Life Lessons with Dr. Steve Schell

Salvation isn’t a transaction, it’s a relationship. We don’t do something to get something; we meet someone and then walk with that person for the rest of our lives. Then, when we arrive at our final day, He carries us through the veil of death into eternal life. It’s a relationship that connects us to the Creator, the One from whom all life flows. Life does not originate from an organic process,...

God is a generous God. He wants to share His authority, but only with a certain kind of person: His Son, and those who are like His Son. If He were to give His authority to anyone else they would use it for things that are not His will, which means He would be assisting them to do things that are harmful. And, of course, He can never do that because He is completely good. To deviate from His will...

When people talk about serving the Lord, when they try to convince us to selflessly minister to others, they often assure us that our service will bring with it a deep sense of fulfillment. We will feel good about ourselves knowing that we did something meaningful and helpful. But in practice, such feelings may boost our self-esteem for a moment, but they rarely make up for the level of personal s...

For the past few years these eleven men had been students. They had been listening, watching, helping and at times doing, but everything centered on Jesus. He preached, He healed, He cast out demons, He prayed, and He led them from place to place. So it was almost impossible for them to think that the kind of ministry that He had been doing could continue in any real way. And how sorry they must h...

ave you ever wondered why so many individuals who claim to be Christians behave so badly? In some cases, large numbers of so-called Christians have behaved worse than unbelievers and some even at a level of evil explainable only by demonic influence. Have you ever been reading a history book or watching a documentary only to suddenly realize that the horror being described was perpetrated by peopl...

God knew how weak we were when He called us. Yet He wanted us anyway. He knows us far better than we know ourselves. Nothing we do surprises Him. In one of the psalms David says, “He knows our frame, He knows we are but dust” (Ps 103:14). Clearly He’s not impressed with our natural capacities. How silly our well-intended promises must sound to Him when we try to assure Him that we will never fail...

They were in their final hours together. He would be arrested soon, and by nine o’clock in the morning He would be on the cross. So, Jesus devoted the time they had left to preparing His disciples for the future. Here were truths to which they would need to cling. Here were promises that would carry them through the trials they would face in the years ahead. He spoke of heaven, love, prayer, the H...

It’s one thing to be wounded by an enemy, but it’s another to be betrayed by a friend. We expect enemies to hate us, and usually know why they do. There’s been an offense or profound disagreement and we haven’t been able to repair it. And it seems that no matter how nice we try to be to people we all end up with a certain number of enemies. It’s just a sad fact of life. But betrayal happens very d...

 It’s counterintuitive. It doesn’t make sense. You would think that the way to happiness would be by serving ourselves, but a self-centered life ends up being very depressing. At first it might seem to work, but as time goes on it produces anger. Life never seems to give us all we feel that we deserve and people seldom love us the way they should, so resentments build, leaving us angry. And that a...

It’s not enough to start out clean, we must arrive clean. When we place our faith in Jesus Christ our sins are forgiven, but on a day-to-day basis sins keep happening, and those sins, if left unattended, have the power to erode the very faith that saved us. That’s why our life with Jesus must be a daily walk, not a transaction that took place because of a prayer we once prayed or a doctrine we aff...

On that final evening in the upper room, Jesus did something that turned our world upside down. Normally, humans think that the more important a person is the more that person should be served and honored. We think important people are too dignified to do lowly tasks. We look for ways to give them special care. We give them the best seat, the best portion, the best of everything. They become the f...

On Sunday, five days before He was crucified, Jesus said this: “Now judgment is upon this world; now the ruler of this world will be cast out” (Jn 12:31). This world is under God’s judgment because of sin, and the “ruler of this world” is the devil. So on that day Jesus was announcing that His death on the cross and His resurrection would potentially release all humans from these two forms of bond...

Truth doesn’t change, especially spiritual truth. The spiritual world is not a myth. There are lots of myths and fairy tales, invented stories about gods, goddesses and how the world was created. But that doesn’t change spiritual truth; it only makes it harder to find. The fact that there are people who say wrong things doesn’t mean right things don’t exist. And the truth is: There is a God who ma...

Fear is very lonely. It seems to place a barrier between us and others, and between us and God. It feels like we’ve walked into a chamber and closed the door. There, alone, trapped with our terrible thoughts, our emotions churn and our body grows weary. In fact the suffering that fear brings is often worse than the problem itself. We can suffer through the same event over and over again in our min...

The greatest decision you or I will ever make is to repent and receive by faith the righteousness of Jesus Christ. That decision changes where we will spend eternity. But there is another decision each person must make which determines the outcome of our life. It’s one of those decisions where to not make a decision is to make a decision. If we make the right choice our life will be “fruitful,” me...

It’s the most natural thing in the world: People turn to God because they need something and want Him to use His power to help them. That’s actually the motivating factor behind most of the world’s religions, and has been throughout human history. People do something, or sacrifice something, or chant something until their god or impersonal spiritual force treats them favorably. And history has sho...

If you’ll recall, Mary is the one who listened carefully. While her sister Martha was busy serving the guests, she sat at Jesus’ feet and pondered His every word. The Gospel of Luke describes that exchange. Let’s hear it again: “Now as they were traveling along, He entered a village; and a woman named Martha welcomed Him into her home. She had a sister called Mary, who was seated at the Lord’s fee...

Human beings have always had a hard time getting along with each other. The same forces that separate us from God also separate us from people. The Bible uses a simple word to describe those forces; it calls them “Sin.” Bundled into that one word are three destructive attitudes that have been the source of our troubles from the first humans onward. Those attitudes are selfishness, rebelliousness a...

There are people who absolutely refuse to believe in Jesus Christ no matter what proof is presented. You can explain God's plan of salvation in crystal-clear terms, but they say it doesn't make sense to them. They might watch a miracle performed before their eyes, yet they won't repent. There are people who fearlessly acknowledge that the Bible warns them about what will happen to them if they die...

You aren't your body. You express yourself through your body; you are influenced by your body; you even have to take care of your body, but your existence is rooted in another dimension altogether. That's because God made you in His image, and He doesn't have a body. He is spirit (Jn 4:24). When He created Adam and Eve, He created rational, volitional, conscious beings who can know Him, obey Him,...

Anyone who serves God effectively has to have two important qualities: courage and caution. They have to be willing to die for Jesus but determined not to do anything careless that might end their ministry early. Without courage a person won't follow where God leads; without caution a person will create so much trouble for themselves that they have to stop. Caution is the careful analysis of a sit...

One of the most wonderful aspects of watching Jesus in action is that we're seeing how things ought to work. He never prayed a wrong request; no prayer of His ever went unanswered because of a lack of faith, and no spiritual opposition was too difficult for Him to overcome. Whenever we get into the subject of prayer the question always arises as to why some prayers are answered, and it appears, so...

Let's reflect for a moment on our walk with God. When was the last time that you or I did something because we felt God told us to do it, and then He showed up and did some sort of miracle or we would have failed? If the answer is never, or it was so long ago we can't remember, what we're going to talk about today may be challenging to understand, but we have to try, because according to Jesus hea...

“If I do not do the works of the Father, do not believe Me, but if I do them, though you do not believe Me, believe the works, so that you may know and understand that the Father is in Me, and I in the Father” (Jn 10:37-38).  Jesus did not try to win people by impressing them with the brilliance of His logic. He didn't try to argue people to faith. He simply performed a miracle that was so solid,...

Does grace mean I can keep doing bad things and still go to heaven? Does God's love mean I don't have to stop? Does repentance mean if I say “I'm sorry” God will let me continue sinning? If asked those questions most of us would quickly answer, “No! Of course not,” that is until God told us to stop doing something we really wanted to do. In that case our answer might be less definite. We might sta...