Coastal Church Podcast

Thankfulness is more powerful than we might think. It is the key to wholeness in our relationships and contentment in life. More importantly, it is the key to receiving the wholeness God has promised for every area of our lives.

In our culture today meekness may be perceived as weakness. However, meekness is not weakness, but supreme self-control empowered by the Spirit to live an overcoming life on earth.

God has designed tears and mourning to release that pain we experience and to be part of a healing process. When pain is bottled up and kept inside, it can poison our spirits. For those in the kingdom God has promised that those who mourn will enjoy His comfort.

Everyone who puts their faith in Jesus Christ is a citizen of God’s kingdom. And in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus gives us the beatitudes, the characteristics He expects every Christian to manifest. The beatitudes are more than pithy sayings, they are radical truths that are as relevant today as they were two thousand years ago.

The end of time is revealed in the book of The Revelation Of Jesus Christ. The whole Bible story leads up to a climax in this book. Here the author, the apostle John, gives us a glimpse into what heaven will be like. What began in the first pages of the Bible is accomplished in the last pages of the Bible.

As we approach the end of the book of Acts, we find Paul on his final missionary journey, spreading the Gospel of Jesus to the known world. He is a prisoner on a boat headed to Rome. He’d been arrested in Jerusalem for causing a disturbance and, while under arrest had shared the Gospel with King Agrippa, almost compelling him to become a Christ follower. Now he was on his way to stand before Caesar and accomplish his mission of bringing the Gospel to gentiles and rulers (Acts 9:15).

This week we will continue in the book of Acts. As the church begins to reach beyond the Jewish world, the question is, who is going to take the message of Jesus and what He has done to the world? Peter is featured in the first 12 chapters of Acts and then Paul takes the spotlight in his mission to take the message to primarily the people outside the Jewish community. His life is a thrilling adventure of someone fully devoted to preaching the Gospel to a culture much like ours today.

The book The Acts Of The Apostles reveals the new beginnings of the church. The early church believed and preached the resurrection of Jesus and the power of His name. The prophet Isaiah had spoken of a Child to be born whose name would be called “Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” and now the church would live and die for that name.

In the upper story God is watching over the ultimate sacrifice for the sins of mankind. From the book of Genesis onwards the scarlet thread of redemption was woven into the bible. It may be obvious for us to look back and see the plan, but for people living at the time, despair was all they experienced until they saw the resurrected Lord Jesus.

In the upper story we see God’s plan of redemption through the death of Jesus on the cross. As Jesus is about to die, He utters these words, “It is finished.” At that very moment, the temple curtain was torn, an earthquake split rocks and tombs were opened. It was finished. What could compel the Son of God to endure such torture? Finishing. Finishing the work that the Father sent Him to do.