The 180 Church Podcast with Dr. Sammy and Friends

When we’re trying to realize a God-given goal in our lives, we inevitably face resistance in the process of what we believe is God’s dream for us. Indeed, it’s difficult to cling on the promises of God when we feel like we’re suffering in vain. But when we look at the story of Joseph and his dream of becoming ruler of Egypt, we learn the journey isn’t only about the final outcome of realizing our...

In part two of the Forgiveness series, the late Dr. Tim Keller, founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, drives home the point that forgiveness is granted before it’s felt and is a commitment to refrain from acting on vengeance. True forgiveness is expressed between one another and oneself through a commitment to extend reconciliation, in accountability to God and to each other. Dr. Keller...

The late Dr. Tim Keller, founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, distinguishes between a watered-down version of forgiveness and biblical forgiveness. True forgiveness is not simply ridding ourselves of our hurt to make ourselves feel better, nor is it a tool we wield to make someone grovel in repentance. Moreover, as Dr. Keller says, forgiveness is the fruit of the Spirit, and we see its...

We may have many desires in life. We will realize some of them, but as desires depend on circumstances outside of our control, we will inevitably fail others. That is why we cannot form our identiy in our desires. Instead, we should form our identity through chasing Godly goals, which, unlike chasing desires, is completely within our control. Then, after having built a Godly foundation internally,...

Faith is a series of ongoing conversations, like a long and winding road where there may be detours, delays, and most importantly, doubt. Our relationship with faith is also a nonlinear process; there are moments when we talk ourselves out of believing in God. Like Nicodemus and his admiration of Jesus, we may never know if our neighbors and friends are close to believing in God, but He may be dra...

There are multiple factors that are hugely important for the health of our spiritual life. One is the discipline of the heart, which is paramount for keeping our human propensity to wander in check. When we are experiencing the highest highs or the deepest sufferings, the danger of our expectations and internal wiring can lead us wayward in our expressions of ministry and what we assume is permiss...

The Book of Ecclesiastes grapples with the notion that life under the sun is hevel - or put another way - meaningless. Like hevel, which means vapor or smoke in Hebrew, our lives on Earth are fleeting and ultimately outside our grasp. However, while our choices and actions may seem like fruitless toil in our limited understanding, they reveal where our heart truly is in relation to God. The discip...

We as humans tend to be self-interested, but that is not necessarily a sin, since we depend on a degree of self-care to survive. This means, however, that when God calls us to do something, we will naturally find tension between our goals and God's goals. At these times, we should recognize that God is calling us to something more purposeful and powerful and to, with God's help, make sacrifices ag...

The vision of the church is to cultivate a safe and authentic community that brings believers into discipleship. What makes an authentic community hard to achieve is our tendency to hide from our own faults and failures, which is behavior that stems from the brokenness of original sin. If the cost of an authentic community is our discomfort in the acts of sharing our pain and striving towards grea...

In metropolitan hubs like NYC, many of us identify with being ambitious in our goals and orienting our lives towards achieving them. However, a prevalent pitfall lies in how we may end up establishing our identities in our achievements and goals. After all, it is not unnatural to want our desires to come to fruition. But when our goals appear to be out of reach, blocked, or uncertain, eliciting ne...

The story of Job gives us wisdom for wrestling with our doubt in the face of great obstacles. In painful or uncertain times we tend to search for answers to our questions, and when we don't get any explanations, it becomes easy to lose hope in a God who is fair and compassionate. But Job's story teaches us that instead of answers, it is God himself we must cling to. We can cry out to God with our...

Defaults are habits of behaviors that help us cope with life’s struggles. When we try to stop resorting to harmful defaults, such as in Lent, we learn that old habits die hard because we create routines in which we are rewarded for coping with certain triggers by repeating certain behavior. It’s not that our need to cope is bad, it’s that our coping mechanisms hint at our need for something only G...

When we come across difficult times, most of us probably have one or two coping strategies that we rely on to provide some semblance of reprieve when dealing with the stress. Whether we’ve learned constructive methods of coping or have to unlearn destructive ones, we fall back on these strategies to get the tiniest bit of relief. To our dismay, the source of our stress doesn’t simply solve itself,...

Not all joys are equal. When we look at Scripture to answer the question of which joys we should pursue, we see that God has commanded us to rejoice in Him to the utmost - and that to rejoice more greatly in other things is sin. It's not that other pleasures are inherently bad, or that our desires for them are too strong; it's that other pleasures are ultimately inferior to God, and our desires ar...

Today’s American churches face a crisis that prevents financial sustainability. Many believers regard their resources as their own and are often resistant to giving back to the local churches that nourish their spiritual health. However, rather than viewing life’s blessings as our own, scripture teaches us that God is sovereign over everything in life, which means we are in fact, stewards of what...

Many of us wish to have stronger faith; faith that can move mountains and bless multiple generations. As faith is a measure of our spiritual habits, to get there, we must pick up good spiritual habits. This does not happen instantaneously, but requires deliberate action, because many of us rely on bad spiritual habits, such as venting our frustrations, to seek instantaneous relief rather than real...

With the myriad ways we describe ourselves and define our identities, one voice tends to stand out above the rest: our past. How we perceive ourselves given our past mistakes, shortcomings, and histories seems to manifest in our behaviors, actions, and most evidently in how we treat ourselves. However, every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. Although it’s easy to believe that all we...

In the parable of the prodigal son, Jesus shares with us a glimpse of who God the Father is. The parable tells of a father whose son leaves with his inheritance, wastes it, and is insincere in repenting his sin. However, rather than punishing the son upon his return, the father unabashedly runs to embrace him. Thinking of ourselves as the prodigal son, we realize that the father's true heart is no...

Sometimes we become too confident in our own abilities or our own morality and forget that we are saved by grace and not by good works. In Ephesians, Paul reminds us that we were, finally and unequivocally, dead in our sins with no hope of ever redeeming ourselves. It was in this direst of states that Jesus offered us the gift of salvation. Thus, we should not view the Gospel merely as advice to l...

Martus is the Greek word for witness, and it is used in situations when a witness is called upon to serve as evidence of an event. More specifically, in scripture, God raises leaders and appoints them as chief witnesses to remind the Israelites of who God is through their testimony of God’s steadfast love. Just like the disciples and the pharisees who were in sight of the perfect witness of God in...

What are your values? It is this question that invites us into a deeper examination of our stated beliefs and intentions. We tend to take our claimed beliefs at face value. But beneath the surface of our words, our actions truly reveal what we believe. In the effort to love Christ and live as called by the gospel, we must honestly assess our thoughts and actions in order to challenge the insidious...

We tend to hurry through life because we believe our hurriedness leads to greater productivity. But hurrying does not make us more efficient or effective in accomplishing things; nor are efficiency and efficacy what God calls us towards. In fact, hurrying often leads us to hurt people whom we mean to love. Just as Mary rested at Jesus' feet instead of stressing over peripheral details as Martha di...

Most of us fall short on our New Year's resolutions; after all, we are fallible, and change is hard. There is good news however. As Christians we are new creations in Christ, and therefore there is change within us that comes not from our fallible selves, but from infallible Christ. Even so, this does not mean we are immediately perfectly Christlike; we will still struggle, sometimes for long peri...

The Incarnation of Jesus showed a radically different approach to changing the world: through vulnerability rather than power. Jesus came to the world not as a king exhibiting power to subjugate people, but in the form of a helpless baby. Furthermore, Jesus led a life of dependence on others for protection and even basic necessities. It is human tendency to keep people at arm's length in an effort...