The 180 Church Podcast with Dr. Sammy and Friends

The Cost and Reward of Surrendering to God’s Will.

We as humans tend to be self-interested, but that is not necessarily a sin, since we depend on a degree of self-care to survive. This means, however, that when God calls us to do something, we will naturally find tension between our goals and God's goals. At these times, we should recognize that God is calling us to something more purposeful and powerful and to, with God's help, make sacrifices against our self-interest to answer His call. In reward, we receive God's shalom: permanent completeness and wholeness. Indeed, He will make whole everything that is broken.

The Rewards and The Costs of Cultivating A Safe But Not Soft Community.

The vision of the church is to cultivate a safe and authentic community that brings believers into discipleship. What makes an authentic community hard to achieve is our tendency to hide from our own faults and failures, which is behavior that stems from the brokenness of original sin. If the cost of an authentic community is our discomfort in the acts of sharing our pain and striving towards greater accountability, then why build the discipline of Christian community? As shown by the exchange between Peter and Jesus after the Resurrection, the discomfort of living in an authentic community allows us to grow and flourish as God meant for us to - because we can be intimate enough to confess our sins and journeys towards repentance.

Our Identity In Desires And Goals

In metropolitan hubs like NYC, many of us identify with being ambitious in our goals and orienting our lives towards achieving them. However, a prevalent pitfall lies in how we may end up establishing our identities in our achievements and goals. After all, it is not unnatural to want our desires to come to fruition. But when our goals appear to be out of reach, blocked, or uncertain, eliciting negative thoughts and beliefs, how can we trust in the promise that the Father has plans to prosper us? When we recognize our true identities formed through salvation in Christ, trust him to do the heavy lifting for things outside of our control, and align ourselves to his plan, we may just find that there is peace of mind and heart in who we are and in the character of the one who is in control.

Disciplines

The story of Job gives us wisdom for wrestling with our doubt in the face of great obstacles. In painful or uncertain times we tend to search for answers to our questions, and when we don't get any explanations, it becomes easy to lose hope in a God who is fair and compassionate. But Job's story teaches us that instead of answers, it is God himself we must cling to. We can cry out to God with our heartbreak and frustrations, we can study Scripture to remind ourselves of God's true character, and we can engage wholeheartedly with community to practice forgiveness and celebration with each other. These disciplines are the foundation of putting our trust in God - of having faith not in ourselves and what we can see, but in the One who works for and loves us beyond our understanding.

Easter Sunday Service 2023

Exploring Ephesians 5:18, Does The Bible Actually Command Believers to Get Drunk In The Spirit?

Defaults are habits of behaviors that help us cope with life’s struggles. When we try to stop resorting to harmful defaults, such as in Lent, we learn that old habits die hard because we create routines in which we are rewarded for coping with certain triggers by repeating certain behavior. It’s not that our need to cope is bad, it’s that our coping mechanisms hint at our need for something only God can satisfy. Though scripture states the “days are evil”, meaning life will give us enough struggles, the good news is that we can create habits of accessing the Spirit to help fill our need to cope with the transcendent love of God.

New Creation in Christ: Leaving the Old Ways for the New

When we come across difficult times, most of us probably have one or two coping strategies that we rely on to provide some semblance of reprieve when dealing with the stress. Whether we’ve learned constructive methods of coping or have to unlearn destructive ones, we fall back on these strategies to get the tiniest bit of relief. To our dismay, the source of our stress doesn’t simply solve itself, and we can find ourselves stuck in the cycle of stress-coping and temporary relief. But in Christ, there is a new way of living; it’s a call to freedom, to leave behind our old ways of coping, through a relationship with Christ. We can take solace in the knowledge that we are new creations in Christ, that we are already freed from bondage, and encouraged to pursue the new self made in Christ’s image.

Joy (is Learned)

Not all joys are equal. When we look at Scripture to answer the question of which joys we should pursue, we see that God has commanded us to rejoice in Him to the utmost - and that to rejoice more greatly in other things is sin. It's not that other pleasures are inherently bad, or that our desires for them are too strong; it's that other pleasures are ultimately inferior to God, and our desires are too easily satisfied. The goal of our obedience to God is not to deny ourselves all pleasure, but to glorify God's name above all else by rejoicing in Him above all else. For while the things of this world can make us happy, the greatest and everlasting joy is found in Christ. 

The Surprising Difference Between Stewardship and Charity

Today’s American churches face a crisis that prevents financial sustainability. Many believers regard their resources as their own and are often resistant to giving back to the local churches that nourish their spiritual health. However, rather than viewing life’s blessings as our own, scripture teaches us that God is sovereign over everything in life, which means we are in fact, stewards of what God provides. When the question is not about how much we can give, but how much of God’s provision we should keep, our relationship with, say, our finances, careers, and opportunities, becomes about how we can glorify God with what we’re given.

 

A habit called Faith

Many of us wish to have stronger faith; faith that can move mountains and bless multiple generations. As faith is a measure of our spiritual habits, to get there, we must pick up good spiritual habits. This does not happen instantaneously, but requires deliberate action, because many of us rely on bad spiritual habits, such as venting our frustrations, to seek instantaneous relief rather than real change. However, in times of adversity, if we deliberately put our hearts into God's hands with all our mind and strength, then we will slowly but surely grow in faith. Indeed, we can do so even with little faith, as no matter how small our faith is, or how big our bad habits are, God will always be just a prayer away.