Practical Faith

Today we will look at the second necessity of leadership, which is, attentiveness.  Applied in the home, we as men (as husbands and fathers) must have an active awareness of the current status of our family and to know the needs of each family member in terms of spiritual direction. 

If you have anyone living in your home who looks to you for any level of care, then you have a sacred calling and commission from God to be the spiritual leader of your home. There are two primary necessities to spiritual leadership in the home, and today’s episode of Practical Faith will be about the first: which is initiative.

Have you ever walked a labyrinth?  A labyrinth is winding one-way path marked out on the ground or through a field.  Christians have been using labyrinths for centuries as a way to engage in “contemplative prayer” (which is sort of a fancy way to say "a beautifully relational conversation with God").

What's is God's will for our lives? What is our assignment from Jesus? To stay attached to the Vine, so that His life can flow through us and produce fruit in and through our lives. If a branch is separated from the Vine, it can’t do anything. It produces nothing.

When our circumstances in life change – like when we move to a new town or a new job or a new school, or our best friend moves away, or there is a tragedy or some other big change comes in our lives – often the first thing we question is the will of God: What does God want me to do now? What is God’s will for my life?

The basic foundations of a consistent time alone with God are to get alone; choose a place; set an appointment; and make it a habit.  Once you are alone, you have your spot picked out, you have your time picked out – then what?  What can you actually do to make your daily time alone with God special?  Here are ten more ideas to get your creativity going!

Today, I want to share with you 10 ideas of things to do during your time alone with God.  Remember last time we talked about the basics: get alone; choose a place; set an appointment; and make it a habit.  Once you’re there, though, what do you actually do when spend a few minutes alone with the Lord?  Here are 10 ideas:

Today, I want to help you create a simple plan for spending daily time alone with God.

Spending time alone with God is not about completing a task or fulfilling some legalistic spiritual requirement. It is about nurturing the relationship with your Father and Savior who loves you and wants to share more of His heart and Spirit with you, as His beloved child. It is about abiding in Him and in His love (John 15) so that His life can flow into us, fill us up, and flow through us.

Jesus promised to be with us forever.  And He fulfilled His promise by sending His own Spirit to be with us, forever.  Emmanuel.  May God bless you with His Presence, purposes, power, provision, and peace this Christmas.

In Matthew 18, Jesus was asked “who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?"  He then called a little child forward to stand beside Him – what was it about the child that you think Jesus was referring to?  What qualities does a 4-year-old have that is important to the success of relationships?

Jesus shows the connection between relational and behavioral holiness in a dramatic and unprecedented encounter with a group of lawyers eager to rightfully exercise capital punishment upon a criminal condemned to die in John 8.

Relational holiness takes precedence over behavioral holiness. Ephesians 2:8-10 says, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God…. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” So not only is salvation itself an indescribable gift of grace, but also the very abili...

As a father, it is more important to me that my kids talk to me than that they never disobey me.  The most valuable thing to me for my children is the honesty, intimacy, and constancy of our relationships together.  Their behavior matters, of course.  But our relationships together matter more...

All throughout the Bible, God calls His people to holiness – “be holy as I am holy."  But what is holiness?  Is it being perfect?  Is it never sinning?  Or is it more than that?  It is critical for us to have a right understanding of what God’s call for human holiness is all about, and this is what I see in God’s Word: it is an invitation into His divine intimacy.

In today’s episode, we will highlight two key assurances the Bible provides in 1 John to help us as followers of Jesus to know that we can be certain of our relationship with God and of our standing before God.

Practicing sin is different than committing a one-off mistake.  Practicing sin is different than giving in to a single moment of weakness. Jesus’ life of sinless perfection is the ideal to which we are to aspire.  As we are born of God, we take our nature from Him, and thus, we aspire to His righteousness by practicing it. 

Today, we will wrap up our multi-episode look at John chapter 9, and the example we have in the man that Jesus healed of blindness.  This man barely knows Jesus, but his life has been transformed by Jesus, and so he shares his simple faith with boldness. 

We all have a story to tell.  If you have been saved and redeemed by Jesus into the family of God, then you have a story to tell!  Don’t be scared off from sharing your faith just because someone may ask you a question that you cannot answer.  And don’t be afraid to honestly admit what you do not know.

One of the primary fears that can keep us from sharing our Christian faith with others is the fear that someone will ask us a question about Jesus, or God, or suffering, or anything – and we won’t know the answer.  There is grace for this, and if we make an honest mistake, God is big enough to handle it.

An honest “I don’t know” is an asset in faith-sharing, not a liability.  Don’t be afraid of it.  We have permission to admit what we do not know or fully understand about Jesus.  The man we meet in John 9 is not hindered in his ability to share his faith by what he does not know, but he was empowered to share what he DID know with confidence, because it was rooted in an undeniable, personal experi...

Stories like the one in John 9 give me great hope, because they encourage me that anyone can share their faith effectively without having to be an expert in Christian apologetics.

Psalm 136 provides us with a simple template for composing our own, personalized Psalm of worship to God.  I want to invite you to think with me – to imagine with me, from your own personal experience of the goodness and faithfulness of God in your life...

Are there any specific moments or instances in your own personal history for which the Lord is worthy of worship? Of adoration? of thanksgiving through song?  In today's episode, I want to do is stoke your imaginations and fuel your memories for praising God for His past goodness, deliverance, and provision for you!

If you were to put your own experience into a song of worship to God, what kinds of things would you want to say?  What kinds of blessings and deliverances and provisions from God would you want to commemorate with your song?