York Alliance Church Message Podcast

While the word "gospel" has so many various and diverse meanings in the church, it's important to look at some of the popular "gospels" of our day in contrast to the gospel of Jesus. The most popular understandings of the gospel within the church are not so much wrong as they are incomplete. However, seeing the partial gospel gives us a foundation for proclaiming the full gospel.

For many of us, evangelism is among the single most terrifying things that we are called to do as Christians. Could it be that our problem is less with the call to evangelism and more with our faulty understanding of the gospel? In order to understand what it means for us to preach the gospel to the world around us, we need to understand the gospel according to Jesus.

Near the end of his life, the Apostle Paul gives us a beautiful and clear example of what it means to tell our story. While the details of Paul’s story are quite different than ours, the arc of the story remains the same for all who encounter Jesus. All of His followers are created for good, damaged by evil, gifted for life, and empowered to heal.

Understanding the story of Jesus requires a big picture understanding of the important phrase "according to the Scriptures." Paul invites us to engage the great story of God through His simple statement of the gospel. Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration are simple and clear movements in God's story that help us to discover where we fit.

Just as baptism played a prominent role in the early church, the sacrament of baptism is a key part of our journey with Jesus. The proclamation of baptism is a beautiful declaration of the gospel and one that every follower of Jesus is called to enact. The question we must ask is the one that came from the Ethiopian eunuch: "Why shouldn't I be baptized?"

For too many of us, our default view of the Holy Spirit is that of a mysterious power or force. However, the Bible is clear that the Spirit is a person who indwells followers of Jesus. It's by recognizing the person of the Holy Spirit that we begin to walk in step with Him rather than seek to use His power for our own ends.

The story of the first martyr in the early church is a sober reminder to us that standing up for Jesus can have a significant cost. The question of whether or not we would be willing to die for Jesus as Stephen did, while difficult, is much more straightforward. The challenging question we each must face is whether or not we are willing to live for Him.

There is a sacred call to serve Jesus, and there is great diversity to that calling. The Kingdom is populated with many different kinds of people with many different gifts. However, we're all called to use what we have to serve and we're all called to proclaim the gospel through our words and deeds.

Movements that come from God will ultimately endure, regardless of the opposition. We are invited to move with God through the power of the Holy Spirit but, even when we don't, His Spirit continues to achieve His purposes. Each of us must ask the question: Am I moving with God, opposing Him, or standing on the sidelines?

As we've seen throughout the early chapters of Acts, the Holy Spirit is a beautiful gift bringing the peace and direction that Jesus promised to His disciples. However, the Spirit also marks the holiness of God, and the tragedy of Acts 5 is a reminder to us that the presence of God is not to be taken for granted.

Our response in the face of threats and danger tells us something about the depth of our faith. When the early disciples faced persecution, they prayed in a remarkable way, trusting God to use them even more. But it didn't end there—their prayer then led to lives that witnessed the presence of Jesus in them.

While there is certainly a place for formal learning and study, they are not the only way to learn. In fact, when growing in Christ, there's no substitute to actually being with Him. What was notable about the disciples to the people around them was that they had been with Jesus, and the same thing should be true for us today.

Being generous with our lives is a result of emphasizing the right values in our day to day lives and allowing the generosity of heart to naturally flow.

We live in a world that emphasizes scarcity, which often moves us toward greed, materialism and discontent. Jesus, however, taught that generosity is the key to both being content and living in freedom. We can only live this way if we shift our perspective away from scarcity towards the abundance of God.

Generosity can't be limited to, but must include, our resources, financial and otherwise. Jesus taught extensively on how we handle our material resources, constantly reminding us that the way we handle them shows what is in our hearts. Far from eliminating the principle of tithing, Jesus taught us to move beyond a fixed standard into a rule of life that reflects the generosity of God.

Our goal as apprentices of Jesus can be summed up in a variety of ways. However, one practical way is that we would become people of love, specifically, the kind of people who both receive and give the love of Jesus. We can only become people who are completely pervaded by love if we love others generously.

What does the church have to offer the world that no other person or organization can? While the church most certainly should meet basic material needs in people, we must always be sure to offer the one thing that no one else can offer — the transformational love of Jesus.

Sacrificial and authentic communities were not anamolies in the early church, and they shouldn’t be in the modern church either. By caring about and for one another, the church becomes a countercultural movement that pours out grace.

Pentecost has been called by many the birth of the church. While the people of God were already gathered, it took the empowering of the Spirit to shape them into a movement and the declarations of Peter and the 11 apostles to invite others into this movement. This same Spirit still empowers us today and, while some results may be different, there are many that must remain the same.

The waiting process for followers of Jesus always contains two key elements: worship and prayer. When we expand our view of worship to a lifestyle and engage prayer as the first and primary work of the believer we are preparing ourselves for the work that Jesus loves to do.

Before He ascended to the Father, Jesus gave us clear directions. The Kingdom will come when we receive power to be witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. Learning to be witnesses is vitally important in order to allow people to experience the Kingdom of God for themselves.

The beginning of the book of Acts provides a foundation for all that is to come--a clear missional direction, a call to be reliant on God's power and not our own, and a supernatural fusion of the Kingdom of God with the reality of earth. Every encounter we have with Jesus should call us back to engaging these same truths.

The Scriptures clearly played a central role in the life and ministry of Jesus. He didn't just view Scripture as a tool for teaching, an instrument to produce change, or a weapon for spiritual war. Rather, the Scriptures were the way that Jesus interacted with God and with the world around Him. In the same way, if we are to interact with God and the world as Jesus did, we must be people who immers...

In a culture that repeatedly challenges authority, how do we handle the subject of Biblical authority? As we wrestle with our fear of authority, we must also wrestle with the Biblical claim to be authoritative, even though the majority of the Bible is story. We are called to read the Scriptures as an act of trust in Jesus and his way of seeing reality.

We get frustrated when we approach the Bible as a guidebook, a rulebook, or a one-size-fits-all encyclopedia for life in the modern world. The reason for our frustration is that the Bible wasn't designed for that purpose; rather, it was given to us as a library designed for ongoing meditation. The ancient practice of Lectio Divina move us much closer to the way the Bible was designed to be read.