Text: Jeremiah 29:1-7; 1 Peter 2:11-12 | Listen to Message By Easter 2019, Grace City will be a thriving, Gospel-driven Church that embodies and shares the heart of Christ in the heart of downtown Denver. Between now and then, we will continue to worship, grow, and serve as a Church – while being strategic and intentional about forming a committed, missional core group to re-plant Grace City in the new “home” where God has led us. Why? Downtown Denver is undergoing a mass-scale metamorphosis right now. Physically, construction cranes dominate the skyline everywhere you turn. Philosophically, there’s been a shift in...
Text: Esther 5-6 | Listen to Message Sometimes obeying God just doesn’t seem to pay off. You know the feeling, right? You decide to take your faith seriously, so you read your Bible, go to church, and try to live an obedient life . . . and things go worse for you than before! Worse yet, you look around at all the people who couldn’t care less about obeying God, and most of them seem better off than you! This is where God’s people find themselves in Ezra 5 and 6. They’ve responded to the call of the prophets Haggai and...
Text: Ezra 4:1-23 | Listen to Message Fighting for Hope I don’t mean to be a downer, but if you’re not discouraged about something right now, you’re probably in the minority. Discouragement is that common. And it requires no definition or explanation – you know it when you feel it. Discouragement is also self-perpetuating in that it typically drives us to actions (and inactions) that make our situation worse, rather than better. All too often, discouragement death spirals into full-blown depression and despair. As C.S. Lewis implies in The Screwtape Letters, discouragement is a particularly effective weapon of our adversary, the...
Text: Ezra 3:1-13 | Listen to Message Fear That Conquers Fear One of Bible’s most important lessons on worship is also one of its most overlooked. Ezra 3:2-3 says of the Jews returning from exile, “They built the altar of the God of Israel, to offer burnt offerings on it, as it is written in the Law of Moses, . . . for fear was on them because of the peoples of the lands.” After nearly 70 years in Babylonian captivity, the people were finally allowed to return home. But home wasn’t anything like what it once was. Their capital city...
Text: Ezra 1:1-2:70 | Listen to Message Stirring The Heart of A King In 586 B.C., God stirred the heart of the Persian king Cyrus to let the Jews return to their homeland and rebuild their temple in Jerusalem. Even more remarkably, he commanded his other subjects to financially support this endeavor. It’s especially remarkable because Cyrus didn’t believe in Yahweh – and he couldn’t care less about restoring and preserving the line of the eventual Messiah. Cyrus was just hedging his bets and ingratiating himself to all the gods of all conquered lands in the hopes that he might get...
Text: Esther | Listen to Message God, Are You There? The name of the LORD is nowhere to be found in the book of Esther. The situation – namely, a king’s decree to annihilate all the Jews – seems to indicate that God himself is absent altogether. Sometimes life feels like that. The early chapters of this book introduce us to a woman called Esther and her adoptive father called Mordecai. I say “called” because these were not their real names. In Persian exile, “Hadassah” had been renamed “Esther,” derived from the goddess “Ishtar/Astarte.” “Mordecai” was a derivation of “Marduk,” the...
Text: Ezra 1:1-3; 8:22 | Listen to Message Someone Is Shaping History Let’s imagine you’re a genuine truth seeker and you’re trying to discern whether or not the Bible is trustworthy. Is it really the Word of God – as it claims – or is it merely the product of man? Let’s imagine, too, that you’ve stumbled across these little Old Testament books called Ezra and Nehemiah, and you really want to understand what they mean. Right at the outset of your study, you have questions like: Who is this Cyrus, king of Persia? And why has he issued a decree...
Text: Ephesians 1:3-14 | Listen to Message Don’t Waste Your Life There’s a power-packed piece of advice that goes something like this: Ask yourself what’s really important and then have the wisdom and courage to build your life around your answer.* Modern people tend to build their lives around some combination of career, possessions, a few key relationships, and the constant drive to be happy, comfortable, and successful. In the end, they die and go to meet God. How does that conversation go? “I’d show you my vacation home and my boat, God . . . but I wasn’t able to...
Text: Acts (various) | Listen to Message High Impact Church Planting It’s an age-old debate: Was the book of Acts meant to be descriptive or prescriptive? Is it telling us what to do or just how things were? Acts is a true history of the Early Church and the expansion of the Gospel outward from Jerusalem. But it’s admittedly a very selective history – and a pedagogical history at that. In other words, Luke has chosen and crafted his stories carefully in order to teach us important lessons about the nature of God and His work in our world. One of...
Text: Luke 24:44-53 | Listen to Message The How And Why of Mission No shortage of material has been written on “The Great Commission” – Jesus’ call to his followers (including the modern church) to go into all the world and proclaim the Gospel. Usually the emphasis falls on the command part of this, which is a call to make a certain kind of proclamation: “[You] . . . go make and mature disciples of Jesus Christ.” It’s a simple fact that the mission of Jesus lives on through the witness of his church. If people are going to believe in...