Asbury Church

In baptism, Christians are buried with Christ and then raised with him to new life. What’s true of Jesus is true of the one who believes in him.

So, why are so many of us living defeated lives?

Many American Christians pray for miracles—a healing, a new job, a particular divine intervention.

Those are external miracles, and it’s good that we pray for them.

But when you read the New Testament, you notice something else:

The constant emphasis of the apostles is not on external miracles so much as on *internal* miracles.

That is, the miracles that work inner transformation of a Christian.

Take Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, for example: Paul, who is in prison, prays that the Philippians will be filled with God’s love, transforming them from the inside out.

When’s the last time you prayed for an internal miracle?

In 701 BC, King Hezekiah of Judah is faced with only bad options:

-Surrender to the Assyrian Empire and lose the kingdom and see God’s people taken into exile;

-Or refuse to surrender and see his people starved and slaughtered.

It is a lose/lose situation.

What do you do what all you have are bad options?

The simplistic, immature answer: “Just trust God.”

The profound, wise answer: Just trust God.”

Let’s talk about the difference.

Jesus calls us to a faith that refuses to stand on the sidelines. In the story of the Good Samaritan, we discover that love goes first—crossing boundaries, meeting people in their places of need, and bringing the hope of Jesus with us. God has uniquely placed each of us in this world with a purpose. The question is: What will you do with the life God has given you?

Jesus, drawing on the Old Testament prophet Isaiah, says that there are two kinds of people:

People who use their ears and actually *hear* the gospel message and people who don’t.

The people who don’t use their eyes and ears and heart to respond to God might as well be stone statues.

But the people who actually *hear* the gospel? Jesus says the results will be shocking. In a good way.

“Do you have ears? You need to use them."

Life is just strange. Good people sometimes die young, bad people sometimes seem to prosper. The best team doesn’t always win. Human life comes and goes quickly, and the world just keeps on turning.

The Book of Ecclesiastes is about life’s strangeness. It’s like the dissenting opinion of the Bible—the Bible’s minority report. And it’s for anyone who has ever wondered, “Why is life so strange?”

Mortality is all around us. Everyone is aging, things are decaying, death seems everywhere; whether in decades or days, death is coming for us all.

And yet, even as we are surrounded by mortality, it is possible for believers in Jesus to become more and more alive with each passing day.

This is the message that Paul wants the Corinthians to understand in his well-known “weight of glory” passage.

Every breath is proof: God’s not done yet.

What has your attention? This question matters because what you give attention to will shape your life.

In the age of the smartphone, this has become an urgent issue for all of us.

The good news is that the Lord has told us what to do, by giving us a way to reshape our attention.

The world is crazy these days. What should God’s people do about it?

When Israel found itself in exile in Babylon, the prophet Jeremiah relayed a surprising word from the Lord:

Make the city you find yourself in better.

Or, to put it another way, “Leave it better than you found it.”

Some people think that America is moving from being a high-trust to a low-trust society.

In Acts 5, Ananias and Sapphira lie to the church, and the penalty is severe: death.

It seems as if the one thing that will kill the church is deceitful speech.

What will it take to be a person of truthful speech in a culture of deceit?