As we sit between celebrating the coming of Christ and entering a New Year, let’s reflect on God’s Radical Love in 2024. If God the author and finisher had A Final Word to declare over your 2024, what might that be? Samson had a final word and God had one for him.
The love of God is greater than any love we will ever experience. His love has come down, but it has also come in. His love is in us and is multiplied as we become more like Him. This great love causes us to live in a posture of "expecting". Through triumphs and trials our position is to expect love to show up in it, through it and after it. The birth of Christ reminds us that love remains and is always present.
Jesus came over 2000 years ago and along with His birth He also gave birth to His Body, the Church. Jesus set things straight when He came the first time and He ascended and He now sits at the right hand of the Father but He promised He would return. He left us with power in the form of the Holy Spirit to help us on the journey between His first coming and His second. Within the help that the Holy Spirit provides is Joy. Therefore we have in our possession Joy for the journey. As followers of Ch...
Corporate worship is a holy, sacred, set apart activity in the earth. There is no other gathering in this temporal world that can replicate what uniquely happens when the saints of God gather to worship Him. In corporate worship God reveals, relocates and realigns. When we worship together, we are changed together.
Worship is a covenantal act. It is our response to the on-going, faithful commands and covenantal love of the Lord God. He is looking for our worship; not because He needs it, but because He knows we do. Worship is the remedy for our unceasing quest to find wholeness, fruitfulness and fulfillment. Worship is the way we access and extend heaven on earth until the new heaven and the new earth.
The Lord God of heaven and earth is a jealous God. In both the Old and New Testament, more than a dozen times, He refers to himself as jealous. The creator of all things has made all things for His beloved. But He will not stand for anything taking His place in our lives. He wants our deepest affections and surrender. He is The Jealous God.
Humanity was created to live from and for the very goodness of God. God’s very goodness isn’t the quality or ability of an individual part; God’s very goodness refers to the completeness and wellness of the whole. We were created to live from and for relational wholeness and wellness — the very goodness of God.
All too often wounds of the heart atrophy our response to the Shepherd of our souls, causing us to miss the Provision, Protection, and Prosperity our Abba longs to supply. There are rituals and routines, sacred rhythms if you will, that are intended to align us with the rhythm of heaven so that our cadence and movement flow with and follow that of the Spirit, the One in Whom we live, move and have our being. As we journey through the 23rd Psalm with an eye on the Good Shepherd, may we encounter ...
There are times, when God allows moments that bring us to the end of ourselves; times when we face odds and obstacles that we have no way of overcoming; times when we face enemies and assailants that have every intent on destroying us; times when we see our families, friends, and resources under attack with no way of rescue or relief. But those can be the very moments, when God is healing our hearts. Those can be the very moments when we are learning to trust again. Some heart wounds persist, be...
Heart wounds are places of unprocessed pain, hurt and hardship affecting the way we see, feel, believe and behave. Some heart wounds go undetected because they’re caused by shared, socially acceptable and normalized events. There is a dimension of our heart healing and wholeness that only comes when we accept and embrace, It All Belongs to Him.
There are times when heart wounds — places of unprocessed pain, hurt and hardship effecting the way we see, feel, believe and ultimately behave — are caused by despair and disappointment over what God did or didn’t do. But God never intended on meeting our deepest needs with what could be found in this world. His plan has always been to give us a peace unlike anything in this world. Scripture(s): • John 14:25-28 Slide(s): The vision of wholeness, which is the supreme will of the biblical God, is...
When our hearts (soul and spirit) are wounded it hinders and corrupts our thoughts actions and motives. Oftentimes, what we describe as, “the way God made us”, is more accurately described as the way life has wounded us. But there is healing for our wounded hearts. God wants us to be made whole. God wants us to learn to live whole. Scripture(s): • Matthew 25:24-30 • Philippians 2:12, 13 • Proverbs 4:23
Kevin Brown Sep 5, 2024, 6:30 PM (4 days ago) to Christopher, Deborah, Joy, Michael, Jill, Lee, me Introduction: We live from the heart. It’s the innermost part of our being. We may think with our minds and act from our physical bodies, but we live from the heart. When our hearts are whole, healthy and pure we think and act as powerfully as we were designed. But when the heart is wounded, weighted down and broken it hinders and even corrupts our thoughts and actions. Oftentimes, what we describe...
The need for comfort reflects a deep-seated desire that drives people to seek environments that offer safety and peace. Comfort provides a sense of stability and emotional solace which is crucial for coping with life’s challenges and stresses. How does the church create that environment?
We all experience it at some point in our lives, the pain of loss. But how we manage it is critical to our faithfulness to God. Discover the Kingdom keys to fully embracing your grief while receiving grace to keep growing through it, so God can get the glory out of it.
Society says leadership is about ruling or lording over one’s subordinates. However, true leadership requires that a leader is a servant first. That is often exhausting, especially when one is leading stubborn and foolish individuals. Therefore, to radically love these individuals, leaders must intercede on their behalf, as Jesus interceded for us on the cross.
Loving each other well is part of the foundation of our rootedness in Radical Love. We cannot live radically through love without radically loving each other. The world will know our radical love through the radical love we show to one another. Jesus reminds us that the world will know what we show.
There will be traumas, tragedies, and excruciating transitions in our lives that God allows and authors — to get us to the places He’s pre-ordained and to make us into the people He’s pre-ordained. There’s pain in the plan, but because God has determined to stand with us there is no force in the heavenlies, in the cosmos, in the earth or beneath the earth that can stand against us. Our great call in this life is not to live trying to avoid pain but to remain inseparable from He who will not sepa...
The Lord is our keeper. He keeps us in distinct ways. He keeps some things from us. He keeps and protects us in the midst of some things. He keeps some things set aside and reserved for us. But we’re not naturally given to being kept. Too often we believe the lie we must keep or are capable of keeping ourselves. Being kept is the art of abiding in trust and dependence on the Lord God. We must learn to live kept lives.
We began our journey of answering God’s call together on July 10th, 2011. Our first service was held in the United Artists Movie Theater. We ended up with standing room only in the 153 person theater, with people standing in the hallways. We started, not with a moment but with a movement towards His mission and we continue together on that journey today.
We tend to believe forgiveness is for the benefit of those who’ve offended us, but forgiveness is more about us than them. Forgiveness is the way out of victimhood. No matter what others do or have done to us our future remains unchanged, as long as we stay in God’s hands by forgiving them completely.
The words of Jeremiah and the words of Jesus seem to be in conflict. How can a good God, who plans to prosper us, not to harm us, to give us hope and a future also be the God who leaves us in a world so twisted it killed its Savior? Jesus, our High Priest knows the brokenness, depravity and violence of this world first-hand, yet he prays to the Father to keep us here and to keep us from the Evil one. As Jeremiah states, God has a plan. But as we’ve come to know first-hand — There’s Pain in the P...
Fatherhood has a unique role in creation. The role of the father is not better or more important than the role of the mother, but the role of the father is different and distinct from the role of the mother. Due to the fall of mankind, all of creation has suffered a father wound and all of creation is in need of healing for our father wounds.
It’s true, the sovereign, radical loving God of creation causes all things to work together for the good. His plans and purposes for His creation will prevail. This doesn’t mean there won’t be afflictions, falls, temptations, traumas and tragedies along the way. It does mean, in spite of it all and in the face of it all, God is working it together for the good. In the end He prevails and in Him we prevail. He’s working it together for the good.
Pits are the traumas, tragedies, and excruciating transitions in our lives that God providentially allows or authors to get us to the people, places and plans He’s pre-ordained and to make us into the person He’s pre-ordained. Our direction and destiny often has much to do with not only what happens to us but how we rehearse and remember what’s happened. If we are going to fulfill the fruitfulness God has intended in and through our lives we are going to have to grow in our understanding of pain...
We will all endure heartbreak in this life. There are many ways our hearts can be broken, the death of loved ones, divorce, betrayal, job loss, financial ruin, health challenges, estrangements, inequities, and the death of a vision, to name a few. Losses can distort our hearts and keep us from the radical love God offers. God’s desire is to heal our broken hearts to expand our capacity to both receive and release His love.
Radical love is unlike storge love, it’s different from eros love and it goes beyond phileo love. Those loves are exclusively for family, our romantic interests and our closest friends. But radical love does not exclude anyone for anything. It willingly accepts all things, in order to make all things new. Radical love is all inclusive.
"Her children rise up and call her blessed" - Proverbs 31:28 We invite you to join us at The Perfecting Church on Sunday, May 12 at the 9 a.m. or 11 a.m. worship service as we celebrate and honor Mothers. We encourage you to arrive early to participate in a special breakfast prepared and served by the men of Perfect Experience. Create lasting memories with your family members by having a photo taken by a professional photographer. For those attending the 9 a.m service, photos will be taken from ...
The seed of the Word of the Radical Love of God is being planted in our hearts. However, the soil of our hearts must be properly prepared and cultivated for the seed to take root and bring forth much fruit in our homes and our communities for the glory of God.
