Riverway Church Sermon Podcast

Our daily lives are busy, and the pressures + stresses we experience become difficult to handle. Adding in uncertainty about our future creates worry + anxiety inside of us.

How can we live free from that worry? God is calling us into a trusting relationship with Him. We have a choice between fear or faith. As we look to Jesus, He lifts us above anxiety to live in His freedom.

How can we make a positive difference in our world? We are each uniquely created by God with purposes, talents, abilities, and passions that are part of who He has made us to be.

God's dream is that we use those gifts to connect with others around us. To use all that we are in order to bless someone else. He has prepared us for a mission, and He wants us to step up and make ourselves available to fulfill that mission!

Forgiveness is an active step towards our personal freedom. Have you ever carried a grudge from a past experience that caused you pain or disappointment? Holding on to the hurts and scars of our past can cause damage to who we're meant to become, because God wants us to live our lives in freedom.

As we pray for the strength to forgive, God starts a work of healing inside of us. And as we forgive, we allow God to enter into our situation and begin changing our lives.

The message of Jesus' death and resurrection holds hope for every one of us. Yet it's a great challenge to try and understand it all; how could someone actually die and then be raised from the dead? Jesus' own followers were devastated and never anticipated that He would come back.

After the resurrection, as Jesus returned to greet his friends, they became eye witnesses to the truth that He was alive! Their testimony holds true as evidence for all of us that Jesus is risen and that we have hope of new life in Him. No matter what fear, brokenness, addiction, or pain we have gone through in life, He desires to fill us with a true and living hope.

God sees the world differently than we tend to see it. There are times when He challenges us to change our perspective and look at the world around us through His viewpoint.

As humans we often want to take something from this world. God, however, is always looking to bless us with His generosity. When He blesses our life, He watches to see how we will then treat the others around us. Will we choose to see our world through His perspective and to live lives that model His generosity?

Jesus' example of compassion challenges us to reach out to others. He reaches us in our most broken moments, and teaches us to help others around us so that they too might be healed and restored.

God's generous blessings and compassionate love never fail us. What will we do to follow His example?

Failures have a tendency to stick to us. Mistake, regrets, and negative circumstances can leave a residue in our life that causes us to feel defeated and even fearful of the future.

As we choose to trust Jesus with all of our life (past, future, & present), His new life in us defines who we are and begins to set us free from our past experiences. It transforms us so that we now live with a new definition and a new purpose.

When we experience failure, feelings of defeat will also flood into our emotions. We might feel embarrassed by what happened, disappointed in ourselves, and deflated by not being to attain our own expectations. It can paralyze us.

In that moment, the challenge we must take up is to persevere beyond our shortcomings and keep moving towards the future that God has for us. God continually calls us forward towards Him, and defeat only happens if we stop responding to His call.

It's no fun to talk about failure... it can leave us feeling embarrassed and defeated. While failure is an inevitable part of our lives, we actually have a choice in how we respond to failure. Jesus' closest followers failed Him, and He in turn showed them the grace and forgiveness to move forward in their relationship with Him. Will we accept God's love, grace, and forgiveness as the starting point of us moving forward in the aftermath of our failure? Will we respond to failure not by pulling away from Jesus but by coming closer to Him?

God designed humans to be unique yet complementary to each other. Men & Women are different mentally, physically, and emotionally for very important reasons. Learning how to communicate respect, honor, validation, and understanding is a fundamental part of a healthy relationship. It's a give-and-take from both sides, leading us to a more unified marriage.