On April 11th, Pastor Ray will begin meeting with what will be called the “Church Plant Group,” or CPG for short. This group will worship with TCO at 9:15am and then meet in the third modular during the 11:00am hour to plan the launch of LIDO....
In light of everything going on right now in our culture, in our nation, we as believers have a wonderful opportunity to display Christ and our hope in a real way. Unity of the gospel and the church in a real way....
The gospel wasn’t meant to simply be admired or acknowledged. It was meant to be submitted to and to be enjoyed....
What we must recognize in the concept of propitiation, and what many decline to acknowledge or accept, is that the gospel satisfies, or pacifies, the wrath of God due our sin, thus God can be just and the justifier of those who have have faith in Christ....
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Previously we looked at what the Biblical definition of waiting is, and how we need to get that correct first. Today, we will look at some of what is involved in waiting according to the Bible....
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This morning and in the coming mornings I hope to add another word to our defense and explanation of the gospel as we attempt to paint a right and full understanding of God and the gospel, and then fully explain that word so we glean every ounce of meaning from it. Because the word we will look at over the coming day or days stands really in many ways to form and establish...
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And above all else, in place of all else, we should live for this one thing. Be consumed by this one thing in our lives. God's glory. Pleasing God. Whether we live or die, sickness or health, rich or poor, seek to please God. Live to advance God's glory....
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What does it mean to wait according to the Bible? And not just any waiting, but waiting well. Anyone can wait poorly. We do it every day. But how do we wait well? I want this time of quarantine and social distancing to be a refining and growing time for us individually and as a body. And maybe one of the things we learn in this time, maybe even thru these three devotions, ...
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Humans do not live in the best of all possible worlds. This world is fallen, wrecked by sin and its consequences, marring an otherwise good creation. Not all suffering is tied to a particular sin nor can we can draw a one-to-one correlation between the degree of a person’s sin and the degree of their suffering. Suffering belongs to the full weight of sin that both believ...
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Evil is not an illusion. We can’t close our eyes tight and will it away. The Bible never minimizes the truth of misery and pain. Moreover, the example of Solomon shows that stoic detachment from evil is not the right response. Today we will examine how the wisest man in history dealt with theodicy or the problem of evil....
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God alone is perfectly GOOD and SEVERE at the same time. God was abundantly merciful to Israel, and yet in their rejection He cut them off. WHY? They did not believe in Christ for their righteousness....
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As we continue to look at our awesome God and His perfect and amazing attributes, we will consider today another of the "less talked about" attributes, that of God's wrath....
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One of the perfections of our God is that He is the judge of all the earth. If people are honest, nobody really likes to think of this characteristic of God. We prefer that of love and mercy and grace. And yet the fact that God is judge is one of the more strongly stressed characteristics of God in the Bible....
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One area Christians often struggle is with the “problem of evil.” In theological terms, this is called “theodicy” and comes from two Greek words (theos ‘god’ + dik...
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What do we do when life falls apart, or when everything is going wrongly, or so it seems? This is the context of David writing Psalm 3 and 4. Many consider Psalm 3 to be a morning Psalm and Psalm 4 to be an evening Psalm. Food for all day....
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If we are honest, often times prayer is left as a last resort. We are so resourceful, we have so many means, it seems more often than not we can solve issues on our own thru these various means. We rarely need outside help or are beyond ourselves, or so it seems. We rarely get to the end of ourselves and our resources to the point of desperation....
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What comes to your mind when you think about grace? Is it possible that we don't truly understand the depth of this word, what it teaches us about God and ourselves, that it has become watered down similar to that of love?...
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Right now I would think that there is a great tendency and temptation for people to begin growing weary in many different ways, from all that comes with working on the front lines in the medical field, to working at home, to not working at all, to now being your children's teachers. The temptation is to grow weary in doing good....
Keep ReadingEnjoy TCO Worship Team's very own Kelli Stuart singing "Forever" by Kari Jobe....
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Today I want us to consider the love of God. In these times, I think it would be fair to say that this might come into question, as suffering and death are all we hear about during the circumstances we find ourselves in. So, let's offer up a proper perspective on the love of God this morning that hopefully will rightly guide us thru these times and those to come....
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Which of these lenses do you gravitate to seeing God's Word thru most often: demands to do or invitations to love? And do you see these as one or separate, meaning, do you see the love of God even in His commands, or are these separate. My hope is that we combine the two and see the love of God for us in all things, even His commands, and that everything God says is absolu...
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One of the ways God is recreating us is through the divine offer of wisdom, namely His wisdom. We see this clearly through Proverbs, the divine gift and need for wisdom on our part....
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As we begin another week of social distancing and walking thru COVID-19 and all that comes with it, let us think on this - that God alone is truly wise....
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The Psalm before us today has been referred to as “the most missionary of all the Psalms.” Psalm 67 is actually a prayer, and the writers of the 1611 KJV preceded this Psalm with a notation that read, “A prayer for the enlargement of God’s kingdom, to the joy of the people, and the increase of God’s blessings.”...
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What comes to your mind this morning when you think about God? How long a list of attributes could you come up with if tasked to do so this morning? What attributes would be on the list? What attribute would be above all?...
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Anyone ever read the Bible and wondered what link it had to us today? Anyone who has ever sought to engage others in gospel-centered conversations has heard something like this as a reason for not reading or submitting to the Bible, that the Bible is outdated, irrelevant, expired, doesn't apply to us today, the world has changed and the times have changed and so the Bible ...
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This morning, let us mediate on and ponder a reality that so often times we gloss right over and miss the staggering and mysterious nature of it and even the implications of on our lives - Jesus Christ, fully God, took on flesh, added humanity, and in doing so emptied Himself on behalf of others to the glory of God....
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