Northplace Church Podcast

This is a special edition of the Northplace Podcast. The goal of these episodes is to bring people who can add value to your life during this time. This episode's guest is Dr. Jeff Kerr; he is a chief medical officer of a local community hospital that is a part of a much more extensive network in the Dallas Fort Worth area. He's right on the frontline as many of the medical professionals...

Our world, our nation, our communities, and our church…we all find ourselves in new territory…beyond the map…off the beaten path. We’ve never been in a situation quite like this before. It’s an uncertain and ambiguous time for leadership, parenting, medicine, business, finance, education…every facet of life.  It’s human nature to “huddle” together in times of uncertainty. Historically, in catastro...

As we think about that phrase “For the one,” I want you to be tuned in to God’s heart for you. The whole story of the bible is the story of God’s pursuit of us. From the beginning to the end, no matter what page you pick, every smaller story is one piece of the bigger narrative.  And if you boil the whole bible down to one phrase…it is the story of God’s passionate pursuit of broken people so he c...

Are you calibrating your entire life by the metrics of Jesus? Is He the fuel that drives the engine of your life? Or has life become so full of everything else that he’s been pushed off to the side, becoming an afterthought? If he’s become an afterthought, that’s not wrong just because it grieves Him; in the end, it keeps you from experiencing your best life. Last weekend, we briefly looked at the...

On November 10th, 2019, we had one united service in the Curtis Culwell Center that culminated the launch of our Unfinished Vision Initiative. We knew the day would be significant, and Pastor Bryan had a message burning in his heart, but I had no idea how one simple sermon illustration would become a battle cry that would shape the destiny of this church. For those of you who were there, it will b...

Your most significant kingdom impact will not necessarily be a what, but a who. All of us have opportunities to develop the people around us. We may think, well, I'm not a pastor. You might say, I'm not some prominent leader in some significant leadership position, but all of us have different relationships where we can make a difference. Whether you're the boss of your company or d...

You could have so many leadership qualities active in your life, but if you lack integrity, it would undermine the combined impact of every other quality. Your integrity is more important than your gifts and talents, your money and position, the size of your network or your reputation. Listen to the words of the Psalmist: Psalm 15:1-2 NLT 1 Who may worship in your sanctuary, Lord? Who may enter yo...

The big dream is often so overwhelming that you don’t even know where to start. You’re paralyzed by the magnitude of it, so you never get around to doing anything productive about it. You sit around waiting on your lucky break or some blessing to fall from heaven. You’ll never do anything until you give yourself permission to dream small. What’s an initial step? It is a small thing that is possibl...

Your ability to foster and maintain quality and meaningful relationships will be one of the most significant factors that will determine success or failure in every area of your life. Relationships are unavoidable. And if you’re bad at them, you will sabotage friendships, family, career aspirations; literally, everything will be impacted by the quality of relationships in your life. We want to loo...

We can't overstate the impact of attitude in a person’s life. Outside of our relationship with Jesus, there’s probably no other factor that will determine your success or failure more in life.  And you’ve probably noticed that attitudes run in groups. In other words, individual attitudes attract people with similar attitudes. And you can often see certain attitudes passed down from one genera...

Self-Discipline was far and away the most requested quality to talk about during this series. We didn't all ask for self-discipline because we're all so good at it; most of us recognize self-discipline, or the lack of self-discipline, as the most significant growth barrier between who we are and who we want to be. 1 Corinthians 9:24 -25 NLT 24 Don't you realize that in a race everyo...

Romans 14:7 NKJV 7 For none of us lives to himself, and no one dies to himself. In other words, our lives are forever woven into the fabric of other people’s lives. At work, with family, in the neighborhood, in our hobbies, at church: no man lives to himself. We live influencing others. And no man dies to himself. Even after our deaths, the ripple effect of our influence will impact generations th...

Who you believe yourself to be, determines where you place yourself. You are a child of God. The knowledge that you are a child of God changes everything. It's not the fact of being a child of God, because you are, but knowing and acknowledging that you are indeed a child of God. The awareness of being a child of God tends to stabilize the ego and results in a new courage, fearlessness, and p...

Throughout December, our Christmas and Advent theme has been: Joy to Your World, with an emphasis on “your” world. It’s pretty evident if you have any familiarity with the Christmas story, that the birth of Christ was a monumental event, both historically and spiritually. And that event was marked by incredible joy. On nearly every page of scripture that details the events of the Christmas story,...

We have this sense that God wants you to experience joy at a profoundly personal level. He wants to bring joy to your world, your life, to the people you love and care about.  This can’t just be about the general “joy” of the season. It has to be felt and experienced on a personal level for it to impact our lives in a lasting way. Otherwise, we’ll pack up all of our goodwill, peace, love, hope, an...

If you could understand the narrative of the bible, it would fill you with wonder. This righteous, all-powerful, and majestic God that has been continually rejected or ignored by mere mortals continues to pursue us. Not because we are worthy, but because we are wanted. He wants you. He wants me. He wants us so badly that he left the splendor of heaven and robbed himself in the frailty of human fle...

one that is finite. There is a set date on the calendar when the waiting will end, and we know that when we get to the end, we will find something desirable. But much of the waiting that occupies our lives is open-ended.  We spend much of our life waiting on a promise. The most challenging thing about waiting is not knowing when it’s going to end. Waiting brings questions without easy answers. Whe...

There’s a subtle but significant difference between gratitude and thanksgiving. Where gratitude is a feeling, thanksgiving is an action. The psalmist didn’t say, “enter his gates with gratitude (feeling).” He said, “enter his gates with thanksgiving (action).” There’s something significant about the act of thanksgiving that opens up access to the presence of the King. Gratitude is important. You c...

When we study the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, we can see that there are a lot of things that seem to bring pleasure to the heart of God; things that honor the Lord. We can't escape the thought that it looks like God's love language is seeing His people living a faith-filled life. God continually puts us in situations that require that we love him and serve him by faith. In Matthew,...

When we started this initiative several weeks ago, we wanted everyone listening to understand that the generations before handed our church family an incredible spiritual inheritance. This inheritance is almost 100 years of kingdom impact. Jesus said: To whom much is given, much is required. We need to be asking ourselves: How can we hand off our faith to the next generation? How can we go, give,...

We are nearing the end of our study of Abraham’s life, and we’ve left out as much as we’ve discussed. We could spend a year teaching on the historical and spiritual significance of Abraham’s life. The most prominent story of Abraham in the bible is probably the most troubling to modern readers. It’s the story of God asking Abraham to offer Isaac on Mount Moriah. If you summed the whole account up...

This weekend is our fourth time in as many weeks to come together and learn from Abraham’s life. So far, he’s taught us about legacy, trust, and honor. In our fourth installment in the life of Abraham, he’ll show us about transformation. In the dictionary, the word “transformation” means “a thorough or dramatic change.” But in scripture, when you see the word “transformation,” it takes on an even...

At Northplace, we’ve become accustomed to using this statement: We honor up. We honor down. We honor all around.  “Honoring Up” means we honor God and those in authority over our lives. “Honoring Down” means we honor younger generations. It means we honor those who serve us in some way, whether it’s the waitress at lunch, the baggage handler at the airport, or the person you pay to mow your yard....

Abraham shows us how to trust profoundly and doubt with honesty. Trust is not the absence of doubt; it’s obeying God in the face of your uncertainties.  And we’ll see from Abraham’s life, how God welcomes and embraces the doubter all while addressing their doubts. It’s titled: The Place of Doubt in Learning to Trust.  There’s a big difference between believing and trusting.  You can believe in som...

We begin our journey through the study of Abraham’s life, and I don’t want you to overlook the significance of this study. If you drive through a large US city and pass a church, a mosque, and a synagogue, the worshippers inside of every one of them see themselves as children of Abraham. Three of the world’s largest religions, the majority of the world’s population, look to Abraham as the father o...