“Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him…” (ESV – Read the chapter)
Our confession when we become followers of Jesus is that He is Lord. Well, if we really believe He is Lord, this is necessarily going to affect how we live. Read the rest…
“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” (ESV – Read the chapter)
I have never surfed. Admittedly, I’ve never been in a really big hurry to try. It looks fun, but I have long been just a bit weary about the water. A couple of experiences growing up cemented this for me. Read the rest…
“And Job again took up his discourse, and said: ‘Oh, that I were as in the months of old, as in the days when God watched over me, when his lamp shone upon my head, and by his light I walked through darkness, as I was in my prime, when the friendship of God was upon my tent…'” (ESV – Read the chapter)
Job’s ordeal had been intense at this point. He had lost everything including his health. That’s not really specific enough. He had faced total financial ruin. All of his children had died in a tragic accident (an accident we, the readers, know was caused by Satan). His wife had functionally abandoned him out of her own grief. And he was experiencing horrendous physical suffering as well. To make matters even worse, three of his best friends had spent days with him arguing with greater and greater intensity and insistence that he was ultimately to blame for all of his troubles because of some sin that was going unconfessed in his life. The old adage, “when it rains it pours,” does not even begin to cover it here. Read the rest…
After spending the past four weeks talking about who God made us to be as a church, this past Sunday morning we started a new conversation about what’s next. Now that we know who we are, what are some of the specific things we can start doing now to make sure we are able to move all together in the direction He has designed us to go? Keep reading to find out.
Diving In
Wasn’t last week fun? If you were not here for whatever reason number one, we missed you. Number two, you will want to get your hands on a video of the service so you can experience some of the Spirit moving as we did in the room. After three weeks of unpacking the key pieces of the identity God has built into this church for the purpose of building up the larger body of Christ and expanding the kingdom starting in Oakboro and moving on outward from here, we finally put everything together as we celebrated the resurrection and found ourselves in the larger story God is writing across the ages. I thought it was a really exciting morning and I hope you did too. It was definitely a morning that I have been looking forward to for quite some time. Several of you have told me how excited you are to race forward to see what God has in store for us in the days ahead as we become fully the body of Christ He made us to be—a place where people connect to grow in Christ and reach out for His kingdom. And yet this week…everything looks about like it did last week. So…what’s next? Read the rest…
“Peter began to say to him, ‘See, we have left everything and followed you.'” (ESV – Read the chapter)
What Peter says here is no small thing. Have you left everything and followed Jesus? Have you really left anything to follow Him? What did you leave behind? If you have indeed not left anything behind, there is a rather uncomfortable question you are going to need to answer: Are you really following Jesus? Read the rest…
The Nexus 