Grace Bible Church

In this message, April looks at the woman in Mark 5 who had been bleeding for twelve years, had spent everything on doctors, and was left poor, alone, and ceremonially unclean. Her story shows what happens when someone runs out of options. She hears about Jesus, risks reaching out to him, and then tells him the whole truth in front of a crowd. Jesus doesn’t only heal her body. He calls her daughter and sends her out free. April invites anyone at the end of their rope to bring everything to Jesus and see him as a launching pad into a free life, not a last resort.

Nebuchadnezzar took credit for everything God had given him, and it cost him everything. Daniel 4 shows how a common sin, pride, can quietly take over a life, and what the alternative looks like: acknowledging God is in charge, doing what is right, and caring for people with less power. We can choose to be humble, or we can be humiliated. And when the king finally looked up, God restored him.

In Daniel 3 Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego stand before Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace and demonstrate what real faith looks like when we don’t know how God will answer. Declaring what God will do can feel like great faith, but it often puts our trust in the outcome instead of in God. The three friends said God could deliver them, and then said “but even if he does not,” and that second part is the faith of the “and.” Eric invites everyone to pray a simple prayer this week: “God, I trust you. I desire ___. And I trust you either way.”

In this message, Matt walks through Daniel 2, where a teenage exile named Daniel is thrust into a life-or-death crisis under a hostile, often ruthless king. Rather than seizing control or fighting back, Daniel serves, prays, and repeatedly hands the credit — and the outcome — back to God. Matt challenges a common assumption: that courage means taking control. Daniel's story suggests something harder — that real courage is often found in giving up control and trusting God with the outcome. Drawing on his own ongoing struggle with control in his marriage, parenting, and leadership, Matt invites listeners to ask where in their own lives they're gripping tightly to something only God was ever meant to hold

Today Eric begins a six-week journey through Daniel by looking at a teenager taken from his home to Babylon who resolves not to let the king's table define him. Daniel's wise, respectful request shows that faith doesn't always mean resisting everything. It means choosing the few things that matter and holding them with everything you have. Faith grows not by knowing more but by acting, because steps of faith are where God's faithfulness meets us. Eric closes by naming the places we're tempted to trust something else (power, money, and pleasure) and inviting everyone to take one step this week, knowing that our steps reveal who we really trust.

This weekend, Nigel preached from John 1:1-14 about where our identity comes from. John shows that Jesus is God, our Creator, our Life, and the Light of the world. We were made in God's image, but sin happens when we build our identity on ourselves (our needs, desires, and plans) instead of our Savior. Jesus became flesh, moved into the neighborhood, and paid for our sin. When we believe in His name, He gives us a new identity as children of God. This week, ask yourself: where am I finding my identity? Believe in Jesus more than you do today.

Continuing the Masterpiece series, Eric turns to a hard but necessary question: how does the family we grew up in shape the identity we carry as adults? Walking through four generations of Abraham's family and three generations of David's, Eric shows how patterns of deception, self-protection, and taking by power don't stay contained to one generation — they travel, often without anyone intending to pass them on. This is not an easy message, and it includes a direct account of Amnon's assault of Tamar, so discretion is advised. But the message doesn't end in the pain of family history. Eric points to Galatians 4 and the hope of adoption into a new family line through Christ — one where the patterns of the past don't get the final say, even though the work of facing them honestly still remains ours to do.

Most of us are carrying a name we never chose, a label absorbed so early in life it feels like a simple fact rather than a wound. This week Eric tells the story of Jacob, a man whose very name meant "deceiver," and who spent decades living up to it before God met him in the dark and demanded he say it out loud. Walking through the strange, physical wrestling match at the Jabbok River in Genesis 32, Eric shows that the road from the False Self to the True Self runs through the same kind of honest confession, naming what we've believed about ourselves before we can receive what God actually says about us. Jacob walked away from that encounter with a new name, a new identity, and a limp that never fully healed. Eric invites the congregation to sit with one question: what name have you internalized, and are you ready to let God wrestle it away from you?

Most Christians know they're forgiven — and yet still feel crushed by their ongoing struggle with sin, as if their standing with God rises and falls with how well they're doing that day. This week Eric untangles two very different biblical uses of the word "sin": sin as a legal status before God, settled once and for all through Christ, and sin as ongoing action, a daily battle believers are actively called to fight. Walking through Romans 5-6, Ephesians 2, and Colossians 2-3, Eric shows why passages like "you died to sin" so often confuse sincere believers — and why they were never meant to describe the end of the struggle, only the end of the verdict. Our BE, our identity before God, was never meant to fluctuate based on our DO. That guilt has already been forgiven. The fight continues — but it flows from a settled identity, not toward one.

As we continue to unmask the false self, Eric turns to one of the most familiar stories Jesus ever told, the parable of the prodigal son, and asks the congregation to see it differently. Both the younger son and the older son are living out of the same false self, just in opposite directions: one through wild living, one through rule-keeping and resentment. Both end up saying something devastating about themselves, "I am no longer worthy" and "I have been slaving for you", because both are trying to earn an identity that was never meant to be earned. Eric unpacks the practical shape of the False Self through the pattern Do, Have, Be, and shows how the Father in Luke 15 offers both sons something entirely different: an identity that is Be, Do, Have, received first, lived out second. The message closes with a simple but costly invitation: examine your own DO, and don't do this work alone.