God Centered Life

Perhaps you've been looking in all sorts of other places for God. You've gone to people trying to sort out your problems. Jesus says He is the blessing, and if you really seek Him with a pure heart, you will find Him!

The Sermon on the Mount is often thought of merely as an ethical framework or a set of rules. But in a Christ-centered framework, it has two purposes: to show us that we could never be perfect, and to point us to the One who can save us.

These famous words are from the story of Joseph: "You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good." The great truths that God is utterly sovereign, and that he is weaving everything together for a salvation purpose, all come to us in power as we trust in Christ.

Paul is launching identity markers for the Galatian church. He's calling them to put their identity in the Bible storyAbraham, Isaac, Christrather than in a religiosity, Pharisaic, legalistic identity. Do you identify yourself with God's grace-filled people?

The story of the Bible as a whole, and particularly the story of Joseph, is God's sovereign telling of a story that weaves together the elements of our lives for the purpose of our salvation. When we are in the midst of a storm, we don't know how it's going to turn out, but we have to trust and do what we can right then and there.

It could be that the very things that you find most traumatic and difficult are the things that God is precisely weaving into the tapestry of your life. In this way, you might, in your weakness, be exalted as a witness that you have been taken out of the pit and restored to a relationship with the King of the whole universe.

We are a people who are constantly under pressure from sexual temptationmen and women both. The way to resist this temptation and be a Joseph is to live in the face of God and to understand the blessing of God. In this way, the temptation itself will seem so petty.

God blesses us so that we might be a blessing. Those today who preach a message that success and the prosperity of God means a bigger house or car have fundamentally misunderstood what it means to be blessed.

The first question people ask when they're really in crisis isn't why, but how. How will I survive this? There are no easy answers to the problem of evil and suffering in the world. But there is One who suffered, died, and rose again. Turn to Him and find salvation and a way to survive.

Paul lays out characteristics of proper pastoring because the Galatians were facing false teachers. How do we spot true gospel pastors?