God Centered Life

We are continuing to looking at true power and wisdom with an illustration from pop culturethe Jonas Brothers.

Adding something to Jesus detracts from Jesus because then he is no longer enough. Jesus becomes merely a stage in my spiritual development rather than my destination.

The great questions that many people in Christian circles are asking are, "Where is the Christian influence that we once had in society? What are we to do with this secular agenda?" Paul encourages us that the Church has faced opposition before, and we have the power of God to help us.

When you listen to preaching, you want to make sure you're listening to someone who is preaching the Bible, rather than expressing their own personality. You don't want preachers who just tell you what they think; you want to know what the Lord thinks through the Word. This is a critically important distinctive, to hear what the Lord is saying and not just what the preacher thinks.

There were celebrity preachers who had developed a following in the Corinthian church. We are susceptible to this today, too. We have a tendency to follow someone we admire, and sometimes this creates division within the church. Learn what Paul has to say about this.

Paul begins by pointing us to God. That's the first thing that gets lost when church begins to go wrong. It starts to be about us, about me and my agenda. It starts to be a human organization. By studying Corinthians, we will find out what the church is meant to be like and how we can get there, and what Christians are really meant to be.

There is power in living out our faith. The Christian faith is not simply a Sunday thing, it's something for every day of the week. Today we look at how our faith effects our family, work, and the church.

The story of Abraham is a powerful way of thinking about this blessing of righteousnessnot wealththat comes to all of us who believe. His material wealth was not the fulfillment of the promised blessing of God.

Religion is like trying to learn to windsurf. There are certain techniques that you have to learn, and if you really try hard, you get better at it. But what the Bible is saying is that however hard we try, we all just keep drifting out to sea.

The human condition that we all naturally incline toward is functional atheism. We want to live as if God does not exist so that we can do what we want. As Christians, we believe in God's existence, but do we actually live with the presense of God in our mind? Do we live centered on God?