The Power of Habit

/
The Power of Habit

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about habits. This direction began with a podcast—The Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast. On his podcast, Pastor Craig Groeschel interviewed James Clear, author of Atomic Habits. Originally I listened to the podcast simply as a way to grow in my leadership. However, that podcast has taken me on a journey researching and investigating the power of habit.

After listening to this podcast, I picked up Clear’s book and quickly read it. I then picked up another book, Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit and now I’m reading one more—Drew Dyck’s Your Future Self Will Thank You. After engaging all of these resources, my thinking shifted from leadership to spiritual growth. This shift in thinking led me to even adjust Vintage Church’s summer preaching series. Why this shift?

Read More

It's Time to SHIFT!

/

As we celebrated our 10th birthday as a church family yesterday, Pastor Dustin challenged us to anticipate our future. What are you anticipating God to do in your life, in our church, in our city, in our world?

Anticipation should bring us to prayer for the future.

This Sunday, we will be kicking off a new series, SHIFT, where we will look at the what Jesus has to say about our priorities—specifically our relationships, time, and money. A major focus of this series will be prayer and fasting. If we are anticipating God to move, we should be hitting our knees in prayer for that future! We’re going to rally together as a church family to pray for the next four Wednesday mornings from 6–7a. We will also be challenging our church to fast on these Wednesdays.

We hope you’ll join us in prayer and fasting as we look to SHIFT for our future!

Prayer & Fasting Resources

We have several resources on our website available for you to utilize as you consider joining us in this season of prayer and fasting. Check them out using the links below.

Replicate Response: Fast Purposefully

/
Replicate Response: Fast Purposefully

Fasting is one way of us showing God that we value His presence more than anything else in our lives. Personally, fasting is a spiritual discipline that I have always struggled with the most, but I’m honestly not surprised by that, because fasting is the action of giving up something, usually food, and clinging to God when we crave it. Fasting is not natural to us because we love our food and possessions! It goes against the flow of what our culture shows us. Fasting pushes against the cravings of our flesh and the world, and it compels us to press into and lean into God more than anything.

Read More

Replicate Response: Pray Earnestly

/
Replicate Response: Pray Earnestly

Prayer is our direct communication to God! I am still amazed at the reality that God grants me direct access to Him through prayer. It is truly amazing! Those of us who are His children and have given our lives to Him, have unlimited availability to talk to God. In our Western culture, we often take this for granted because life can be so busy and overwhelming. We also have so much at our fingertips and become easily distracted. The truth is, prayer should not just be something that we do when life is not going well or when tragedy hits. Prayer should be constant and consistent in our lives, no matter the circumstance we find ourselves in.

Read More

Jesus Can Relate

/
Jesus Can Relate

Prayer is one of the most foundational disciplines and principles of the Christian life. Although we know that we should pray and need to pray, we can often be intimidated and insecure in our prayers. Thoughts come across our mind that God is distant from us or that God is too big and busy to listen to our personal prayers. Does God really pay attention and take note of our needs? Can he really relate to our situation? In this text, the author of Hebrews shares some great encouragement and insight—God is not far from us, but he is very near. Jesus was fully God, yet fully man. Because of this truth, we can be assured that Jesus had experiences, struggles, and situations in life, just like we do. In fact, in Matthew 26:36–46, Jesus earnestly prays to God the Father as he was approaching his death: “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done.” Jesus did not necessarily like his circumstances, or even want to walk through it, but he knew that it had to be done, and he sought out God to be his refuge in time of need.

Read More

The Position of Prayer

/
The Position of Prayer

These passages of Scripture take place during Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. He stands on a mountain, and begins to teach people the truths of his gospel, explaining the Beatitudes, how to be salt and light in a dark world, fulfilling the law, dealing with anger, fighting against lust, resisting divorce, loving your enemies, and giving to the needy. Jesus covers some very difficult and relevant topics that hit the issues of that time period, and even today. He already knows what we struggle with, and what we WILL struggle with. Pride is one of these things. Jesus refers to the discipline of prayer, and how Christians are to approach prayer. In this section of Scripture, Jesus models and teaches how we are to pray, and calls it “The Lord’s Prayer.” He teaches against approaching prayer in a prideful way, as the hypocrites and Gentiles do, but rather approaching prayer in a humble and desperate way.

Read More

Urgent Prayer Request from Pastor Rob

/
Urgent Prayer Request from Pastor Rob

I can’t believe that we’re home. On the one hand, the last five weeks went by way too fast for my family. We had a blast resting, playing, traveling, reading, and turning off. We were so blessed to make some lifelong memories. On the other hand, the last five weeks went by real slow. We really missed our friends and family in NOLA and couldn’t wait to get back. This break was never about fleeing a life that we hate. Instead it was about retreating from a world that we love and are honored to serve so that we can continue to walk faithfully in this call. 

Read More

Experiencing Transformation through Prayer

/
Experiencing Transformation through Prayer

On Sunday, we continued our vGroups series, looking at how vGroups exist for transformation. If you missed the sermon, you can check it out here. We talked about how transformation ultimately comes through two means: Scripture and prayer. Yesterday, we noted the importance of being in the Word both individually as well as communally. You can find that blog post here. 

Read More