Ecclesia Houston

Jerry Cox walks us through a the purpose of our story. Hebrews 10:21-24 Ephesians 2:10 1 Samuel 17:1-49 Faith is not talking about the giant, analyzing the giant, or praying about the giant. Big talk will never slay Goliath. Faith is taking that first step—knees knocking, hands shaking—with fear and trembling going into the valley in the name of the Lord of Hosts. You take that first step not because you think you can do it but because you know you can’t. Therefore, you know that if the giant is defeated, it is because God has done it through you.   - Ray Pritchard

Jack Wisdom and Steven Turley. A podcast series on practical and historical meaning of repentance. Interact with Jack and Steve on the subject via email at [email protected]

Pastor Chris Seay shares stories of reconciliation while in Rwanda with Living Water International. Josh Hilburn walks us through a biblical perspective on how to live out forgiveness. Matthew 5:38-45. Forgiveness means bearing the cost instead of making the wrongdoer do it, so you can reach out in love to seek your enemy’s renewal and change. Forgiveness means absorbing the debt of the sin yourself. Everyone who forgives great evil goes through a death into resurrection, and experiences nails, blood, sweat, and tears. -  Tim Keller

Jack Wisdom and Steven Turley. A podcast series on practical and historical meaning of repentance. Interact with Jack and Steve on the subject via email at [email protected]

Gideon Tsang shares perspectives on how we approach scripture. Gideon is pastor of Vox Veniae, a church in Austin, TX. For more information visit Vox at voxveniae.com. Hebrews 4:12-13

Gideon Tsang returns to share good news on Generosity. Gideon is pastor of Vox Veniae, a church in Austin, TX. For more information visit Vox at voxveniae.com. 2 Corinthians 8:1-8

Acts 10:34-36 Psalms 95:8-9,Proverbs 15:23, Proverbs 15:17, Proverbs 16:3

Nish Weiseth, friend, blogger, and author of Speak, a book about the power of telling our own stories and hearing those of others to change hearts share a talk titled Walking Through. For more information about Nish, visit her at nishweiseth.com. John 4:1-30

Hebrews 12:1-2

Jack Wisdom leads us through a biblical look at liberation through confession. 1 John 1:5-2:2 James 5:16 "A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity.  Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world he came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are addressed. We lack the first condition for understanding what He is talking about.” C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain "If man has his true humanity in his relation to God, namely in that he acknowledges his responsibility to the Creator and that he lives in the communion to which he is called, it is possible that man may find this freedom, grounded in responsibility, to be too little and that instead of being free in God, he wants to be free from God. Instead of taking his life out of the hand of God in obedience, thankfulness and trust, man can fall upon the idea to take his life into his own hands and to create what pleases him. Thanks to those gifts which the Creator has given him, man can emancipate himself from his Creator and make himself his own lord. This is what the Bible calls sin." - Emil Brunner, The Scandal of Christianity "Slippage in our consciousness of sin, like most fashionable follies, may be pleasant but it is also devastating. Self-deception about our sin is a narcotic, a tranquilizing and disorienting suppression of our spiritual nervous system … what’s devastating about it is that when we lack an ear for wrong notes in our lives, we cannot play right ones or even recognize them in the performances of others. Eventually we make ourselves religiously so unmusical that we miss both the exposition and the recapitulation of the main themes God plays in human life. The music of creation and the still greater music of grace whistle right through our skulls, causing no catch of breath and leaving no residue. Moral beauty begins to bore us. The idea that the human race needs a Savior sounds quaint."  - Cornelius Platinga, Jr., Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin “Just as the sacrifice is burnt upon the altar so do we burn down, by our act of confession, our well-barricaded complacency, our overblown pride, our artificial existence.”                    - Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik “I remember that as I was sitting on the dock on the occasion of my last trial listening to [the prosecutor’s] appalling denunciation of me . . . and being sickened with horror at what I heard, suddenly it occurred to me, How splendid it would be if I was saying all of this about myself.  I saw then at once that what is said of a man is nothing. The point is, who says it. A man’s very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all of the sins of his life.”                                                  - Oscar Wilde, De Profundis “A man who confesses his sins to in the presence of a brother knows that he is no longer alone with himself; he experiences the reality of God in the presence of another person.”   - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together