That's Grace Podcast

 Over the past few weeks, we’ve talked about how God has intended our faith to benefit more than just us. The expression of our faith should extend to those in our circles of influence, but sometimes, it’s easier to play the “Christian part” when we are at work, at church, and with our friends. But how does your faith affect those who are in your own home? Do they see your faith being lived out when you’re in your own house or do they see one person at church and another person at home? In this week’s teaching, we look at what the Bible says our responsibility is to those in our home, how our faith should be benefiting them, and what steps we can take if it’s not. 

Time is the most precious resource that we have. Unlike money and possessions, our time is something that we can never earn or buy back. Once it is gone, it is gone. So it’s no wonder that we most often use what time we have for our benefit, but for those who follow Jesus, he says that our time and abilities have been given to us for so much more than our own gain. In this week of our series Scoreboard, Pastor Sean talks about how giving up our time and talents to help others is a true mark of a follower of Jesus.  That our time is either a tool we can leverage or an idol we can worship. 

Have you ever stopped to think about why talking about money is such a sensitive topic? Money is often the center for many of our arguments, relational breakdowns, stress, frustrations, and worries. It kinda makes sense seeing as how we spend a large portion of our week and our lives working for it. We give up so much time and effort to gain money that is is often something that we hold very close to us and care much about. Money, or the lack thereof, often determines what we can and can’t do in life and what we can and can’t possess. But more than that, how we choose to handle our money is one of the greatest reflections of the priorities in our lives. And honestly, is often one of the most brutal mirrors into what we really believe is important. In this week of our series Scoreboard, we see from the Bible why generosity is such an important marker in how we are doing spiritually and how rearranging the priority of generosity in our lives can allow us to grow deeper in our relationship with God.

How would your life be different if you had a community of people pushing you to grow in your faith? Whats holding you back? Is it the fear of vulnerability, time commitment or thinking it’s unnecessary? The truth is God intended you to share life with other Christ followers for more than just an hour on the weekends. In the second week of our series Scoreboard, we looked at what the Bible says about building relationships, and why prioritizing biblical community will help you grow in your faith. 

If you had to guess who benefits more from your faith, would it be you or those around you? For most of us, we would probably have to admit that our faith benefits us the most. While it’s true that our faith does benefit us, God has a much bigger plan for your faith. In the first week of our series Scoreboard, we looked at what the Bible has to say about who should benefit most from our faith, what that looks like practically in your life and how being intentional in your faith can help you take your next step. 

If you had the choice between living in luxury or leaving a legacy, which one would you choose? Most of us would probably try to pick both, but these two values are often in competition with one another. Do we make decisions that best impact the life we are living right now, or make decisions that will leave an impact both now and long after we’re gone? It’s the never ending struggle between instant gratifications and delayed gratification. In this week’s message, we look at the life of a man named Saul from the Bible who appeared set up for nothing but success, but made 3 critical mistakes that caused him to miss out on all that God had intended for him. See what choices you need to make in order to avoid these mistakes and allow God to determine what success looks like in your life. 

You would probably agree that most of your closest friends, family, and even acquaintances are pretty similar to you. We tend to create and maintain relationships with people who hold to similar values as us, who believe like us, live like us, and yes…even vote like us. There seems to be a part of our nature that searches for comfortability in the people that we rub shoulders with. And this tendency is still true for many Christians. The problem is that Jesus intentionally did not live this way. Jesus gives what the end result should look like for those who follow Him, but many Christians don’t look anything like that. In the last week of our series DNA, we look at the people and relationships that Jesus was focused on the most and how as a church, we are striving to focus on the same thing. 

Most of us recognize that we all have gifts, talents, time, and resources. Most of the time, we work hard to leverage these things in order to achieve success or to advance ourselves in life. Sometimes we even refer to these things as “God-given” gifts. But have you ever stopped to think what purposes God may have given you these things to accomplish? Most of the time, we leverage them for our good and our purposes. In this week’s teaching, we see from the Bible that God has given us our time, talents, and treasures to help us accomplish the purposes that He has for us in life. But it’s not always about using these things for our good, but for the good things God has planned for us to do. 

God never drafted you for you to idly sit on the sidelines. God created you with a purpose for a specific purpose! Somehow, we naturally know that we we’re not here just for ourselves. There is an innate sense built into us that we were created for something bigger! But how do you figure out what your purpose is so that you can begin to live it out? In the second week of our series DNA, Pastor Ken looks at what the Bible says about how you can discover and live out this purpose, and how living out the purpose God created not only helps you grow in your faith, but helps others along the way. 

In the first week of our series DNA, we explore the first and most important of our churches values – Biblically Centered. We recognize that we didn’t invent us. We didn’t choose to be born with the skills, IQ, or advantages. All of that was a gift given to us by God to be leveraged in this life. And because, we didn’t invent us, God has a unique plan for our lives and it’s in His Word that we discover that plan and are held accountable to it. It doesn’t mean that we’ll always like everything that it says, but that we can trust everything it says.