Blog (Page 8)
The Firstborn (Part 1)
How many of you are the eldest among your brothers or sisters? Are you a firstborn in your family? According to some studies, the oldest in the family are usually high achievers, excellent problem solvers, born leaders, independent thinkers, and the brains in the family! If you are a firstborn, have I just described you? How many of those things I listed are true of you? On the flip side, as with many things in life, being the firstborn comes…
Escape from a Trapped Life
Knowing God the Deliverer For Christmas a few years ago, our kids bought us one of those escape room events. The whole family went into a locked room, and we had to work together to figure out the clues on how to get out. It was very fun, but I found it very frustrating! I can promise you that if I had been put in that room by myself, I would likely still be in that room even now. I…
Annual Family Meeting: An Invitation
This Sunday at 5 p.m. we will have our annual all-church Family Meeting. I am asking as many of you as possible to attend this gathering time. What is the big deal about an annual church meeting? We will affirm new LifeWay elders. Over the last few months, three new names were submitted as possible elders. An interview team has independently vetted these three candidates and is now recommending their acceptance into the Council of Elders. The three recommended…
Knowing God—The Great Deliverer
The Denzel Washington movie from 2000, “Remember the Titans,” portrayed the true story of an underdog high school football team coached by an African American man who took them to the state championship. It is an inspiring story and worth a watch, for sure. But the center of the movie was that they, as a whole team, had to have confidence in what the new head coach was doing with them and where he was leading them. They had to…
Let’s Mourn
Let’s be honest. No one likes mourning. Mourning that is, not morning (many don’t like that too). None of us looks forward to something that gives us a reason to mourn. Just hearing the word makes us feel sick. To mourn assumes one is already experiencing some kind of a deep grief, and he or she is expressing that deep grief outwardly. Genesis 23:2 Sarah died in Kiriath-arba (that is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan; and Abraham went in…
Global Impact Celebration: A historical review
Where have we been and why do we do this? Eleven years ago at LifeWay Church, we began dedicating one week of the year to a Global Impact Celebration, or GIC. It is a week on our calendar, but if that is all the annual GIC is for you, then you’ve totally missed the entire point. Let me explain. Why did we start this, and what’s the history of GIC? To be honest, most churches, when they are involved in missions,…
A Global Mandate from Our Global God
If you had a dream of going somewhere in the world where you have never been—seeing something with your own eyes instead of seeing just tourist photos—where would it be? It’s a bit of a “what’s on your bucket list?” question. A cruise through the inside passage to Alaska? The tropical islands of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean? The fjords of Norway? The glaciers and penguins of Antarctica? The Gobi Desert of Mongolia? The Great Wall of China? Machu…
The Global Need
What’s the greatest need in the world today? Clean water? A secure food supply? Access to education? Each of those needs is significant, and they are also universal—meaning that everyone, no matter who they are or where they live, has these needs. But the greatest need we all have is a Savior. The Bible tells us that every person is dead in their sin until they accept the gift of Christ as their Savior. He is the solution to our…
Global
Have you ever met someone who is constantly focused on themselves? Maybe they aren’t actively mean or uncaring; they are just simply too occupied with their own lives to notice the people around them. They don’t notice if someone needs help or care if someone is celebrating a milestone. Their lives are about themselves. Sadly, a lot of churches and a lot of Christians can be inward-focused as well. We get caught up in our own church activities and issues,…
Asking “What If…?” of the Great I AM
Exodus 4:1Moses answered, “What if they do not believe me or listen to me and say, ‘The Lord did not appear to you’?” Does God—the Great I AM, YHWH—take questions? In the classic 1939 movie, The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy and the band of misfits that she had collected along the yellow brick road finally come into the throne room of “Oz the Great and Powerful,” she begins to ask him basic questions. The first questions are met with anger, fury…
Let’s Be Poor!
In Matthew 5:3, Jesus introduced us to something called being poor in spirit. In this introduction, he added that those who were poor in spirit were blessed. Matthew 5:3“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” What does that even mean? Over in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus said it even simpler. He didn’t even say poor in spirit. He said, “Blessed are you who are poor.” How can being poor in spirit be a…
Awed, Not Overwhelmed
Be in awe of God more than overwhelmed by anything else that comes your way! This was the essential theme laid out last Sunday as we launched into a year of study we are calling, Knowing God. Just contemplate that for a minute: Be in awe of God. The story from which we are launching our year is Moses’ encounter with God at the burning bush (Exodus 3). Essentially, Moses was just minding his own business, tending the sheep. He…
Peace in Making Decisions (Part II)
If it is true God’s choice for us is as simple as the choice that offers us the least pain and the most comfort, then we should find God’s people all over the Bible making choices that are the least painful or the most comfortable. But we don’t find that. We find the opposite. Consider the apostle Paul. In Acts 20, he told the Ephesians he was traveling to Jerusalem and he did not know what would happen to him…
Knowing God: The Great I Am
This Sunday, September 11, we are launching into our third year of study and sermons to help us grasp the whole of Scripture. To remind you… Year 1 (2020-21) — The Book of Jesus We explored the idea that ALL of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is ultimately about Jesus and God’s rescue plan. Do you remember our memory verse? Colossians 1:15Christ, the visible image of the invisible God… Year 2 (2021-22) — Building His Church We sought to…
Peace in Making Decisions (Part I)
In this life, we make decisions of all kinds. We make smaller decisions regularly on a daily basis. We call them smaller decisions because if we happen to make the wrong choices on these smaller decisions, it is not the end of the world. But from time to time, we are asked to make bigger life decisions. Making bigger decisions is quite different. If we happen to make the wrong choices on bigger decisions, it can lead to catastrophes. How…
Christians in Conflict
Hello, LifeWay Family! It’s Edwin, and I wanted to take a moment to say how excited I am for this Sunday! For those of you who may not know, this Sunday will be my first opportunity to preach to the church as a whole! I am so elated to be able to share something that God has really been placing on my heart this year. Have you ever had a conflict with an unbeliever? Has a conversation and attempt to…
Gospel, Meet World
This Sunday I’ll be teaching again on the overall theme of the gospel and our culture. I’m going to be laying out some practical things from scripture about raising up a church family with the identity that we can find in Christ. I’ll teach some practical ways in which the body of Christ relates to the rest of the world and helps the world discover their identity as a creation of God. This is a bit challenging, because the church…
LifeWay and the Desna Cup
The Desna Cup story and LifeWay’s long connection with it This coming Sunday, we are closing our building, leaving our church property, and heading to join a handful of local churches for a group worship service at an event called the Desna Cup. The worship time is at 10:30 a.m. and the basic instructions are highlighted for you in this week’s newsletter. Some of you, for the last several years, may have driven by Saghalie Middle School on a mid-August…
The Gospel in Our Culture
During the month of August, we are taking a few weeks to explore how to take the gospel into the very complicated culture that surrounds us. We are hopping around a little bit: On July 31, I launched the series by beginning an unfinished message about sexual identity. Last Sunday, Chris Berry taught about our government—and more importantly, how we should navigate our own relationships when we disagree politically. This Sunday, I am picking up where I left off on…
God and the Government
“My country, ’tis of thee…” From an American background, those words sound so patriotic and wonderful. We (especially those of us who are a little older) grew up saying the Pledge of Allegiance at school and singing the national anthem for ball games. I even remember taking a patriotism class when I was young; such classes can be helpful, and they’ve come to us historically in our American culture because we grew up being taught to love and support our…
The Gospel and the Sexual Identity Crisis
Last week, I began a series of teachings wrapped up in the subject of the gospel and our culture. The plan is to address on Sunday mornings a few issues with which we all seem to be faced, and about which we are often confused. The intent is to deal with a few specific topics this August, and from time to time pick this theme back up and deal with a few more. This Sunday, July 31, I am addressing the gospel…
Good News!: Our Missions Pastor Goes Full-Time
The Council of Elders at LifeWay, including Pastor Billy Arnold, are proud to announce that Heather Althoff is moving to full-time status as Missions Pastor at LifeWay, beginning August 1. Heather has been part of our pastoral staff team for over 14 years, having been on mission with her husband, Matt, in Germany for 5 years previously. During those 14 years, she has served LifeWay both as the Discipleship Pastor and also in her current role leading our mission work, which…
The Gospel and Our Culture
When the Church (Ekklesia) was being planted in Gentile territories in the 1st century, they quickly realized they were having to deal with issues that had long since been settled in the Jewish world of Israel—prostitution worship, emperor worship, allegiance to the government, paying taxes, polytheism, animism, child sacrifice, and many, many, many more issues. The issues today are not all the same, of course, but amazingly, most the core concerns of the historical church are the same core concerns…
The Moment We’ve Been Waiting For
At the beginning of my message series on Ecclesiastes, I said that the Book of Ecclesiastes was a hard book. Along with Proverbs, Job and Song of Solomon, we know that the Book of Ecclesiastes is one of the Wisdom Books in our Bibles, but God sure didn’t make it easy for us to extract wisdom out of Ecclesiastes. Much of the book is complex and enigmatic to me. It takes a lot of work for me just to understand…
At World’s End
Did you know that from polls done in 2012, some 14% of the population of the world believed that the world would end sometime during their lifetime? The lowest percentage was 6% in France. Can you guess in which country the percentage was the highest? You guessed it. America tied with Turkey at 22%. Does that say something about Americans? Anything? Fascination with the end of the world has always been a people’s topic of discussion. If you are as…