Tag: Bible

Published July 17, 2023

Growing Up

Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.

Romans 12:2

This verse is the foundational principle for our summer series of messages – Transformational Discipleship. As followers of Christ, God wants to totally transform our lives – changing us into the people that He created us to be. But he doesn’t do that instantly in the moment that become a Christian. But rather, it is a slow, life-long process where we learn to know God’s will for us – which is good and pleasing and perfect!

So throughout the summer, we want to look at that process and hopefully discover where we are in that journey personally! And more specifically, we want to know how we can align ourselves with what God is already doing in us so that we can take the next steps in that process of becoming more like Him.

We started last week by looking at a few of the distinguishing marks of being both spiritually dead – as well as being a spiritual infant. And I’ll give you just a quick summary before we move on.

Being born as sinners with a natural desire to rebel against God and to do things our own way, our initial state of existence for every person on the planet is being relationally separated from God. And because we are separated from Him – the Giver and Sustainer of Life – we may be physically alive, but we are absolutely spiritually dead. We have no relationship with Him – and because of that, have no life and no hope for the future.

However, because of God’s great love for us even while we were sinners, He provided a way for us to restore that relationship. Jesus Christ died on the cross and rose again from the grave – paying our penalty so that we could receive forgiveness and life. The only requirement for us is that we simply believe and accept that he did that for us!

When we make that choice to believe who Jesus is and what He has done for us, we become spiritually alive – born again – as we sometimes phrase it. At that point, we become a spiritual infant.

Now as infants, we really don’t know much of anything! Everything is brand new and there is very much a steep learning curve! In this stage of your spiritual journey, it’s really important to have some mature Christian people in your life who can help you along as you begin to grow and learn what it’s all about. This is what your church family is for. These people will be like your spiritual parents – or at least older brothers and sisters. They can help guide and direct you as you begin to figure things out.

But perhaps the greatest gift that you’ll discover in this stage of your journey is the Bible. God has given us a whole book on who He is and what He has done in the world over the centuries – so that we can learn what it means to live in right relationship with Him. Getting to know what the Bible says and being part of a Bible-believing church in this stage of life is so important.

And of course, just as physical infants need to learn to feed themselves and begin eating solid food, so too as spiritual infants, if we want to grow and mature, it is so important that we begin to read and understand the Bible for ourselves. If our only spiritual nourishment comes from the Sunday morning sermon, we’re probably going to be a bit mal-nourished! We don’t want to be like a grown person still being spoon-fed pablum all their life. That would be ridiculous and unhealthy – both physically and spiritually. At some point, you have to learn to feed yourself! You have to take responsibility for your own spiritual growth and health. This is one of the key ways that we begin moving into the next phase of maturity – growing from being an infant into being a child – which we’re going to talk about today.

Continue Reading This Article

Leave a Comment

Published July 10, 2023

First Steps

Last Sunday we kicked off a new summer series which I’ve entitled “Transformational Discipleship”. The main principle for this series is rooted in Romans 12:2 which says:

Romans 12:2

The idea here is that, even though God loves and accepts us just as we are – with our sins, faults, and failures – it’s not His desire that we stay that way! God wants to totally transform us into new people – new people who know His will for our lives – which is good and pleasing and perfect!

And of course, this transformational discipleship is a life-long process. Certainly there can be some immediate, major changes in our life when we first accept Christ. Many times new believers can be radically different from the people they were just weeks before! But even though we may experience some immediate, major changes (which are often outward changes in behavior) – it always takes much longer to make those inner changes – the changes in the way we think and what we believe – the renewing of our mind as the NIV puts this verse.

This kind of changing the way we think is really a slow, maturing process. Just like how we physically grow up slowly from an infant to a child to a youth to an adult – in the same way, we spiritually grow up slowly as we mature and grow and develop as followers of Jesus.

Continue Reading This Article

Leave a Comment

Published January 3, 2022

The Worship of the Wisemen

Through the month of December, our Sunday morning messages revolved around the characters of the Christmas story. We looked first at Jesus himself, then his earthly father Joseph, then his very young mother Mary, and then finally last week we looked at the shepherds who were outside of Bethlehem on the night of Jesus’ birth. Typically we tend to look at the events of Christmas more so than the characters, so I’ve appreciated the new perspective that we’ve gained as we’ve looked more in-depth at these different people.

Now my plan for today was to start leading us through a new series of messages that will take us right on through until Easter. Basically, I want us to walk through the life and ministry of Jesus Christ from birth to resurrection. However, I feel like we’ve kinda missed an important set of characters in the Christmas story. You’ve may have realized too, that we haven’t looked at the wisemen or King Herod.

And so today, I want to use the wisemen as a bridge between these two series of messages. They will be the final characters in the Christmas series, but also the first story in this new series as we begin to look at the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.

After all, the wisemen really do serve as a transitional story between the baby Jesus and the young child Jesus. Despite what most nativity scenes depict, the wisemen most certainly did not gather around the manger to meet baby Jesus on the night he was born, but rather, they met Jesus at least days, weeks, or even months after his birth! But we’ll look at all that stuff as we go through our passage today.

Continue Reading This Article

Leave a Comment

Published November 12, 2019

The Great Drama of God

About six weeks ago we began our visual theology message series – based on the book by Tim Challies and Josh Byers. And as you can see on the title page, there are four main components that make up this series. These are like the four reasons why we want to study Theology (or why we want to study God)… These are four things that every Christian should want to do.

#1. We want to grow close to Christ,

#2. we want to understand the work of Christ,

#3. we want to become like Christ, and

#4. we want to live for Christ.

Those are the four main reasons why we are studying theology – and these four components form the basic outline for these messages.

In the first component, which Greg just finished for us last week, we talked all about how to grow close to Christ. In that section, we talked about everything from how the Gospel connects us to Christ to our new identity in Christ. We looked at how God speaks to us through the Bible, and how we speak to God through prayer. These are the basics of growing close to Christ.

The second component of this series (that we’re going to start looking at today) is designed to help us understand the work of Christ. In other words, not only do we want to have a personal relationship with Christ, but be also want to understand what He is doing in the world. This is a key element of the Christian faith – we need to understand what God has done, what He is doing right now, and what He’s going to do in the future.

You see, the Bible tells us that we are living smack-dab in the middle of an incredible story! We are all part of God’s unfolding drama. Our life on this planet is just one scene in an eternal, cosmic story that’s been playing out since time began. It’s like God is the ultimate writer and director and the world is the stage for his drama to unfold.

Continue Reading This Article

Leave a Comment

Published October 28, 2019

The Bible Is…

To begin this morning, I want to ask you a question that I’ve often asked at the end of my messages, but I don’t think I have ever asked it right at the beginning. Preachers will quite often ask a question like this one as the concluding thought of the sermon – it’s the main point that everything has been driving towards. After all has been said and done, this is the question that they want you to take home and think about and hopefully act upon….

And the question is:

Do you have a personal relationship with God?

Normally this question is asked to encourage you to think about accepting Christ as your Saviour – to make that first time decision to follow Jesus and become a Christian.

But that’s not necessarily where I’m going with this one today.

The question is not “Do you want to become a Christian?” – The question is “Do you have a personal relationship with God?”

And maybe before you answer that question, I should define what a personal relationship is. You see, having a personal relationship with someone requires having personal interactions with them.

For example, I do not have a personal relationship with Donald Trump. I believe he exists. I believe he has said things and done things that have impacted my life (to a certain extent). I’ve even read some of his tweets and heard him speak on tv. But I do not have a personal relationship with him – because the two of us have never had any personal interactions. We’ve never had a conversation – we’ve never emailed back and forth. We’ve had no personal interactions with each other – and therefore I do not have a personal relationship with him.

So when I ask the question “Do you have a personal relationship with God?” – I’m not asking if you believe he exists or if you believe that he has said and done things that have impacted your life. I’m not asking if you’ve read some books about God or heard a preacher preach about God.

I’m asking if you personally have some sort of interactions with God. Are there times when you speak and He listens and are there times when He speaks and you listen? Because that’s what a personal relationship is all about.

It’s two people speaking and listening to each other – it’s the two-way street of communication. Without those back-and-forth interactions, it’s pretty hard to say that you have a personal relationship with someone.

As Christians we have the awesome privilege of having a personal relationship with God. God has invited us to have personal interactions – those back-and-forth conversations with Him – which is pretty amazing when you think about it.

We think it’s pretty awesome when we meet a famous actor or athlete – We’re thrilled when they say three sentences to us and autograph our posters. But how much more awesome is it that the Creator of the universe wants to connect with you and interact with you on a regular basis?!

Continue Reading This Article

Leave a Comment

Published November 6, 2017

Discipled By God

Six weeks ago, we began looking at a fairly straight-forward question: What does it look like to make disciples?

Does it look like Sunday morning at a mega-church? Does it look like coffee with a friend at Tim Hortons? Does it look serving the homeless at a soup kitchen? Does it look like a neighbourhood block-party? Does it look like a ladies Bible study or youth group or Sunday school or kids club or any of these things?

Well, to find the answer to these questions, we started by defining discipleship. And of course, the key passage we looked at was Matthew 28:18-20 – which by now, I imagine most of you have memorized – since we’ve looked at it for each of the last six weeks! But it says this:

18 Jesus came and told his disciples, “I have been given all authority in heaven and on earth. 19 Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. 20 Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Matthew 28:18-20

Now this isn’t the only place where the Bible talks about making disciples – its actually quite a re-occuring theme – but based on that passage, we defined discipleship as: helping people trust and follow Jesus.

Discipleship: Helping people trust and follow Jesus.

It’s really as simple as that. If you are helping people trust and follow Jesus – then you are making disciples. And we came to realize that we can help people trust and follow Jesus in a lot of different ways – and in a lot of different contexts.

In fact, we identified 5 different contexts in the life and ministry of Jesus that we could learn from as we try to model our discipleship on what He did.

At a glance, those five context’s were: The Public Context, The Social Context, The Personal Context, The Transparent Context, and the Divine Context.

And so the first context that we looked at was the public context.

Continue Reading This Article

Leave a Comment