Life Journey Church Podcast

This Sunday we wrap up our 10 week journey where we have looked at the 10 things everyone needs to know, ESPECIALLY CHRISTIANS, about Christianity. We wrap up this Sunday with one of the biggest misconceptions regarding Christianity: God's will for your life! Have you ever wondered what God's will for your life is? Have you ever wished you could know? All of us have! So what is His will? What is His great desire for us? What if His will for us doesn't have to do with which job to take, which house to buy, or even which person to marry? What if His will, His desire, is much more personal and intimate? We'll see on Sunday that God's desire for you is for Him to be with you and for you to be with Him! What if the will of God is achieved in you already if you believe in Jesus and now we get to live and make decisions and do life from the dead center of His will instead of trying our hardest to find His will?

We are all the way down to #2 in our top 10 list of things everyone, especially christians, needs to know about Christianity! The Old Testament is not a collection of stories for us to find a moral to live by. The Old Testament is much more than that! It is a revelation of Jesus Christ! In John 5:46 Jesus says that "Moses wrote about Me!" But where and when did Moses ever write the name "Jesus." Well, Moses didn't write the word "Jesus" ever, but apparently all of it is about Him! So what does this mean? For one, instead of reading the Old Testament simply as a story where we need to find little morals to live by (ie. have the courage like David, be upright like Noah, etc), we really need to ask the question, "What is this story revealing about Jesus?" Then and only then, will the true meaning of the Old Testament stories be life to us!

On a scale of 1-10, how close are you to Jesus? How clean are you? How holy are you? How righteous are you? When most of us read questions like these, we tend to survey the last 48-72 hours of our behavior in order to determine a number. What about you? The truth, however, is that we are not inching our way closer to Jesus, to cleanness, to holiness, nor to righteousness! We don't die over and over to ourselves. Our old self was crucified with Jesus once and we have been born new of Jesus' "incorruptible seed!" That means our new life is close to Jesus. We are clean. We are holy. We are righteous! The real questions are "do we see it?," and "are we willing to live by faith now in that reality?"

So many of us see ourselves as God's slaves or servants. Is that the picture the New Covenant paints as to our relationship with God? Not really! Over and over, we are said to be sons and daughters of God! Does it really matter how we view ourselves? Jesus seems to think so. He shares a brief parable in Luke 17 which shows that if we see ourselves as God's servants/slaves then we will never understand what faith and life in Christ is really all about. We are sons not slaves! Now, do sons serve their fathers? Of course, but from the position of sonship not from the place of servant! Do you live FOR Jesus (servant mindset) or do you live FROM Jesus (son mindset)?

Have you ever thought of God's grace being his "soft side" and his laws and expectations being is "other side" or his "hard side?" Many have and many do see God in this way--his soft side vs. his harsh side. Is that true? Does God have a soft side and a hard side? Is the grace of God the "milk of Christianity" and we are to move on to the harder, more difficult "meat of Christianity" which is something greater than his grace? It might sound familiar that we are to move on to something greater than God's grace in order to grow into maturity. But what if the Apostles actually taught something different? What if they taught God was full of grace and there is no "other side"? What if it's God's grace that not only brings salvation, but also teaches us to say no to sin and yes to Jesus? The irony is that many of us have thought that moving "beyond grace" to "something meatier" is what brings obedience and maturity. This couldn't be further from the truth!

How many of us have tried and tried to get our priorities straight by putting Jesus first in our life? We feel guilty after a while of neglect and we resolve to reprioritize Him as #1 where He belongs! Sounds noble right? What if that is completely missing the point? Jesus' never set out to be a priority in life. He is life! There's a huge difference between prioritizing Jesus in our life and coming to the realization that Jesus IS our life. Colossians 3:4 says that Jesus is our life.  What does that mean? What does that look like? What could it solve in your life to stop trying to prioritize Jesus in your life an start seeing Him as your life?

We are likely all familiar with what Jesus did for us! He died for us! That alone is simply incredible. But did you know that Jesus didn't just do something for us? He did something to us! To believe that Jesus did something for us is great, but Christianity is far more than just Him doing something for us. The power of the gospel is that He has done an incredible work to us. Namely, He crucified our old self, He buried our old self, and He created us new in Him. That's not just an intellectual truth, it is personal and experiential!

What an eye opening and exciting first two weeks of our new series have been! This Sunday, the third week of it, promises the same! For some reason, a vast majority of Christians think that God forgives us our sins on an ongoing basis as we ask Him to forgive us. But what if we forget to ask? Wouldn't we have unforgiven sin? Wouldn't that jeopardize our salvation? What everyone, ESPECIALLY CHRISTIANS, needs to know about Christianity is that Christians are forgiven ONCE AND FOR ALL not over and over as they ask for it. One is truly good news, the other is worse than they had on the Old Testament.

In the weeks leading up to Easter 2018, we are going to take a look at the top 10 things that we wish EVERYONE new about the good news of Jesus--ESPECIALLY CHRISTIANS. There are so many misconceptions of who Jesus is, what He came to do, where he now is, etc, etc. Wouldn't it be nice if those who have embraced a misconception about Jesus and His Gospel would come to know the amazing reality of His Grace--ESPECIALLY CHRISTIANS? We start this Sunday with #1 - The Bible is one book with two drastically different covenants. If we don't see the two covenants in the one book, it is very likely we are mixing the New and Old Covenants and therefore have an incredibly skewed concept of this whole thing we call Christianity.

As we celebrate Jesus' birth we are going to take a look at a question that has been asked for generations, "WHY A VIRGIN?" It seems quite odd that the entire validity of Christianity hangs by a thread that a virgin had a baby! Why would God do it that way? How can we know Mary was a virgin? What if she wasn't? But what if she was? Our hope is that we come away with even more reason to celebrate the baby in the manger, who became the sacrifice on the cross, who became the deliverer risen from the grave.

It's the most wonderful time of the year! We are celebrating the entrance of the Son of God into our realm of Earth! We're taking a look at one of the clearest predictions of the coming Messiah and specifically what He came to do out of Daniel 9. If Jesus is the Messiah, then God's accounting of iniquity, sins, and trespasses have all ended, we who believe are now perpetually right with God, and the most amazing reality of it all, we have become the very holy dwelling place of God Himself! WOW!

As we wrap up our series, we're looking at one of the realities of our new life in Christ that the enemy works very hard to keep hidden from us. What does it really mean to be a child of God? We use the phrase. We heard it all our lives. But what does it mean? The truth is that however much of a son Jesus is, that is the same measure of a child we are for we are "co-heirs" with Christ! Are we willing to believe this?

One of the most difficult things to believe about the Gospel is that we are no longer condemned, ever, in any way by God, whatsoever! It's hard to believe because we still condemn ourselves, others condemn us and so on. But the truth is that however condemned Jesus is by the Father is the same amount of your condemnation by the Father now that you are in Him! Is this of your doing? Of course not! It's all His doing. We now choose whether or not we are going to believe what He's done to us! Do you believe Him? Do you believe that as He is so are you now in this world? If you do, it will change your life!

We hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! One of the things we are most thankful for at Life Journey Church is our new relationship to Sin and the Law now that we are in Christ. There's great confusion in the body of Christ about this. Many Christians see themselves still in Sin and under the requirements of the Law. We will see plainly on Sunday that the truth is so much better! The truth is we are free from Sin and no longer under the Law! Why is this such a big deal? Because the Law gives opportunity for Sin to deceive us and kill us! So why would we seek to put believers under the very thing that gives Sin this power? Let us be thankful for the truth that "AS HE IS SO ARE WE IN THE WORLD!" Let us discover the truth of what Jesus has done for us and to us!

It has been God's desire for a long time for us to have a heart that matches His. And that is exactly what we now have in the New Covenant! As His heart is, so is ours now in this world! But do we live from our new heart? That's the question. There's not a problem with our new heart in Christ, the problem is we don't know how to live from it.

The purpose of God's love is to give us confidence in the day of Judgment for "as He is, so are we in this world!" How can there be any fear of judgment if we are, by grace, as He is already? This sounds too good to be true doesn't it? What about all this sinning? We still sin don't we? Sure, but did you know that if we are Christians, we have died to sin? Did you know that? Most don't! Most of us believe that we are still very much alive to sin. But the truth is so much better! However dead Jesus is to sin, we are too! If you've missed any of the messages, we encourage you to check out the podcast. It can change your life!

Did you know that God the Father loves you as much as He loves His Son, Jesus? It's hard to believe isn't it? One of the greatest lies of the Enemy is that God's love for you is based upon you, your actions, your behavior, your thoughts, or anything else about you. This couldn't be further from the truth. The truth is that God is unconditional, one sided love! He doesn't know any other type of love. Many of us struggle to really believe that the One who flung the stars into space loves us in this way. It affects our daily lives. We all want to be loved like this, but are we willing to believe it? We are loved like Jesus is loved! As we grab a hold of this truth, it changes our lives.