The Christian Atheist – Can I Earn My Way Into Heaven

The Christian Atheist series is based on a survey led by the Cultural Research Center of Arizona Christian University.  They surveyed 2,000 U.S. adults from four major groups: Pentecostals, Charismatics, Mainline Protestants, and Catholics about 51 topics including marriage, absolute truth, the sanctity of human life, and the authority of the Bible. The leading researcher, George Barna, concluded the following. “The most startling realization is how many people in our churches are adopting unbiblical beliefs.  American Christians are . . . Read More »

Embracing What God Has Done For You

Last week, Sam shared the seven ways we can mess up grace.  It was such a helpful and redemptive talk.  The reason I liked it so much, Sam gave us handles on how to keep grace simple.  People and religion tend to make grace a lot more complicated than it really is.  Do you remember how Sam did it?  He asked us to describe our Christian faith in a sentence or a word.  And he said, if our . . . Read More »

Unapologetic and Ferocious Courage

Why can’t we fully experience God’s grace?  Because we make our sin and failure a bigger deal than God’s grace.  And until we make God’s grace a bigger deal than our sin and failure, we will struggle to fully experience God’s grace.   This is important because experiencing God’s grace is the foundation to being redeemed and forgiven.  That was Sam’s point last week and it was so well done. Let’s get practical.  There are basically two parts to . . . Read More »

Redeemed & Forgiven Series Kick Off – Understanding Grace

Today we start our big fall series Redeemed and Forgiven.  As Ken and I built this series I just kept getting more excited, because we are going to be exploring what it truly means to live out a life in Christ.  We want to talk about what it could look like to live a life that is truly redeemed and forgiven and most importantly how we can actually live like we are redeemed and forgiven…do you see why . . . Read More »

Only God can Reproduce God

It’s Christmas. It really is the most special time of year. The reason it’s so special is because God entered earth as a baby. And when that happened, it sent shock waves through history. Today, the birth of Jesus is still radically impacting our culture today. How? Think about most of the Christmas movies produced. The themes around Christmas are, ‘believe’, ‘hope’, and ‘love’. Even if you don’t believe in God, in general, people are impacted by some . . . Read More »

In The Opposite Direction

Today’s video with Dave Robbins hits home, doesn’t it? Maybe not to that extent, but we’ve all felt temptation before, and we’ve all given into it at some point too. It doesn’t matter if you’re here today and you don’t believe in Jesus yet, you know what temptation feels like. And you also know that you’ve had consequences for giving in. Right? Whatever you believe, temptation and its consequences is something we can all relate to. Several years . . . Read More »