Posts from 2017

The goal… The goal of the church… The goal of prayer… The goal of preaching… The goal of worship… is not for us to just grow closer to God. The goal is to make a difference in everyday life.  The goal is the restoration of all things.   This is why Jesus teaches his disciples to pray “Your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.”   Have you ever heard someone say, “I feel…

It’s one thing to know what Jesus taught. It’s something entirely different to do what Jesus taught. This is the difference – the ONLY difference – between the life that stands up to adversity and the life that crashes under it’s pressures, according to Jesus (Matthew 7:24-27). Christians can easily hide our lack of obedience to Jesus’ teachings behind all of our talking about Jesus’ teachings.  Jesus calls this “foolish.”  He says this lack of “putting [his] words into practice”…

In the first recorded sermons of the Church (you can read these in the New Testament book called Acts), we hear how the first Christians’ whole understanding and practice was built on the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And not only did they consistently proclaim the reality of the resurrection, they also named specific ways the resurrection made an impact on their daily lives. Here’s a summary of their teachings: