Posts with the tag “faith”

Sunday you heard about the moment Nehemiah had to open his mouth and ask. He had been carrying the burden for months. He had prayed. He had planned. And then the king looked at him and said why does your face look sad. And everything came down to what Nehemiah did in that moment. He asked. Most of us have something we need to ask for and have not asked for yet. A conversation we need to start. A door we need to knock on. Help we need to admit we cannot get along without. We are waiting for the perfect moment, the right words, the guarantee that the answer will be yes before we risk the vulnerability of asking. There is no perfect moment. There never is. Nehemiah was standing in front of the most powerful man in the world with no guarantee and no script and a prayer he sent up in about three seconds between the question and the answer. You know what you need to do. You have known for a while. The plan is not the problem. The ask is the problem. This week, make the ask. Send the message. Make the call. Walk through the door you have been standing outside of. You do not need certainty. You need the same thing Nehemiah had: a God who goes before you into rooms you cannot control. The opposition will show up when you start moving. That is actually a sign you are going the right direction. Sanballat showed up the same day Nehemiah got permission. The resistance is not a reason to stop. It is confirmation that what you are building matters. Ask. Move. Trust the One who opened the door.  Read More

Every graduation season somebody reads the Dr. Seuss book. The one with the winding road. And the words land the way they always do: "You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose." Beautiful. True. And not enough. Because Jesus did not say follow your dreams. He said follow Me. And the generation standing in cap and gown right now is about to discover that the direction they choose matters more than any commencement speech told them. Read the full post.  Read More

There is a moment in every swimming lesson that nobody talks about honestly. The moment the instructor says let go of the wall. Everything in that child says no. The wall is solid. The water is unpredictable. Baptism is that moment. And it is one of the most prophetically loaded things a believer can do in a world that is desperately afraid of what comes next. Because when you went under that water, you were not just getting wet. You were practicing dying. And when you came back up, you were declaring something that death itself cannot argue with. Read the full post.  Read More

I live with five women. My wife and four daughters. And the word in our house lately is delulu. Short for delusional. It means you are holding onto something the rest of the room has already decided is not going to happen. Here is what I did not expect. The longer I sat with that word, the more I realized it is exactly what the world says about the Church. About every believer who still genuinely expects Jesus to come back. Peter warned us this was coming. Mockers would say: where is the promise? Nothing ever changes. Everything just keeps going the way it always has. But the people calling us delulu forgot about the empty tomb. And that changes everything. Read the full post.  Read More

Want to go deeper? This blog expands on the message preached on April 19 at GracePointe. Watch the full message at https://gpnaz.church/media. There is a character in C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew named Uncle Andrew.He is present at the creation of Narnia. He is standing there when Aslan, the great lion who represents Christ, opens his mouth and sings the world into existence. Stars appear. Mo...  Read More

Want to go deeper? This blog expands on the message preached on April 19 at GracePointe. Watch the full message at https://gpnaz.church/media."He told them, 'The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and b...  Read More