YONDER BREAKS

Here is the first sermon in a series about Heaven by Judah Smith. It's based off of John 3 , where Jesus has a conversation with a Pharisee named Nicodemus. In it, Jesus says, " No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man." Judah points out that Jesus was the only One who lived on earth after being in heaven, and the series is about what life in that context would be like, and what would happen if we adopted it. I'm really excited to share this series. It has profoundly changed so much in my life. There are so many great things said here - too many to write down; so I definitely encourage a listen:  John 3 Jesus says He is the first to live on the earth, after He has existed in Heaven (verse 13) This must have changed the way Jesus lived His life And would change our way of life profoundly if we could have this mindset Hebrews 11 - People who, by faith, looked forward to a home beyond this earth. We are j...

I was working on my car, which is never something I like to do. People often tell me they can't imagine what I'm like when I'm angry. I tell them there's a few things that'll do it: traffic, parking, not being able to land a skateboard trick I know I can land, and working on cars. So today I set out to change the rear hub assembly on my '97 Honda. I looked up a video of how to do it on YouTube and the whole thing took less than ten minutes. From years of experience, I know that's not going to be the case for me, but I was hopeful. Almost immediately I ran into an issue trying to get the drum off. This is when the cool thing happened. There are two little holes where you can screw something in the get it unstuck -- a brilliant design when usually cars manufacturers build cars as if they will never break, or parts as if they will never get stuck -- the only bad part is that I literally could not find any screw that fit the threads. I even unscrewed the whe...

Ecclesia is doing a series titled God is Moving. This is the first one in the series and a really good one. The big takeaway with this one is that, if we start trusting God before knowing why things happen, it's better than if God gave us all the answers before we trusted Him -- if He did that, we'd still be left without the peace of trusting Him. That's really what we long for anyway, right -- peace? Something else that hit me is that we tend to make a god out of things we want, or at least attribute them to God being pleased with us. If I'm not healthy or getting richer, than I must be doing something to make God mad. Or flip it -- if I am super healthy or have been very blessed financially, God is pleased with me. But if those things are suddenly taken from me, I must have made God mad. Both of those are folly of course, but at the bottom of it, that's probably how most of us view God -- the great Gift-giver. God does give good gifts of course ( "Eve...

Here is I'm Good Enough by Joseph Barkley. He has an awesome way of taking a lot of information and making it relevant to the heart. Most people would say that, as long as they're not a "bad" person (i.e.-don't kill anyone or steal something major), they will go to Heaven. I think that would be great, but that point of view doesn't line up with the bible. And since we're getting our information about Heaven from the bible, we should probably pay attention to what it says about getting there. There are several excellent lines in the notes below, but this one is a good summary: Grace means we can get all of the love, acceptance, forgiveness we long for, not because we worked harder, but because we accepted defeat. Pretty much every religion is centered around pleasing a god or gods in order to get into an awesome afterlife. It's all based on our works! With Jesus, we get all of the benefits, without the endless work! And I love what Joseph points o...

This is a good sermon by Greg Koukl about religious pluralism, which is very popular these days. The basic argument against this, though (which is detailed in the sermon), is that contradicting ideas cannot both be correct. This has to be one of the most relevant subjects around right now, as the belief that "you believe what you want and I'll believe what I want and everything is okay" is so rampant. It's a nice point of view and I wish it were true, but it's just not logical. What's good about this sermon is, at the end, Greg appeals to the heart. He says that everyone has something inside them they don't like. We can attribute this to many things, but maybe, deep down, it's guilt; and if we all feel guilty, maybe we are guilty. I don't know if I can say that everyone essentially feels guilty in life, but I would say that most people, if they examine the innermost of their hearts, would recognize that something is broken. Jesus claimed to fix ...