Christian Christmas Gift Guide for Kids, Tweens, and Teens
A Christian Christmas Gift Guide for Kids, Tweens and TeensThis gift guide is full of gift ideas designed to ENCOURAGE. Here you'll find gift ideas geared towards babies, kids, tweens and even teens (some of these gifts in the second half of the list, of course, could...
5 Powerful Truths from Watching Jesus in a Raging Storm
Let’s dive into 10 truths we can glean from watching Jesus with His disciples in a very literal raging storm.
How to Find Community
COMMUNITY.
There is such purpose in community. A solid community can help build and encourage us in our purposes.
But how do we find that community? How do we foster it? How do we find friends that will actually build us up instead of tear us down.
Here are some ways YOU can find and foster community.
Be Still
Be still my anxious heart.
If only, right? If only we could just tell our hearts to be still and they would be. If only with those two words our minds and hearts could release the weight of the stresses, worries and concerns of the known and unknown.
The radical thing is that those two words can actually calm the raging seas in our lives. These two words hold real weight and ability for change when and only when the One who says them has any and all power, knowledge and love for us in those situations that cause us to worry and stress.
Oftentimes we need that affirmed to us over and over again. Here are two verses to cling to that assure us of just why we can be still just because God calls us to.
Obey and Let God Move
Do you ever have that moment when you want to obey God, you want to stand for justice, you want to show love… but you don’t know how people might react?
You’re nervous if people will think you’re awkward or a goodie-two-shoes or what have you?
Maybe you’re worried people will laugh — and this fear lasts WAY past elementary school.
These can worries that last from a young age all the way through the working field and beyond.
We want to obey God to the fullest — but what will the people around me think? How will they act? What will they do?
Here’s a WEIGHT OFF THE SHOULDERS truth for you: we are called to obey, we are not responsible for how people react.
We are called to obey, and God will do the rest.
You’re not called to figure the whole situation out.
You’re called to obey.
Rooting Out Pride Part 2 – Pride Comes Before the Fall
Pride tricks us into thinking it’s for us because it puts us first, but ultimately, its blinding ability to see only our perspective, or to put our perspective above those of others, gets in our way.
God HATES pride.
God is not for the proud.
In part one of Rooting Out Pride – What Pride Can Do, we noted these two verses
James 4:6 says, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”
Proverbs 16:5 is very firm when it states, “Everyone who is arrogant in heart is an abomination to the LORD; be assured, he will not go unpunished.”
Ultimately, God brings low the proud and raises the humble.
Whether it be out of its own consequences or directly from God Himself, we know that a life and way and walk of pride leads to destruction. It will come before a fall.
Rooting Out Pride Part 1 – The Power of Pride
Living purposefully, for a Christian, goes hand in hand with living the way God calls us to live.
It calls us to step into what He calls us to step into, but it also calls us to root out the things He hates. One of those things is pride.
Isaiah 2:12 says very clearly, “For the LORD of hosts has a day against all that is proud and lofty, against all that is lifted up–and it shall be brought low.”
James 4:6 says, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”
Proverbs 16:5 is very firm when it states, “Everyone who is arrogant in heart is an abomination to the LORD; be assured, he will not go unpunished.”
On a very practical level, we can see that pride destroys.
If God HATES pride and if pride brings destruction, it must go. Pride needs to be taken out. Living the way God calls us to live, living purposefully, does not allow for pride.