Grace for New Life

We believe that God loves us, but it is hard for us to imagine the infinite scope of God’s love for us. Jesus shows us that God’s love for us has no limits.

We usually think of other humans as both the source and the object of our love. But we read in the Bible that the ultimate source of all love is God. He loved us first and best, and as we know and rely on His love, He helps us to truly love others.

God does not change and yet He does new things. When is it time for us to get out of our comfort zone and change? God will guide us in when and how to change. The most important thing is to remember why we change: Because we want to know God better and we want others to have the joy of a close relationship with Jesus.

Given enough time, all of us will face challenges that are beyond our ability to meet and that’s when we cry out to God for help. But God wants something more for us in life than that. He invites us to live in continual confidence of His saving love for us. That begins by being aware of our own neediness.

Most religions teach that we need to earn God’s favour, but not Christianity. The Bible tells us that God Himself came to earth in the person of Jesus and suffered the punishment of divine justice to bring us into His family where He sings with delight over us.

The most important thing in life, Jesus tells us, is to love God and our neighbor. Such love is more valuable to God than religious worship. And God motivates us to love by loving us first. And our soul is fed by receiving God’s unconditional, infinite love for us.

Our desires and misplaced values often lead us astray. We value some things too highly and pursue them while, at the same time, we neglect and disregard our own soul. Jesus knows that our soul is the most precious part of us and because He loves us, He gave up everything, including His life, to save our souls. Jesus’ sacrificial love helps us to rightly value and guard our own soul.

This Sunday we celebrated because eight young people from our church confirmed that the Christian faith is their faith. We not only celebrated that God has given them faith, but also that they have been supported and nurtured in the Christian faith by their families and this community of faith and they are now ready to take responsibility for their own faith. Listen as they share their personal te...

Examining our own soul is an important part of Soul Care. But we are often reluctant to examine our own soul because of what we might find there. Because of God’s unconditional love for us, we know that the most important things in life-His love for us and our life in Him-are not going to change. Thus encouraged, we examine our own souls because we want to grow in living the life that Jesus has gi...

The soul is the most important part of us, but most of us do not know how to care for our own soul. So our souls languish, undernourished and neglected. Jesus wants to give us a rich, full, abundant life with Him. That life and relationship is a free gift He gives to us. But experiencing the fullness of that relationship and life requires caring for our own soul, and we do that when we receive God...

On Pentecost Sunday, we celebrate that God has poured out the Holy Spirit upon all believers. When God pours out the Holy Spirit upon us personally, the before-and-after difference is dramatic for the Spirit gives us life and peace.

Without water, we soon become thirsty. Similarly, each of us has a great inner thirst that needs to be quenched. Jesus invites us to come to Him and He will give us the Holy Spirit Who will satisfy our inner longings.

We tend to make judgments about situations or people based on appearances, but those judgments are often wrong because our assumptions and beliefs are wrong. As we lay those things down and, in humility, follow Jesus, He helps us to judge by true standards.

Sometimes, to help another person, you have to say or do something that might cause them pain. We are reluctant to do that because we do not want to offend them. But then people never hear the truth. The solution: Let Jesus be your love, strength and truth.

There are many things that we need for life in this world and we spend most of our time and energy striving for those things. But they don’t last. We need Jesus because He is the bread of life that gives us eternal life.

God uses miracles to take ordinary people and form them into special people that shine His light into the world. God does this so that the whole world may that there is a God who protects from death, gives eternal life and nourishes our hungry souls.

Sometimes we are confronted with challenges that are beyond our ability to solve. Those are opportunities for us to consider, “In what or whom am I trusting?” Jesus came to this world to usher in a new Kingdom where small things have infinite worth in His hands.

Fear can control our lives because it is powerful. Some of its power is because we not only experience fear, we can imagine it when we are not in a fearful situation. Jesus’ resurrection shows us that we no longer need to be controlled by our fears and we can live in freedom.

The joy people felt as they welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday, and the joy we feel as we welcome Him into our hearts, is a foretaste of the greater joy we will experience when Jesus comes again to restore all things including us. Gone will be death, suffering and all corruption caused by sin, and God will wipe every tear from our eyes. Because of the Restoration that Jesus wil...

Many of us have experienced the devastation of abandonment and rejection. But Jesus experienced rejection in our place so that we would never be abandoned by God.

Most of us fear punishment and we avoid it however we can. But that leaves us in bondage. God shows us a third way through the story of The Fall: the Way of Forgiveness.

The Big Story that we see as being our own will have a major impact on our life. It will influence how we see ourselves in the present and chart a course for our lives in the future. Jesus has a Big Story for us in which we are unconditionally loved and accepted and He invites us to make that story our own.

We naturally tend to invest in the things we love. But when we invest in people and things on earth, we worry because we can lose them. God invites us to release all earthly people and things into His loving care, trust in Him and ask Him to help us refocus our love on what is in heaven. Then we will be free to invest our lives in what will make a difference in eternity.

We tend to think that we can get all that we need out of life as an individual. But God does something special in our lives when we gather together with others around God’s Word and share life together. God helps us to grow.

Our old heart was focused on having power over others. But Jesus laid down all his power and gave his life to save us. As we rest in Jesus’ humility and love, he sets us free to serve others with self-less love.