We do not wonder whether a person can “lose their salvation” or at what point a person “falls from grace” or if “baptism by immersion saves” or whether God “chooses who is saved” because we are trying to accurately exegete Scripture. We ask these questions about salvation because we are looking for hope that someone we love will find Jesus. We may not know if the person we love is saved, was ever saved, or will be saved. But we do know our failures and flaws will never exhaust God’s love. God’s love is eternally secure because he is faithful. Why would you want to give that up?
Communion
August 28, 2022 • Andrew Cullen • John 6:53
The sacrament of communion is a moment of reenactment that engages all our senses. When we participate in communion, we are invited to look backward, forward, inward, and outward. We are engaged with the reality of Jesus’s presence through the Holy Spirit. We are reassured of God’s love for us and the forgiveness we have through Jesus’s atoning death. Communion is a simple act with common elements, and yet, it has such deep meaning. As we remember the words Jesus gently spoke, encountering Jesus through the bread and the juice, we experience an awe-inspiring moment.
Worship
August 21, 2022 • Andrew Cullen • John 4:24
Worship is our response to the awe we feel when we encounter God. The heart of worship is a posture of awe, love, and adoration toward that which our heart considers worthy. This means we all worship in different ways because worship can take different forms. We can worship with the words we speak, the melody we make, or the posture we take. So what if our most sincere form of worship is not how we worship? What if our most sincere form of worship is how we encourage others to worship? What if our most sincere form of worship is setting aside our preferences so that our brothers and sisters can respond to the awe they feel when they encounter God?
Love
August 14, 2022 • Tom Ellsworth • John 3:16
Cliché is a 19th century French word originally used to describe the clicking sound of a mold being stamped into cooling metal to produce an endless supply of the very same design. We use the term today as a synonym for predictable, platitude, and commonplace. If you had choose a passage of Scripture that the world might view as cliché, what would it be? What about John 3:16? And yet, John 3:16 gives us an eagle's eye view of the greatest love story ever told.
The Incarnation
August 7, 2022 • Andrew Cullen • John 1:14
The incarnation refers to Jesus, the Son of God, becoming fully like us in our humanity without ceasing to be fully God. In the incarnation, Jesus revealed the goodness of God. Jesus was gracious, merciful, slow to anger, abounding in love, and faithful even to the wicked and the rebellious. Jesus did not keep his distance from our suffering. Jesus received the sufferings of humans. He shared in our sufferings so that we could share in his glory.
