Walnut Grove Lutheran Church Podcasts

When we lack intimacy in our relationship with God, we miss out on living life with peace, hope and resilience. Jesus is inviting us to receive more of God’s love in the deepest part of our soul so that we, and others, feel both safe and loved.

While we struggle to understand if God is who we want Him to be, God has been faithfully loving humanity since before time began. When we open our hearts and minds to His love, we can see evidence of God’s faithful love throughout history. We see that faithful love shines most clearly when Jesus came to personally rescue us and bring us into the freedom of abundant life with Him.

We believe that God loves us, but it is hard for us to imagine the infinite scope of God’s love for us. Jesus shows us that God’s love for us has no limits.

We usually think of other humans as both the source and the object of our love. But we read in the Bible that the ultimate source of all love is God. He loved us first and best, and as we know and rely on His love, He helps us to truly love others.

God does not change and yet He does new things. When is it time for us to get out of our comfort zone and change? God will guide us in when and how to change. The most important thing is to remember why we change: Because we want to know God better and we want others to have the joy of a close relationship with Jesus.

Given enough time, all of us will face challenges that are beyond our ability to meet and that’s when we cry out to God for help. But God wants something more for us in life than that. He invites us to live in continual confidence of His saving love for us. That begins by being aware of our own neediness.

Most religions teach that we need to earn God’s favour, but not Christianity. The Bible tells us that God Himself came to earth in the person of Jesus and suffered the punishment of divine justice to bring us into His family where He sings with delight over us.

The most important thing in life, Jesus tells us, is to love God and our neighbor. Such love is more valuable to God than religious worship. And God motivates us to love by loving us first. And our soul is fed by receiving God’s unconditional, infinite love for us.

Our desires and misplaced values often lead us astray. We value some things too highly and pursue them while, at the same time, we neglect and disregard our own soul. Jesus knows that our soul is the most precious part of us and because He loves us, He gave up everything, including His life, to save our souls. Jesus’ sacrificial love helps us to rightly value and guard our own soul.

This Sunday we celebrated because eight young people from our church confirmed that the Christian faith is their faith. We not only celebrated that God has given them faith, but also that they have been supported and nurtured in the Christian faith by their families and this community of faith and they are now ready to take responsibility for their own faith. Listen as they share their personal testimonies of their journey of faith.

Examining our own soul is an important part of Soul Care. But we are often reluctant to examine our own soul because of what we might find there. Because of God’s unconditional love for us, we know that the most important things in life-His love for us and our life in Him-are not going to change. Thus encouraged, we examine our own souls because we want to grow in living the life that Jesus has given us.

The soul is the most important part of us, but most of us do not know how to care for our own soul. So our souls languish, undernourished and neglected. Jesus wants to give us a rich, full, abundant life with Him. That life and relationship is a free gift He gives to us. But experiencing the fullness of that relationship and life requires caring for our own soul, and we do that when we receive God’s love in our soul.

On Pentecost Sunday, we celebrate that God has poured out the Holy Spirit upon all believers. When God pours out the Holy Spirit upon us personally, the before-and-after difference is dramatic for the Spirit gives us life and peace.

Without water, we soon become thirsty. Similarly, each of us has a great inner thirst that needs to be quenched. Jesus invites us to come to Him and He will give us the Holy Spirit Who will satisfy our inner longings.

We tend to make judgments about situations or people based on appearances, but those judgments are often wrong because our assumptions and beliefs are wrong. As we lay those things down and, in humility, follow Jesus, He helps us to judge by true standards.

Sometimes, to help another person, you have to say or do something that might cause them pain. We are reluctant to do that because we do not want to offend them. But then people never hear the truth. The solution: Let Jesus be your love, strength and truth.

There are many things that we need for life in this world and we spend most of our time and energy striving for those things. But they don’t last. We need Jesus because He is the bread of life that gives us eternal life.

God uses miracles to take ordinary people and form them into special people that shine His light into the world. God does this so that the whole world may that there is a God who protects from death, gives eternal life and nourishes our hungry souls.

Sometimes we are confronted with challenges that are beyond our ability to solve. Those are opportunities for us to consider, “In what or whom am I trusting?” Jesus came to this world to usher in a new Kingdom where small things have infinite worth in His hands.

Fear can control our lives because it is powerful. Some of its power is because we not only experience fear, we can imagine it when we are not in a fearful situation. Jesus’ resurrection shows us that we no longer need to be controlled by our fears and we can live in freedom.