Sunday Renewal | Christian Podcast, Biblical Encouragement, Spiritual Growth

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Have you ever wanted to talk to someone about Jesus, but talked yourself out of it?

What if they reject me? What if I don't know what to say? What if sharing my faith damages our relationship?

Sometimes our greatest obstacle to sharing the gospel isn't a lack of knowledge. It's the fear that keeps us waiting.

Recent conversations in Bible classes have brought this subject back to the forefront, so this week on Sunday Renewal, we're revisiting a message I originally preached to a congregation in 2021.

You'll notice a different recording format and a more traditional sermon setting, but the question at the heart of this message remains just as relevant today:

If we truly love God and the people around us, what keeps us from sharing the good news of Jesus Christ?

In This Episode, We'll Discuss:

• ✅ Why every soul is worth more than the entire world
• ✅ How fear, rejection, and uncertainty can keep us silent about Jesus
• ✅ Why God's love for us should motivate our love for others
• ✅ What the Great Commission teaches about our responsibility to share the gospel
• ✅ Why fear should not have the final word in our obedience

You don't have to be the most confident speaker or know the answer to every question to begin sharing your faith.

But you do need to remember why the message matters and why the people around you matter.

🎧 Listen to Episode 96 and consider who in your life needs to hear about Jesus.

RESOURCES

 📖 FREE 5-Day Audio Devotional: Renaming Your Story
Struggling with identity or feeling stuck? Move from pain to purpose to legacy—15 minutes a day. https://sundayrenewal.podia.com/renaming-your-story-devo⁠

✨ For Families: The Devo Kids
Short devotionals, songs, and prayers that help children fall in love with God's Word. Watch on YouTube | Free printable journal pages at thedevokids.com

🎧 When God Feels Distant — Free 5-Day Audio Journey 

Do you still love God but don’t feel as close to Him lately? When God Feels Distant is a free 5-day audio journey designed to help you recognize spiritual drift and take honest, biblical steps toward reconnecting with God.

Start Your Free Journey Today →

Support the show

Support the Show:

Want to help us reach more people with God’s Word? Consider supporting the podcast with a donation. Your generosity fuels this ministry and helps us create even more resources for you. Click here to learn more:
One-Time Donation (Paypal)
$3+ Monthly Subscription

Send us Fan Mail

You can know what the Bible says and still make decisions you regret.

You can know God should come first and still give Him whatever time is left over. You can know you need to apologize and keep waiting for the other person to make the first move.

Knowing what is wise and actually living wisely are two different things.

In this episode of Sunday Renewal, Ernest Benjamin welcomes back Hiram Kemp for a practical, Scripture-filled message on how to live your life wisely, drawn from the book of Proverbs.

And one of the most important lessons may surprise you:

Something doesn't have to be sinful to distract you from what matters most.

In This Episode, We'll Discuss:

• ✅ Why the fear of the Lord is the foundation of biblical wisdom
• ✅ How to put God first instead of giving Him your leftovers
• ✅ Why wise living sometimes means saying no to good things
• ✅ How to recognize, confess, and forsake sin before it destroys you
• ✅ Why a sincere apology takes courage and can begin restoring relationships
• ✅ How to learn from mistakes instead of repeating them
• ✅ What Proverbs teaches about guarding your heart and finding peace
• ✅ How to trust God when you cannot control what happens next

Wisdom isn't simply knowing more Bible verses. It's learning to live skillfully in God's world, with your priorities, decisions, relationships, and heart shaped by His truth.

And ultimately, biblical wisdom points us to Jesus Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

Where is God calling you to live differently, and what would it look like to begin today?

🎧 Listen to Episode 95 and discover how God's wisdom can transform the way you live.

RESOURCES

 📖 FREE 5-Day Audio Devotional: Renaming Your Story
Struggling with identity or feeling stuck? Move from pain to purpose to legacy—15 minutes a day. https://sundayrenewal.podia.com/renaming-your-story-devo⁠

✨ For Families: The Devo Kids
Short devotionals, songs, and prayers that help children fall in love with God's Word. Watch on YouTube | Free printable journal pages at thedevokids.com

🎧 When God Feels Distant — Free 5-Day Audio Journey 

Do you still love God but don’t feel as close to Him lately? When God Feels Distant is a free 5-day audio journey designed to help you recognize spiritual drift and take honest, biblical steps toward reconnecting with God.

Start Your Free Journey Today →

Support the show

Support the Show:

Want to help us reach more people with God’s Word? Consider supporting the podcast with a donation. Your generosity fuels this ministry and helps us create even more resources for you. Click here to learn more:
One-Time Donation (Paypal)
$3+ Monthly Subscription

Send us Fan Mail

You probably know the words: “For God so loved the world…”

Maybe you memorized John 3:16 as a child. 

You’ve heard it preached, seen it on signs, and quoted it yourself.

But familiarity can make us miss just how astonishing these words really are.

Because Jesus doesn’t simply tell us that God loves.

He tells us what God’s love did.

He tells us what kind of world God loved.

And then He brings the question directly to us:

What will you do with the Son God has given?

In John 3:16–21, we discover a love far greater than sentimental affection. God loved a world that Jesus describes as loving darkness rather than light, and His love moved Him to give His Son to save.

In This Episode, We'll Discuss:

• ✅ What “God so loved the world” really means
• ✅ Why the cross is the ultimate demonstration of God’s love
• ✅ What kind of “world” God loved
• ✅ Why believing in Jesus means more than knowing facts about Him
• ✅ What it means to put the weight of your hope on Christ
• ✅ Why Jesus says humanity loves darkness rather than light
• ✅ What happens when Christ’s light exposes what we would rather hide
• ✅ Why your darkness is not greater than the Savior God provided

God loved.

God gave.

God sent.

And now the question becomes personal.

Are you relying on the Son God gave?

You don’t have to clean yourself up in the darkness before coming to the light. The One shining the light is the very Savior God sent to save.

Listen now to Episode 94: What Does John 3:16 Really Mean? | John 3:16–21

RESOURCES

📖 FREE 5-Day Audio Devotional: Renaming Your Story
Struggling with identity or feeling stuck? Move from pain to purpose to legacy—15 minutes a day. https://sundayrenewal.podia.com/renaming-your-story-devo⁠

✨ For Families: The Devo Kids
Short devotionals, songs, and prayers that help children fall in love with God's Word. Watch on YouTube | Free printable journal pages at thedevokids.com

🎧 When God Feels Distant — Free 5-Day Audio Journey 

Do you still love God but don’t feel as close to Him lately? When God Feels Distant is a free 5-day audio journey designed to help you recognize spiritual drift and take honest, biblical steps toward reconnecting with God.

Start Your Free Journey Today →

Support the show

Support the Show:

Want to help us reach more people with God’s Word? Consider supporting the podcast with a donation. Your generosity fuels this ministry and helps us create even more resources for you. Click here to learn more:
One-Time Donation (Paypal)
$3+ Monthly Subscription

Send us Fan Mail

You can know Bible stories.

You can attend church for years.

You can believe true things about Jesus, sincerely respect Him, and try to live a good life.

But is knowing about Jesus the same thing as having the life Jesus came to give?

Nicodemus was a Pharisee, a respected religious leader, and a teacher of Israel. He knew the Scriptures. He took God seriously. He even recognized that Jesus had come from God.

Yet Jesus looked at this deeply religious man and said:

“You must be born again.”

Why?

Because Nicodemus needed something his religious background, biblical knowledge, morality, and effort could never produce.

He needed life from God.  transcript-93-what-does-it-mean…

In This Episode, We'll Discuss:

• ✅ What Jesus means when He says, “You must be born again”
• ✅ Why being religious is not the same as receiving new life from God
• ✅ How Ezekiel 36 helps us understand being born of “water and the Spirit”
• ✅ What the bronze serpent in Numbers 21 teaches us about grace and faith
• ✅ Why responding to God’s grace is not the same as earning it
• ✅ How Jesus’ death makes eternal life possible

Jesus did not tell Nicodemus to make his old life more respectable.

He told him he needed life from above.

And when Nicodemus asked how this could happen, Jesus didn't point him back to himself.

He pointed him to the Son who would be lifted up.

The life you need is not something you manufacture.

It is found in Christ.

Listen now to Episode 93: What Does It Mean to Be Born Again? | John 3:1–15

RESOURCES
🎧 When God Feels Distant — Free 5-Day Audio Journey 

Do you still love God but don’t feel as close to Him lately? When God Feels Distant is a free 5-day audio journey designed to help you recognize spiritual drift and take honest, biblical steps toward reconnecting with God.

You’ll also receive a printable + fillable companion workbook with reflection questions and prayer prompts to guide you along the way.

Start Your Free Journey Today →

📖 FREE 5-Day Audio Devotional: Renaming Your Story
Struggling with identity or feeling stuck? Move from pain to purpose to legacy—15 minutes a day. https://sundayrenewal.podia.com/renaming-your-story-devo⁠

✨ For Families: The Devo Kids
Short devotionals, songs, and prayers that help children fall in love with God's Word. Watch on YouTube | Free printable journal pages at thedevokids.com

Support the show

Support the Show:

Want to help us reach more people with God’s Word? Consider supporting the podcast with a donation. Your generosity fuels this ministry and helps us create even more resources for you. Click here to learn more:
One-Time Donation (Paypal)
$3+ Monthly Subscription

Send us Fan Mail

If being a good person can’t make you right with God, what can?

Maybe you look at your life and think, Surely I’ve done enough good for God to accept me.

Or maybe you look at your past and wonder, After everything I’ve done, could God possibly accept someone like me?

One person is proud of the record. Another is crushed by it.

But both are looking in the wrong place.

In Romans 3:21–26, Paul turns our eyes away from ourselves and toward Jesus Christ.

After showing us that we cannot make ourselves right with God, Paul gives us two words filled with hope:

“But now…”

God has acted.

The righteousness we could never produce, God provides. The guilt we could never erase, Christ deals with through His death. The salvation we could never earn, grace gives. And what God provides, faith receives. 

In This Episode, We'll Discuss:

•  ✅ Why your moral or religious record cannot make you right with God 
•  ✅ What it means to be justified by grace 
•  ✅ Why salvation is a gift you receive, not a reward you earn 
•  ✅ What redemption and Christ’s blood reveal about the cost of grace 
•  ✅ Why the cross shows both the seriousness of sin and the greatness of God’s grace 
•  ✅ What it means to receive God’s saving work by faith 
•  ✅ How God can forgive guilty sinners while remaining perfectly just 

The gospel does not ask you to pretend your sin is smaller than it is.

It asks you to believe that Christ is greater than your guilt.

Whether you’re proud of your record or crushed by it, stop looking to yourself for what only Christ can provide.

🎧 Listen now to Episode 92: How Can I Be Made Right With God? (Romans 3:21–26)

RESOURCES
📖 FREE 5-Day Audio Devotional: Renaming Your Story
Struggling with identity or feeling stuck? Move from pain to purpose to legacy—15 minutes a day. https://sundayrenewal.podia.com/renaming-your-story-devo⁠

✨ For Families: The Devo Kids
Short devotionals, songs, and prayers that help children fall in love with God's Word. Watch on YouTube | Free printable journal pages at thedevokids.com

🎧 When God Feels Distant — Free 5-Day Audio Journey 

Do you still love God but don’t feel as close to Him lately? When God Feels Distant is a free 5-day audio journey designed to help you recognize spiritual drift and take honest, biblical steps toward reconnecting with God.

Start Your Free Journey Today →

Support the show

Support the Show:

Want to help us reach more people with God’s Word? Consider supporting the podcast with a donation. Your generosity fuels this ministry and helps us create even more resources for you. Click here to learn more:
One-Time Donation (Paypal)
$3+ Monthly Subscription

Send us Fan Mail

Maybe you know you’re not perfect.

You’ve made mistakes. Said things you regret. Made decisions you wish you could change. There are parts of your life you know could be better.

But needing to improve and needing to be saved are two very different things.

If your biggest problem is that you need to become a better person, then perhaps more discipline, better habits, and greater effort could fix it.

But what if the problem goes deeper?

In Romans 3:9–20, Paul brings us face-to-face with a difficult truth: we cannot make ourselves right with God.

In This Episode, We'll Discuss:

•  ✅ Why being better than someone else cannot make you righteous before God 
•  ✅ What Paul means when he says we are all “under sin” 
•  ✅ Why sin is more serious than mistakes, flaws, or bad habits 
•  ✅ How our words and relationships reveal sin’s deeper reach 
•  ✅ Why good works cannot erase our guilt before God 
•  ✅ What it means for “every mouth” to be stopped before Him 
•  ✅ Why admitting you cannot save yourself is not the same as having no hope 

Paul doesn’t prove that you cannot be saved.

He proves that you cannot save yourself. 

And once we understand that, we’re finally ready to hear the good news of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.

🎧 Listen now to Episode 91: Why Do I Need to Be Saved?

RESOURCES

📖 FREE 5-Day Audio Devotional: Renaming Your Story
Struggling with identity or feeling stuck? Move from pain to purpose to legacy—15 minutes a day. https://sundayrenewal.podia.com/renaming-your-story-devo⁠

✨ For Families: The Devo Kids
Short devotionals, songs, and prayers that help children fall in love with God's Word. Watch on YouTube | Free printable journal pages at thedevokids.com

🎧 When God Feels Distant — Free 5-Day Audio Journey 

Do you still love God but don’t feel as close to Him lately? When God Feels Distant is a free 5-day audio journey designed to help you recognize spiritual drift and take honest, biblical steps toward reconnecting with God.

Start Your Free Journey Today →

Support the show

Support the Show:

Want to help us reach more people with God’s Word? Consider supporting the podcast with a donation. Your generosity fuels this ministry and helps us create even more resources for you. Click here to learn more:
One-Time Donation (Paypal)
$3+ Monthly Subscription

Send us Fan Mail

We trust experienced doctors with our health. Pilots with our safety. Experts with decisions we don’t know how to make.

Why, then, can it be so difficult to trust God?

Especially when the future is uncertain, money is tight, someone has wronged us, guilt resurfaces, or life simply isn’t going according to plan.

In this episode of Sunday Renewal, my good friend Hiram Kemp challenges us to look again at God’s track record.

God has never broken a promise. He has never lost control. And He has never failed to be faithful.

Yet trusting God means more than believing He exists. It means entrusting Him with the parts of life we desperately want to control.

In This Episode:

 ✅ Trust God when someone has wronged you 

 ✅ Trust God to provide your daily needs 

 ✅ Trust God to work through circumstances you don’t understand 

 ✅ Trust God when guilt makes you question His forgiveness 

 ✅ Trust God to direct your path when the future is unclear 

 ✅ Trust God with the future of His church 

 ✅ Trust God to save you in the end 

You don't need to know everything God is doing to have peace.

You need to know the God who is doing it.

His track record is perfect.

🎧 Listen now to Episode 90: Can You Really Trust God? 7 Truths for When Life Feels Uncertain with Hiram Kemp.

RESOURCES
📖 FREE 5-Day Audio Devotional: Renaming Your Story
Struggling with identity or feeling stuck? Move from pain to purpose to legacy—15 minutes a day. https://sundayrenewal.podia.com/renaming-your-story-devo⁠

✨ For Families: The Devo Kids
Short devotionals, songs, and prayers that help children fall in love with God's Word. Watch on YouTube | Free printable journal pages at thedevokids.com

🎧 When God Feels Distant — Free 5-Day Audio Journey 

Do you still love God but don’t feel as close to Him lately? When God Feels Distant is a free 5-day audio journey designed to help you recognize spiritual drift and take honest, biblical steps toward reconnecting with God.

Start Your Free Journey Today →

Support the show

Support the Show:

Want to help us reach more people with God’s Word? Consider supporting the podcast with a donation. Your generosity fuels this ministry and helps us create even more resources for you. Click here to learn more:
One-Time Donation (Paypal)
$3+ Monthly Subscription

Send us Fan Mail

What if you didn’t have to prove how strong you are?

We work hard to appear capable.

We hide our limitations. Compare ourselves to people who seem stronger. And sometimes we quietly assume that the more capable we become, the more useful we’ll be to Christ.

But Paul discovered something radically different.

After pleading three times for Christ to remove his thorn, Paul could eventually say:

“I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses.”

What changed?

Not the thorn.

What changed was where Paul placed his confidence.

In this episode, we explore 2 Corinthians 12:9–10 and discover how Christ’s power frees us from proving our strength and teaches us to live confidently, even when weakness remains. 

In This Episode, We'll Discuss:

•  ✅ How Christ’s power changes the way we see weakness 
•  ✅ Why comparison keeps our attention focused on ourselves 
•  ✅ The difference between admitting weakness and glorifying weakness 
•  ✅ What it means for Christ’s power to “rest upon” us 
•  ✅ How to find contentment when circumstances haven’t changed 
•  ✅ What Paul really means by “when I am weak, then I am strong” 

Your weakness is not the hero of this passage.

Christ is.

You don’t have to prove your strength when your confidence rests in His power.

🎧 Listen now to Episode 89: When I Am Weak, Then I Am Strong: Finding Confidence in Christ’s Power.

RESOURCES
📖 FREE 5-Day Audio Devotional: Renaming Your Story
Struggling with identity or feeling stuck? Move from pain to purpose to legacy—15 minutes a day. https://sundayrenewal.podia.com/renaming-your-story-devo⁠

✨ For Families: The Devo Kids
Short devotionals, songs, and prayers that help children fall in love with God's Word. Watch on YouTube | Free printable journal pages at thedevokids.com

🎧 When God Feels Distant — Free 5-Day Audio Journey 

Do you still love God but don’t feel as close to Him lately? When God Feels Distant is a free 5-day audio journey designed to help you recognize spiritual drift and take honest, biblical steps toward reconnecting with God.

Start Your Free Journey Today →

Support the show

Support the Show:

Want to help us reach more people with God’s Word? Consider supporting the podcast with a donation. Your generosity fuels this ministry and helps us create even more resources for you. Click here to learn more:
One-Time Donation (Paypal)
$3+ Monthly Subscription

Send us Fan Mail

What happens when you’ve prayed for God to change something, and it still hasn’t changed?

You’ve asked Him to heal.

To restore.

To open the door.

To lift the burden.

You believe He can do it. That’s why you keep praying.

But the harder question is this:

Can you trust Christ when His answer is different from your request?

Paul knew that tension.

Three times he pleaded with the Lord to remove his thorn. But instead of removing it, Christ answered:

“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

Paul asked for removal.

Christ answered with grace.

And that changes how we understand unanswered prayer, persistent weakness, and the sufficiency of Christ.

In This Episode, We'll Discuss:

✅ Why persistent prayer is not evidence of deficient faith
✅ How to keep asking while surrendering the outcome to God
✅ What “My grace is sufficient for you” actually means
✅ Why an unchanged circumstance does not mean an absent Christ
✅ How weakness reveals where we’ve been placing our confidence
✅ Why Christ’s power becomes unmistakable when ours runs out

Sometimes Christ removes the thorn.

Sometimes He gives grace to carry what remains.

Either way, our hope was never that our strength would be sufficient.

Our hope is that His grace always will be.

Bring Him what hurts.

Receive what He promises.

Rely on His power when yours runs out.

🎧 Listen now to Episode 88: When God Doesn’t Remove the Weakness: Is His Grace Really Enough?

RESOURCES
📖 FREE 5-Day Audio Devotional: Renaming Your Story
Struggling with identity or feeling stuck? Move from pain to purpose to legacy—15 minutes a day. https://sundayrenewal.podia.com/renaming-your-story-devo⁠

✨ For Families: The Devo Kids
Short devotionals, songs, and prayers that help children fall in love with God's Word. Watch on YouTube | Free printable journal pages at thedevokids.com

🎧 When God Feels Distant — Free 5-Day Audio Journey 

Do you still love God but don’t feel as close to Him lately? When God Feels Distant is a free 5-day audio journey designed to help you recognize spiritual drift and take honest, biblical steps toward reconnecting with God.

Start Your Free Journey Today →

Support the show

Support the Show:

Want to help us reach more people with God’s Word? Consider supporting the podcast with a donation. Your generosity fuels this ministry and helps us create even more resources for you. Click here to learn more:
One-Time Donation (Paypal)
$3+ Monthly Subscription

Send us Fan Mail

What if the weakness you keep asking God to remove isn’t proof that something has gone wrong?

We spend so much of life trying to prove we’re enough.

Strong enough.
Capable enough.
Successful enough.
Spiritual enough.

Then weakness enters our lives and exposes what we’d rather forget: we have limits.

The apostle Paul knew that feeling.

After receiving extraordinary revelations from God, Paul was given something completely unexpected: a painful, persistent “thorn in the flesh.”

Why?

Paul tells us twice: to keep him from becoming conceited.

The thorn was painful.

But pride was the greater danger.

Listen to discover how Christ can use the very weaknesses we wish would disappear to deepen our humility, dependence, and trust in Him.

In This Episode, We'll Discuss:

✅ Why Paul’s thorn was about more than suffering
✅ How even God’s blessings can become occasions for pride
✅ Why weakness does not mean Christ has stopped working
✅ The danger of taking credit for what grace has provided
✅ A better question to ask when God doesn’t remove the burden
✅ Why you were never meant to be enough because Christ is enough

We don’t know why every thorn comes.

But we do know this:

Your weakness does not put you beyond Christ’s work.

Sometimes Christ changes our circumstances.

Sometimes He uses our circumstances to change us.

🎧 Listen now to Episode 87: The Purpose of Weakness: What Paul’s Thorn Teaches Us.

RESOURCES
📖 FREE 5-Day Audio Devotional: Renaming Your Story
Struggling with identity or feeling stuck? Move from pain to purpose to legacy—15 minutes a day. https://sundayrenewal.podia.com/renaming-your-story-devo⁠

✨ For Families: The Devo Kids
Short devotionals, songs, and prayers that help children fall in love with God's Word. Watch on YouTube | Free printable journal pages at thedevokids.com

Support the show

Support the Show:

Want to help us reach more people with God’s Word? Consider supporting the podcast with a donation. Your generosity fuels this ministry and helps us create even more resources for you. Click here to learn more:
One-Time Donation (Paypal)
$3+ Monthly Subscription