Tag: God
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Giving Thanks and Other Essentials
Thanksgiving is an essential. The problem is, we don’t think of it as an essential. We think it’s important. We think it’s nice. Too often though, we act as if gratitude is an add-on rather than an essential. Consider this sobering comment from God’s man, Paul: For even though they knew God, they did not…
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At Calvary – Episode 86 – More than in Name Only
“Follow me as I follow Christ.” This is an encouragement that God’s man, Paul, gave to the young church leader Timothy. Paul wasn’t just asking Timothy to follow his example. He was also encouraging him to compare Paul’s example to the example of Jesus. Likewise, it is one thing for us to claim the name,…
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Doing Good Stuff in Secret
Why do you do things? Do you do things just because it’s the loving thing to do? Can we really honestly say that is our only motivation? To be honest I kind of wonder if it is. I wonder that not because I think we’re all horrible people who have horrible motives. I wonder that…
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At Calvary – Episode 85 – Justified Before God?
Talk is cheap. That is a well used observation, isn’t it? It is the observation that it is easy to say things that sound good or loving. It is easy to sound committed to a cause. It is much more difficult to actually be committed. Did you know that God thinks that our talk is…
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The Example of God
Rain. When you are a kid, it is something to have fun in. You play in it, you dance around, and you get completely covered in mud. Even though you’re covered in mud, it’s all good. As we get older, rain becomes something else to us. It becomes an inconvenience. In fact, we can come…
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At Calvary – Episode 84 – Becoming People Who Can’t Be Trusted
We’re better than lost people, aren’t we? Such is the attitude of self-righteousness and hypocrisy that we so often critiqued by the apostle Paul and our Lord Jesus. They didn’t just say that we shouldn’t think like that. They said that thinking such thoughts condemns us! We learn why this week during our time in…
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At Calvary – Episode 83 – Becoming People Who Can’t Be Trusted
We talk about sin as a wrong thing we do. Have we ever thought about what repeated sin does to our thinking? As we finish Romans chapter 1 this week, Pastors Jeff, Ed, and John share how humanity’s repeated choosing of selfishness and our consistent rejection of God’s way of thinking has made our own…
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At Calvary – Episode 82 – What a Tangled Web We Weave
Depraved. The word brings up images of the vilest of things. However, when God uses the word He doesn’t use it exclusively for those things which are traditionally considered immoral. He also uses ‘depraved’ to describe activities that we accept as commonplace. It should make us pause to wonder why we don’t consider such sins…
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At Calvary – Episode 81 – Love without Truth is Not Love
There are times I really shake my head at the news, don’t you? I just can’t understand the choices people make sometimes. I wonder if it has ever been as bad as it is today. In our passage this week, the book of Romans mentions something that many of us might think as a recent…
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At Calvary – Episode 80 – Exchanging Truth for Lies
How do we get rid of guilt? The Bible’s antidote to guilt is the cross. How do folks who don’t want to give their life to Jesus attempt to get rid of guilt? They do it the way people have always rigged things. Rigged scales. Rigged games. Rigged life. All of it happens when we…
Pastor John D Jakes 