Christ Journey Church

As followers of Jesus, we have a responsibility to encourage and build each other up, especially those who are fresh in the faith! God is busy leading us into intersections with other people, and many times all we have to do is notice. The Kingdom moves when we love our neighbor. Would you stop and think about the everyday ways you could bring God’s sweetness to your world?

Evangelism. Discipleship. Generosity. Empowerment. EDGE. What does a church on the EDGE look like? It looks like Jesus followers fully connected to each other and their church. In fact, living on the EDGE cannot happen apart from your church. You need the church just as much as the church needs you!

What do you do with the sour moments of life? Do you add more bitterness to what you’re experiencing or are you intentional about looking for a sweetener? Life may give us lemons, but God is the official sweetener to turn everything around.

We all need to stop from time to time, take stock of where we are, where we're going, and what's ultimately ahead. If we want to live well, we must understand that God’s paths get us where we want to go. Along the way we will want to quit, but we must remember that none of us are beyond the reach of God’s forgiving grace and faithfulness. Nothing is too hard for God.

In a relationship, how do you keep love alive? You step out of yourself and speak their language. In Hosea, we see that God also speaks love language. He is seeking connection in a fresh way with his people.

What do you do when you find yourself in a relationship with someone whose choices, behavior and life are a dead end, yet you care deeply for them? This is the hellish place where we find God in the book of Hosea. Every couple has troubles, hardships, obstacles and conflicts. Counselors say deeper intimacy waits just the other side of conflict, but we have to learn how to get there.

Freedom isn’t free. It costs something to have it. It costs something to keep it. And when you lose it, it costs something to get it back. In Hosea’s story we see how human freedom gets hijacked by sin, and how God sets in motion His plan of redemption to restore freedom and set right what sin makes wrong.

What do you do with your anger? Some of us will vent it while others stuff it in suppression. Either has consequences that may not be helpful in the long run. But there is a way to be angry and still be pleasing to God – a way to harness the energy of anger to serve a higher cause, a godly one.

God loves us like a father and shows us what a father’s love can be like. He compares his experience with Israel to what a father feels – both tender memories and some very tough struggles. Part of our growth challenge may be believing God loves us like that.

100% of all couples have trouble. What are you going to do when trouble comes? As we look at the story of Hosea, we learn that it’s God who is going through the pain of rejection from His beloved, Israel. She prefers the company of false gods to the real thing, but God has a marriage dream for his people with him that is larger than their infidelity.

Some of life’s greatest joys happen in family – but also some of its deepest pains, hurts and heartaches. In this series, we will work through the challenging book of Hosea to discover hope in seemingly hopeless places.

Happy 95th birthday, Christ Journey Church! We have a God-given vision and a God-sized dream. At 95, we are facing a new adventure doing hybrid church, requiring us to learn new skills. How might God want to shape us to stay on mission in this new place?

Without threats there would be no need for security. Yet no security device or system is 100% fool-proof. Spiritually, we also have a need for security. We face spiritual threats and have to guard ourselves against our enemy, the devil. How do we protect our hearts?

The most difficult part of a prayer life is starting one. As we ask, we learn what it means to give voice to our faith, which God loves. It is a conversation that grows from trust and in love and builds confidence in Him. The more we do it, the closer we draw near to God and God to us.

Any arena of responsibility becomes practice for us to let God do more – more for us, in us, and through us. Everything requires practice and development. In today’s message, we see this exemplified by Deborah, one of the 12 Judges of Israel. We’ll see how she was  much more than a Judge; she was a prophet, a strategist, a counselor, and even a mother.

Through faith in Jesus as God’s Christ, we become children of God. Being a Christian isn’t a matter of pledging allegiance to a set of doctrines or religious rules and rituals. In fact, when we trust Jesus Christ, God is able to do something quite amazing through our lives!

Imagine if before you start your day you choose to forgive every offense before it ever happened. When we live out of God's DNA in us, it’s possible to live our days like that. As children of God, his traits are passed on to us, therefore we have victory over sin and love for others.

What does God want us to know about eternal life? For a Christian, the good news of Christ’s resurrection proclaims that death does not speak the final word over us. Following his resurrection, Jesus showed us life after death. The witness of his life promises more life, victory, and peace for those who place their life in His.

There is a sense in which every book of the Bible fits the statement, it’s all about the people, especially in the book of 1 John. John understood how people got themselves into problems they couldn’t easily get out of, or how people were vulnerable to temptation. But he also knew and understood the plans and future God has for His people in Jesus Christ.

It is not uncommon to think that if we place our lives in God’s hands, He’s going to ruin our fun, steal our joy, and slap a bunch of rules in our lives. And yet, in Scripture we read Jesus came that his joy might be in us and our joy be full. This Easter, how do we join in the joy of Jesus?

Is it possible that every one of us is mad at God for something? Something we believe he could have done, should have done, but didn’t? The answer may be painful for you to admit, but it is possible to find understanding. God is always striving to reach us with breakthrough in order to give us an opportunity to live a life with purpose!

It is human tendency to focus mainly on what is right in front of us while the mind is too dull to experience God. The Bible tells us there’s a deceiver at work in the world, set to destroy us, almost like a spiritual parasite. This parasite has implanted words in the human brain that we’ve never recovered from.

Would you settle for a self-made life when you can have a great and God-graced life? You can live trying to make yourself great without God. Just live by any number of worldview options – the road is wide! Or, you can live trusting God to make your life great with a blessing – that’s the narrow road. How you think matters. How you look at life matters. How you live your life matters.

"What is truth ?” Pilate asked this question of Jesus before his crucifixion. How would you answer? Does truth have to make rational sense? Do we need to be able to "feel it” to know it’s true? The topic can turn confusing and our understanding may be limited, but there are answers to these questions.

Life on earth doesn’t last forever. How do you make sense of that? What do you do with that? Scripture tells us that …God has set eternity in our hearts – but we can’t get there by ourselves. It’s through faith in Christ that God graces us to walk with Him into life beyond death.