One of the wonderful things about our God is that He is a living relational God, who speaks to His creation.

(This was a two week lesson I taught to our World Changers class, which is made up of young elementary students) I. Jesus gave us an example to follow (in all of life) John 13:15 “For I gave you an example….” Jesus I John 2:6 “The one who says he abides in Him ought Himself to walk in the same manner as He walked.” The apostle John II. Jesus prayed often, Jesus prayed early, and Jesus prayed long. A. Often – Luke 5:16 “But Jesus Himself would often slip away i

It was striking as I began to gather these passages that almost every book in the New Testament has at least one warning re: divisive people.

This study is meant to highlight what the Psalms teach us about the reality of sin, iniquities and transgressions, God's plentiful mercy for such, and the call to holiness in the Psalms - all of which should be a significant part of the foundation of Christ's church in every city

Like so many other things in the kingdom, we tend to think we know this, and tend to be a bit simplistic in talking about it to others. May meditation on these purpose statements result in greater devotion to Him, and greater effectiveness in speaking of the cross to others.

In preparation for Holy Week, I sensed the need for a tool to help us in our meditations on the greatness of our sin that required and led to the greatness of His sacrifice. Very easy to overlook or take for granted the greatness of His salvation and deliverance from the greatness of our sin and lostness.  

Knowing the significant importance of water baptism for believers, and knowing how we believers can easily not see or understand the significant importance of baptism, the Holy Spirit gave us nine different accounts  of people being baptized in the book of Acts.

The whole basis and motivation to repent or reason to repent is the King and His Kingdom had invaded their time and space and reality, and thus their sins and darkness were exposed, and thus they needed to bow to King and be delivered out of the kingdom of darkness and translated into the kingdom of God.

“The word of the Lord” appears in the New Testament – 16x’s in 12 verses. The purpose of this study is to help clarify the difference between the phrase, “The word of the Lord” and phrases such as “the word of God” and terms like “the scriptures”.

Knowing some years ago that I was more like the 12 disciples (who often did not see the value of children) than I cared to think, I decided to search the scripture for what God says about their value. The following study came from that search. May the Lord continue to help us all feel about children the way He does!

Because of my own journey of self-examination, particularly surrounding the decline and death of my father in 2017, and the experiences others have shared with me, I around that time began to study in earnest the scriptural theme of what some call “generational sins”, sometimes referred to in scripture as the “sins of the fathers”.

The reality sadly in the body of Christ today is that many of us have been able to serve and minister and seemingly be used (sometimes greatly) of the Lord, and yet have huge blind spots as to our own personal need for inner transformation and cleansing.

One of the major reasons Jesus Christ laid His sinless life down for us and allowed evil men to beat Him and nail Him to a criminal’s cross is to break the hold of lawlessness on us, and to so cleanse and purify us – that we would become a united people, who gladly submit to His Lordship, and zealously go about doing His work on the earth until He returns.

Because the living God created man and woman fully dependent upon and biologically or physiologically connected to one another, as important as sons are to their parents in helping them with the family business and in helping to take care of them in their old age, their relationship with their God ordained wife is far more important.

The enemy of our souls loves to lie to us in our times of great difficulty that there is no hope; that our sin or someone else’s is just too great. May the Lord continue to convince us of the unfathomable depths of resource we have in Him for every challenge and battle and difficulty and impossibility we will ever face, and may we ever know Him as the life giving Well, Fountain, Spring, and River

Sadly while many of us would identify ourselves as evangelicals, in our daily experience and expectation we function more as Deists. That is – we say we believe in the God the Bible reveals, but we rarely expect to see Him working in our daily lives and circumstances.

Prophets and teachers typically don’t overly appreciate each other. But in this church (Jerusalem) they were the ones who in harmony and unity heard the word of the Lord and carried it out

Only when we are regularly reminded of how we were before Christ saved us, will we appreciate the greatness of His salvation. Only when we are regularly reminded of who we are in the flesh in the present, will we appreciate the greatness of His grace, and cleansing blood, and impartation of the life of Christ by His Spirit.

Why should we make teaching in the local church a priority? Well there are many solid reasons for doing so and there are many obstacles and enemies against it. I've laid out below some of the more obvious reasons for the importance of the teaching ministry of the church.

“Heavens” in the old and new testaments Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:9 Then God said, ” Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear”; and it was so. Genesis 1:14 Then God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years; Genesis 1:15 and let them be for lights in the expan