In our culture, our access to power, influence, and judgment is faster than our access to knowledge and relationship. It’s easy for us to jump on the bandwagon and cancel someone without truly knowing all the facts. As we look to influence people with the platform of our lives, how do we navigate our polarized world? What does it look like to engage a culture that cancels individuals so quickly? How did Jesus respond to someone being cancelled right in front of Him?
BIG IDEA: Culture shames you for your sin & cancels your future. Jesus cancels your sin & frees your future.

It seems like our culture is growing increasingly frustrated, contentious, and hostile. Social media is always ready to pounce on its next victim. If you are honest, under the pressure of our world, you’ve privately torn down, gossiped about, ghosted, or blamed someone this year. Culture can tell you it’s okay to hurt someone--even cancel them--in the name of truth. Jesus has a radically different view of how you can approach your life. A way of living so freely that it’s worth canceling your membership in today’s polarized culture.
BIG IDEA: Truth is most powerful when it is filled with grace. Grace is most powerful when it is filled with truth.

Growth, accountability, belonging and care happen in community groups—in circles, not rows. It's easy to stumble away from faith when you are a nameless person sitting in a row on a Sunday morning. But it's almost impossible to stumble away—or to stay away—when you're in community, doing life with a group of people.
BIG IDEA: It’s easier to stumble out of church & away from God than it is to stumble out of community.

We are currently in a seller’s market when it comes to our housing boom. People are paying $50,000 or more above asking price to purchase their dream house. What makes you want to walk through the front door and take a look? Curb Appeal. You never will get to see the inside of the foyer if you don’t like the house from the curb.
The same idea applies to the church. Amazing, life-changing things can be happening inside the church, but us as Jesus followers must get outside and love and lead people into a church. We must create curb appeal.
BIG IDEA: Sidewalk environments create curb appeal that can lead to the front door of a church.

What does God want me to do with my life? Should I take this job? Pursue this relationship? Make this career choice? For the Jesus follower, we don’t want to miss God’s will for our life. Today, we’re going to look at two short verses that help us determine not only how to hear God’s voice, but how we can know what He wants us to do with our lives.

We all have something in our lives that it took a lot of practice or training to develop confidence in. It could be cooking, writing, building. Whatever it is you and I know that: Practice makes perfect. However, it gets better than that. When it comes to our walk with God, our spiritual life, there’s a principle that runs deeper than practice makes perfect!

Have you ever had something in your life that you know is not good for you, and yet, you always seem to lose the battle against it? Have you ever listened to the wrong voice? Here’s the awesome thing about God - He wants to speak and he doesn’t leave us to figure it out on our own.

God speaks, but we don’t always listen. In fact, we often suffer from “selective listening” when it comes to hearing God, especially through the Bible. God wants us to hear his voice, understand his voice, and act on His Word, but we can’t do it alone.
BIG IDEA: You can’t understand God’s word without His Spirit.

So many times we feel like God's up there and we’re down here. Yet, the Bible teaches us that God wants to lead us, teach us, help us, and be with us. Does God intend to have a living, active, interactive, personal, and vibrant relationship with us?

We compare ourselves with others. You can imagine the results already. Either you are prompted to feel smug and proud because your strengths outweigh his weaknesses—or, more often, you begin to feel threatened, inferior, and blue because you fail to measure up. Striving to emulate a self-imposed standard, you begin to slide from the pleasant plateau of the real you to the sinking sands of I don't know who. This sometimes leads to extreme role-playing where you try every way to adapt and alter your portrait to fit into someone else's frame. In simpler terms, you've pawned your real personality for a phony disguise.