Family Fest Speaker Podcast

Let's Go! can be a celebratory phrase or a command to move forward. As Jesus is dying on the cross he says "It is finished." "It is finished" is the ultimate Let's Go moment. Through His death on the cross, our sin is conquered. We have the opportunity to live a new life with Him. 

God wants peace for all of us. He is reaching out and whispering to us "I love you, I love you." He sees artwork in his creation. Anything that feels broken or shattering, unredeemable to us, in Christ, can all be put back together. God can take anything and use it for good.

Be watchful when you're climbing the ladder of success, you might meet Jesus on his way down. Stop trying to understand the vastness of God and just receive him. To get further in faith, you sometimes have to rest and receive peace. 

In the presence of God your life is changed. As we grow closer to God, we realize, with time, that all the things that don't make sense to us in the present, somehow make sense in His hands. Our lives are filled with the time God gives us to receive peace and clarity.

We don't have to have it all together because Jesus comes to us, in our brokenness and in our mess.

You can't trust a foundation that can't be tested. When we are faced with storm and our foundation in the Lord is tested think S.I.N.G. Sit wherever the storm takes you. Invite Jesus and others in. Name the pain. Go, keep moving forward.

When we have a foundation in the Lord, we can weather any storm. We live our lives differently, live with a purpose, use what we've been given to bring others closer to Christ. Home is beyond us but also within us. Home is through Him.

Who are we? There are three "I am" statements: I am who others see me to be, I am who I see me to be and I am who God sees me to be. When we know who God sees us to be, when we understand that he chose us even before he created the world and that he delights in us, then those other two "I am" lies don't matter. God wants us to encounter him and live in the joy of his life. Prayer Journal and Addit...

What do we believe God to be? God gave up heaven and humbled himself to walk among us as Jesus. What did we do to him? We betrayed him with a kiss, we denied him three times. What do we do to hurt God in our lives? Jesus was proclaimed innocent yet he was killed on the cross. We are the guilty ones, yet he died for us. Even though we neglect him and mistreat him, God sacrificed his son, the innoce...

We are created for eternity but we live in a temporary world. We can experience God in the present moment when the Jesus in me encounters the Jesus in you. God exists in all time, past present and future. He can heal past pain, help with present struggles and we can trust him with our future. Prayer Journal and Additional Resources

Where do we encounter God. Where are we headed? We live in this temporary world but this is not our final destination. God knows where we are going, but he allows us to pick our path. The four Cardinal Virtues (Prudence, Temperance, Justice, Fortitude) can help us move in the right direction to be with God in eternity. Prayer Journal and Additional Resources

Why do we exist?  Our life's purpose is to realize that we are beloved of God and to help others realize they, too, are the beloved of God.  Each of us is a thought of God. Each of us is willed by God. Each of us is loved by God. Each of us is necessary to God. Prayer Journal and Additional Resources

Love. When we enter into a relationship with God, life becomes an adventure of love. Go out in the world and be love, show love. Prayer Journal and Additional Resources

Jesus is the visible image of the invisible God. He is slow to anger and abounding in love.  As Jesus reveals himself to us, it will transform our lives. God wants to use us in other's lives and all we need to do is lean in.

True love offers a choice. God offers us a choice because he truly loves us. Sin is what separates us from God. We have choices.

Christ's crucification cleared the barrier to God. We now have a pathway to a relationship with God. We don't have to earn God's love, it's a free gift, given by the blood of Jesus, willfully and gleefully. All we need to do is surrender.

God wants each of us to know that he loves us infinitely. We can't earn God's love, we can only receive His love. 

Kristina Sakaria shares her beautiful testimony here from Family Fest's Winter Weekend family retreat.

God loves you where you are right now. Also, God loves you to much to leave you where you are right now. He is always chasing and pursing us. We need to allow ourselves to be caught. In moments of faith confusion, we simply need to go back to our "Galilee" (the place we first encountered God) or simply pause and allow ourselves to be caught.

We are one body of Christ even though we live in a world surrounded by others. There are no ordinary people, we are all connected and impact each other in ways we realize and in other ways we can't possibly understand in the moment. We need to have the strength, the humility, the courage and grace to allow ourselves to die so that we can be left with the perfection of Christ shining though us.

We all have times when we don't feel close to God and experience desolution. When everything we believe is thrown up in the air, are we going to make a move of faith into the void, not knowing if we are going to be caught? What is the point of Fatih? God is slowly and sometimes painfully teaching us to love as he does- constant and never ending. God gives us himself. We give God our love because h...

What is the nature of Hope? Hope means we believe in the promise made by the One who always keeps his promises. We need to be people who want to choose God in this life so much so that we choose to be with God in eternity.  

"How gloriously different are the saints." The church is filled with a diverse collection of humans spread throughout the ages and in that diversity we get an amazing stained-glass vision of what God is doing in the lives of his people. Those who have helped bring you closer to God were able to do so because God's light shone through them differently. We all matter and we all impact each other in...