That's Grace Podcast

We've all felt like outsiders at one time or another. Whether it was a team we wanted to be picked for or a social group. Maybe it was a job that you really wanted but you didn't get it. In this week's teaching, Pastor Stephen talks about how God made the shift in the book of Acts to give access to Himself to everyone. No longer was it for a certain people group or for those who followed religious...

When crisis comes it's hard to see anything positive coming from such a negative situation. We often begin to get anxious, stressed, and depressed. It feels like this crisis will never end and that it's so big it's the only thing that can be seen in life. But in this week's message, we talk about how there are actually some advantages to going through crisis. While nobody wants to go through diffi...

We all experience moments of crisis in our lives. Sometimes it's when things don't happen how we intended them and sometimes these moments of crisis come out of nowhere. Crisis is a normal part of life, but we can choose to have a response that is anything but normal. But how can we choose to think and act calmly in the midst of the chaos we experience in life. In this week's message, we learn fro...

We all are wired to have a purpose in life and to know that purpose. Without it, we can feel lost, unmotivated, and stuck wondering why we are here in the first place. Purpose is what helps us focus on what's important and what needs to be accomplished. In this week's message, we see in the book of Acts that after God gives His presence to a people, He then gives them a purpose as well. So what wa...

What does it take to experience God's presence in our lives? Some of us have been told that we need to be in a church or maybe even a temple to feel God. Others of us might have been told that the more good we do, the more likely we will feel God. But what does the Bible say about feeling God's presence? In the first week of this series, we see that one of the first things that God does is move Hi...

When things don’t go like we want, we tend to lose our faith. Maybe you believed in God but then something unexpected happened. You lost your job, the cancer came back, or someone that was close to you died. When we experience these hard situations it often leaves our faith floundering, searching for answers, and often leaving us feeling like God isn't there like we thought He would be. If you fin...

Sometimes, when crisis hits, we become open to things we rejected before. We were closed off to them before, but when you’re in a place of crisis or desperation, an unexpected curveball gets thrown your way, all of a sudden – you open up your options. Routines change, priorities change, and it provides the opportunity for us to think differently and maybe reconsider the things in our lives we have...

In a broken world full of broken people, it isn't long before you find injustice happening. At times, injustice can be found in your home, at your work, and even in public. Some of this injustice happens on a personal level and some of it can be systemic, but what's true regardless of the circumstances of injustice is that we all can recognize injustice and know deep down that it's wrong. That it'...

Tragedy is one of those things that none of us want to experience, but many of us will. It's a part of living in a broken world full of broken people, but it's never something we want to think about, anticipate, or expect. And as a result, when tragedy does come our way it often catches us off guard and leaves us feeling hopeless. We feel as though God has lost control and we have lost our way. So...

Fear is probably one of the most common emotions that we are dealing with right now. With the spreading of the Corona Virus, many of us are afraid for our own health or that of loved ones, some of us are afraid because of our work situation, and some of us are just scared cause it seems like everyone else is! While it might be the results of this virus that bring fear into our lives now, fear is n...

Friends not only can provide support and companionship, as we learned last week, but they also can be the people you turn to when you don't know what to do or where to turn to. And in the same way, you can be that person in someone else's life. Great friends help share each other's burden, celebrate each other's victories and forms a bond that becomes like family. In this week's message, we look a...

It's hard to build great, close knit friendships as adults. Maybe we're just busy. Or maybe we've been hurt in the past. But for many of us, our best friendships are in the past and not in the present. Loneliness is reported to be a major issue in our culture from all age groups, yet we still find making new close friends very difficult. In today's teaching, we are going to talk about why the Bibl...

If there is one thing we can all agree on, it's probably that maintaining healthy relationships with those around us is tough. It requires a level of selflessness of us that, honestly, we don't always want to give. And if that isn't hard enough, God calls us to a much higher standard in our relationships. We are to love those who won't and don't love us back. To give to those who seem to only take...

We all have relationships in our lives that we tend to avoid. Whether it's an ex, a co-worker, or maybe even a family member, we do our best to stay away from these people and navigate our lives around them. Sometimes this is from past hurt, but often it's because we feel these people are a waste of our time. It sounds harsh but is often true. We all have a tendency to be transactional in our rela...

It's a part of our nature to look out for ourselves first and to make our comfort and enjoyment number one. While we might aspire to be known for helping others and putting others before our needs, many times we find ourselves helping in ways that ultimately benefit us. We wake up in the morning planning out how we want our day to go, and often react negatively when something or someone gets in th...

Sometimes it's the people closest to us that we struggle to get along with the most. Maybe it's because they are the people we spend the most time with, see the worst of, and can get away from least. All of us would say we want to have healthier relationships with our family, but sometimes, it's hard to imagine how to even begin that process. Because our families have broken people just like us, i...

I think most of us would agree that it is a good thing to stay close to God and to intentionally set aside time to hear God's leading, pruning, and guiding in our hearts. That it's good to take a step back in life and lean into what God is trying to tell you. But in the last week of our series, we see what the purpose of staying close to God is! It's not so that we can get more money, be more bles...

When it comes to prayer, many of us are unsure or uncomfortable with how to utilize it in our relationship with God. We say our thoughts and prayers are with others during tough times, but often neglect the "prayer" part. For many of us, talking to God seems intimidating and we believe we have to have eloquent speech and language. And others of us have learned to recite certain prayers since we we...

There are some things in life that require extra focus and attention in order for us to grow in those areas. Passing a difficult exam requires extra studying. Lifting your body weight requires both training and lifestyle changes. And in the same way, there are areas in our spiritual life where God is trying to grow us and prune us, but until we commit to the extra discipline of eliminating noise a...

Life is often busy. Noisy. Chaotic. Rushed. If you're like most people, you've probably at one time or another looked back and wondered where time went. And if we are not careful, the busyness of life can pull us along and cause us to stay distracted enough to where our relationship with God tends to become stagnant and even begin to wither away. As we begin this series Airplane Mode, we challenge...

Have you ever received a gift that just blew you away? Something that you weren't necessarily expecting and maybe even something that you didn't deserve. How did you feel when you opened that gift? Around Christmas, we talk a lot about giving and receiving gifts, but what if the best gift you've ever been given was still unopened. What if was there, ready for the taking, and all you had to do was...

While most of us want to live a life defined by joy and contentment, it seems incredibly difficult to obtain and at times almost impossible. Whether it is comparison, outside circumstances, or other people that rob our joy, something always seems to right there threatening to steal away the joy we want. And honestly, for many of us, the biggest reason that we can't find joy is because of the deep,...

If you were to list the things that steal your joy what would they be? Many of would say things like money, or the way others treat us, or maybe life not being fair. But in those answers we find a common factor. Our joy is often "stolen" when we are most concerned with the things that affect our lives. When things don't go how we intended, we feel that we have the right to be upset and be joyless....

We all want to be happy. In fact, we all spend a significant amount of time in pursuit of things that make us feel happy. If we were given a choice everyday on whether to feel happiness or not, most of it would without thinking choose happiness. But it doesn't take long to realize that the brokenness of our world and the brokenness inside of us is at odds with our quest for happiness and at times,...

We spend a lot of time thinking about our lives here in the here and now. Working to reach our next goal, trying to make more money, and gain more happiness. But we often spend very little time thinking about how the lives we are living right now will make a difference after we are gone. While none of is like to think about the end of our lives, none of us want to get there and look back with regr...