Lantana Community Church

God desires to bless us, but what does that mean? God’s blessing means we receive God’s grace and live under His care. To be blessed is to seek God’s direction for our lives and have faith that He is who He says He is and will do what He says He will do for us.

Today paints a beautiful picture of peace. A lesson that was true for Israel in 720 BC is equally true for us today. We can find peace in Jesus. Not only did the coming of Jesus bring us the ability to have peace today, the future coming of Jesus will bring peace that we cannot comprehend.

Jesus did not share the message about His second coming with people to make them paranoid or to make them spend all their time and effort trying to predict when He would return. The message to the crowd that day, and to us, is that if we live every day in relationship with Christ, we will be prepared. May we live every day ready for His return!

So what's the lesson for us today? Harkening back to the beginning of this letter, there is a marvelous mystery: God's grace which draws us all together as one. The gospel message flows from the love of the Holy Spirit and the grace of God that we experience through Him. This means that our responsibility as members of the ekklesia is living humbly and in unity under the power of the indwelling Sp...

Isn't it interesting that everything comes back to love! Paul's prayer for us is that we might be strengthened and filled with the Spirit of God and understand that God has given us all of Himself. We learn that the indwelling presence of Jesus in our hearts is rooted in love and it is this love that allows us to be filled with the fullness of God.

We often talk about a "relationship with God." This might be too simple a phrase. God doesn't just want a relationship with us, He wants to exist with us. He wants to be one with us. He wants us to experience victory and He wants the spiritual authorities and powers to know who we are and what this mystery is. We, the church, gets to announce it! However, this is only possible through Holy Spirit....

The gospel is a great mystery, but not a great secret. Paul explains that God has made the mystery of the gospel known through the Holy Spirit. When someone has an encounter with the Spirit, their lives are forever changed and the mystery is revealed. As the mysteries of His Word are revealed through the Spirit we also become students of the Word, drawing ever closer to Him.

Isn't it amazing that we have all been made one in Jesus?! Isn't it amazing that the wall that used to divide us has been torn down?! This is what it looks like when we live as a community of Spirit sourced followers of Christ. We cannot remain unchanged and prejudiced. We have been called to something deeper, something that looks like the Kingdom of God!

Great message about the movement of the Holy Spirit, by Pastor Steve Pettit from One Hill Rescue.

Revival Conference at lantana community Church

Here's where we are today. God is calling! Can you hear Him? Come as you are. Join Him in this great adventure of life and invite others to join you. We are a generation who is being raised up for this time! What are we doing? We love like Jesus so lives are changed. We love people who have lives as messed up as ours. We are all invited because no one is better than the other. No one's righteousne...

We have been chosen by Christ! Predestined to follow Him. When we choose to step in to that destiny, His manifest presence is deposited into our lives. It is His presence that brings life change that becomes apparent to others. His presence doesn't only bring life change, it changes the way we live. We begin to see things like Jesus does and we have power to conquer the trials in our lives. The fr...

It is important we understand that our God is a God who chose us. People have been struggling with the idea of Grace and a God who is angry and vengeful for a long time. Don't get me wrong, God is holy and we must honor Him, but he also desire to bring unity to ALL THINGS…which is us! Let's embrace the grace of God as we lean in to our identity as a church committed to an inward journey of spiritu...

When we take communion, we are renewing our covenant with God and are direct recipients of God’s grace. It is during the act of communion that we are opening a channel by which God is pouring his grace on us. It is through this grace that we realize that we have been forgiven of our sins and are enabled to leave them. The Bread and Cup are signs of the New Covenant-they point to the reality of the...

We cannot overstate the importance of community life for Christians. We have been conditioned to think that individualism is the right way to go, but that is not at all what we learn from Jesus or the scriptures. John Wesley started something he called societies, bands, and classes to help accomplish community. These small groups prayed together, ate together, and held each other accountable. At o...

We must be Christians in both word and deed, this is how we will express the love...the grace of God. Acts of service are those practices that draw us closer to one another through the presence of the Spirit. Jesus told His disciples that His followers would be recognized for how they loved and served one another. Scholars have noted about John Wesley and the Methodists that, “It was not so much t...

There are things we can do to increase our spiritual formation and attend to the grace of God in our lives. One thing we have to be careful about is that these disciplines do not become their own religion. We cannot expect anything if we are not doing them for the right reasons...to grow closer to God and attend to God’s grace in our lives. If used properly, these means become a channel by which G...

At the end of the day we have to ask ourselves the question, "How is my spiritual life?" In all we are doing, isn't that what's important? Of course we want to see people be saved, and we want to witness miracles and baptisms. But how are we with God? Do we have an intimate relationship with Him like the Psalmist? Oh God, we need you to know us, and we want to know you.

Pastor Jerry Porter gave us a awesome illustration of Prayer as a Spiritual Formation, check it out. 

If we are to be transformed into the image of Christ, it is for the sake of others. John tells us if you love God, you will love others. Because of this, we learn that our transformation into Christ's image is for the sake of others. As we learn to love like Jesus loves, people see him through us.

If we are to be transformed into the image of Christ, we must all him to do the work in every area of our lives. Mulholland wrote, "When we respond to the confrontation of the Spirit at the point of our brokenness with a consecration that allows God to do the work God wants to do, we begin to experience the reality of being conformed to the image of Christ."

At the end of the sermon on the mount Jesus deals with the idea of being and doing in a frightening statement. He says, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my father who is in heaven" (Mt 7:21). People will reply and say, "Lord, didn't we do things in your name? Cast out demons and prophesy?" These are surely works of God,...

We stand on the precipice. Will we step in? The Israelites were once at the same edge. It was at this edge they found themselves at a crisis of belief. With overwhelming evidence of God’s power behind them, they suddenly stopped believing God and stopped moving forward. We will not make the same mistake.

"The Christian journey, therefore, is an intentional and continual commitment to a lifelong process of growth toward wholeness in Christ. It is a process of "growing up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ" (Eph 4:15), until we "attain to mature personhood to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" (Eph 4:13). It is for this purpose that God is present and active in eve...

Bob Heneghan said, "At the end of the age you have to be in line with Christ or Satan. We are being shaped by either one critter or the other critter. Who I am is who I'm going to end up with. Union with God, abiding in Christ, shapes us. The fire that purges us is basically destroying our self-centeredness where it's actually creating and activating our real self in to the person God wants us to...