That's Grace Podcast

When things don’t go like we want, we tend to lose our faith. Maybe you believed in God but then something unexpected happened. You lost your job, the cancer came back, or someone that was close to you died. When we experience these hard situations it often leaves our faith floundering, searching for answers, and often leaving us feeling like God isn't there like we thought He would be. If you find yourself dealing with some of the same things this Easter, you're not alone. In fact, you'll find yourself right in the Easter story.

Sometimes, when crisis hits, we become open to things we rejected before. We were closed off to them before, but when you’re in a place of crisis or desperation, an unexpected curveball gets thrown your way, all of a sudden – you open up your options. Routines change, priorities change, and it provides the opportunity for us to think differently and maybe reconsider the things in our lives we have ignored or pushed away. In this week's message, we talk about how crisis can sometimes lead us to new opportunities or a new calling in life. Maybe it's something we never expected, but something God was preparing for us all along.

In a broken world full of broken people, it isn't long before you find injustice happening. At times, injustice can be found in your home, at your work, and even in public. Some of this injustice happens on a personal level and some of it can be systemic, but what's true regardless of the circumstances of injustice is that we all can recognize injustice and know deep down that it's wrong. That it's not how it's supposed to be. So the questions is still to be answered, as followers of Jesus, how are you supposed to respond when faced with injustice in your own life and in the world?

Tragedy is one of those things that none of us want to experience, but many of us will. It's a part of living in a broken world full of broken people, but it's never something we want to think about, anticipate, or expect. And as a result, when tragedy does come our way it often catches us off guard and leaves us feeling hopeless. We feel as though God has lost control and we have lost our way. So what do we do when the unexpected comes into our lives? How can we possibly react well? This week we look at what the Bible says about responding to tragedy and how amidst the panic and the chaos, we can find peace and strength.

Fear is probably one of the most common emotions that we are dealing with right now. With the spreading of the Corona Virus, many of us are afraid for our own health or that of loved ones, some of us are afraid because of our work situation, and some of us are just scared cause it seems like everyone else is! While it might be the results of this virus that bring fear into our lives now, fear is not an uncommon thing. We all have things that we fear and if we are not careful, it can cripple us and negatively affect our mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. This week, Pastor Sean takes some time to address the fear and anxiousness that we are all dealing with and spends time looking at what the Bible has to say about our fear and what we can take away from it that will help bring peace no matter what the circumstances.

Friends not only can provide support and companionship, as we learned last week, but they also can be the people you turn to when you don't know what to do or where to turn to. And in the same way, you can be that person in someone else's life. Great friends help share each other's burden, celebrate each other's victories and forms a bond that becomes like family. In this week's message, we look at how this type of friendship is modeled in the Bible and what it takes to have a purposeful friendship and how you can work to become this type of friend for someone else.

It's hard to build great, close knit friendships as adults. Maybe we're just busy. Or maybe we've been hurt in the past. But for many of us, our best friendships are in the past and not in the present. Loneliness is reported to be a major issue in our culture from all age groups, yet we still find making new close friends very difficult. In today's teaching, we are going to talk about why the Bible says having close friends is so important, not only for your mental and physical health but your spiritual health. We tend to become like the people closest to us and if you did become more like those closest, how would your life be different? Would you be closer to God or further away?

If there is one thing we can all agree on, it's probably that maintaining healthy relationships with those around us is tough. It requires a level of selflessness of us that, honestly, we don't always want to give. And if that isn't hard enough, God calls us to a much higher standard in our relationships. We are to love those who won't and don't love us back. To give to those who seem to only take and take. How is this even possible to maintain? In the last week of our series, we talk about the one relationship that is VITAL to maintain if we want to have good relationships with those around us. That is our relationship with God. If you are struggling to love the unlovely, and to serve those who take, it's time to take a look inward and refocus your attention on the priority and closeness of your relationship with God.

We all have relationships in our lives that we tend to avoid. Whether it's an ex, a co-worker, or maybe even a family member, we do our best to stay away from these people and navigate our lives around them. Sometimes this is from past hurt, but often it's because we feel these people are a waste of our time. It sounds harsh but is often true. We all have a tendency to be transactional in our relationship. To love the people who are easy to love and to avoid the people that are hard to love. God knew this about us and as a result, has a lot to say about how we should interact with these difficult people. This week, we will talk about some motives we have for avoiding these people, assess our motives against what the Bible has to say, and learn from how Jesus interacted with the kind of people many of us think of as not worth our time and energy.

It's a part of our nature to look out for ourselves first and to make our comfort and enjoyment number one. While we might aspire to be known for helping others and putting others before our needs, many times we find ourselves helping in ways that ultimately benefit us. We wake up in the morning planning out how we want our day to go, and often react negatively when something or someone gets in the way of that. So of course this aspect of our nature often causes problems with those around us. When two people with their own interests in mind are in proximity to each other, there are bound to be problems. In today's message, we look at what the Bible has to say about how we should serve others and why we should serve others. By realigning our priorities to God's, we can make strides to suppress our selfish tendencies and make a difference not only in our relationships, but in our world.