What comes to mind when you think of the Christmas season? For me, the word that comes to mind is anticipation. A simple definition of 'anticipate' is to believe that something will occur in the future. We live in a state of anticipation every day. We anticipate...
The Christmas season is one of great anticipation. Children can’t wait for Christmas Day to arrive. They hope that time will speed up and shorten the days until they can rip open the presents under the tree and begin enjoying the toys that have been...
God created a physical world to communicate the glories of his grace. Sunrise, with its colorful illumination of all matter upon which we live and from which we derive resources for life, is a spectacular display of God’s revelatory ways. God makes things visible through...
This Sunday at Grace Community Church, we will consider the martyrdom of Stephen from Acts 7:54-60. This paragraph is worth a weekend of meditation to mine all its encouragement for our living and dying in Christ. John Stott said that Stephen’s death was full of Christ....
While reading in Acts 7 the sermon Stephen preached as his defense against the accusation of blasphemy, I was struck by his strategy. He gave his opponents a history lesson that ended with Jesus. The accusation against Stephen was that he had spoken against the law...
Christians should live in a heads-up frame of mind. “Be sober minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8, ESV). The man who wrote these words shows us how he did it in Acts 6. The...
This Sunday at Grace Community Church we will again consider the early stages of persecution against the infant church in Jerusalem. I encourage you to read Acts 5 this weekend to prepare yourself for our time together. A common but unhelpful approach to Bible passages about...
The great potential of marriage is that it can help us honor God, follow Christ, and walk in step with the Holy Spirit. Sadly, marriage can also be a relationship in which a husband and wife find no help in their discipleship or in which...
Our brothers and sisters who first tasted the grace of Jesus and were filled with the Spirit’s power soon felt the pressure of opposition. Acts 4 is their story. A new day has dawned as the Holy Spirit is poured out on the people of the...
I had been a Christian a month or two when I began thinking about the Holy Spirit. In conversations with other Christians, it was suggested that there might be more to the Christian life than faith in Christ and following him as Lord. That “more,”...
