Frontier Church

"The People Who Changed My Life" (And the People We're Called to Become)

Frontier Church | October 25, 2026

Who are the people who changed your life? Someone who believed in you, welcomed you, challenged you, or helped you become who you are today?

In this special Sunday conversation, we hear personal stories about the extraordinary influence of ordinary people and explore a powerful biblical truth:

God changes our lives through people so that he can change other people's lives through us.

Through Mark 3:13–15, 31–35, we discover that Jesus doesn't simply call us to follow him individually. He invites us into a new kind of family—one where we belong, are formed together, and are sent to bring his life into the world.

Three Key Takeaways

1. FAMILY — We were created for belonging.**

Jesus doesn't simply save individuals; he creates a people. Church isn't just somewhere we attend. It's a family where we share our lives across generations, backgrounds, and stages of life.

2. FORMATION — God changes us through relationships.**

Spiritual growth isn't just about personal prayer and spiritual practices. God uses people who encourage, challenge, forgive, and model the way of Jesus to shape who we're becoming.

3. FRONTIERS — We're called to become the people who change lives.**

Following Jesus means more than receiving his love. We're invited to carry his love into the world through ordinary acts of faithfulness, hospitality, encouragement, and intentional relationships.

Five Kinds of People Who Change Our Lives

Think about the people who shaped you—and who God might be inviting you to become for someone else.

- **BELIEVE:** Someone who believed in you before you believed in yourself.

- **MODEL:** Someone who showed you a different way of living.

- **CHALLENGE:** Someone who loved you enough to challenge you.

- **WELCOME:** Someone who made room for you and helped you belong.

- **CALL:** Someone who recognized gifts and purpose you couldn't yet see.

Put It Into Practice This Week:

Remember: Who helped shape your life? Consider reaching out to thank them.

Reflect: Are you making room in your life for the kind of relationships that form you spiritually?

Respond: Who is one person God might be inviting you to encourage, welcome, mentor, or invest in this week?

You don't have to change everybody's life. But you can make room for somebody.

FAMILY. FORMATION. FRONTIERS.

Scripture: Mark 3:13–15, 31–35

#FrontierChurch #FollowingJesus #ChristianCommunity #Discipleship #Pasadena

WHY IS IT SO HARD TO TRUST GOD?

Learning to Live Free | Exodus 17:1–7

We can believe in God without fully trusting Him. When life gets difficult, we often find ourselves anxious, controlling, or questioning whether God is really with us.

In Exodus 17, Israel discovers that freedom from Egypt is only the beginning. God is teaching them how to live in relationship with Him.

BIG IDEA: God isn't just testing your trust. He's training you to trust.**

3 Key Takeaways

1. Bring your real needs to God. Trust begins when we stop pretending to be self-sufficient and honestly bring our needs to Him.

2. Expose your transactional trust. Are you trusting God's character, or only trusting Him when life goes your way?

3. Let the test develop your trust. Difficult circumstances can become opportunities to grow in dependence, surrender, and faith.

Three Practices for This Week

- Turn your worry into prayer. Bring one specific concern to God. (Philippians 4:6–7)

- Examine your hidden transactions. Complete the sentence: "God, I find it difficult to trust You when ______."

- Ask what God is forming in you. Identify one difficult circumstance and one step of obedience you can take.

The Gospel: Jesus is our faithful Rock (1 Corinthians 10:4). Our relationship with God doesn't depend on how perfectly we trust Him, but on His faithfulness to us.

We don't learn to trust God by becoming perfect at trusting. We learn to trust Him by discovering, again and again, that He is faithful.

Join us at Frontier Church as we continue our journey through Exodus.

#FrontierChurch #Exodus #TrustingGod #FollowingJesus

Exodus 14:10–14, 21–31

**You cannot live free if you cannot see clearly.**

Have you ever noticed how quickly fear can take over your imagination? We assume the worst, imagine futures that haven't happened, and allow uncertainty to shape how we see our lives.

In Exodus 14, the Israelites have escaped slavery in Egypt, but when Pharaoh's army approaches, fear begins to take over. They've been set free, but they're still seeing the world through the power of what once enslaved them.

**There's a way of seeing that leads to fear, and there's a way of seeing that leads to trust.**

In this message, we explore three ways God teaches us to see differently so we can learn to live in greater freedom.

Three Main Takeaways

1. RECOGNIZE HOW FEAR DISTORTS WHAT YOU SEE

Fear doesn't just affect how we feel. It changes how we interpret reality.

- Discover how fear causes us to assume the worst, rewrite our past, and imagine futures that haven't happened.

- Recognize the patterns of anxiety, control, compromise, and retreat that reveal what we're really trusting.

- Learn to distinguish between what's actually happening and the story fear is telling you.

2. LEARN TO TRUST THE GOD YOU CANNOT ALWAYS SEE

Faith isn't the absence of fear. It's knowing where to take your fear.

- Learn what it means to trust God when you cannot control your circumstances or predict the outcome.

- Discover why freedom isn't simply having no master, but learning to trust the right King.

- Understand how to stand firm in your confidence in God while moving forward in obedience.

3. LET GOD'S FAITHFULNESS TRANSFORM HOW YOU SEE

We often interpret God through our circumstances, but faith invites us to interpret our circumstances through God's faithfulness.

- Discover how remembering God's faithfulness can reshape your perspective on present challenges.

- Learn to see your fears in light of who God is rather than seeing God through the lens of your fears.

- See how Jesus' death and resurrection reveal the ultimate faithfulness of God and offer us freedom from sin and death.

Practices for the Week:

1) Name the story your fear is telling you.

Ask yourself: What am I assuming? What do I actually know, and what am I imagining?

2) Take your fear to God and take the next step.

Bring your uncertainty honestly to God, then take the next faithful step of obedience.

3) Rehearse God's faithfulness.

Remember what God has done, what Scripture reveals about his character, and what Jesus' resurrection means for your future.

The Big Takeaway:

You may not always know what God is doing, but in Jesus, you can know who God is.

The more clearly we see Jesus, the more freely we learn to live.

You can leave Egypt and still live like Egypt owns you.

In Exodus 12, God does more than rescue Israel from slavery. Before they even leave Egypt, He begins teaching them how free people live. He reshapes their time, gives them a story to remember, and places a lamb at the center of their freedom.

In this message, we look at three ways God teaches us to live free:

• **Let God reorder your life.**

What has become Pharaoh over your calendar? Freedom means our time is no longer ruled by productivity, hurry, pressure, or endless demands.

• **Remember the story that makes you free.**

We forget what God has done, so we need practices that help redemption move from information into identity.

• **Learn to live under the Lamb.**

Our freedom does not come from trying harder to become better people. It comes from Jesus giving His life for ours.

Practices for the week:

• Leave room.

Protect one space in your week from work, scrolling, and productivity.

• Remember around the table.

Share a meal, give thanks, and tell the story of what God has done.

• Return to the gospel.

Take five quiet minutes and pray, “Jesus, remind me what you have rescued me from and what you have rescued me for.”

Freedom is not something you achieve. It is something you receive from the One who gave His life for you.

Israel had been rescued from Egypt, but getting out of Egypt was only the beginning.

The wilderness became a kind of “desert honeymoon,” a place where Israel had to learn what life with their new God was actually like. And they quickly discovered that this God had standards, moved at His own pace, and didn’t always work the way they expected.

Through Israel’s conflicts in the desert, Exodus reveals something deeper about the God who rescued them: beneath His commands, His timing, and even the things they struggled to understand was a heart they could trust.

In this message, Phil explores what Israel’s wilderness journey teaches us about learning to live with God, trust His character, and discover that freedom is only the beginning of relationship with Him.

Desert Honeymoon: Learning to Live with the God of Exodus

Moses finally stands before Pharaoh with a message from God: “Let my people go.”

Pharaoh responds with the question at the heart of this part of Exodus:

“Who is the LORD, that I should obey him?”

And that question is bigger than Pharaoh. Who gets the final word over my life?

In this message, we look at the confrontation between Pharaoh and the God of Israel, why the signs in Egypt are about more than punishment, and how God begins exposing the powers and false gods that have claimed to rule people’s lives.

Exodus reminds us that freedom is not simply escaping a bad situation. Freedom is learning to live under a new King.

We explore:

Why obedience to God can sometimes make things harder before they get better

The “masters” we look to for security, identity, control, and significance

How God confronts what enslaves us, not simply to defeat it, but to reveal who He is

Why God’s purpose reaches beyond Israel, even inviting Egypt to know Him

How Jesus ultimately reveals the King whose power is expressed through self-giving love

The question Exodus puts before every one of us is simple: Who really rules?

What do you do when you realize you’re not enough for what’s in front of you?

In Exodus 3, Moses encounters God at the burning bush after his own attempts to fix things have failed. Moses asks, “Who am I?” But God doesn’t respond by building up Moses’ self-confidence. He says, “I will be with you.”

This week we explore the God who reveals Himself as “I AM,” the God who sees, hears, knows, and comes near. Moses’ transformation isn’t learning to believe more in himself. It’s learning to depend on the presence of God.

The answer to our inadequacy isn’t becoming enough. It’s learning to live in dependence on the God who is.

We look at three movements in Moses’ journey:

Stop trying to be enough.

Start with who God is.

Learn to live with God.

Ultimately, Exodus points us to Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us. Our confidence isn't “I am enough.” Our confidence is:

I AM. And I am with you.

Scripture: Exodus 3:1–14

Series: Exodus: Learning to Live Free

Frontier Church | Pasadena, CA

What has a hold on you?

We like to think we're free. But sometimes you don't realize something has a hold on you until it starts pulling you somewhere you don't want to go.

This week we begin our fall journey through Exodus, Learning to Live Free, by looking at the masters we serve. Career, money, approval, relationships, control, even good desires can begin to shape us in ways we don't recognize.

Through the story of Israel and Moses, we'll discover that we're often far less free than we think, that you can pursue the right thing while being driven by the wrong master, and that God is often at work in the background long before we can see what He's doing.

Exodus ultimately points us toward Jesus, the Deliverer who doesn't just forgive us, but sets us free and forms us into a different kind of people.

Whatever I serve will shape who I become.

This fall, we're not simply going to study freedom. We're going to learn to live free.

What if God’s presence, not merely His promises... is actually the whole point?

We spend so much of our lives believing that rest is waiting somewhere ahead of us: when the circumstances change, the prayer gets answered, the breakthrough comes, or we finally reach our “Promised Land.”

But in Exodus 33, Moses makes a stunning discovery: he would rather have God in the wilderness than the Promised Land without God.

In this message, we explore how the wilderness had been forming Moses into someone who increasingly wanted God more than what God could give him—and how God desires to do the same in us.

God’s presence is the rest.

God’s presence is the journey.

God’s presence is the goal.

Through Jesus, the invitation is no longer to remain at a distance, but to draw near—to become a people who know God, practice the way of Jesus together, and learn to live in His presence.

People. Practices. Presence.

A people, being formed, to live in the presence of God.

Exodus 33:12–18

WE NEED GOD | Frontier Church Pasadena

FORMATION: WE NEED PRACTICES | Exodus 16

Why doesn't getting free automatically make us free?

Israel was out of Egypt... but Egypt was still in them. God had delivered them in a moment, but learning to live as free people would take time. So in the wilderness, God didn't just give them information. He gave them practices: daily bread, trust, Sabbath, repetition.

The same is true for us. We're all being formed by something... our habits, our phones, our work, our fears, our culture. Following Jesus means intentionally allowing His way to reshape us.

Prayer. Scripture. Sabbath. Community. Generosity. Worship. Again and again.

These practices don't earn our rescue. Jesus rescues us first. Practices teach rescued people how to live free.

Deliverance can happen in a moment. Learning to live free takes practice.