Suffering challenges our faith, but it’s also an opportunity to go deeper with God than you ever thought possible.  In this teaching taken from our recent Equipping Night, Deborah James shares the story of her daughter’s leukemia diagnosis and how God brought them through it.

Summary: The church is God’s idea. It is described as Christ’s body, through which He speaks and acts on the earth. But for the church to fulfil its purpose, we must all fill our part — which means leveraging your God-given gifts to serve others. What’s your part?

Just like Jonah, God invites us to partner with Him to reach those living in spiritual darkness.  He often works behind the scenes to prepare people’s hearts to hear and receive the message — all He needs is a messenger.  But sometimes we are more concerned about our comforts, than the people around us and where they will spend eternity.

It’s easy for us to overindulge in the pleasures of life to numb our pain or dissatisfaction. Whether it’s food, alcohol, or boxsets, the problem with binging is it only provides temporary relief from our problems.  Jesus wants to bring healing to our hearts and set us free from our addictions.

Jesus warned us to “Guard yourself from every kind of greed” because greed is actually idolatry — it is worshipping things of this world.  Generosity breaks the power of greed.  Persuasive people can inspire or guilt us into giving, but true generosity comes when we understand God’s great generosity towards us.

We all know not to gossip, and yet it is still rampant in church culture.  But to change our words, Jesus says we must change our hearts. We must become Advocates instead of Accusers.

Everyone experiences anger, but many of us have never learned to handle our anger positively — we either express or suppress our anger.  But the Bible gives practical wisdom for dealing with our anger so that it is productive, not destructive, to our lives and relationships.

Most of us lead busy lives, so we don’t think we’re lazy.  But it’s possible to be both busy and lazy — to have areas in our life where we chose to sacrifice what really matters for our immediate comfort.  To win the battle against laziness, we need to live a life of intentionality.

Dealing with pride is a common issue for everyone.  It’s easy to see in others, but almost impossible to see in yourself.  But pride blinds us to our own faults, to our need for others and our need for God.  But by following Jesus example and embracing humility, we can overcome prides destructive power.

All of us deal with jealous thoughts from time to time, what we’re not aware of is how destructive jealousy can be if it’s allowed to go unchecked.  So how do you overcome jealousy?  By choosing to celebrate the success of others.