His children. He is a protector - but He only protects us from that which would ultimately harm us. He is not obligated to protect us from extremes that serve to develop us. In fact, He harnesses difficulty in order to fashion us into His own likeness. When a distress or difficulty accomplishes His purposes for us, God enacts powerful reversals. He literally overhauls the circumstances and brings forth treasure from the trial. For those who are oppressed, smothered, persecuted or opposed, God will take care of what threatens you and accomplish a full and final deliverance. This Psalm reveals what this process often looks like in the life of a believer.
Satan knows that godly leaders remain vigilant and aware of his constant attacks. Godly leaders walk in personal purity which results in elevated spiritual discernment and power. Their hearts are clean from bitterness and selfish ambition. Godly leaders have robust prayer lives which keeps them ready and equipped for spiritual warfare. Because Satan and his demons cannot always defeat human spiritual leaders who are prepared for war, they intentionally target the hearts and minds of followers to poison them against their spiritual leaders. Sadly, this attack has a frequently high success rate in churches and other Kingdom works. In this portion of 2 Chronicles 32, we learn the tactics of the enemy’s ministry of accusation through the strategy of wicked King Sennacherib as he seeks to destroy the leadership of Hezekiah. The modern Church needs to know of this type of warfare, and to be prepared when it comes against a Kingdom movement that God is seeking to release through their leaders, through their Church and through them.
It is not difficult for us to understand that God will rescue His children from the attacks of the enemy. It is easy to grasp how He swoops in, destroys what threatens us, and then brings us back safely to His appointed places. Yes, God clearly protects and rescues His own.
But how eager are we to believe in a rescue from trouble that we ourselves have created? Should we expect God to move win the same zeal to bring us out of messes that arise from our own sin and rebellion?
This portion of Psalm 107 reveals how our Redeemer moves in grace and mercy to bring us out of some awful circumstances that come about because of our own failures. If we cannot envision His love and kindness to us when we least deserve it, then we do not yet comprehend the fullness of His merciful heart.
Some Christian tend to believe that God is only eager to help those who get in a difficult circumstances due to the fault of others. Maybe the devil attacked and made life hard. It could be that some other human made a mistake that put us in a major challenge. When the fault is someone else’s, most of us believe God will almost always come to our rescue. But what about when we ourselves blew it and are now reaping what we sowed? Should we expect God to help us then? This portion of Psalm 107 highlights the goodness and willingness of God to come to the rescue to deliver us from our self-imposed messes and distresses. We need relief from our troubles, and only God can meet our desperation with Heavenly intervention and powerful remedy. The question is whether or not we posses elevated confidence to expect Him to come to our rescue when we are in trouble due to our own poor decisions and sinful actions. This is a Psalm of hope for that very issue!
Nobody enjoys the feeling of helplessness. We much prefer feeling large and in charge. Weakness, lack, dependence and hungers are not the things we desire to describe the core of our daily lives. Yet, for those who live by faith, it is nearly impossible to experience spiritual growth without God allowing these types of elements to cycle in and out of our lives. God does not wish for us to live in our own strengths or sufficiency. As we begin to explore the 107th Psalm, the first nine verses remind us that, apart from the Father’s intervening grace and supply, we are all lost, spiritually homeless, scattered, troubled and destined for distress. The joy of these verses is that we are NOT forgotten by the Father and left on our own. His compassionate heart goes after all wanderers. He moves when we cry out to Him for help. God will not forget you.
How we respond toward God when we have failed is a deep indicator of what we believe about Him. Sin separates us from God. While the relationship remains intact, sin separates and breaks off our sense of closeness with God. He works hard to allow the discomfort to find us. He does not gloss over our sin. He seems to take a step back. Why? Because we won’t likely return to Him apart from His allowing us to feel the damage done when we disobey Him. God is a good Father, and He takes each of us through a similar process when we experience a moment or season of ignoring His ways and His word. When we recognize our sin, we are able to immediately make it right with Him. This message walks us through the aftermath of David’s great sin with Bathsheba, and reveals to us what we can know about God’s heart when we also fail Him. We should grieve over our sin, but we must learn to rejoice in the grace of God which abounds above the level of our sin. God is a forgiving, restoring Father when we confess and forsake our sins.
The dark, sad secret in the Church is that many Christians rarely pray. All of us as Jesus-followers began our journeys with the understanding that praying is vital and healthy. Yet, as time went on, many believers just let prayer fade away. For many, the reason they stopped praying is because of their experience of routinely unanswered prayers. Why bother praying if God doesn’t respond the way I desired? This message takes multiple bible passages to help us understand the massive promises attached to our prayers. It also reveals some painful reason why many prayers do not and cannot get answered by God. If we can understand what potentially wrecks our prayer life, we will be emboldened to address these issues and become again a praying Christian who calls out in confidence to God.
The greatest storms to ever hit the Church are still future. Jesus said so. Paul said so. Peter said so. John, in the book of Revelation, clearly said so. Before eternal rescue, relief and reward there will be an unprecedented span of intense storms that Jesus-followers will be called to endure. So the question for us all is, “Am I ready?” In this message, Jesus offers a prophetic warning for us to examine what our lives are currently founded upon. Sinking sand will never support us in the coming storms. We must know beyond a fact that we are anchored upon the rock, and wisely building thereupon. Without intentional inspection of our life-foundation, we are presuming to be able to endure what is coming. Jesus calls us to be intentional, ask the tough questions, and come away knowing we are prepared.
Most devoted Christians will admit that wrestling with the timing of God has been occasionally difficult as they seek to live by faith. We understand that we are to seek to discern the will of God, operate in the ways of God and complete the works of God as He leads us in life. It is not uncommon for us to wonder why God does not move at what seems to us like a logical pace. Why does God sometimes seem to spring big events on us before we feel ready? Or, more commonly, why does it seem like God drags His heels when we feel like the clock is ticking too fast? We cannot always know the answers to these questions, but we CAN become more resolved to learn how to devotedly align with God’s timing. When He moves quickly, He is wise. When He seems to go to slowly, He is wise. He knows what He is doing as He leads our steps and He will always give us understanding later on as to why He determined the pace in which He leads us. Our job? Follow Him, wait on Him, trust Him and obey Him.
Christians must live daily with the understanding that they are in a war. When we were saved by grace through faith in Jesus, we were also enlisted into the army of God. Together, the church advances the mission of God unto the eventual establishing of His Kingdom on earth. Satan and the demonic army have only one agenda: to resist that with all their evil power and fury. Because of this, spiritual warfare is the context for every Christian, family and church that has committed to live and die for the glory for Christ. I n this message, we see an ancient picture of some of what it looks like when God begins to release grace, glory and revival to His people. Joy, sacrifice, holiness and celebration bring Him great pleasure. This atmosphere also stirs the enemy and motivates him to furiously fight what God begins to do. This is the beautiful backdrop for breakthrough…and for all spiritual warfare.
The modern Church must awaken to the reality that we are already living in intense spiritual warfare. We don’t get a vote, and its only going to grow in size and scope. We aren’t allowed to resign from the fight and go AWOL. The enemy has declared aggressive war against the glory of God, and he is advancing accordingly. We must become intentional towards the battle or we will become casualties of the war. This message reveals the response of godly King Hezekiah to wicked King Sennacherib’s determination to invade and capture Israel’s possession. From Hezekiah’s response to the attack, we can be instructed on how we Christians also must engage in spiritual warfare coming from Satan and the demonic realm. We cannot afford to remain un-strategized and reactive. God is calling us to become well-planning and highly proactive in repelling the enemy, and running him our of our individual lives, our families, our cities and our regions. We must send him fleeing.
Most of the world thinks of peace as the absence of conflict. Beyond that, many of those same people assume that peace is unattainable unless that absence of conflict is their current reality. Wouldn’t it be terrible if that were true? That would mean that there would be zero possibility of peace unless everything in our lives was pleasant, friction-free and easy on our souls. In this message, we will learn that peace is something that is to be prized by us, and especially when it is attained in the midst of real-life struggles. Peace is the spiritual byproduct of a life rooted in prayer and trust in God. Because we live in a world conditioned by sin and brokenness, we will only experience spiritual peace to the degree that prioritize and pursue it. Prayerlessness disqualifies us from living in true peace and spiritual rest. The Apostle Paul teaches us how to create the place for peace and how to aim our prayers and thoughts in a way that breed deep peace within. This message instructs us to fight for peace in our human relationships, our relationship with God and in our own minds.
The warnings in the Bible about false prophets are not subtle. They are not inconspicuous. They are not infrequent. Both Old and New Testaments hold for us numerous cautions about the existence and activities of people who claim to speak on behalf of God but do not. No other passage of Scripture has more focus on this crucial issue than Jeremiah chapter 23. God Himself is doing all the talking as He pulls back the curtain on false prophets in the ancient Israel. From what God says, we are greatly equipped to mark false prophets in our own generation and to avoid ever coming under their dangerous influence.
If you have never had your faith rattled for even a short time, then you likely are not attempting to do much for the glory of God in your life. When we consider that God is always stretching our faith to enlarge our trust-muscle, we should not be surprised that we frequently find ourselves in over our heads. Add to this the reality of intense spiritual warfare from the enemy, plus the inherent weaknesses of our flesh, then it is reasonable to conclude that sometimes strong Christians can have their faith shaken. Yet, the Lord will never leave us in the place of shaking. He meets us where we are, asks us some tough questions, and then begins to graciously lead us from our dark cave of doubt and distrust back into the fullness of confidence in Him and His plans for our lives. Shaken faith is to become strengthened faith. If we don’t quit in the cave, this will become our reality.
King David once lived in a season of being backslidden. This short, painful scene in David’s life became a turning point that brought him face to face with the consequences of living outside of the will of God and beneath his destiny. When we make decisions that do not honor the Lord, there will be consequences. Sometimes those consequences are intense. How do we respond when our sins catch up with us? Do we run further from God, or do we have enough assurance of His committed love to turn to Him in our moment of deep need? David temporarily lost everything he treasured. Even his own life hung in the balance. Yet, a gracious God met the struggling king and brought him to the place where he could receive back what the enemy had stolen. Something happened in David’s encounter with God that changed everything. David’s bad decisions had created an impossible knot for himself. God was going to prove that He knows how to untie impossible knots.
It is not a question of if the enemy will strike, but when. Attached to when the enemy will come against the people of God is the issue of how the enemy will come against us. We cannot win in spiritual warfare if we are ignorant of the enemy and his strategies. Not surprisingly, we also know that we cannot win spiritual battles with fleshly means. On our own, none of us are smart enough, experienced enough nor strong enough to defeat the devil. We must be empowered by Holy Spirit to fight and win. Part of this empowerment arrives when He opens our eyes for the fight. From an ancient account of warfare, we learn some holy and helpful means by which we can be assisted in fighting the enemy. It is never too soon for us to pray that God would enable us to see what He sees in the spirit realm. When this occurs, we are heavily positioned to win our battles.
Once a person has been brought to God through faith in Jesus Christ, it may be argued that the most vital experience to follow is to become transformationally convinced of the majesty, holiness and supremacy of God. Isaiah had spent five chapters pronouncing woe upon other people. When he sees for himself the glory of God in the temple in chapter six, Isaiah pronounces woe upon…Isaiah. How he is ministered to in the throne room of God reveals much about the heart of God towards His people. Isaiah was never the same after this personal and transformational encounter. We cannot be Christians who live off of the encounters, experiences and testimonies of others. We need our very own. This message calls all of us to consider the supremacy of God over all of creation, and to cause us to press in for our own encounter with Him which will prove to be transformational for the rest of our days.
On one occasion, Jesus cast a demon out of a man and it led to a debate about whose power Jesus was operating under. The religious crowd accused Jesus of using Satan’s power to cast out demons. Others demanded further proof beyond His casting out demons. Jesus, instead of walking away from His detractors, used this opportunity to teach about the dynamics of demonic possession and what is required to set people free from them. Demons are real and they are fully active in the present day. How can we defeat them? Does it require traditions, disciplines or counseling? Well, you may be surprised that none of those things intimidate a demon. There is only one thing to which they respond: the power and authority of Christ in us. This message highlights why Jesus says this is true.
If there is one thing that should be received as absolutely true it is this:
This planet is not ready for the return of Jesus Christ.
Many Christians are ignorant of what the Bible declares about the Second Coming. The Jesus we see in the Gospels at His first coming acted as One who is merciful, gracious, kind and patient. He laid down His life and allowed His enemies to reject and crucify Him. When He. Comes the second time to earth…it will be nothing like the first time. King Jesus is coming back to make war. Most people are not living as though they believe this indisputable bible fact. This message harnesses what John saw in Revelation 19. It serves as a dire warning to all who have not yet surrendered to the King of kings. For those who have already trusted Jesus and confessed Him as Lord, this message reminds us of the destiny He has secured for all of us.
God the Spirit brings you into the faith. Nobody gets saved and delivered from sin apart from the advance work of Holy Spirit in our hearts. When we trust Christ, the Spirit of God begins to live in us and transform us. He sets us free from the grip of the enemy and brings us into the family of God. He delivers us from destruction Yes, we are all led by the Spirit into our salvation…but do we listen to Him after we are saved? The voice of Holy Spirit is to be learned, discerned and obeyed. There is a passage in the book of Ecclesiastes that uses some enlightening human imagery that drives home to us all the importance of our continuing to listen to Holy Spirit after He delivers us from the enemy. To stop listening to the Spirit is to welcome our own downfall. To learn His leadership and to value His voice is what leads us to victories and breakthroughs.
For several days before this message was released, Jeff sensed an intentional assault from the enemy against God’s people at the Church at Winder and in the surrounding region. Being led of the Holy Spirit to set aside his previously prepared message for that Sunday, Jeff released this prophetic pushback against fear and intimidation, and exhorted those listening to take ownership of the condition of their own hearts and minds by refusing to feed their fears.
How do you believe you would feel if you were empowered to experience and seek satisfaction in every possible available human pleasure? Seriously, what if you had all the money and all the material possessions that you desired? If you could enjoy the finest wines, the most amazing entertainment, the strongest sensual pleasures available on earth - do you think you could live happily? If your name was globally famous and your intellectual abilities beyond comparison - do you believe that your soul would be fulfilled? There was a man named Solomon who conducted a long experiment in his life to see if these things would satisfy his own soul. While he did not deny the pleasure he experienced, he leaves us all with the startling results that revealed that he actually became less satisfied with life when he chose to live for his own pleasures. This message calls us to consider Solomon’s failed experiment and how we ourselves can profit from what he learned.
For close to 100 years, easy-believism has plagued the American Church. In a zeal for evangelistic results, somebody reduced the message of biblical salvation to a prayer that is to be repeated by a person in order to go to Heaven when they die. None of us know just how many people have been led to pray a religious prayer to invite Jesus into their hearts…but have never repented of their sins and bowed to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. The result? Countless people who have a fondness for Jesus but have come up short of a transformational relationship with Him. The Book of First John can be startling as we read it because it gives us several diagnostic tools to determine whether or not we have been truly born again. This message walks us through these truths so that we can discern in our own lives if we have the evidence of true salvation.
One of the longest debated questions in Scripture is whether or not eternal life is…well…eternal. Does the Bible teach that a truly saved person can somehow lose that salvation? Can a person who says they trust Jesus as Lord live in unbroken patterns of sin? If someone renounces Christ after initially accepting Him go to Heaven when they die? If a true Christian can forfeit eternal life, what sin causes that - or what amount of sins? Does the Bible say? These are important issues worthy of our examination. This message gives us plenty of scripture to consider when seeking to answer the question, “Can we lose our salvation?"
Cozy Christianity has never been a healthy option for Jesus-followers. We live out our loyalties to Christ in a world that has rejected Him, His teachings and His ways. In a misguided effort to appear loving, the Church has for many years tried to play nice with the culture. This has been tragic because the culture has still not embraced the Spirit of the Church while it is obvious that the Church has become contaminated with the spirit of the culture. Christians should expect resistance, rejection and persecution. When that becomes the overwhelmingly undeniable reality, will we be ready for what comes? We certainly will if we are living as those who have embraced lifestyles of crying out to God. This riveting account from Acts 12 reveals what it looks like for Christians to overcome cultural and spiritual foes. God has plans to release supernatural breakthrough to all who will press in to Him for wisdom, trust and power. He is unlimited in how He can answer our breakthrough prayers.
We all know that Christians are to be people of prayer. But do we know why we are to prioritize prayer? Jesus taught so simply on the activity of prayer that it can leave us wondering sometimes why we seem to make it so complex. This first message in the new series focusing on prayer will provide us opportunity to un-complicate this vital aspect of the christian life. Prayer is not the activity of presenting a list of demands to God. Nor should prayer be as flimsy as some hollow wish that we offer up while never knowing how God might respond. The better our understanding of what Scripture teaches us about prayer, the better equipped we are to pray like God invites us to, and to experience breakthroughs which He releases when our prayers link up with his desires.
God has never created a single human whose life is absent of divine purpose. You and I are expressions of God’s heart, will and glory. He had an eternal purpose, wrapped it in human DNA and called it YOU. This is why our lives are rich with meaningful potential. Second only to coming to faith in Christ, our life-purpose is to define all of our days. Yes, God has a reason for you being here. He always has. The life of Moses is a beautiful example of just how committed God is to revealing and completing His purpose for our lives. It is never too late in life for us to experience an encounter with God which changes everything from that point forward. Each Christian, if he or she is still not aware of God’s purpose, should pursue the Lord to know His will for their lives. Even if we are slow to do so, God is not. He may very well appoint a burning-bush encounter for you in order to communicate to you that He is still inviting you step into your life’s assignment.
Shame is one of the devil’s most effective weapons. In our generation, we can experience shame for our appearance, our income status, our personal failures, the abuse which happened to us and, of course, the shame from religious people and systems that constantly remind us that we do not measure up. Jesus is not willing that any of His people live in a constant sense of shame. Part of His ministry includes His power to facilitate shame crushing encounters. In this famous passage of Scripture, Jesus comes to the defense of a woman whose sin had caught up with her. While the religious leaders of her day wanted to make a public example out of her, Jesus wanted to make a new creation out of her. The way He treats her is a great lesson for how we should expect Him to treat us when a sense of shame tries to swallow us whole.
God doesn't simply desire to tell us things, His purpose is to spend time with us - to personally intersect with us as His individual children. His purpose in creation and redemption is to walk with us in life so that we may know him, love Him and enjoy Him. This first message in the Divine Encounters series sets the table for the other messages which will follow. This passage from the ancient prophet, Zephaniah, shows us the degree to which God delights in us as His beloved children. Very few places in Scripture allow us the opportunity to clearly visualize how God feels about His children like this passage does. You may be astounded to learn how God the Father feels about us. So, will you have courage to believe that God feels this way even about you?
Stretched. Tired. Frazzled. Worn out. Beaten, Bruised. Broken.
Sound familiar?
This life can weigh us down with countless pains, losses and burdens. This is not a new thing. The human experience has always carried heaviness. When Jesus went to the masses in His day, He did not pretend that their lives were easy. Even His own followers would nod their heads when He mentioned the weariness of life to them. Yet, in the midst of all that might stretch us thin and wear us down, there is a beautiful invitation from Jesus. This message unpacks the simple call from the son of God to everyone who wonders if they can make it another day. Jesus is no distant King. He steps up to us in the midst of our heavy struggles and invites us with the relieving summons, “Come to Me."
The subject of the return of Jesus Christ to earth intrigues all Christians and even provokes the curiosity of non-Christians. Because the mission of the New Testament Church is to prepare the world for the Second Coming of Jesus, we who follow Him should be eager to understand all that is said about His return. What if I told you that this subject, perhaps more than any other in the Bible, must properly affect our normal day-to-day lives. In this message, the Apostle Paul shares with us how we can be prepared as individuals for the tings which immediately precede the return of Jesus to earth. These verses are willed with wisdom, warning and deep comfort as we consider what is toga-pen just before Jesus comes back. Our lives can be aligned accordingly so that we are fully prepared for this monumental future event.
When God brings a person’s mind into wisdom and revelation, He has won that person to Himself forever. An ancient passage of Scripture holds some extremely relevant guidance for today’s Christian pertaining how we step into spiritual breakthrough and continue there. So much of the Christian life hinges on how we think. Listening, believing and responding to God’s ways and words result in powerfully transformed lives that are no longer enslaved to what is happening in this world. We are able to rise above and triumph over anything which life throws at us. This is not some religious self-help rah-rah message. This is a message grounded in ancient truth that welcomes God to capture and hold our attention for breakthrough. If you seem to always be waiting on Kingdom breakthrough and not actually experiencing it, these ancient verses may hold the key for you.
In your Bible, the life of faith is likened to many different things. It has been called a fight, a journey, a flight, a valley, a marriage, a crucifixion, a voyage, a race, a pursuit, a birth, and even a death. These metaphors, along with others, bring the concepts which incorporate our lives of faith down to earth. One word the Bible never uses to describe the believer’s life is convenient. The fact of the matter is that life is often difficult whether you are a Christian or not. The difference between the Christian’s difficulties and the non-Christian’s is that we have the sure-fire promise of eventual and ultimate victory. Yet, in the midst of impossibilities, challenges and wearisome routine, there are moments wherein God works in such a mighty way that we can never forget. Sometimes, nothing short of a fiery display of breakthrough power will suffice. In this message, Elijah not only needed a display of power like that from God, he unapologetically set up circumstances wherein, if God did not show up, Elijah would have lost everything including his own life. These moments are when we are all reminded that fire works. God is willing to release His fire into your impossibility.
Who among us has not known what it is to become the target of someone’s intentional attempts to verbally wound us? Whereas the old children’s saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” may be popular, it could not be farther from the truth. The impact of someone’s verbal assault against us can potentially remain in our memories for decades. Our identities can take severe blows and become misshapen if we put stock in foul things spoken over our lives. Satan traffics in accusation and, if we do not walk in the Spirit, we might become one who speaks his words over others, or one who believe what others have spoken wickedly over us. This message teaches us from the life of King David what it means to overcome days of slander and shaming. It is impossible to always dodge the sinful words of others against us, but it is entirely possible to live free from having perpetually offended hearts. David helps us to see how this refusal of living offended looks in live action.
World events are playing out right before our eyes in a manner that is perfectly aligned with biblical prophecy. Long ago, a group of His followers asked Jesus what people should be looking for in the season where Jesus would establish His Kingdom on earth. Jesus answered them in a way that they could not have expected. His words in this passage of Scripture help us to see that the very things which Jesus prophesied are building in their fulfillment in this present generation. The upheavals on earth are growing more intense and more frequent. Jesus wants His followers to recognize the indicators and prepare. It is clear that the hour of His return is close at hand. Skeptical? Listen to this message and ask yourself if it is not time for you to spiritually sober up and get ready.
Nobody gets into Heaven apart from personally, intentionally surrendering to Jesus Christ as Lord. In this sense, sinners are saved through their own personal faith. Yet, it is also true that nobody gets into Heaven apart from God sovereignly initiating, continuing and completing their salvation by His grace. Remove sovereign grace, there will be no salvation. Remove personal faith, there will be no salvation. So, what does it look like when God goes after a soul? This message spotlights the testimony of one man who desired to know God and His truth. The visible means by which God brought this man to Himself help us to discern what saving love in action looks like. May we worship God for His sovereign grace, and may we also be sobered to recognize that God uses human commitment to accomplish His divine plan.
When God calls an individual or a people to a Kingdom mission, it is always the case that the enemy will oppose the work. Satan hates Kingdom advancement, and he is a committed foe as he seeks to undermine whatever God’s people are doing for the glory of God. Relentlessly, the enemy uses any means available to bring a halt to the work. He seeks to intimidate, debilitate and frustrate the people and the mission. In this message, we see two humans who are raised up to oppose the mission of Nehemiah. From their tactics we are made aware of how our enemy fights us today. From Nehemiah’s response to the opposition, we learn how to resist, respond and endure until the work is completed. When the enemy fights you, it is not game-over. It’s game-on. And God has determined a breakthrough for you. Whoever chooses not to quit is the one who wins.
When the story of planet earth and its inhabitants comes to an end, all the strategies of Satan and the demonic realm will be fully and forever exposed. Each redeemed saint of God will bet made aware of any and all lies we believed while we were alive on earth. Though we will be forgiven and justified before Holy God, we will, no about, be brokenhearted about the lies we believed. Chief among those demonic lies will be the notion that abortion was a debatable issue. From God’s perspective, there is no fog surrounding the issue of abortion. God Himself speaks His position concerning innocent life in the womb. It is Satan and his host of demons that has planted the lie that abortion is permitted by God. This message takes us through the clear teaching of Scripture concerning the damnable practice of abortion. This is not a political issue. This is a moral issue from which the Church in America has departed and sided, in many instances, with the demonic strategy to exterminate life that God has ordained. Christians should listen carefully, inspect their own position on the issue of abortion, and immediately align with the heart of God.
Frequently, God will move in a generation of His people to bring them to a deep level of truth and repentance. Before God releases a fresh move of the Spirit, He first moves within His own people to acknowledge their deep need for His presence and power. What does it look like when God has determined to restore His people to Himself? He stirs internal hunger. He exposes an unhealthy tolerance for sin. He reveals the apathy of our hearts toward His Kingdom. Then…He places His love, grace and mercy on full display until we can no longer resist His call for us to return home to Him. This message walks us through a time of generational restoration to God. We are in need of such a move in this present hour.
Most of us would be surprised to do a survey of the Bible with our goal to be to discern what is written therein about human sexuality. Scripture is filled with references about sex. These references include the beauty of marital intimacy, the prohibition from God of sex outside of marriage, and the consequences that arise when we lean to our own understanding concerning sexuality. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus called His audience to develop and guard a holy attitude about sexual desire. There is one God-blessed outlet for human sexuality, and there are countless other outlets that people, even Christians, choose which lead to heartbreak, sin and personal loss. What did the Son of God have to say about sex? In the current generation that has much to say about sexuality, we need to listen carefully to Jesus and let His voice be the one which guides us.
The Bible teaches the unconditional love of God for people. That is not to say that people are unconditionally accepted by God, but His love is simply offered because it is who He is in His nature. Not as easily received is the truth that God’s children are to love others in this same way. Jesus taught that we are to intentionally love those around us without conditions. He even tells us to press in to loving our very enemies. Of all that Jesus taught, this may be the hardest for us to embrace. We are to love all others just as we ourselves are loved by God. This message unpacks this teaching from the King and exposes how often we fall short of His command to love. How will we ever arrive to this level? By trusting in the One who will pour His love through us.
Jesus calls His followers to live out well-seasoned and brightly shining lives. We are not to hide from the world. Christians do not live in retreat or recluse. The goal of the Gospel points upward in worship and outward in mission. In these verses from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reminds us who we are in Him, and what He has fully accomplished for us. He exposes the weakness of trusting in moral religion. Jesus declares that He has fulfilled all that the Law demands so that we are free to live motivated by trust and love rather than fear and striving. He is calling us to put Him on full and public display as we live out our lives in a world that does not know Him. Religion demands that we behave. Jesus demands that we believe. Between these two demands, eternity hangs in the balance for us.
Many people understand and believe in a literal devil. the Bible teaches that he exists. Jesus was fully aware of the reality of Satan and He battled Satan in the wilderness. But where did the devil come from? How did he become what he is today? This message unpacks one of the rare Old Testament passages that serves to reveal to us how Lucifer, a once-glorious angel in Heaven, became Satan, the evil dragon whom God cast out of Heaven and destined for destruction. If you know your enemy, you are better equipped to defeat him. Here is the story that the devil hates to be told.
One of the most challenging things for us to process is how to reconcile the truth that all Christians are unspeakably loved, graced and blessed by God while, at the same time, recognizing that we are not kept insulated from loss, pain and suffering. As we approach the last beatitude, we hear what Jesus teaches about our being persecuted because of our loyalty to Him. The bible promises persecution for all who live committed lives to Jesus. But this is NEVER the end of the story. The Savior emphatically reminds us of the glorious end of the Christian’s story so that we might overcome the painful days that we experience before we reach that appointed end.
Are you willing to fight all that opposes your inheritance? God is a Father who pledges that all of His children are joint-heirs with Jesus, the firstborn. We are those who have been pledged an inheritance in the Kingdom. Yet, the enemy seeks to oppose us from walking in the full inheritance reserved for us. While much of what is given to us bye the Father awaits our arrival in Heaven, there is a vast expanse of Kingdom goodness that is ours right here and now. This message spotlights how God partnered with an ancient believer to ensure that she received all that belonged to her. As she practiced obedience, patience and a willingness to embrace change, God ordered her steps to be able to reclaim all that stolen from her. He will do the same for you.
There are two misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Christians that are stereotyped in America. The first is that Christians are pushovers who are to roll over and play dead, passive, weak and irrelevant. The other stereotype is that we are militant, dominating, suppressive and threatening. Neither of these misrepresentations are sourced in the bible. The fact is that the Church of Jesus is the mightiest people on the planet. We have strength that no other people possess because it is imparted from God Himself. Yet, with that strength, we operate in love and gentleness. We are not threatening, intimidating or operating in fleshly dominance. The last four beatitudes reveal what it means for Jesus-followers to live as gentle giants.
How important is the Word of God to you personally? What about the local church you attend - do your leaders hold to biblical truth? As the Apostle Paul was writing his final letter before he gave his life for Christ, he could have prioritized a number of subjects pertaining to the Kingdom of God. Interestingly, Paul filled this last letter with references that emphasized our need to hold fast to truth as revealed in the Word. Yes, all of the creation will pass away and be renewed…but the word of Lord endures forever. In our present day, biblical truth is being viewed a optional. In its place, people and churches are erecting allegiances to social doctrines, human philosophies, political platforms and even doctrines of demons. Paul’s words to Pastor Timothy in this message have crucial bearing on the Church in the twenty-first century. Now more than ever, we must re-pledge our allegiance to the Word of God.
As Jesus begins to release His sermon on the mount, He imparts to His hearers what are commonly referred to as the beatitudes. These are the core values of His heart and, therefore, Jesus’ Kingdom. While our tendency is to look at these beatitudes as rules to follow, that is not the intention of Jesus. He is simply stating these things as the things He values and what He imparts to His followers. With each beatitude, there is an attached reward. These first four of the eight core values that Jesus teaches deal with the inner condition of our hearts. Clearly, as we hear Him impart what He values to us, we are quick to discern that Jesus is completely different than the world around us and its values. He invites us to join Him in this life of distinction.
Because it is clear that we are living in the last days, it should come as no surprise when we hear preachers, pastors, prophets and teachers reminding us urgently that there is shaking being sent from Heaven. God forewarns His people when He is about to shake the heavens and the earth. He wants us to get ready for what He is preparing. This urgency comes to us with a personal and corporate awareness of the need to repent, align with God more fully and to live as those who will have nothing to regret when we stand before Him. Sometimes, God warns of a shaking that will upset our lives intensely as He moves among the inhabitants of earth to establish his glory. Within His warnings there is also a pledge of His goodness and faithfulness to those who respond. He will shake all that can be shaken, but what is in alignment with Him will remain. God will reward those who respond as He awakens our sense of urgency in this present season.
Before we hear the first words from the most famous sermon ever preached on earth, it is helpful to set the stage for the words that Jesus is about to share. The Sermon on the Mount provides a revolutionary prescription for living - both in Jesus' day and in ours. This message was not released without purposeful timing from Jesus. While His fame was spreading and the number of people following Him was increasing, Jesus' released a sermon that cut to the very core of the human heart. This message will prepare us to receive the transformational words which will comprise this series on the Sermon on the Mount. What was happening just before Jesus shared the words concerning culture of His Kingdom? Why did He choose this specific moment to speak on these eternal truths? We will be helped by setting the stage before the curtain rises.
The life of faith eventually results in a fork in the road where God takes you in a new direction that is different from the way you have previously traveled. Part of being a committed follower of Christ is that you renounce your rights to govern your own life. He is the Master, we are the servants. He is the Shepherd, we are the sheep. He is the Captain, we are the soldiers. How we respond to unexpected change from God reveals the level of current surrender that we are living in. From the life of Samuel, we can learn how beautiful the results can be if we will trust God’s mysterious leadership, let go of our addiction to the past, and surrender our plans and dreams to His trustworthy hand. In the end, He will fly a flag of His own glory over our lives.
There are innumerable obstacles that we must hurdle as we follow Jesus in this life. Temptations are everywhere. The enemy is militant in his opposition of us. The world system is evil at its core and it seeks to lure us away from faithful pursuit of the best in God’s Kingdom each and every day. In our culture, however, there is one proven idol that shipwrecks many from fully following Jesus as Lord. Among all the idols that seek to draw us from our commitments to Jesus as Lord, there is one that stands taller than them all. The shining, towering idol of the pursuit of riches is the champion of all disciple-destroying efforts of the enemy. Jesus had an encounter with a man who seemed to have everything together. He was moral, spiritually hungry, eager to become a follower of the Master…but he had a stronghold in his soul that Jesus exposed. While wealth is not evil in itself, the pursuit of it is the #1 rival to our faithfulness to Jesus. Find out what Jesus taught others after this rich man walked away from Him. Find out how to topple the tallest idol that is placed in front of you. Find out how to ensure that you are the master of money and that money never becomes the master of you.
When a sinner turns to Jesus to be saved, he or she has answered a calling. That first call to salvation leads to numerous other callings in that person’s life. Yes, the Christian journey is one of being led by the Good Shepherd as He takes us to the places and events that He has planned for us. In the end, He brings us fully and finally home to Himself in a place of beauty, perfection and glory. This final message in the Consecration & Callings series takes us to the very end of our journeys with Jesus. What awaits those who consecrate themselves unto Christ? Where do our callings eventually land us? What should we expect? The known answers from the Book of Revelation are mind-blowing, but the most beautiful part is that the end of this life of callings leads to an entirely different realm where new callings will begin. Jesus is never done calling us, leading us and thrilling us. Even into eternity future it continues.
Heaven is not about pearly gates, golden streets or a glassy sea. It’s not about angels, glorified Bible characters or seeing our departed loved ones who have gone on before us. The central point of focus is an eternal throne inhabited by a risen King. With all of the splendor of Heaven, one thing stands out as the most important fixture of all: the glorious throne of Jesus Christ. This message contains the single most important aspect of what it means to be a Christian. The Kingship of Jesus over the entire cosmos is the enduring theme of the ages. If we can stay anchored in and fixated upon the throne of Jesus, the rest of our lives will make sense and bring glory to God and deep pleasure for us. We join with the angelic throng and fall down before the throne of King Jesus, discovering His majesty and our never ending need for Him.
What does it really mean to be called to becoming a follower of Jesus? It includes a surrender to salvation, but it is far more than just being saved. The Scriptures reveal that each of is called to follow Jesus in such a way that it can be defined as nothing less than radical. Jesus left no doubts concerning what He requires of those who follow Him. His words are both inspiring and sobering, and they are very different than what is commonly offered by the Western 21st Century church. Perhaps more than anything else Jesus said, the words in this message get to the core of our calling to follow Him. He commands us to count the cost and to pay the price. For those who do, there is immeasurable reward.
Last words are usually important. When someone knows that his or her path is leading them from one group of people and to a new group, he or she will weigh what they say as they purposefully step into whatever is coming next. In his final message to the church family he led for 24 years, Jeff harnesses the words of the Apostle Paul to a group of people whom he loved. Jesus Christ will return to this planet to establish His Kingdom, and sometimes we just need a Heavenly exhortation to reminds who we are in Him, and how we can spend the remainder of our days in excellence for His glory. These final words are Jeff’s desire for New Bridge Church as he moves on from the joy and privilege of having been their pastor.
Most of us have prayed for God to change us, deepen us and greatly use us for His glory. We usually picture the answers to those types of prayers to somehow just magically appear within us. Maybe we hope God will put all those good things inside of us while we sleep. Maybe we imagine that He will supernaturally encounter us and then- ZAP! - we will be changed, depended and fit for His greater use. But this is not the way God typically operates. Sometimes, God designs for us to experience a body-slam from Heaven. Sometimes, we have to wrestle with the Almighty to be made ready to receive His very best for us. This message features a moment like that from the life of Jacob. God had great plans for Jacob, but He needed to transform Jacob on the inside before Jacob could receive his purpose from God. Maybe this season requires a similar experience for you. If so, don’t run away from it. Great things follow after we experience God’s beautiful body-slam. Learn about what it means to wrestle with God.
Did you pause to remember today that you are living in the middle of a cosmic war? It is true - the devil has declared war against the glory of God, and that results in him declaring war against all Christians. That means you are a strategic target of the enemy. Christians need to exercise faith in the Kingdom truths concerning spiritual warfare. We do not have a choice about whether or not we will take part in spiritual warfare. We only have a choice as to whether we will be proactive or passive. Scripture tells us much about how to defend against the forces of spiritual darkness. We are also informed about how to live in a proactive offense against Satan and his demonic army. We are empowered by God's truth as we adopt His perspective on the victory that he has granted us through the blood of Jesus, the Word of God and the active gifts of Holy Spirit. The outcome has been finalized: we have already won. But we have to wage warfare to receive the victory that we have been promised. This message reveals some key components that all Christians must embrace as we live in the triumph we have been given in Jesus Christ.
The life of faith eventually results in a fork in the road where God takes you in a new direction that is different from the way you have previously traveled. Part of being a committed follower of Christ is that you renounce your rights to govern your own life. He is the Master, we are the servants. He is the Shepherd, we are the sheep. He is the Captain, we are the soldiers. How we respond to unexpected change from God reveals the level of current surrender that we are living in. From the life of Samuel, we can learn how beautiful the results can be if we will trust God’s mysterious leadership, let go of our addiction to the past, and surrender our plans and dreams to His trustworthy hand. In the end, He will fly a flag of His own glory over our lives.
Most of us have learned to despise legalism. God has revealed that we do not earn acceptance from Him based on us keeping a man-made set of rules. We are not saved by keeping the Law. Our relationship with God is based on His grace through faith in all that Jesus has made available to us in His blood-covenant. Yet, those who are saved by grace through faith are certainly made into new creations. Our lifestyles change and we are called to pursue Jesus and to reflect Jesus in everything that encompasses our lives. This message details what a life transformed by consecration looks like. Though we are all growing in our commitments to Christ, we are called and empowered to immediately put off some old things from our previous days before we received Christ. We are also called to enter into some new things, empowered by Holy Spirit and motivated by growing love for Jesus. How much is too much consecration? This message raises the bar for how we approach the consecrated life.
Sometimes, god makes a calling known in the midst of a massive mess. Urgent situations often produce people of valor who can see the need of the hour and trust God enough to step forward and be used by Him. Such is the case of an ancient woman named Esther. With the threat of the destruction of her people, the Jews, Esther was the only person in the entire land who was positioned to provide a rescue. Her story walks each of us through the possibility that God might raise us up in a significant way in our own generation. You would have not picked Esther because she had no qualifications, no pedigree and no experience. Yet God picked her, and Esther gave herself fully to the assignment. In the end, an entire race of people was delivered from the hand of the enemy - all as a result of Esther’s risky and costly consecration.
Nobody lives more than twelve years without knowing the deep feeling of loneliness. You are not imagining things: sometimes nobody understands, nobody can help and nobody is coming to the rescue. Yes, there are seasons when God leaves you with no human assistance. That is when He himself becomes everything to you. In King David’s glorious life, there was a season wherein he was unsure how he could go on. He had lost everything and did not have a single person (or so he thought!) in his corner. His words from Psalm 142 express the pain of his loneliness mixed with his heartfelt desire for God to become His lasting hope. What happens in response to David’s cries shows us how, even today, God answers the lonely.
Many people struggle to understand how a good God could possible leave so much that is NOT good in this world. Why is there evil? Why do we endure human opposition? Why does God not eradicate all the bad guys and exalt the good guys? These types of questions have haunted philosophers and religious thinkers for centuries. One of the reasons God allows trouble to exist in the world is to prove the faithfulness of His own people. That’s right, God tests us through troubles. In this message, God Himself explains this principle by using Israel and her enemies as an example. Warfare is part of God’s plan for His children, and nobody learns how to wage war unless there is opposition. What we learn from our troubles, opposition and battles is highly valuable in the eyes of God. He wants us to pass the hardest tests. Most of those tests come to us through trouble.
There may not be a more dramatic calling in the entire New Testament than the one that came to Saul of Tarsus. Everything changed for Saul, including his name, after Jesus saved him, set him apart and sent him forth. Saul became known as Paul and he became the pioneer of apostolic missions, evangelism, discipleship and signs and wonders. When we examine the consecration and calling to the Apostle Paul, we can see some of the Kingdom dynamics that are active in each of our Kingdom callings. While our own calling may not be as dramatic as Paul’s, the God who called and commissioned him is the the same God who has a life-purpose for us. Learn from Paul’s life about the intensity of a calling from God. It is to be stunning from the moment of the call until the day when we exit that calling and enter into His presence.
Jesus was accomplishing mind-blowing works that were stunning the people. Yet, when He revisited His own hometown of Nazareth, the people were not impressed with Jesus. In fact, they were offended at Him because they chose to view Jesus through natural eyes that had watched Him grow up there among them in previous years. Because they viewed Him as common and ordinary, Nazareth experienced absolutely nothing supernatural from Jesus. In fact, Jesus actually walked away from them and never returned. What can we learn today from the offer of Jesus and the failure of Nazareth to receive it? When we are bored with Jesus, when we get used to His name, His story, His ways and His teachings, we can risk taking up offense with Him, minimizing how much we need Him, downgrading what He does for others, and missing out on all that He wants to do for us. This message calls us to protect our awe of the King.
While God has specific, individual designs for each and every life He creates, there are some shared callings that we all must answer from Him. The level of our answers to these callings found in Titus 2:11-15 will deeply impact the quality of Christian life we each experience. Additionally, how we respond to these four calls to us all will impact the amount of eternal reward we receive from God at the end of the age. We are living in the final chapters of this age, and there has never been a more crucial time for any of us to ensure that we are moving deeper into intentionally consecrated commitment to the King.
There is a gift of the Holy Spirit that is simply called “faith”. Paul writes briefly about it to both the Romans and the Corinthians. Faith is a growing work of God in the lives of all Jesus-followers. As we learn of Him and become more like Him, our faith-muscle will grow. We are to be maturing in our ability to believe and trust the Lord. In this message we see the differences between refusing to believe, being slow to believe, and then growing in our ability to believe and trust as we follow Him in days of challenge. If you struggle in the area of living by surrendered faith and trust in God, do not fear. As long as your heart is not hard, Jesus will not reject you for being slow to believe. He bears with us, challenges us and then empowers us to grow in our ability to have hearts that are growing in fuller trust. He is working in you for that goal even now.
In one scene, found only in Luke’s Gospel, we behold a Kingdom encounter between a lady, the Lord and a legalist. Her life had been dominated by demonic power for close to two decades and religion had not helped her a bit. On this life-changing day, Jesus delivered her from both the power of demons and the powerlessness of religion. As one might expect, those loyal to their religious ways protested what Jesus did for her which led to a strong rebuke from the Lord. In this message we have opportunity to examine our own hearts to discover if we make the same mistake of prioritizing policy above people and religion over rescue.
All Christians would vote YES for revival to break out. We all want to see powerful conversions from spiritual death to eternal life. We want to witness an awakening sweep across a dull and dusty Church in America. We believe in healings and miracles…but we don’t see nearly enough of either one of these beautiful manifestations of the power of God. Who among us would not want to operate in a daily, uninterrupted flow of Holy Spirit power that sets people free from their strongholds and demonic oppression? What about Christians forsaking all and committing to take the Gospel to the farthest and darkest places on earth? Yes, we all desire revival. But true revival is not cheap. This message helps us as individual believers to know how to prepare our own hearts for the revival that God will send.
Everyone wants to get a promise from God. Occasionally, God makes a personal promise known to His individual children. More often, He shows us a promise in His written word and calls us to believe it by faith. God made massive promises to Abraham. Nobody had ever received promises like Abraham. Yet, to build his faith, God then tested Abraham by allowing him to choose to promote and protect his own interests connected to the promise, or to allow his nephew, Lot, to have the upper hand in a huge decision that would effect both of their destinies. Abram allowed Lot to make the choice instead of asserting his own rights to make the choice to benefit himself and to protect God’s promise by means of fleshly actions. In essence, Abraham chose to temporarily lose so that He became more fully reliant upon God for his future. This message will reveal how God often calls us to do the same: letting go of something in the moment in confidence that God will secure something better for us in the future.
Everyone has an opinion about who Jesus is. Most of those opinions are wrong, simply because they are incomplete. Sadly, even the modern Church is releasing incomplete, insufficient messages about who Jesus Christ is and what is required of us to be called one of His followers. In this message, we find a scene where Jesus probes us to help us come to terms with what we truly believe about Him. In the process, Jesus states with clarity what He has designed for all who would be called by His name as Christians. The Church must recapture the heart of what the Lord says in these verses. If we do not present Jesus as He presented Himself, then we must soberly consider that countless people have believed an incomplete, insufficient version of who He truly is. There is great reward in knowing Him. There is immense consequence for believing that He is something other than what He presented.
There is a deep commitment in God’s heart to continually draw His own people back to Himself. It is no secret that, on our own, we are prone to wander and quick to drift away from God’s ways. Our love can grow dim. When we drift or grow dim, we tend to look to other places to satisfy our spiritual hungers. Sadly, we learn the hard lesson that only God can satisfy those desires. When we refuse to listen to His call to return back to Him, He comes after us. This message reveals the great lengths that God goes to in order to bring His straying children home.
You haven’t been a Christian very long before you encounter your first door that God refuses to open. When we talk about open doors and closed doors in the Kingdom, we are usually referring to our desire to step into something and, as we attempt to do so, we discover if God is saying Yes or saying No to us. These are important moments for all Jesus-followers because they reveal so much about where we are in our own hearts with the Lord. The Apostle Paul had a massive calling to pioneer the Gospel in his day. He lived to take the message of Jesus to places where nobody had gone before. Sounds like a tremendous ministry, right? Yet, this message reveals that Paul was met frequently with closed doors…with the answer No from God. We can learn much about how God powerfully uses closed doors in our lives. When we cannot go where we want to go, when we cannot leave where we want to leave, when we cannot receive that which our hearts long for, we cannot give what we powerfully desire to release…these are closed doors that God uses to fulfill His master plan for our lives.
To believe that He is a caring God is one thing. To believe that He is a God who cares personally for you is another. In a world full of problems, pain and poison, how can we daily live with the confidence that God truly cares for us? This message revisits the timeless words of the 23rd Psalm to walk us through the determined communication from God that He personally chose to reassure us time and again that we are loved and cared for by Him. This care for us is seen - not in the absence of our trouble - but in His unwavering promise to accompany us in our trouble and deliver us out of our trouble. He is the God who cares for you, no matter whatever else life may be communicating to you.
None of us is called by God into half-hearted Christianity. The Word is clear that our response to such a full and free salvation in Jesus is to become a full and free surrender to Jesus. There is so much that He offers us as we increasingly grow in our belonging to Him. Paul had experienced a radical conversion to Christ, and his own response was a full and committed surrender. He longed for this same response in all of us, so God inspired him to pen a prayer for fullness to the Colossian church. From this written prayer we discover the depths and treasures of growing into a fuller life in the Spirit. His words are meant to stir our spiritual hunger and to boldly call his to step up and step in to the fullness that is offered us through a fuller surrender to Jesus. Are you hungry for more? Is there a certainty that the Christian life is greater than your past and current experience? You are feeling what God has placed within each of us. It is coming alive again. He is stirring you. This is what we need. This is what we long for. Now is the season to pursue this with all of our being.
There is a longstanding strand of Kingdom DNA that has come fully unraveled in the modern Church. God's people have always been called to maintain a distinction from the corrupt cultures in which they live. As citizens of an entirely different Kingdom, we are to reflect the priorities, beliefs and pursuits of the Heavenly realm. To keep us in generational awareness of this call to live consecrated to God, there have always been voices which He has raised to communicate this essential calling. When those voices fade or fail, that generation will inevitably lose its way. In ancient Israel, God brought a strong indictment against those whom He had appointed to be the watching eyes and warning voices of a generation. When spiritual watchmen sleep and Kingdom watchdogs refuse to bark, evil creeps in. God is not content to allow this to happen without sounding a wakeup alarm. Our generation, soaked in political correctness, needs to heed this ancient message from God to Israel. If the Church presses the mute button on herself, refusing to speak the hard messages, evil will continue to creed in and take many captive. We are called to keep the bite in our bark.
It has been said that God is good…but He is not safe. What does this mean? the Bible portrays God as being perfect in wisdom, motivation and action. All He does is holy and good. We are to rest and trust in His flawless character. However, we should never interpret His goodness as being obligated to create for us here a life of ease, empty of risk. God calls all of His children to a journey of faith which removes the notion that we are ever in full control. Gods stretches us, bends us and breaks us. He does this in order to create within us a heart and life that is fully dependent upon Him so that all of the glory ends up with Him. Because of this, we should not ever assume that the life of faith in him is going to be easy. Abram was 75 years old when he began to learn these truths. God called an old man to uproot from all his comforts and familiarities to enter into a season of redirection. God is doing the same thing with many of you in this season. Learn from how God and Abram interact as they partner together in a covenant that would change the course of human history forever.
When you received Jesus as Lord over your life, there was one component that He made a reality without asking for your input. Jesus made you a SOLDIER in His army. That’s right, none of us come into the Kingdom without also being drafted into the Army of God. So, the question is not IF we will fight but, rather, when and how we will fight. Spiritual warfare is a constant activity in the life of all Jesus-followers. Though the final outcome has already been decided, each of us is called to take territory for the King while also defending territory that the enemy seeks to reclaim from us. This constant warfare can be both exhausting and isolating - especially when so many Christians have gone AWOL. This message features two obscure Old Testament warriors whose examples can help us remain in the fight, crush the enemy and bring God the glory…even if we find ourselves fighting alone.
When Jesus assumed the role of the lowest household servant by washing the feet of the disciples, He left us an example. He told the disciples that they could not comprehend in the moment what exactly He was doing when He washed their feet. He told them that they would understand later as they followed His example by showing honor to each other. What does Jesus want us to learn about humility, serving others and showing honor to each other? How do we wash each other’s feet today? When we take the time to consider in depth the great differences between the disciples whose feet Jesus washed that day, we can understand the richness of His call for us to show honor to one another - especially those who are very different from us in the Body of Christ. God honors those who honor others. At some point, He will call us to show honor to those with whom we have great differences. This message shows us what that looks like.
What is the most essential theology connected to Christmas? What must we know and believe about the advent of Messiah? Is it enough to simply declare that God the Son came and was born into the human race? While that glorious truth is certainly the headline of the birth of Jesus, there is so much more that feeds our soul if we will ponder the beautiful ramifications of the incarnation. How is it that Jesus' birth lends itself to the eternal salvation of sinners? This non-traditional Christmas passage from Galatians helps us to know more deeply and treasure more greatly what God began to accomplish when the Creator entered the human experience via the incarnation of Jesus Christ. There are three important things we all must remember concerning the birth of Jesus.
Most everyone has something about which they are occasionally afraid. In heartbreaking scenarios, some people live in fear, dread or anxiety almost every day. It is no surprise then that the most frequently repeated call in the Bible coming from God to us is the command to not be afraid. God wants us to live in assurance that He is in control and that He is for us, not against us. Because we live by faith, we embrace the reality that we must live with many unknowns as we follow Jesus. Our response to these unknowns is meant to be faith and trust, not fear and terror. In the very first scenes surrounding the birth of Jesus, we find three separate occasions wherein Heaven commands Mary, Joseph and the shepherds to refuse to live in fear. Christmas is the great message of hope that serves to banish our fears.
Christians are constantly being saved. Most of us define salvation as that act whereby God declares us no longer guilty for our sins after we have placed our faith in Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. Yet, that is only the beginning of salvation. That moment of faith in Jesus seals our justification, but salvation is also seen in the acts of sanctification and glorification. Justification is the beginning and glorification is the final destination. But what about sanctification? God is saving all of us every day from the power of sin. He is delivering us from the fallen ways of humanity. He is crushing the enemy’s power in our lives. He is making us more like Jesus through the activity of the Holy Spirit. This message focuses on the differences between those walking in their flesh versus those walking in the Spirit. If our justification has truly taken place, our sanctification will surely follow. Sanctification is the evidence of what winning looks like for the followers of Jesus.
We all have a tendency to drift from God. If we are not proactive in our pressing in to God for intimacy, wisdom and encounter, then our natural movement is actually away from Him. The world system can pull us away. Our flesh opposes His will. Then there is the added factor of the enemy’s work against our souls that never ceases. Yes, it is sad but true that we tend to drift. But do not fear! God himself is always pursuing us. He calls out to us. He shepherds us and keeps us from wandering too far off. This message highlights God’s constant ministry of invitation. He loves to remind us of all the goodness that He has for His children. He reminds us that He does not think nor act like a mere human, and that His grace and compassion are immeasurably grand toward us. Listen for His voice calling out to you, inviting you to no longer drift. Answer His repeated to call to come…come…come home to Him.
If you ask me what I believe is the #1 key requirement for spiritual victory, I would answer quickly that it is desperation. We must remain in a spiritual state of longing for God’s presence, wisdom and power. We are wired in both the body and the spirit to pursue that for which are the most hungry. We pursue what we desire. For this reason, we must cooperate with Holy Spirit to long for nearness with Abba Father. The words in this Psalm are a beautiful example of what it looks like to press in to the Lord to know Him and experience His goodness. When we are desperate for Him, we will eventually leave off from anything lesser and make knowing Him our greatest pursuit. When we pursue God, we discover the riches of His greatness and the thrill of revelation in learning who He discloses Himself to be. If you feel like you are spiritually suffocating under the stale air of emptiness, then the words from this Psalm will help you breathe again in the presence of the One who most loves you.
The great debate on whether or not a true Christian can sin their way out of salvation will likely continue until the return of Jesus to earth. For nearly the entire history of the Church, people who equally love Jesus have disagreed on this issue. What is clear in Scripture is that there can be no reasonable expectation of entering Heaven for those who live their lives in unbroken patterns of sin. But the question remains, “Do those who profess Christ lose their salvation by sinning or do those who profess Christ, and yet practice habitual sin, ever possess salvation in the first place? Well, the answer must be determined by what the whole of Scripture teaches. This message offers us some of the most important verses on this frequently debated issue.
God has promised to discipline His children if they go astray. But that promise is attached to another promise - a more desirable promise: God says that he will restore and bless His children when they humbly respond to His discipline and return to Him. God had told Israel that they had strayed and that He would be sending correction to them. Lest they believe that He had cast them off forever, He also reassures them in this message that He knew that Israel would return to Him, and that they would experience great blessing from Him once again. Their correction was not the end of the story! This message reminds us that the ways of God include both correction for the disobedient and blessings for the repentant. For any and all who may have wondered if God was through with them because of past failures, this message reassures us that God is not yet finished with us.
God makes us wait…and we need to accept that as reality. Yet, when God determines to move, He calls us to be ready in a moment’s notice. The Book of Joshua is a beautiful narrative about what it means for God’s people to step into the fullness of their inheritance. When the waiting season ends, the warring season begins. From the details of this passage of Scripture we can learn so much about what it looks like when God raises up an individual to step into destiny. Additionally, everyone has a role to play in the plan of God and we need to understand what He requires of us. This message will unveil four requirements that find us in the season where God calls us forth to be ready to move into all that He has for us.
Most of us in America heard from an early age the story of Jesus dying on the cross. If we are honest, most of us also struggled on some level to understand exactly what that had to do with us. 750 years before Jesus actually died on the cross, a prophecy was released by Isaiah that explained so much of what Jesus would accomplish for us when he died there on Mount Calvary outside of Jerusalem. This message reveals some of the immeasurable treasure provided for us through Jesus’ sacrificial death. Beyond that, we can also learn how we can follow in His footsteps as we personally encounter rejection, injustice and affliction during our own lives. To live like Jesus also involves us learning how to die like Jesus. What does that activity look like in our modern-day lives, and how do we cooperate with it?
We hear many sermons on our need to be good stewards of the money God gives us. We also hear messages on the importance of stewarding the time He gives us along with the spiritual gifts & natural abilities given to us by God. Not as frequently do we hear the preachers call us to be good stewards of all the opportunities which God presents to us. Yes, God is still opening doors of purpose for us. He is still calling us to step though those doors by faith. This message from the life of Joshua connects his calling, purpose and opportunity from God with our own lives today. In these verses, we find the essential elements to recognizing an opportunity from God, remembering all that He has said to us in the past, and then taking trusting steps to walk through those kingdom doors into those things which He purposes for us.
The very essence of what it means to be saved can be summarized by saying, “God, through the sacrifice of Jesus, graciously and permanently removed the hostility between us and Him.” What an immeasurable gift it is to have all of our sins forgiven and to be welcomed into the life of God. Is it any wonder then that God expects us to live in that same way with all others? We are to refuse the presence of hostility in our hearts toward others. As our culture is promoting division, outrage, lovelessness and hostility, the followers of Christ are to live intentionally in such a way that we are killing hostility anywhere we are able. This message from Ephesians shows us why we must kill hostility in our hearts and how God empowers us to accomplish this. Our commitment to biblical, Gospel-centered kindness to others will magnify Jesus to a lost and hostile culture that expects the Christian to be no different than others. But for this to happen, we must learn to kill the hostility.
The history of God’s people reveals that, before they encounter strong correction from the hand of God, they receive from Him multiple warnings. God never “flies off the handle.” God is not an erratic Father who unpredictably loses His temper. When the time comes for God to correct His children, He usually issues many calm warnings before unleashing the stormy season that is meant to bring them to repentance. This message shows how God told His children what He was about to do because of their rebellion. Their proud sin had reached its tipping point, and God was soon to send a storm into their lives to bring His straying children back to Him. The Church today is wise to recognize this mode of operation from the Lord. Do we hear His warnings to us and our own nation? Do we presume that we will be the exception to God’s ways, and that He will not send storms to correct us? May the listener evaluate his or her own heart, and may we all be moved to pray for our nation as we discern that we are equally guilty of the very same sins for which God judged His people long ago. His warnings are present. The storm is still future. But the gap between the warnings and the storm of correction is shrinking.
Jesus promises His followers a life of freedom in Himself. Being made right with God through the sacrifice of Jesus results in our lives being transformed and set free. Far from living a life of dead religion, mundane rules or smothering weights of demand, Christianity brings us to a place wherein we become joyful and free to embrace the lives Christ has purchased for us. But, for this to occur, we must be trained in what it means to partner with the Holy Spirit. Nobody lives the life of freedom and victory apart from a growing oneness with God the Spirit. This message magnifies the freedom God declares over us and offers us some healthy guidance in how to daily partner with Holy Spirit in order to experience spiritual freedom. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
History tells us that more believers fall due to becoming distracted from God than they do because of some in-the-moment moral implosion. Satan prefers to erode us than to explode us. He likes the slow kill. In Psalm 73 we find the amazing testimony of a believer who confesses how he almost fell away from God, but was rescued right before falling apart. How did God keep this person from crumbling? He showed him that his envious heart was the problem. Then, God gave him a private revelation that woke this straying believer up from his spiritual slumber. In our day of cultural class-warfare, we need to be on guard against being eroded by envy. There is a key component to protect us from this possibility. Psalm 73 unveils the secret to coming out of envy and finishing our race with confidence and joy.
We get saved. Things begin to change. Previous beliefs, behaviors and attitudes begin to change. New ways of living begin to appear in our lives. Then it happens: we find a stubborn patch in our lives that simply won’t change. There is something we cannot overcome. Maybe it’s a previously held attitude towards others. Maybe it’s an emotional struggle. Maybe it’s a recurring sin. This message takes one of the most important bible passages on the struggle in the lives of Christians against sin. How do we overcome those issues in our lives that we know fall short of Jesus’ expectation? Can we ever get victory over long-standing sin struggles? The answer is Yes. Romans 7 tells us how to better win this war within.
It will not be too long before these verses become illegal to preach in America. Mark it down: Romans 1:18-32 will become classified as hate-speech and will be banned as such in the United States. Until that time comes, those who preach and teach need to assert the truths of these difficult verses and show great love as they communicate these truths to a generation who hates what they say. What does the wrath of God look like? You may be surprised that it is not necessarily all fire and brimstone. Sometimes, God releases wrath by withdrawing quietly from determined sinners and giving them what they most desire: full independence from Him. This message tackles the sins of our present generation and offers a heartfelt plea for those who are willing to return unto a merciful and gracious God while there is still opportunity. May we sorely acknowledge these crucial truths. The clock is ticking.
Most of us have heard the good news of the Gospel. We have heard that Jesus came to earth, lived a perfect life, laid down His life on the cross as the payment for sin, and rose again three days after He was buried. We know that when we repent and trust in His sacrifice, we experience the new birth and are saved from the wrath of God through faith in Jesus. This part of the Gospel is known and believed by all Christians. But do we know the rest of the good news? Do we really understand what happened to us and for us when we were saved? This message uses an Old Testament passage of scripture to show us what God does for us when He brings out of sin and into redemption. It’s far greater than most Christians would dare to believe!
The Bible is filled with miraculous accounts of God’s supernatural healing power. Most Christians have found themselves at one time or another praying for a miracle of healing, provision or divine intervention from God. In the last days there will be an increase of supernatural release of spiritual gifts and Holy Spirit power. Yet, Scripture also reveals that experiencing miracles and the power of God does not necessarily connect us with the heart of God. This message reveals that trust and obedience are more important than experiencing the supernatural, the miraculous or the unexplainable. Jesus has deep compassion and desire for His sheep - we must turn and desire Him as He desires us.
All encounters with God leave us changed on some level. Perhaps in our day of post-Enlightenment Christianity, the hardest thing to change about us is our minds. Whoever got to you first as a christian likely laid the foundation for much of what you believe and practice today. That is wonderful…if they taught you in Spirit and Truth. What is difficult is when you were not taught properly and God must later encounter you so that you can un-learn some things. Such was the case of Peter in Acts 10. This message reveals how God reserves the right to reform our personal convictions, enlighten our incomplete beliefs and reorient patterns of conduct. Mark it down: if you are encountering God, He is intentionally removing you from your comfort zone. Peter can stand up and testify to this.
From the life of Jesus, we are able to learn how Satan seeks to divert all of us from our God-spoken identities and assignments in the kingdom. In subtlety, the enemy is constantly seeking to redirect our minds and wills towards lesser investments of who we are in the Kingdom. Harnessing the world system and the different streams of influence from our culture, Satan and his demons are committed to the art of diversion. If they can succeed in disconnecting and diverting us from our true identities as sons and daughters, then they are able to redirect our eternal focus unto a temporary focus. When they are successful at these diversions, Christians no longer live FOR the Kingdom of God even though they are living IN the Kingdom of God. The raw truth is that the enemy succeeds in this tactic of diversion in the lives of innumerable believers. We are able to learn how to consistently overcome Satan’s strategies by learning from Jesus himself as Satan sought to divert Jesus from the assignment He received from the Father.
In the eyes of God, there has never been an insignificant human being. Each person is an expression of some component of the heart of the Father. Everyone has a purpose assigned to their existence. Unfortunately, many do not believe this about themselves. Moses had once believed that he had a purpose from God. He fumbled it. He blew it. He became humiliated and afraid. Decades later, God wanted to reacquaint Moses with his life-purpose. This encounter would change everything for the man that thought he had missed his opportunity. Moses would learn that the purposes of God may come slowly to a life, but come they will. What was true for Moses is true for us today.
Unity is, possibly, an overused but undervalued word in churches today. In some places it means uniformity - Christians are pressured to look alike, dress alike, vote alike, and conform to an exterior standard imposed by a leader. In other churches unity may mean that Christians never challenge one another, resulting in an artificial harmony that lacks Kingdom wholeness. So what does the Bible reveal to us about the real meaning of unity among Christians? Is unity primarily theological and positional? Is it more about relationship and shared mission? What does God expect of you when it comes to walking in biblical unity with other believers? This message seeks to bring clarity to the issue by revealing four key aspects to unity that all Christians should embrace.
Every Christian longs for the power of Jesus Christ to mark their lives. Not as many recognize that this power only comes from the abiding presence of God. We are called to enter into the life of Jesus in order to experience all that He has for us. This message reveals the testimony of the Apostle Paul who so longer to know Jesus that he even committed to partner with Him in suffering and loss. Intimacy with God involves much more than experiencing an occasional dose of power from Him. To know Him intimately, we must pursue Him relentlessly.
God wants all His children to be convinced that He can accomplish the impossible. The only way that this can happen is for Him to lead us into life-circumstances that we simply cannot handle alone. the Bible consistently reveals that God will MOST DEFINITELY give you more than you can handle. This message highlights that truth through an encounter with Ezekiel that would not only give him greater faith and hope, but all of Israel would learn that nothing is impossible for their God.
Everyone wants to be successful. Sadly, not everyone agrees on the definition of a successful life. For all Christians, God has both defined the successful life and the means to achieve it. This message gives us Heaven’s perspective on what it means to live a successful life in the sight of God. Mark it down: the American Dream is almost completely devoid of what success looks like in the Kingdom of God. Material success if vastly overrated, while Kingdom success remains greatly undefined among so many believers. Don’t be fooled by what the world is offering us - God wants to unpack His version of success for us so we can put it on every day of our lives.
In God’s Word there is frequently found a call to engagement with Him. The Father summons us to partner with Him to accomplish whatever it is that He is doing. In ancient times, a king’s invitation was not meant to be answered but, rather, obeyed. It is no different with God’s call on our lives. In this message, God cautions us about our procrastination, excuses and reluctance concerning His mission. He points believers to one of the smallest creatures on the planet - the ant- and asks us to learn from it. How can an ant teach us about living with Kingdom urgency? In the example from the ant, God calls us to preparation, proactivity and persistence. Anything less reveals that we lack the urgency that faithful believers are called to manifest in every generation.
Few things dent the human soul than the experience of rejection, abandonment and betrayal. Nearly every family you know has been impacted by one or more of these painful events. When these experiences occur during one’s childhood, it can be catastrophic and result in lifelong struggle for the one who experienced them. This message reveals the grace and faithfulness of God to a mom and teenage son who were rejected by their husband and father. While there is complexity in the reasons behind their rejection, the bottom line is that it bruised their souls. How does God minister to those who have been rejected and abandoned? From the story of Hagar and Ishmael we see the caring heart and restoring hand of God on behalf of those with an orphan-spirit.
It is the strong conviction of many in the Church that we are stepping into a season of true, Heaven-sent revival. While many would nod their heads at that concept, not all agree on exactly what constitutes revival. This message takes us through many places in the Bible which address the topic of revival. What precedes revival? How do we recognize revival when it arrives? Who is responsible for revival - God or us? If we are truly seeking the times of refreshing from the Lord, this message will help us know specifically what we are asking for.
Once a person has been brought to God through faith in Jesus Christ, it may be argued that the most vital experience to follow is to become convinced of the majesty, holiness and supremacy of God. While it is true that God is love, His holiness defines and regulates that love which comes from Him. He is not so holy that He remains distant from us, but He is not so loving that He endorses our indulgences. Isaiah had spent five chapters pronouncing woe upon others. When he sees the glory of God in the temple in chapter six, Isaiah pronounces woe upon himself. How he is ministered to in the throne room of God reveals much about the heart of God towards His people. This message calls all of us to consider the supremacy of God over all of creation, and brings us to an encounter which should cause us all to bow in submission and honor before His throne of grace.
Sometimes, because of what we are seeing and what we are feeling, we wonder if God might have forgotten about us or, worse yet, forsaken us. When the enemy appears to have the upper hand, when God is not stopping the growing tide of evil in our culture, when our past sins accuse us, we can find ourselves living with our backs pinned against the wall. This message reveals how the Father uses these seasons to develop a deep sense of urgency in His children. Sometimes, God lets the enemy advance so that it will produce an urgent cry for help from His people. These are the seasons when we cannot go a day longer without the breakthrough of God’s glory exploding upon the world in which we are living.
If there is one thing that Scripture makes perfectly clear it is the truth that “a faith that saves is a faith that behaves.” Eternal life through Jesus Christ is not just a duration of life, it is a quality of life. We do not merely live forever, we live forever as new creatures who are different from those who are outside of Christ. Passages of Scripture like Colossians 3:5-11 help us to clearly see that we are called to a higher standard. What God commands of us, He will empower within us. This message removes all doubt about what saved people are to embrace and what we are to refuse. Paul gives a clear list of behaviors and calls all believers to align themselves with the high expectation of God. This message provides us with a gut check to examine ourselves and see if we are truly in the faith.
In this final message from the Book of 1st Peter concerning suffering in the life of the Christian, we get a glimpse and a reminder of the promised victory that all believers have over every form of suffering. Much of this victory will be experienced while we live by faith on earth. Perfect and full victory, however, only comes after we enter into eternity. The question remains, “Can we beat the devil and overcome all that he hurls against us?” The answer is a resounding YES. Our victory over suffering is contained in the paradox of discovering that, the more we die to what is temporary, the more alive we become to that which is everlasting. God takes every attack, loss, trial, suffering and pain and turns it to our good - both in this life and then for all eternity. Christians must live with a determined confidence that we are triumphant in Jesus. From that launching point, we walk in victory.
Are you aware that what comes forth from your life will never elevate above the way you think about your life? Proverbs 23:7 asserts that the way we think determines who we become, therefore it is crucial that we think as God would have us to think. This message provides the healthiest approach to how we think of ourselves, of Jesus Christ and of the world around us. When we get our thoughts under the harness of the Holy Spirit, everything begins to change. If we continue to give the best of our minds to lesser things, then we will continue to live at a level beneath the will of God for each of us. We need an altered state of thinking.
As we explore the topic of suffering from the book of 1st Peter, we now come to crucial place of discerning how Jesus-followers should respond to God allowing suffering into their lives. If God is good, and if He allows troubling seasons to find us, then those seasons must be ordained for our ultimate good. Whether or not we experience this goodness from God through suffering depends on how we respond to it. This message helps us to understand how our Father will empower us in suffering and actually harness our faith-fueled response to suffering to elevate us in the Kingdom. While God will accompany us and help us in times of suffering, He truly does expect us to respond properly toward Him and what He is working.
As we have learned that God has never promised to insulate us from all suffering, we then should consider what possible good could come from Him allowing us to experience pain, loss and heartbreak. If He is truly good, what reason could He have for allowing these types of things to find us in life? Well, the answer is not unclear when we look through the Scriptures. Here is a hint: it is impossible to grow in holiness and Christlikeness apart from suffering. Every single character in the Bible whom we admire and long to emulate experienced some measure of testing, trials and trouble. By looking at their examples and also by reading what Peter writes in these two verses, we can prepare to experience both the suffering and the good that comes from it when it lands on our doorstep.
Message description: If God is truly good, why does He not prevent bad things from happening? This question has been a torment to many theologians and philosophers throughout the centuries. The answer for Christians is not really a mystery. Why god allows difficulty and pain to find us is answered clearly in the verses covered in this message. The issue is not whether the question can be answered, it is whether or not the answer will be received by us.
The Christian life was never designed by God in a way that you and I could live it out apart from His power. That’s right, God designs the lives of Jesus-followers to be impossible without His supernatural strength. We are promised, trouble, suffering and tribulation. Most modern Gospel preachers will not tell you that. But it is true. In this famous passage from Hebrews 12, we are given the greatest example of endurance found anywhere in the Bible. Jesus Christ not only empowers our ability to press on in life, He actually shows us how to do it by example. This message will remind all of us that it is always too soon to quit. We must press on for the glory of Jesus in our lives. When we do, we will find that He is our very present help when trouble finds us.
We have heard since childhood that God loves us and has a great plan for our lives. While those words are factual, they are certainly incomplete. The modern, American view of God having “a great plan” for our lives somewhat lends itself to us believing that God is committed to our lives being easy, prosperous, unhindered and free of trouble. Nothing could be further from the truth. From the life of the Prophet Elijah, we see how God works in the lives of those people whom He intends to use for His own glory. Elijah would eventually become known as the greatest prophet in Israel’s history. That was God’s great plan for his life! But for that plan to become reality, Elijah had to experience the painful, difficult process of the glory of decrease. We should expect the same in our own lives.
Jeff and Amy Lyle take time to expose the ongoing ignorance about spiritual warfare among Christians. Amy highlights proactive ways to engage in warfare and chase the enemy from your life, your family, your house and your ministry. Jeff calls us to become proactive before the battle instead of reactive when the battle begins. If you do not see the validity of discussing spiritual warfare, you are probably already being victimized by it. This 2-part Truth Shot series helps all of us to discern the activity of the enemy and to send him running.
God is always working to strengthen our trust-muscle. As in the physical realm, heavy weights are used to stretch and break down muscle each time we workout. When those broken down muscles repair themselves per God’s design, they are tighter, bigger and stronger. The fact of the matter is that physical muscles do not grow bigger without weight, resistance and breaking down. This is also true in the spiritual realm. God intentionally uses heavily weighted circumstances to strengthen our trust. Resistance makes our trust-muscle larger. He breaks us down from where we were in order to build us up to where He has appointed us. The stretching and heaviness are the methods He employs to build our ongoing trust in Him. Right now, there are plenty of heavy forces working to break us down. God wants to use those forces to build us up. This message reminds us that God is not working on us from a distance, but that He is actually as close to us in the Spirit as any personal trainer would be to us in the gym. He calls us to deeper levels of trust and empowers us to respond to Him by promising to always be by our side.
Jeff and Amy Lyle take time to expose the ongoing ignorance about spiritual warfare among Christians. Amy highlights proactive ways to engage in warfare and chase the enemy from your life, your family, your house and your ministry. Jeff calls us to become proactive before the battle instead of reactive when the battle begins. If you do not see the validity of discussing spiritual warfare, you are probably already being victimized by it. This 2-part Truth Shot series helps all of us to discern the activity of the enemy and to send him running.
Isaiah chapters 24-26 are extremely important for us right now. These three chapters are filled with promises, principles and prophecy. Isaiah’s words predict a future global outpouring of judgment. Might we be entering those times? For the people of God, there is protection and provision during global shakings. But what are we to actually do when the judgment that is hitting the planet is negatively impacting our lives, troubling our minds, and diminishing our strength. We need to know these answers and this message from Isaiah 26 lends us help in doing so.
Have you ever considered how astounding it is that the Creator of the universe chose you to be His friend? God is all powerful, all knowing, and ever-present. He is immeasurable and eternal. Yet, for some amazing reason, He chose you to make you His child. Once you became His child, He began working to make you His friend. This message takes us into the tenderness of God and reveals the mystery that He desires, more than anything else, to simply walk with us through life as our Father and our Friend.
The Apostle Paul once wrote that “All the promises of god are Yes & Amen in Jesus.” (2 Cor. 1:20). Yet it is undeniable that sometimes God seems to look us straight in the eye and tell us, “No, my child.” The challenge for us is discerning what the difference is between our desires and God’s promises. This message from King David’s life walks us through what it is like to receive a flat denial from God. David asked for something that made sense. It was spiritual. He wanted to honor the Lord by doing something for Him…and God told David NO. Can we embrace God’s No’s in faith? Will we praise him when He denies us? Have we matured to celebrate His wisdom when He declines the thing we desire? David’s life helps us to see how God saying No is sometimes the gateway to greatness and glory.
One of the most challenging aspects surrounding the reality of suffering is determining the source of our suffering. Different Christian viewpoints will give drastically different answers. Did a sovereign God cause me to suffer? Is the devil afflicting me with intentional warfare? Am I being punished for my sins? Or is suffering just built in to the human experience, therefore I am to accept it? All of us have wondered about these issues at times. Paul the Apostle suffered like few others in the Bible. This message reveals an intense season in Paul’s life where He asked God to remove his suffering and God told Paul, “No.” From Paul’s response to his season of suffering, you and I are able to learn some incredibly helpful insights about how God allows suffering to work some of His most precious offers into our lives as His children. The devil may be the source of our suffering, but he never has to have the last word about the final outcome.
The modern American Church has almost zero theology for suffering. It’s like the uninvited visitor who shows up and takes over for a little while, leaves abruptly, and never announces when he is coming back again. We are unable to deny the reality of suffering, and we cannot pretend that Christians are immune from it. Yet, it certainly is not the will of God that His children remain so awkward when thinking upon suffering and discussing it within the context of the Kingdom. The words of the Apostle Paul serve as a beautiful template for all of us who are experiencing suffering or know someone else who is currently enduring painful difficulty. What good comes from suffering? Why would a loving God allow it in the lives of His people? What do I do with my fears, weaknesses and doubts that arise when the suffering finds me and does not leave? These are not questions without biblical answers. We just need to learn to trust what God says and then welcome Him to bring stunning grace to help us. That is exactly what Paul learned to do.
All of us are going to be entrusted with seasons of pain. Trouble is simply the unavoidable reality of passing through our time on planet earth. When the Christian is entrusted with a season of struggle, the intent of God is to bring us closer to Himself. Wisdom, revelation and intimacy are to be birthed from any and all pains that find us in life. Yet, pain seems to have its own agenda. Pain wants to be the predominant voice, speaking more loudly to us than God. This message from the Book of Job highlights how pain seeks to lie to us when it enters into our lives. Knowing ahead of time the potential deceptions that attach themselves to our suffering and trouble can equip us not to believe the lies and to remain resolved to magnify the promises of God to us when we follow Jesus into the deep and dark valleys.
The Book of Job offers the reader a strange, unique glimpse into the interactions between God and Satan. When Satan discusses the godly man, Job, with God, he receives permission to test him. Satan aims to destroy Job. God intends to strengthen Job through whatever attack Satan launches against him. Job suffers a lifetime of woe in the matter of one singular hour. This message takes us on the emotional and spiritual roller coaster ride that occurs when godly people encounter their worst nightmares occurring in real time right before their eyes. From Job, we learn the freedom of acknowledging all the pain and loss with raw emotion, while at the same time holding onto our confidence that God is good and that He is for us. In the end, we behold a man showing us all how to worship in the ruins.
There is a scene in ancient Israel from which all modern followers of Jesus can powerfully learn. Four dying lepers stumbled upon a miracle from God in the middle of the wilderness. The initial response of these four lepers sadly characterizes so much of modern Christendom. Happily, just a short time later, the reality of the treasure entrusted to them hit their hearts, and then became something to release into the lives of others. As all Christians have received immeasurable treasure in their salvation, our response to this grace from God is to become people of generous release into the lives of others. We who have trusted Jesus will follow the Spirit into releasing our lives to enrich others rather than hoard all we have received for ourselves. This message highlights the power of God to initiate powerful reversals of our hopeless circumstances. It also serves to summon those of us who have been rescued by Him to live in such a way that others can drink from the streams of love, care and generosity which will flow from our rescued lives.
There are certain strands of Kingdom DNA that are irreplaceable. No substitute will do. When it comes to living as citizens of God’s Kingdom, and advancing the message of Jesus into the dark kingdom of this world, we must recognize the necessity of the Holy Spirit. God’s people must understand in their minds and surrender in their hearts to what Scripture says about the person and work of God the Spirit. Apart from Him, we cannot accomplish anything that will bring lasting glory to God. Holy Spirit gives us life, purifies us from sin and the flesh, energizes our lives to become supernatural, transforms us over time to reveal the nature of Jesus to others, and unifies us with all other Christians. None of these things can be accomplished through any other means than the indwelling spirit of God. This message harnesses multiple passages of Scripture to emphasize just how much we need Him in our lives today.
As David moved forward in leading Israel as their king, he discerned it was time to bring the ark of the covenant back to Jerusalem. For decades it had been sitting in places where it was no longer an instrument in the national worship of the God of Israel. After seeking to move the ark without consulting God, disaster struck, and a man named Uzza was killed for putting his hand on the holy ark. David referenced the Law and learned how to properly transport the ark. In this message, we see the unbridled joy of David as he dances in the presence of God. We also see the nasty heart of someone who despised his public displays of worship. This message calls us to unapologetic displays of enthusiastic worship of God, while also warning us about the dangers of judging those who engage their spirit, emotions and bodies as they magnify the God who loves and leads them.
We only experience intimacy with the God of the bible to the degree that we pursue the God of the bible. We will only pursue Him as He desires to be pursued if we know Him as He desires to be known. And there is no way to accurately know the God of the bible independently of what He reveals of Himself in the written Word. Apart from the ongoing renewing of our minds (Romans 12:2), it is actually possible for us to worship and serve a version of God that we or someone else made up. Many people have beautifully warm feelings toward a self-created God who doesn’t actually exist. Something other than the written Word has shaped their understanding of God, therefore the one they worship is not the same as the true God of the bible. Apart from the revelation of Scripture, we cannot authentically know Him. This message magnifies the intense and non-negotiable call from Heaven for Christians to hold to the truth of the written Word of God. We crave deeper encounter and experience with God, therefore we crave the revelation of who God actually is through the Word. The written Word keeps us anchored in the truth of who God is, what He has promised, all that He requires of us and the power of His constant invitation for us to experience Him in spirit and in truth.
You have likely never met a person that can honestly say that they delight in waiting. While it is true that, as we mature, we learn to patiently wait, nobody truly enjoys waiting for something they desire. We have an impulse in our soul that prefers to immediately receive what we long for. Part of becoming a deep follower of Jesus is learning how to cooperate with His practice of making us wait. King David’s life was marked by long, deep and sometimes painful years of waiting on God to bring to pass His plan for David’s life. In this message, we witness David’s breakthrough that was two decades in the making. That’s right: David waited twenty years for one day. Yet, when that particular day finally found David, he was so glad to reap the harvest of all those years of patiently waiting upon the Lord. We should expect the same in our own lives. Are you and I willing to wait as long as God determines for Him to bring to pass His plans for us?
Very few people in the Bible captivate us as powerfully as David. His story is one of an underdog who became an overcomer. His stunning heart for God is not so spiritual that we are kept ignorant of his raw passions and public failures. In the end, David's story offers us much about what it means to be a man of faith. Our culture is confused about the issue of masculinity. The Church does not seem to always offer clarity about being male and living as a son of God. This season in David's life offers us a platform for growth in seeing both masculine strength and humility as part of what it means to be a man who follows Jesus. May God impact our hearts and minds to reframe what we believe masculinity truly is. It is not toxic to be fully, unashamedly male. It is nothing to apologize for. What every man needs is a touch from God that imparts him the identity which God has reserved for him.
Perhaps we should no longer assume that everyone understands that the followers of Jesus will live in a way that reflects the character, commitments and passions of Jesus. The Church is the visible reflection of the heart of the Lord. As we walk in oneness with Him, He will live out His life through us as individuals. When we live in harmony with each other as believers, there is an even greater level of the revelation of the nature and purpose of God through us. This message helps us to discern what a healthy spiritual family can look like. Our spiritual DNA is inseparable from the nature of God. As we live in humble trust, the world around us will be able to see who God is and what He is like.
Perhaps we should no longer assume that everyone understands that the followers of Jesus will live in a way that reflects the character, commitments and passions of Jesus. The Church is the visible reflection of the heart of the Lord. As we walk in oneness with Him, He will live out His life through us as individuals. When we live in harmony with each other as believers, there is an even greater level of the revelation of the nature and purpose of God through us. This message helps us to discern what a healthy spiritual family can look like. Our spiritual DNA is inseparable from the nature of God. As we live in humble trust, the world around us will be able to see who God is and what He is like.
There are moments in our lives where God calls us in to have an honest conversation with Him about our lives. He addresses what our hopes have been. He helps us work through the complexity of all our inner desires. He reminds us of His plans and priorities for our lives. God asks us some tough questions, and then He walks us through an assessment of how things have been going from us. These God-ordained moments give us an understanding of our recent past, a clear grasp on how we are presently interacting with him and a beautiful invitation into the future that He is offering us. As we approach a new year and a brand new decade on our calendar, God is calling us to release to Him our seed of faith. If we clutch that seed He is requiring from us, He wants us to know what we should expect. If we obediently release that seed in trust, we will experience a harvest greater than we can imagine.
As David’s long stint as a backslidden believer continues, he is about to find out what it means for us to reap what we sow. This short, painful scene in David’s life was a turning point that would bring him face to face with the consequences of living outside of the will of God and beneath his destiny. When we make decisions that do not honor the Lord, there will be consequences. Sometimes those consequences are intense. How do we respond when our sins catch up with us? Do we run further from God, or do we have enough assurance of His committed love to turn to Him in our moment of deep need? David was about to temporarily lose everything he treasured. Even his own life was hanging in the balance. How he responds to the dire situation he had created can instruct us in how to turn to God when we have failed. David’s bad decisions had created an impossible knot for himself, his men and all of their families. God was going to prove that He knows how to untie impossible knots.
Most everyone has something about which they are occasionally afraid. In heartbreaking scenarios, some people live in fear, dread or anxiety almost every day. It is no surprise then that the most frequently repeated call in the Bible coming from God to us is the command to not be afraid. God wants us to live in assurance that He is in control and that He is for us, not against us. Because we live by faith, we embrace the reality that we must live with many unknowns as we follow Jesus. Our response to these unknowns is meant to be faith and trust, not fear and terror. In the very first scenes surrounding the birth of Jesus, we find three separate occasions wherein Heaven commands Mary, Joseph and the shepherds to refuse to live in fear. Christmas is the great message of hope that serves to banish our fears.
What is the most essential theology connected to Christmas? What must we know and believe about the advent of Messiah? Is it enough to simply declare that God the Son came and was born into the human race? While that glorious truth is certainly the headline of the birth of Jesus, there is so much more that feeds our soul if we will ponder the beautiful ramifications of the incarnation. How is it that Jesus' birth lends itself to the eternal salvation of sinners? This non-traditional Christmas passage from Galatians helps us to know more deeply and treasure more greatly what God began to accomplish when the Creator entered the human experience via the incarnation of Jesus Christ. There are three important things we all must remember concerning the birth of Jesus.
God declared David to be a man that had a heart like His own. David is famous for being the man after God's own heart. What an amazing description given to David by his God. Yet, we must never forget that the man after God's own heart was still a man. David, like all of us, possessed a sinful nature. This heroic man committed some very famous sins during his life and marred his testimony with some fleshly actions. Not as famous was the period of time where David spent living in fear and manipulation as he sought to preserve his life from King Saul. This message focuses on a sixteen-month season when David was operating according to his own wisdom and placed the lives of all who were following him in great peril. Motivated by fear, David compromised his commitment to live by faith and began living in a way that was mired in falsehood. God loved David too much to allow him to prosper in this season of backslidings, so we see Him go after this son who was feeling right while he was living wrong.
The differences between men and women are far more than any of us are able to number. God made males and females to be distinct from one another. This important determination from God is seen in human anatomy, personality and the different ways that men and women tend to lean in our natural instincts. Fewer places in the Bible put on a clearer display of the differences between men and women than the part of David’s life where he meets the woman who would become his future wife. Sadly, for David, he is presented with all of his flaws in this portion of his story. Abigail, on the other hand, is revealed to us as a powerful woman, fell of grace and wisdom. David and Abigail are not alone in this account. The largest, darkest and coldest shadow is cast upon them both by a man named Nabal, Abigail’s first husband. Take note of how these two men at their worst are contrasted by the Holy Spirit with this woman who is at her best. May we all, male and female, learn from both the excellent and powerful examples from all three of these lives.
For four centuries, Israel had been captives in Egypt. There was an intentional, cultural and spiritual bondage which had robbed them of their identity as the descendants of Abraham. As their cries had gone up to their God for deliverance, immediate relief did not arrive. Moses was now an old man who had been commissioned by God to lead His people out of slavery and into their inheritance. There was one major obstacle: Pharaoh. If Israel would ever experience deliverance, the leader of Egypt would have to break. This message shows twenty first century believers the realities of what often happens in our lives when God determines that it is time to deliver us from all oppression from the enemy. The devil, the culture and our own flesh work together to keep us from walking in the full freedom purchased for us by Jesus. We need complete deliverance! In the story of God preparing Israel to be set free, we are able to see some what occurs in our own lives just before deliverance finds us.
One of the most challenging things that Christians deal with is how to respond to the attacks of those who choose to treat us as their enemies. If we do not fight back at all, we become doormats. If we fight back in the wrong manner, we forfeit the covering of God and may end up making a difficult situation much worse. Jesus commands us to turn the other cheek, but does that mean we passively tolerate mistreatment, abuse or lies? What exactly does it mean to leave all vengeance to the Lord? In this season from David’s life on the run, we are impacted by several important Kingdom principles that all appear in one tense scene. David has an opportunity to wipe out an enemy who is clearly wicked. It seems like God is giving Saul into David’s hands to defeat. People encourage David to aggressively put an end to the fight, but David’s heart is not so sure it is the right thing to do. From David’s actions, we find ourselves instructed on how to submit to human authorities, how to show honor to those who may not deserve it, and how to rest in trusting God with His perfect timing to bring a holy end to our battles with others. In the end, we learn how to send our enemy back home.
One of the most undesirable aspects of the Christian life is facing the reality that God's intentional kindness towards His children sometimes manifests itself through His disciplining of us. Yes, God is not unilaterally committed to our continual comfort and personal pleasure. To the degree that He intends to grow us and use us, He must break us. Frequently, the Father takes us through seasons wherein we are stretched, tested and proven. In these seasons, life can feel somewhat like a dark cave to us. For David, this season involved a literal cave that became his temporary home for longer than he would have liked. In the midst of losing all of the comforts in his life, God took David through a prolonged season of decrease wherein he was being trained to look to God alone for comfort, hope and security. It was during his cave-season that David received the bright light of learning to trust deeply in the faithfulness of God when the rest of his life seemed to oppose him.
The closer we get to the end of the age, the more we should expect to hear Heaven-sent messages which spotlight the great need for Christians to persevere in the faith. God the Spirit will be leading messengers to call the Church to press in closer to the King as the culture moves farther away from Him at a rapidly increasing rate. The writer of Hebrews sent a message to people in the first century who were being tempted to turn back from their current levels of belief in Jesus as Messiah. Some of these people were truly born again. Some of these people believed with their minds but had never fully surrendered to Him in their hearts. The writer recognized that the external pressures from the culture and the internal uncertainties in their individual hearts posed a real threat to their souls. Today's Christian must recognize that a verifying mark of authentic faith is that we will endure unto the end with a committed faith in Jesus. God's grace makes that endurance our reality, but it never happens without our ongoing cooperation. We must continually press in or it is certain that we will be drawn back into something other than the lordship of Jesus Christ. This message reveals four calls to us from God that reveal to us what it looks like to press in unto the end.
To truly embrace and experience all of what God has created you for, one element is essential: the recognition that God is now and forever will be everything to us. All our lesser loyalties and potential things upon which we might trust must either be renounced by us or removed from us so that we recognize that our lives are completely dependent upon God alone. While God commands us to love and appreciate all that He places in our lives, He forbids that we ever give our full trust to these things. David would be a great source of glory for God, but he would first need to learn what it meant to stand utterly alone, with nothing to lean on but God Himself. There was a season wherein everything else was removed from David, leaving him with absolutely nothing left to lean on.
If you live long enough and keep your eyes open, you will be able to discern repeated patterns within the Kingdom of God. One of these cycles of how God works is seen in His exalting one person while simultaneously reducing another person. None of us is a permanent fixture in our generation. The young get old, the old die and, while that is happening, newborns are entering the cycle to ensure that there is always someone whom God may use for His glory. In this passage, we have this cycle undeniably placed before us as God’s hand remains upon David for blessing, while that same helping hand is removed from King Saul. What does it look like to be promoted in the Kingdom by God? Are you positioned for this type of touch from God upon your own life? This part of David’s story also serves as an opportunity for us to see if there is any danger of us living in the prison of our own insecurities when God promotes others around us. Envy and jealousy are open doors to the demonic realm, and we have the calling to keep our own hearts free and clear of these powerful emotions. As God continues in our generation to elevate some and reduce others, we have decisions to make about how we are positioning ourselves under His hand. Will the fingerprints of God mark us for blessing, or will the thumbprint of insecurity mark our lives?
There are unforeseen moments in life that will define our entire storyline. Many times, we did not see them coming when we awoke on the day that they occurred. God’s providence sets up encounters, events and opportunities that will mark us forever. How we respond to those moments is crucial. Most of the time, how we respond is determined by everything we have believed, envisioned, and committed ourselves to prior to that moment arriving. David was about to face the giant in the valley. If he was going to emerge victorious, there were several obstacles he would need to overcome. David needed to be covered in the armor of God, trusting that the Lord was going to bring him a humanly impossible breakthrough. A different type of armor was offered to him. If David trusted in human resources for the victory, his moment could implode. If he would wear the armor that God provided, the giant would fall. This message walks us through a familiar story from an uncommon point of view. The armor we wear in our defining moments will likely determine the storyline of our life.
Smith Wigglesworth prophesied in 1947 that the greatest revival would occur in the midst of that generation who intentionally married the Spirit of God and the Word of God in both identity, theology and ministry. We are living in the midst of such a generation of Christians and churches. Those who have historically cherished the written word of God, the Bible, are being awakened to the need and offer of the power of the Holy Spirit that has always been available but was historically ignored by them. Denominations who once shunned the supernatural work of God the Spirit are now being gloriously entrusted with His presence and power. For those Christians and denominations who have historically been given to the signs, wonders and gifts of the Holy Spirit, there must be an accompanying return to the prioritizing of the written Word. Man does not live by signs and wonders alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. This message takes a penetrating look at what God’s written word contains, how it is described and what it accomplishes. Those who pursue the Spirit independently of the Word will eventually fall into error. The bible itself tells us of the immense value of God’s Word. We all need a baptism back into the fullness of the written Word of God as our soul’s anchor.
The life of a believer is described in countless ways throughout the bible. One of the metaphors that is repeatedly used all throughout Scripture is the picture of life being a battle. Yes, all believers are living out their days on a battlefield. While there are innumerable forces that actively oppose us, God has declared us to be victorious overcomers in the midst of it all. King David’s life is, perhaps, one of the clearest examples of how we must prepare for war, look to God for wisdom and strength, fight bravely as we rely upon Him, and endure all hostility and opposition until victory is secured. David was a perpetual warrior. We are also to consider ourselves to be the same. In this message, we hear the words of David as He reveals so much of what he was taught by God throughout the years of endless battles with military foes, individuals who wrongly resisted him and even painful opposition from those whom he loved. In the end, David learned something that we also must learn: our Heavenly Father is faithful to prove Himself to be the God of our battles.
Jesus was never fooled by the crowds. One day they loved Him, the next day they cried out for His death. Instead of living for the welcome of the masses, Jesus lived every hour of His life seeking to do the things which brought pleasure to the Father. So clear was Jesus about the Father’s assignment for His life that He never once stepped off that pathway. Along the way there were powerful healings, miracles, resurrections, conversions and teachings. The people loved it when Jesus moved in the power of the Father! Yet, Jesus knew that people are fickle, and He was never drawn away after their halfhearted devotion. He often spoke aloud of the wonder of knowing just who would follow Him all the way to the cross. In this message, Jesus leaves us with one of the key principles for living a life that counts for eternity. When the Christian recognizes this principle is his or hers to live out, then spiritual fog evaporates and powerful clarity comes to us. Apart from our receiving this principle as foundational in our lives, we cannot experience the fulness of what is offered to us through the Son of God.
All good parents want to see their children grow, succeed and prosper. The best parents are intentional about ensuring that their children have the opportunity to go farther than they themselves could have ever gone. What is true in natural parenthood is also true with spiritual mothers and fathers: we want the best for our sons & daughters in the faith. When God allows us the joy and privilege of pouring into those coming behind us, we want to be proactive in our investments in their own walks with Christ. Paul’s prayer in Colossians 1:9-14 reveals what he prioritized as a spiritual father in the lives of those coming behind him. He wants these Jesus-followers to be marked forever by the King. From Paul’s prayers over them, we find ourselves stirred in spiritual hunger for these marks to be bolder upon our own lives and appearing on the lives of those in whom we have the opportunity to invest. What does a life marked for eternity look like? Are our own lives displaying these marks? Are we intentionally living in a way that those coming behind us are also marked with the powerful traits of a disciple of Christ? Jesus gave so much so that our lives would be marked for eternity. This message calls us to give ourselves more fully to this desire of the King.
Never forget that God has a plan. We also need to remember that He is constantly working to bring that plan to fulfillment. God was done with Saul as the King of Israel, and He had already chosen Saul's replacement. David was presently anointed and awaiting his future elevation to the throne of Israel. Before that occurred, there was a process that God had initiated that must first be completed. David's slaying of Goliath was a huge piece of that process. What does it look like when the winds of God's providence begin to blow? When it is time for things to move within God's wise plans, His people need to exercise sharp discernment to recognize what He is accomplishing. In a very discouraging situation, God would providentially move to bring about one of the most glorious events in the young life of the boy who would become a king. David would be slaying a giant. Looking back now, we can clearly recognize the winds of change which were being unleashed in Israel by God.
If you got down-deep honest with God about what we see happening in our world today, what might that conversation with Him look like? If we recounted in detail our growing concern, disgust, outrage or fear about the spread of unholy ideas and ungodly actions in our generation, how do we think God might reply? More than 2,500 years ago, a prophet named Jeremiah had that kind of heart-to-heart with God. As Jeremiah poured out his heart to the Father, the reply he received might surprise us. This message explains why we might need to pay specific attention to all that Jeremiah spilled out and the two questions that God answered Jeremiah with. Those two questions point towards something that all living Christians need to soberly consider.
No other generation that has ever lived has needed to understand what is written in Scripture about the calling to discern the times in which they live. Jesus spoke about this need in some very pointed words in Matthew 16. He later listed a whole host of signs that manifest at the end of the age in Matthew 24. John taught us to test & discern the various spirits that operate around us in each generation (1st John 4). Peter mentions in his second letter that God has given us the ability to perceive the nature of the times in which we are living. And then there is Paul. In this message we will see that Paul prophetically reveals the anthropology at the end of the age - he tells us what people will be like. As we study his description of the people living just prior to the Second Coming of Christ, we should all be sobered. It is undebatable from his writings that we are currently very close to the return of Jesus. Our present generation is exiting off the end-times on-ramp. Knowing we are close, what do we do?
Many people wonder, "Just how do I walk in my God-appointed destiny?" The answer for each of us is that we walk in destiny one faithful step at a time. David has been anointed as the future King of Israel by Samuel. David is a teenager whose current job is protecting sheep from predators. Positionally, he is the low man on the totem pole in his family. Yet, when it comes to David's destiny, there is nobody positioned higher in all of Israel. How would David ever make it from the lowly shepherd's field to the throne of Israel? This message reveals how our impossibilities are God's opportunities. God called David to be a king, and He would see to it that David eventually arrived at the appointed place. From this season in David's life, we learn the immeasurable value of treating small opportunities as if they were the most important. Sometimes the greatest treasures come to us in the smallest measures. If we are faithful in the least, we will eventually be faithful in the greatest.
Few people in the Bible are as compelling as King David. We are drawn to him from the very first mention of David as the little brother whom nobody thought much of. His anointing as the future king of Israel by Samuel bursts open a biography that is filled with elements of faith, love, poetry, warfare, betrayal, sin and lavish grace from God. It is impossible to know the story of David the King of Israel without learning much about our own lives. David’s story consistently intersects with the very things that mark our own lives as we endeavor to follow God in a generation that is embattled by many of the same forces that opposed David and his reign. In the end, David’s life instructs and empowers us as overcomes who contend for the breakthrough offered to us by God. This unlikely hero was singled out as a teenager by God and, from that day forward, David lived a life of passion and purpose. God is raising up many in our generation to follow in David’s footsteps, model his heart for God and learn from his regrettable mistakes.