Walnut Grove Lutheran Church Podcasts

Our values are very important because they guide our decision-making. We often have values that lead us away from life with Jesus, but God pursues us with His love and transforms our values. As life with God becomes our greatest value, God gives us opportunities to share the gift of life with God with others.

Part of God’s plan for renewing all things is for His People to live lives that attract others to God. But this can only happen when we rest in God’s love and embrace the fullness of the Good News of what He has done for us through God the Son, Jesus Christ.

Sometimes we experience public rejection and humiliation in our personal social space, and the results can be devastating. Through His death and resurrection, Jesus experienced ultimate rejection so He could be the Cornerstone of our unconditional acceptance. Accepted and forgiven, we serve as God's royal priests who share His love with a broken and hurting world.

This week special guest speaker Rae-Anna Hedlin shares about the mission work that she is doing, along with others, in Japan. She also encourages us to live in God’s grace and follow in His ways, for His ways are always best for us.

Your life is far more precious than you know. God created, redeemed and equipped you to join in His Mission of renewing and restoring all things. Failing to understand that can lead to us ruining our lives. But knowing who you are in Jesus will help you to engage more fully with God’s mission and live the fullness of life that He has for you.

Emptiness is the lack of meaning or purpose we experience when we fail to accomplish our dreams. By spending time reading the Bible, we can see that Jesus is always with us and at work around and through us to bring us hope in the midst of our emptiness.

When we are compassionate and conscientious and placed in an environment that is stressful and frustrating, we are at risk of experiencing burnout. But Jesus invites us to retreat with him, reset in his love, repent of the lies that are leading us into burnout and reset our lives according to his love and truth. Then we will experience more fruitful and joyful lives.

Everyone has a blind spot, things about themselves which they cannot see, and often pride is in our blind spot. Pride is toxic because it will destroy the things we care about and harden our hearts against God. Jesus invites us to open our eyes and see the damage our pride is causing, and then bring the burden of that awareness to him. Forgiven by Jesus, we cultivate a heart of humility and enjoy a rich and satisfying life with him.

When we are younger, we tend to keep up with the pace of change. But eventually, we set down roots in our personal preferences and let change pass us by. But we become irrelevant, we cannot share the infinite treasure of life with God with others. Resting in God’s love and learning from him and others will help us to share the gift we have been given with others.

With rapid changes in technology & our fast pace of life, we easily become disconnected from the people around us. Confession helps us to get real with God and ourselves and that can help us to become people of integrity who build rich, full and satisfying relationships with others.

When the temptation to compromise hooks into one of our heart’s desires, we can find ourselves doing things that are destructive to ourselves and others. But the Good News is that God’s love for us is infinite and unconditional and Jesus came into this world to save us from ourselves and for a rich, full, abundant life with him.

Sometimes when we get hurt, we choose to stop trusting, hoping and believing and become cynical. But cynical hardens our heart against the people around us who love us most and against God. Our world is messed up but with Jesus there is always hope.

We can think of ourselves as a kind, gracious person, but the grace that we extend toward others usually has limits or conditions or is reciprocal. But Jesus’ love covers a multitude of sins and he has grace for all people. There is no barrier to grace on Jesus’ side of the relationship equation, only on ours. Sometimes we need to get desperate before we receive it. In that posture of humble reception, we are then free to share that gracious love with others as the Holy Spirit guides us.

Human life tends to be a self-centred enterprise. But God calls us into community, which we need and which forces us to become more selfless. As we remain in Jesus and his love, he saves us and fills us with his love so that we have no need to try to save ourselves. We can love selflessly and together with other selflessly-loving followers of Jesus, we can be an irresistible community.

Sometimes we equate happiness with joy. But joy is a much greater and different thing. When our joy is centred in the Lord, we will find that it will make a huge difference in our lives, from the inside out, for faith chases away darkness.

The early Christian Church was an Irresistible Community, but today’s Church has become very resistible. By making ourselves vulnerable to Jesus and letting Him challenge & re-orientate our values, He will help us to be people that help others to experience Jesus’ unconditional love.

We need to receive favor from God to have hope when facing the big challenges of life. But what do we do when our circumstances threaten to crush us and it seems like all favor has left us? We continue to have faith in God, for the assurance of His favor is not our actions or circumstances but God’s actions and His promises to us and God is never closer to us than when we need Him most.

Human beauty, accomplishments or special occasions can be joyous, even glorious occasions. But that human glory is fleeting and it fades away. Seeing God’s glory gives us the assurance that God is with us, that he will never leave us nor forsake us and that, with God, in the end, everything is going to be alright. Jesus’s divine glory was revealed as he hung on the cross to give us all those promises, plus the promise of resurrection life. Therefore, we bask in his Jesus’ glory.

In those times when we are confronted with what we have done wrong, we can become overwhelmed with guilt. But Jesus, God the Son, was born and baptized to become one of us so he could pay the full cost of cleansing us from all our sin. Through Baptism, Jesus makes us beloved, forgiven children of God who greatly please our Heavenly Father.

Sometimes we put God in a box and think that he cannot be for us because of our faults, failures and weaknesses. But the wise men who visited Jesus when he was a small child show us that God is for us and for all people.