The world tells us to be proud of our success, our power, our wealth and our prestige just to name a few. Yet the irony is while we take pride in those things, we often find our lives still wanting and the important relationships around us adversely impacted. Our feelings about ourselves can actually undermine who we want to be. So of what should we feel proud? Let’s continue to journey through Philippians to find out!
The life of the Apostle Paul is one of hardship, pain and uncertainty, and yet his letters to the early churches are filled with expressions of peace and joy! How did this man, who endured so much, encourage so many to have joy in all circumstances? Let’s take a look at his letter to the Philippians and find out.
Look at your life as a story, like a movie. God is the director. You are the lead role and partner with God in writing the script. You have a calling, a big idea, that God has called you to do. You must discover that vision and develop it into production. Like any good movie, you will face conflict. You’ll have detractors. You will face setbacks, but, if you hold on to your faith and stay true to whom God has created you to be, you’ll succeed.
Life just doesn’t seem fair at times. Why does it feel like God isn’t answering your prayers? Why are you going through the struggles you have? Why does it look like others have a better situation than you? Is God really with you? These questions can create a haunting darkness in your life, making you feel alone and faithless. How can you find faith in the dark?
Many people have come to a point where they believe that IF there is a God, IF he’s offering a relationship, IF he brings some people to Heaven when they die, he wouldn’t for me. His attitude towards me would be, in the words of Alanis Morissette, “But you, you’re not allowed, you’re uninvited.” Perhaps you feel that way because you’ve walked away from God or because of things you’ve done. But here’s Jesus, who claims to be God, and he’s saying, “Come to me.”
Forgiveness is central to the message of Jesus. It’s a simple concept to understand, but it’s quite possibly the most difficult thing to live out consistently in our lives. Without it, there is no way to experience the abundant life and relationships that God wants for all of us so how do we navigate through our unforgiveness?
Our hearts can be our strongest muscle, but they’re also very vulnerable. Wounded hearts can impact our lives for decades. How do we heal from those wounds so that we don’t turn around and wound others?
Conflict is hard, whether it’s in our families, with friends, in the work place or even at church. When relationships become battered, it’s challenging to address it and bring healing. It seems like our natural instincts lead us to all sorts of actions that don’t help on the road to reconciliation. Fortunately, God is committed to healing relationships, and Jesus is a constant guide towards forgiveness.
Have you ever thought about the power of a lie? We live in a world filled with lies, half-truths, deceptions, and now even fake news. Where’s the truth? What’s the truth? Is there truth, or is it all just relative?
Most people concede that Jesus was a great teacher. However, Jesus also made some audacious claims. He said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life…” Were Jesus’ claims just fake news made up by His followers? If His claims were authentic, what does it mean to be an apprentice of Jesus? What did Jesus really teach, and how can we understand what He meant when He claimed to be “The Way”?
Professional athletes spend thousands of hours training and practicing for big games like the Super Bowl, but what would happen if they suddenly decided they weren’t good enough, and stayed in the locker room instead? Life can be like that for us as Christians; we think God has big plans for us, but fear or feelings of unworthiness keep us stuck on the sidelines instead of fighting for the win. How do we get off the bench and into the game?
Most of us desire to live with more joy. However, one important barrier that often gets in our way is immaturity in the ways we relate to others. Are there relationships in your life that need mending? Do you have people with whom you long to go deeper? Perhaps the key to improving your relationships is to understand what God says emotionally and spiritually healthy relationships really look like.
Although God promises us many things that are positive, if we follow Him, He also tells us that we will all experience suffering (John 16:33). Though the degree and form of the trials we experience vary from person to person, no one leads a perfectly easy life. While we all experience hardship, we react to it differently, depending on our perspective on it. Will your suffering take from you, or will you take from it, seizing the opportunity to strengthen and grow?
People have an immense power to shape one another in profound ways, including spiritually and emotionally. God made us that way. Growing up, our families shaped us for better or worse (actually, for both). While our family of origin may have passed along good ways of doing life, what do we do with the broken ways?
Growing up physically and intellectually do not guarantee we will grow at the same pace (if at all) emotionally and spiritually. Charting a path of growth towards becoming our true selves requires that we take an honest look in the mirror. Are you ready?
Picking a word of the year is different than your typical New Year’s resolution. It doesn’t exist to be a constant reminder of what you “should be doing.” Instead, it stands as an inspiration of who you really are in Christ and how you want to live. The word invites you to think about who you want to be, who God created you to be. So, choose a word that will help you experience this.
We’re all busy at this time of year and many of us are simply fighting just to keep the peace at home. It’s easy to feel tugged in so many directions. Carve out just a bit of time for your family, and come join us to find “A Place Called Home!”
There are lots of times in life when we need a safe place: when we feel beaten down from the pace of life, when we feel we can’t live up to people’s expectations, when we’ve made a terrible mistake and have no place to turn, when we feel chained to an addiction or stuck in sinful patterns that hurt us and harm others. But where do we turn when we need a safe place?
It seems there’s constant crisis with war, poverty, sickness and natural disaster in our world today. Likely, most of us feel powerless in the face of so much chaos, so we tune out the pain and focus on the near and familiar. However, with refugees here in our own city, it’s harder to ignore the needs that are practically on our doorstep. How can we raise our heads above our own self-interest to see those desperate for us to care?
While most of us are preparing for Christmas, millions of displaced people around the world are wondering what the future holds and whether or not they’ll see home again. It’s a sobering thought. The question is — should we care? Does this matter to us? And why would we talk about this leading into Christmas?
For what are you striving? What are you clinging to in order to get to where you want to be? Me-centered living often seems the best way to live. It can work for a short while, but it ultimately fails us. So how can we put God at our center trusting Him with all things and live a more profound yet Centered Life?
One of our top fears, according to Gallup and other polls, is losing everything. Most of us are wealthier than 6 billion people and yet it’s never enough. We still fear and don’t feel rich when in fact we are. Why is it never enough? It’s ironic. We fear God wants to take from us, when in fact God wants to make us rich — truly rich. But what is truly rich?
Whether single, married, divorced or somewhere in between, we likely all have strong feelings about the idea of marriage. What is God’s perspective? How do we find hope a midst our relational challenges and failures?
There’s a reason the saying, “To err is human,” exists — we all make mistakes. However, there’s a big difference between letting mistakes become a pattern versus allowing God to turn those mistakes into lessons from which we can heal and grow. So what perspective can we gain about the times we’ve had moral failures?
Failure goes with the territory of being human, and the workplace is a hard place to fail because it’s so easy to allow our work, our title or our role in some other arena of life to define who we are. Can God really turn the epic fails of our careers into something that can bring Him glory, and even bless us and others through them?
Sometimes when we make a dramatic spiritual commitment, like doing the 60/60 experiment, we experience a spiritual high. We feel closer to God, more loving towards people and have a renewed passion and purpose. However, the hard part afterward is to risk answering the question, “what now?”
Just like we’re not meant to live without oxygen, we’re not meant to live life without God. Without God in our lives, we’re spiritually dead. Through Jesus, we can have a relationship with God, which makes it possible for us to stay connected to the spiritual oxygen God gives to live life to the full. How do we though keep remembering to breather in this “oxygen”?
We all know there are good things we should do that we resist doing. Fear, pride or stubbornness keep us focused on doing things our way instead of God’s way. How can we surrender our desires and wills to God, who knows what’s truly best for us?
A joyous, intimate, fulfilling, exciting life with God — many of us want it desperately, but we often feel as if it is unattainable. We crave His guidance for our decisions, comfort in our pain, provision in our need, companionship in our loneliness and inspiration in our search for purpose. As we make an intentional effort to invite Him into our lives through the 60/60 experiment, perhaps we’ve had an encounter with God that requires a response. Are we willing to take a risk by obeying His voic...
Do you believe God speaks? Although we may not hear an auditory voice from God, we can know His voice. The Bible is a record of His words. His words were the genesis of all that we see. He is the word. We have nothing else but His words and faith that He is who He claims to be. So how then can we hear His voice?
