God Centered Life

The law and the promise play different roles. The law is to convict us of our sins, while the promise of God's grace through faith in Christ is to save us. It is that distinction that must be clear in our minds in order for us to live freely for Christ and His glory.

So many Christians spend their lives living as if it is works and a good moral effort that will get them to heaven.That is not how God has designed His salvation plan. We need to defeat the legalism that kills our faith.

It's a frequent temptation for all of us to look at our faith as something that we need to make happen. In many ways, that attitude toward self-generated faith is what the world thinks we mean by faith. Actually, God is behind it all.

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.

We excuse our own genuine lack of commitment to God by accusing others of a lack of commitment. Pastor Josh teaches about the excuses we use to avoid doing business with God.

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

Some of us have had good fathers and some have not. But the father figure is important; we all need to feel that we fit into a spiritual lineage.

We do need to work hard to grow as Christians, but that is not the same as supplementing Christ with "religiocity". Paul points out some things that we don't need to be doing.

Because our culture assumes that religion is a matter of private devotion and that what we can know about God is precious little because he's a mysterious being, people tend to default to the view that God is a matter of opinion.

There is a mystical faith union but it's not just between you and Jesus, it's between you and the cross of Jesus.