Podcast: Gospel in Life

What is faith? What is it made of? How do you know if you have it? How do you lose it? How do you get it back? Hebrews 11 deals with all of these things through specific personal case studies of men and women who wrestled with issues of faith. I would suggest that it’s…

One mark of a supernaturally changed heart is a changed attitude and view of races and cultures.  In social relations, grace-changed Christians use their power to serve, not exploit. We’re going to look at this by looking at a dispute that happened in the church of Rome, and by comparing it to another dispute. These…

Some people say there’s a cultural crisis of integrity.  For example, Volkswagen was revealed to have deliberately used software designed to lie about emissions. It was a failure of integrity from one of the biggest corporations in the world. And some of you may be yawning, thinking that’s just the way things are. But the…

When the Greeks and Romans met the early Christians, one of the first things that surprised them was how Christians handled suffering.  Christianity brought into the world a view and a way of handling suffering that the world had never seen. It was one of the evidences of a supernaturally changed heart. And in Romans…

What are the characteristics of a supernaturally changed heart? You can be very moral and active in church and still be an incredibly impatient, bitter person. So we’re looking at what Paul says are the marks of a supernaturally changed heart. And for this, Romans 12 is an explosive passage.  Let’s look at what this…

Most of us know how to restrain a life. We start to get in trouble, so we change. But when the consequences go away, we snap back the way we were.  Human nature without supernatural intervention is like a rubber ball that’s squished, but when the pressure is off, it snaps right back. The rubber…

There is nothing that beggars your own sense of wisdom than to study what the Bible says about divine wisdom. Ephesians 5 tells us a lot about wisdom. And it shows us that biblical wisdom puts God in the center in a way that develops three aspects of wisdom. We see in these verses 1)…

Ephesians 5 talks about light and wisdom. Paul says that because you once were darkness and now are light, you should now expose works of darkness and experience the fruit of light. Then in verse 15, Paul says that we are to walk as wise and not as fools, for the days are evil. What…

The essence of Christianity is arguing with yourself. What makes you an effective Christian is that you’re continually arguing with yourself, and you’re winning the argument. Because of what Christ did, God can restore the world and restore everything if we come to him through Christ. And in Ephesians 5, Paul uses the imagery of…

Christianity is never a mechanical thing. And the church is not a morality agency—it’s a regenerating agency. The real goal of the do’s and the don’ts in the Christian life is always character—growing into God’s holy people. The church does bring about moral behavior but, in a sense, as a byproduct. Because what the church…