Generation Church

Renowned martial arts expert and child & youth advocate Victor Marx shares his incredible story of enduring a childhood marked by physical and sexual abuse. Still, through the discipline of military life and faith in God, he recovered from his traumatic childhood and is now empowered to help others. In this message, Victor encourages us to be bold, listen to God’s voice, and obey God’s calling in our lives.

Have you ever wondered how to make the most of the talents, gifts, and blessings that God has entrusted to you? As we see in the Parable of the Talents, each one of us has been uniquely blessed by God with talents, resources, and opportunities. It’s up to us to be faithful stewards of God's divine provisions – no matter how big or small they may seem. Explore how faith can multiply even the most modest offerings, all in service to God's Kingdom.

God’s instructions about money in His word go beyond tithing. It involves generosity, and as followers of Jesus, we should be generous people. In fact, this kind of generosity is unique to Christianity because we don’t give to get applause from men. We don’t give for tax breaks. We don’t even give for what we can get. We give because God first gave to us!

Tithing is a topic that can cause a lot of confusion among believers if you see it as being part of the old covenant. But is that the case? The reality is that not everything in the life of a Christian is as simple as Old Testament or New Testament. But when you look at scripture, you see that the Old Testament lays the foundation of tithing, and the new covenant of grace only raises that bar—making it clear that Christians should be tithing today.

Money is one of the top three topics that Jesus addresses throughout scripture. He knew that tithing — submitting one-tenth of our income — was not a financial issue but a heart issue for all of us. Tithing is how we honor God with our finances by returning to God what is already His. We are only stewards of managing what God has given us, including our income. When we don’t prioritize tithing or give the full tithe, we are robbing God and robbing Him of the opportunity to bless us.

You may think you need to learn about physics, cosmology, archeology, and more to defend your faith. Although that can be interesting and help build up your faith, you don’t need to become a master in those areas. You need to know God’s Word. In fact, the best answer to objections to God is the Word of God! So when you face objections, go to the Word of God and get equipped to respond to the most common objections.

Jesus has given us the Great Commission to share the Good News of salvation with others. Just like the farmer in Jesus’ parable, as Christians, we are to scatter the seeds of our faith to those who are far from God and need the hope of Jesus. Our job is to recognize evangelism opportunities with our family members, co-workers, neighbors, and friends. We do this by sewing the seeds of the gospel and casting out our fishing lures to draw others to Jesus. Then it’s God’s job to make the seed grow.

As Christians, we have a mission — the Great Commission — given to us by Jesus. This means we are to share our faith and explain the hope and blessed assurance of spending eternity in heaven with Him. For many of us, sharing our faith is not easy because we think it relies on us. We fear rejection, saying the wrong thing, or offending someone. These fears keep us from explaining to others why the Bible is true and salvation is found only in Jesus. But when we realize we have a helper — the Holy Spirit — we can put faith over fear. That’s when the Holy Spirit will give us the right words to speak, the wisdom and boldness to witness to others, and the courage to act.

Everyone is led by something. Some are led by sin, many are led by others, but few are led by the Spirit. As children of God, we have the Holy Spirit available to us in all aspects of our lives, but are we living a life that is Spirit led?

Some people have the idea that “If I’m not happy, nobody should be happy.” Or they will say, “You can’t celebrate your thing because I’m sad about my thing.” People look at everything through the lens of “whose feelings will it hurt.” But that’s unbiblical. As Christians, we are called to be compassionate to the hurting AND rejoice with those who rejoice. This means there will be seasons for weeping, and there will be seasons for rejoicing. But most seasons will call for both weeping and rejoicing.