99 CHURCH

Ephesians 2:11-3:13 The world today is just as divided as ever before. We create ism's and phobia's that categorize people as the "others" to be avoided. But the Gospel calls us to something different, something more. Paul makes the case to the church in Ephesus that Jesus' finished work on the cross has destroyed every wall of hostility that divided us, from Jew to Gentile and beyond. This week,...

Continuing the theme of spiritual maturity, Dan Fang reflects this week on some of the biggest barriers we might face in our spiritual growth. Especially if we’ve been Christian for many years and notice that we still seem to be “stuck” in the same place, or still drinking the spiritual milk referenced in Hebrews 5, it may be worth evaluating whether any of the following barriers to spiritual matu...

Ephesians 2:10 Have you ever found yourself asking: "God, what is your will for my life?" Some of us hear that God has a plan for our lives and it doesn't feel like a blessing, it feels like a burden. We live anxiously because we're afraid that we'll make a wrong turn and veer off of the will of God. But God doesn't call us to live that way. This week, we explore God's will for our lives and what...

Ephesians 2:1-10 When we talk about living, what we’re often talking about is existence. But when God talks about living, He's talking about something so much more, an abundant life. But there are three enemies of the soul that keep us from the life God promised us: the devil, the flesh, and the world. How do we overcome these enemies to truly live? And perhaps more importantly, what has Jesus don...

Ephesians 1:15-23 Paul continues His letter to the church in Ephesus with a prayer. He prays that as follower of Jesus, we would know these four things: to know Him, to know the hope to which we were called, to know the riches of His glorious inheritance, and to know the immeasurable greatness of His power. What would our lives look like if we truly knew these things? How different would we walked...

Ephesians 1:3-14 Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus opens with an epic prayer. It’s a prayer that celebrates the bigger story within which every one of our stories is a part of. We come to find that this story is not so much about what we have to do to get into God's good graces, and more about what God has done to welcome us into His blessing.

Ephesians 1:1-2 We begin a new collection of teachings on the book of Ephesians. Ephesians opens our imaginations to what growing up and maturing in Christ could look like. While the church in Ephesus got off to a powerful start, we later read in Revelation that they had lost their first love along the way. We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and very little about how it might cont...

Can you think of a time in your life, when someone showed up to give you the strength you needed to carry on? When the early Church gathered, their time together was marked by a supernatural encouragement. People walked away strengthened and filled with the courage to live into their destinies. What would it look like to be a community that embodies encouragement? Recorded live from Belong Retreat...

At the core of every human being is the longing to be fully known and fully loved. In the garden of Eden, humanity was naked and unashamed before God and before one another. But because of sin, we often find ourselves hiding and afraid from community. This week, we explore how the Johari Window could be a powerful tool in helping us reclaim our humanity in community, allowing ourselves to be fully...

We live in time where we're simultaneously vigilant about accountability, yet so turned off by it. We’re proactive in holding people accountable in the court of public opinion, yet absolutely turned off by the idea of anyone holding us accountable. Scripture calls us to sharpen one another, to help each other become all that God has created us to be. This week, we explore the final practice of bel...

Throughout Scripture, we see many maternal and motherly metaphors used to describe God's nature, specifically toward us as His children. Unfortunately, the church in recent history has steered away from using feminine imagery for God. But it wasn't always this way. Church fathers and mothers throughout history used language about God that was quite fluid in regards to gender. What does it look lik...

Sociologists have observed a steep decline of empathy in our world today. And this has big implications on our journey of belonging. Thankfully, empathy is a skill that can be developed. As we look to Jesus, we see a God who embodies empathy in the way He sees and knows us. This week, we explore the fourth practice of belonging: empathy.

Like Adam and Eve, you could be tailor-made for the place of ultimate communion, and yet forgo connection due to fear. We experience profound loneliness with the very people we belong to because we hide, afraid of being seen as we are. Vulnerability is coming out of hiding and exposing our wounds so that we can be accepted as we are—not as we want to be. It's confessing our brokenness, our weaknes...

Our world is full of division and hostility. There always seems to be walls of separation between groups, whether it’s because of race, gender, sexuality, class, politics, or faith. But the Gospel calls us to have an open posture of love towards everyone, even those who aren't easy for us to get along with. This week, we talk about the second practice of belonging: Chemistry. Is it okay to priorit...

We live in a world where we’re constantly distracted, busy, and pulled in a million different directions every single day. It makes it hard to discern what to prioritize. Belonging is impossible to cultivate if we aren't willing to make it a priority. We only have so much time, which beckons us to ask ourselves: How should we spend our time? And more importantly, who should we spend our time with?...

In recent years, America declared loneliness a public health epidemic. We all know what it's like to feel unseen, unknown, and unloved. But this isn't the way God created us to live. We were made to belong. We all want to find belonging, but most of us don't know. This week, we begin a journey of exploring key practices that can help us cultivate belonging in a lonely world.

Jesus didn't come to make bad people good. He came to make dead people come alive. Jesus didn't die on the cross for us to merely exist. He died on the cross so that we can have life to the full. Easter reminds us that Jesus is alive and He is making all things new.

Anywhere you go in the world, you will almost always find some dude on a horse. There's always some conqueror on top of a warhorse memorialized as a statue. Yet, the image of Jesus we remember on Palm Sunday is Him riding on a donkey. In doing so, Jesus was making a statement about the kind of King He was: a humble and meek King, turning the ways of the world upside-down.

There’s a kind of fatigue that attacks the body, but there’s another kind of fatigue that attacks the soul. Many of us are tired. But it’s not just our bodies that are tired, our souls are weary. Yet, we follow a Savior who meets us in the middle of tiredness. We believe in a God who’s powerful enough to give us strength, yet human enough to be tired with us. What does it look like for Jesus to me...