Somewhere along the way most of us came to believe the lie that wealth equals riches and power equals strength. But not all that glitters is gold. As it turns out, true riches and true strength don't belong the most talented, the most attractive, or the most affluent, but to those with blameless hearts. Here's to abandoning useless paradigms and letting the truth thrown us right-side-up again.

Nobody hopes to be a fake when they grow up. Most people would like to live authentically and yet we struggle to be ourselves. What do you do when you've lost yourself to a persona? What do you do when things look good on the outside, but are dead on the inside? Sometimes the only way to move forward and rejoin the path of life is to go back to where you left it and start again.

Tolerance is a popular idea in our culture. But what if we are tolerating things that actually lead one another to death? Jesus doesn't tolerate the people He loves, He disciplines them, and that discipline ultimately leads to true freedom.

You can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped. You can't change someone who isn't ready to change. To offer someone a cure who won't even accept that they are sick could easily offend and might even invite persecution. And yet, as one brave woman from Eritrea said, "Jesus is the medicine of the world and must be shared."

The lives of persecuted Christians are fraught with perils ranging from discrimination, to violence, to economic devastation, to imprisonment, to death. And yet, Jesus' letter to the church of Smyrna in the book of Revelation shows us that His eternal promise to those who endure for His name's sake far outweighs the struggle.

We live in a culture that generally rejects the idea of moral absolutes. The Bible flies in the face of this and instructs us to take God's word as the source of all truth. Many Christians excel in this, but many have abandoned something equally important along the way...love.

Sometimes we view our God only as a warm, cuddly teddy bear. While He is a precious, compassionate savior, He is also a mighty force. In our new series, we'll be examining the persecuted Church in the book of Revelation (and in our world today) in order to gain a better understanding of our vast and gracious God.

Human beings are almost all, to one degree or another, risk-averse. But the Bible tells us that God's thoughts are not our thoughts, nor are His ways our ways. And God, in His love toward us, is riskier than we could ever imagine.

Guest speaker Philip Pattison speaks about God's intentions for us to be salt and light. We live in a busted and broken world that's decaying without Jesus. In order to find security in our identity, we need to turn to Him.

Guest Mark Buckley preaches on the precious, powerful mysteries of God: including God's will, His wisdom, our salvation, and our unity with other believers.