If your money could talk, it would say, “I’m easy to keep up with, but I’m difficult to catch up with. Keep up or you’ll be playing catch up. Keep up with me and I’ll keep up with you.”

Are you mastering your money or being mastered by it? Maybe it’s time to flip the script. Instead of striving to have enough money to satisfy a me-first appetite, Jesus encouraged his listeners to have an others-first approach.

If our money could talk, what would it tell us? You might be shocked to find that what our money would say is pretty close to what Jesus did say—and what we should still consider today.

Many of us have an uneasy relationship with prayer. It’s as if we believe we have this huge prayer deficit and we’ll never catch up. There are times in our lives when prayer comes easy: when we need to make a pivotal decision or when we’ve hit a tough stretch. In these seasons, prayer comes naturally. But eventually life settles in and we go back to our normal routines. For most of us, prayer is something we know we should do more of and so we feel guilty. What would happen if we prayed more in the second half than we did in the first half of this year?

You have undoubtedly heard it said that time flies. Unfortunately, there are no “do-overs” when it comes to time. The past is in the past. The good news? At the time this message was delivered on June 14, there were still over 163 days left in 2020! While you can’t change the past, you can use your remaining time to make a difference in your life and the lives of those around you. None of us is promised another day, so leverage the time you have with purpose.

Remember January? The new year resolutions and wishes can seem a long way away. And yet, it’s too not too late to finish strong. It’s only July. It’s only Halftime. Before we go any further into the second half of the year, the writer of Hebrews gives us a great perspective which leads to 4 great questions to ask at halftime. These questions not only prepare us for the rest of the series but the second half of 2020.

God wants me happy? God wants me to enjoy my life? Above all else, God only wants good things to happen in your life, and God never wants anything bad to happen in your life.

This is one of the most relevant and culturally believed lies. This is commonplace in our

neighborhoods, in our jobs, and in our families. You may of heard it. You may of said it. You may even believe it but all over the world today people say this: “It doesn’t matter what you believe about God as long as you are sincere.” We’ll find out that God actually has a lot to say about this and it’s not what most of us want to hear.

The Bible did not create Christianity. Christianity is the result of an event (the resurrection) that created a movement (the church) that produced sacred and reliable texts that were collected and bound into a book (the Bible). But how do we approach not being at peace with everything we read in the Bible? Paul—the apostle, Pharisee, author, preacher, and church planter—offers us clarity and confidence to move forward.

“In the beginning. . . .” can be a loaded phrase—one that forces us into debate and doubt. But maybe we’re missing the point of Genesis 1:1—a point Moses made to a world where the violence and injustice of the gods justified and legitimized the violence and injustice of human rulers. Moses introduced a radically different, unparalleled, and untested worldview.