Living Stones Church, Red Deer, Alberta

What impedes our spiritual life from flourishing and growing? With whom should we associate or disengage? To what degree should we relate to the society around us? What dangers do we need to guard our minds against regarding the values of a contaminated society? What may be even more subtle is watching out for deviations from the purity of the gospel that call forth disassociation from p...

Erwin Lutzer, former Pastor of Moody Memorial Church, received a letter from a radio listener years ago, in which he wrote: ‘I am a man, thirty-one years of age and divorced, though I fought the divorce bitterly. I feel bad because I have no hope for the future.  Often, I go home from church and cry, but there is no one to hold me when I cry. No one cares. What hurts most is that I have ...

What does biblical ministry really look like? How can we identify the real thing? When do we know when something is authentic? We know that in life, we all will suffer. Some suffer more than others. Some suffer because of their own folly. But others suffer because of their concern for others. Paul, in appealing to the genuineness of his ministry and message, will give us insight into the...

To begin anew in our lives, we need to begin to assess life differently. In our text from 2 Corinthians, we will discover three things we must do to experience God’s incredible grace in our lives.  

How do we hit the reset button on our lives? What does it take to see a new beginning and transformation happen in our lives? We must stop evaluating life through the lens of our world. We ne...

Being a Christian is about having a passion for God and compassion for people. The greatest need of our nation, province, city, workplaces, schools, and neighbourhoods is that people come to know the Lord. God has entrusted His people with that commission. God entrusts us to be His witnesses, His ambassadors to the people in our world. So, how do we live a transformed and influential lif...

There is much speculation and controversy between the moment we die and the time when Jesus comes again, in which we will receive our eternal spiritual bodies. In writing earlier to the Corinthians, Paul laid out the teaching on the resurrection in detail in 1 Corinthians 15. He also describes the difference between our earthly bodies and spiritual ones.

1 Corinthians 15:42-44, 50-54

So...

John Piper writes in his book The Roots of Endurance that he shared some of the challenges facing Charles Simeon (1759-1836), the pastor of Trinity Church in Cambridge, England. “I heard that he stayed in the same church as pastor for fifty-four years and that in the first twelve years there was so much opposition from his congregation that 'pewholders' locked their pews, stayed away, an...

It is amazing to discover the people that God chooses. It usually is the people others pass over. That was certainly true for David when Samuel came to anoint one of Jesse's sons to become the next king; even his father didn’t bother to have David stand before the prophet. God generally chooses the weak and the nobodies of our world to manifest his grace, glory, and power. Kent Huges poi...

Many of us have heard the Christmas Story of Jesus, born to a virgin named Mary, two thousand years ago. That first Christmas night, while shepherds were watching over their flocks, they had an angelic visitation announcing the birth of the Messiah, the Christ. Born in the little town of Bethlehem, they would find him in a manger and off they ran to see this wondrous birth. In Matthew's ...

The first Christmas did not happen in a vacuum. We do not understand the need for the Christmas story simply from the birth of Christ.  We need to go to the beginning of the human story to really understand why God, in the person of Jesus Christ, had to come to earth. What necessitated the need for God to become a Man, live a sinless life and die a cruel death? The Bible states that we, ...

Years ago, when Patty and I first came to Red Deer with our newborn daughter, Andrea, the church was in its earliest beginnings. That was over 41 years ago. After witnessing the church's amazing growth over 10 years, we resigned and moved to Seattle, Washington. Three years later, we were confronted with a very agonizing and significant decision that affected not only our lives but also ...

The context for C. S. Lewis’ book, “Mere Christianity,” was drawn from a series of wartime BBC broadcasts on the Christian faith in which he spoke on the problems of suffering, pain, and evil from 1942 to 1944. You can then imagine when, in one broadcast, Lewis spoke on the issue of forgiveness. The book was published ten years later, in 1952. During WW2, 800,000 Londoners lost their hom...

We should never be surprised when our good intentions are misconstrued and cast in a negative light. We can also expect that in serving others, there will come moments of misunderstanding and unwarranted criticism. In teaching a course on Nehemiah, I was reminded of this very thing. Nehemiah was confronted by those opposed to God’s purposes for His people.

When Sanballat the Horonite and...