Grace Church Sc Teaching

God’s design for all marriages is that they would be a grand adventure, working toward a shared purpose worthy of the entire lives of each spouse. The challenge for spouses is to discover what this will look like for their own marriage. What is the adventure that God is calling us to go on?

As an essential aspect of oneness, marital intimacy tends to be emblematic of the health of a marriage overall. Sadly, this area is most often marked by brokenness and bitterness, instead of the power and enjoyment that God means it for. If we are to experience marital oneness, we must recover the Biblical vision of marital intimacy and work to restore it in our marriages.

To a similar degree as the truth about marriage, the truth about singleness has become tangled and twisted for Christians today. The Church has become alarmingly prone to borrowing its view of singleness from the surrounding world, and the distinctions between dating and marriage have become blurred, if not altogether lost. If we are to escape this confusion and live out God-honoring singleness, we must be directed by Biblical truth about marriage and the wisdom offered by those who have gone before us.

Marriage is not characterized by emotion or duty, as our culture teaches, but by loyal, steadfast, committed love, just as God has for us. Both romance and duty fail to provide solid foundations for marriage because they entail a commitment to something besides the other person. The only true foundation for oneness in marriage is a loyal, unfailing commitment to the other person, as exemplified by God’s love for His people.

Marriage is the practice of oneness between two people,and that oneness is made even more profound by the uniqueness that sets each gender apart from the other – a controversial subject, but also an important one. In a time when the lines between genders are blurred, how are we to think about uniqueness in a way that is Biblical?

What is marriage? How are we meant to define it? The world around us offers many answers to these questions, making the truth about it less and less clear. The institution of marriage itself seems broken within our culture, leading some to reject it outright. Now, more than ever, we must recover a Biblical perspective of marriage as oneness, and more importantly, a practice of this oneness to match.

Along with the rights that God has given us as citizens of His Kingdom, we have also been entrusted with certain responsibilities: to establish a distinctive community united around the purposes of God in the world, and to endure suffering in hope, among others. As we work to be faithful in fulfilling these responsibilities, our response to a changing and sometimes hostile culture becomes clearer.

Many of our troubles in dealing with culture around us stem from being unclear on our concerns versus our responsibilities. As Christ's ambassadors to the world, we have been commissioned with His work in the world. So what exactly is included within our responsibilities?

As our culture swirls due to rampant injustice and controversial social change, the responses we offer reveal the nature of our hearts. By our responses, we are able to discover where we have placed our identities. Do our responses reflect we are citizens of heaven and not of this world?

We have hope because ultimately life swallows up death for those who believe in Christ and are judged according to His deed on the cross. We in response must live our lives in light of the future.

It’s difficult to grieve and mourn the deaths of loved ones in the midst of a culture that tells us the goal is to “move on” or “get over it.” Thankfully we see in the Scriptures that there is a distinct, hope-filled form of grieving that Christians can enter into because of what Jesus has accomplished on the cross. We do not grieve as those who have no hope, but we engage in living a lifestyle of grieving as we anticipate the day death’s sting is finally vanquished when Christ returns.

There is an embracing of physical brokenness in suffering and aging that shapes your soul and shifts your hope away from yourself and toward the Lord.

Staring down the sobering possibility of the approach of his own death in a prison in Rome, the apostle Paul declares that for him, “to live is Christ, and to die is gain." Widely known and recited, this statement presents Christians with great comfort but confronts them first with a hard challenge. Death is only gain for those who love Christ and spend their lives for Him.

In order to begin to view and understand death with a biblical lens, we must first cut through what our culture says about it. Matt Williams traces death back to its root cause, the Fall, and contrasts our culture's aversion to this subject with a biblical understanding of it as both groaning and glory.

Bill White concludes our series with some practical advice and a framework for disciplining older children in ways that will help equip them with the maturity they need to engage the world on their own.

Matt continues our series with a challenge to pursue a genuine humility in our children by creating opportunities which are nearly impossible that help lead them to an authentic confidence in their ability.

Relationships between husbands and wives, children and their parents, are bursting with hot-button issues. Family has all the marks of a cultural crisis. Within that fog of questions and confusion regarding family, light can indeed cut through. Far from the picture of a distantly removed god, scripture presents a loving Creator who speaks directly into the nooks and crannies of our every-day life. This May’s series Parenting by Design will peer into how God personally and strategically designs parenting to further his glory. His plan also lays down a blueprint, which invites us to nurture and launch the next generation for his fame and our flourishing.

Relationships between husbands and wives, children and their parents, are bursting with hot-button issues. Family has all the marks of a cultural crisis. Within that fog of questions and confusion regarding family, light can indeed cut through. Far from the picture of a distantly removed god, scripture presents a loving Creator who speaks directly into the nooks and crannies of our every-day life. This May’s series Parenting by Design will peer into how God personally and strategically designs parenting to further his glory. His plan also lays down a blueprint, which invites us to nurture and launch the next generation for his fame and our flourishing.

Matt finishes our Forever series by talking about where our hope lies and how our cravings in this world reflect those hopes.

Matt Williams gives a glimpse of what "forever" will be like based on images in chapters 20-22 of Revelation. In those chapters, we see three big ideas about the "New Heavens and New Earth" or the final eternal destination for Christians.