That's Grace Podcast

We all have a set of priorities in our lives. Our priorities are the things that will determine how we think and what decisions in our lives we will make. In fact, we center our lives around our priorities. But when our priorities are misaligned, we are in danger of missing out on the blessed life that God wants us to live. In the third week of our series, Pastor Sean shows how Abraham allowed God to be the first priority in his life and as a result was able to be blessed and used by God. But in order for us to allow God to have priority over our wants and plans, we must choose whether or not we trust that God’s plan for us is better than ours.

For some of us, the blessed life may look different depending on the skills, talents, and resources that God has given to us. But God has given all of us the elements in our lives needed to live a blessed life. In this week’s message, Pastor Ken talks about how our trust in God plays into having a life blessed by him. He shows from the story of Abraham that trusting in God is not always easy and sometimes we fail. We don’t understand how God could come through and so we bail on waiting for Him and try to work it out on our own. But God isn’t interested in keeping us from all difficulty. He is interested in helping us grow our faith muscle so that we can trust more and and accomplish the blessed life.

What does it take to live a life that God would want to bless? A life that when you get to the end of it, you are greeted with the applause of heaven. You get to experience every awesome thing that God had planned for you and squeezed every last drop of greatness from your life. But this kind of life doesn’t happen by accident. In this week’s message, Pastor Sean shares that right now, you might be running away from the very things that God has put in your life in order to give you the blessed life. Sometimes, these things are scary and sometimes they are more than we think we can handle. But God dreams dreams that far outlast the dreams that you have for your life.

Have you ever allowed your behavior to change because of what you thought others might think about you? Maybe you kept your belief in God to yourself because you thought your co-workers would criticize you. Or maybe you decided to participate in something that would compromise your values because you were afraid of what others might say about you? For some of us, the struggle to please other people is greater than it is for others, but we all find ourselves filtering what others may think of us through our decision making filters. In this week’s message, Pastor Sean talks about how our insecurity often leads us to care more about what others think than we care about what God thinks. But the Bible has a lot to say about who we are and who God created us to be and when we focus on living out that purpose, we can break free from our fear of what others think and our insecurity.

We all face fear and anxiety at different times in life and sometimes, the fears and the anxiety feels so real that is cripples us. We don’t know what to do, we don’t know where to turn. All we want to do is find a way to escape the things that are plaguing our minds. While these two things weren’t things that God ever intended us to experience, they are common things we battle against in this broken world. When problems arise or we begin to fear the unknown, we can start believing that God has lost control and we begin to doubt whether or not He really is good. In the first week of this series, Pastor Sean shares how we often want to base our faith on the mountaintop experiences that we have in life, but the Bible says that our lives here are short and full of trouble. So what do we do when we find ourselves struggling with fear and anxiety in the valleys? In this message, Pastor Sean gives us two practical things.

What is the first thing you think of when you hear the word “Church”? If you’re like most people, you probably thought of a building that had religious services in it. Maybe you thought of the place where you got confirmed or had your first communion. Maybe stain glass windows and a steeple came to mind. In this last week of our series Long Story Short, Pastor Sean talks about how the church isn’t a location or a building. The first church was defined by the people. And how God had a specific purpose for the church (people) to accomplish through meeting and gathering together. And it wasn’t to have a cozy religious service. It was all about helping people who felt most distant from God find there way back to Him.

Have you ever felt that because of the things you’ve done there was no way you could talk to God? Maybe you thought He was too angry to listen to you, or maybe you’re own shame and guilt kept you from even trying. In our series Long Story Short, we’ve seen God create a perfect world and environment for mankind to live in, but we’ve also seen mankind decide to try their own way in an attempt to get something better than God provided. In during away from the Creator of all good they found all that was bad. But God promised not to leave them that way. In this week’s message, Pastor Sean shows how Jesus came to do for us what the old rules couldn’t. He didn’t come to just forgive us when we do wrong, but to make us innocent before God once again.

Have you ever heard the expression that rules are meant to be broken? It seems that wherever there are rules, they will be broken shortly thereafter. Many of us think of the Bible has being a religious book that’s full of rules that God wants us to keep, but that’s not at all what God intended the rules for. In this week’s message, Pastor Sean talks about the rules that God gave mankind after Creation was for them to understand what holiness looked like and to show them that no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t keep all the rules. But instead of leaving them hopeless, He made a way for them to be made right with Him despite their inability to obey all the rules.

Have you ever felt ashamed of your past and the decisions you’ve made? Do you ever wish you could go back and do things differently? If so, you’re not alone. We all have done and said things we wish we could take back, and sometimes, the guilt, the shame, and feeling of being unworthy makes us feel like even if we talked to God, He would want nothing to do with us. But did you know that shame, guilt, and fear are all emotions that God never intended us to feel? In week two of our series Long Story Short, Pastor Sean talks shows from the Bible where mankind went off track to experience this emotions, why they chose this path, and why we are still struggling with the exact same decisions today.

Have you ever wondered why God decided to create the world and everything in it? For instance, what was His goal and what was He trying to accomplish? And why did He give mankind the option for evil to exist? In the first week of our series Long Story Short, Pastor Sean looks at the very first account in the Bible – the Creation of the world. Through this story, we see why God created everything, what our purpose is in His story, and why He allowed the option for everything perfect He created to be ruined by evil.