Tara Lee Davis's Podcast

Send us a textEveryone loves a good story!  But how do we live our best stories, especially when our lives are full of disappointment, pain, and heartache?  Is there more to our story than just our accomplishments and failures?  How can we live lives that are marked by Jesus and moved by love?  One sinful woman shows us how, and what appears to be an extreme waste to some ends up being extravagant love for One.

Send us a textWhat is God saying in this season?  The pandemic, the political divisions, the violence, the quarantines and our lives completely upended as we knew them, is God speaking still?  Does God's still, small voice speak louder than the screaming of the world in which we live?  And why does it matter?  What if in missing God's whisper we miss out on passing on a legacy to the next generation?

Send us a textWhen do we grow from emotional experiences with God to actual encounters with God?  When do we move from throw up to growing up?  When do we stop wasting our lives magnifying and instead put Jesus on display?  Is the Gospel partial to us and our own shortcomings, or is it for all?  What do our hearts reflect about us?  Jonah not only gets swallowed by a large fish for disobeying, but after surviving being thrown up by that same large fish, we discover that his heart is still far from God, even though on his second chance he obeyed.  God is asking for all of us, our complete hearts.  Obedience without a heart change is merely rule following.

Send us a textIn the midst of a pandemic and a quarantine that never seemed to end, we all found ourselves in the midst of a storm.  What if the storms of life were meant to be danced in instead of sheltered from?  How should we respond when faced with adversity?  How does God respond to us and our endless questioning?  While it's true that storms bring destruction, they also bring great growth when received with open hands rather than resisted with closed fists.

Send us a textJesus gave His followers a lot of authority, but what exactly does that look like and mean for us today?  Elijah the prophet understood what it meant to stand and operate in God-given authority, and even though he stood alone, he used his God-given authority to put God on display and turn the hearts of people back to God.

Send us a textThe spies were sent into the land, which God has promised them in advance, for 40 days to investigate.  10 spies came back talking of the giants that inhabited the land, 2 spies came back saying that the land was theirs to take and that anything was possible because God was with them.  Because of their murmuring, complaining, groaning and grumbling, the Lord was angry and turned them back into their wilderness where they would wander for 40 years until every single of them died off.  What is louder to God, our worship and praise or our grumblings and complaining?  Was it the report that our lives speak of?  Do we spur others on in faith or cause them to shrink back in unbelief?  Yes, the grapes are big.  Yes, the giants are bigger.  But God is greater even still.  How sad it would be if we, just like the Israelites, forgot all that God has done for us and wasted the rest of our lives wandering aimlessly in the wilderness waiting to die, all because we didn't take God at His Word.

Send us a textGod has made it clear through His Word that His ways are not our ways, His thoughts not our thoughts.  And yet many of us get stuck trying to understand what He is doing, rather than just yielding.  God, much like our faith, cannot be measured.  But when His plan goes one way and ours run perpendicular to that, we are left with the ultimate reminder, the cross.  And it is the cross of Jesus Christ that reminds us that we can fully trust and rest in who He is, especially when we don't understand.  God is good, God is faithful, there is hope.  He, in fact, is really good and completely worthy of trusting...unlike us.

Send us a textGod never promised to bring us out of the fire, but He did promise to walk with us through the fire.  And how you and I choose to walk through the difficulties of life can either point others to Jesus and make much of Him, or we can waste that opportunity.  We have been called and chosen to suffer well, Christ did.  The fire of life is a gift; it purifies, it refines, it makes us more like Jesus.  We are better in the fire, with God at our sides, than out of the fire without Him.  Our miracle is in the fire.

Send us a textLiving from a place of insecurity limits me to living only in and through and for myself.  Living in confidence allows us to live fully confident in who God is, and in who He has called us to be.  We live our best lives when we live in confidence, yet it's something we all struggle with in the everyday mundane of our lives.  And yet there was one, David, an overlooked shepherd boy, who when living with confidence overcame the odds stacked against him and rewrote the history books forever with the slaying of a giant!  Maybe instead of trying to live really big lives rooted in insecurity and ending up exhausted and confused, you and I could live everyday simple lives rooted in Godfidence, and in so doing be used by God to rewrite the history books for His fame and honor!

Send us a textWhy do we waste so much of our lives allowing others to define us?  Only the Creator has the power and authority to define us as created beings.  I AM was the name of a very holy God, long before it was a label we used to define ourselves.  When we misspeak of ourselves, we not only speak what is not true but we are also speaking those same things of the very One who created us.  So who are we, then?  As long as we don't have a firm grasp on who we truly are, we will never live the life that God created and destined for us to live!

Send us a textIf contras is the "difference of degree of difference between the lightest and darkest parts of a picture," then what is the difference between life and death itself?  The Bible is actually a story of contrast, highlighting the epic adventure of a good God who pursues evil man with the light of His love in the midst of the darkness and we find ourselves in the middle of this story, but we get to choose how it plays out for us.

Send us a textWhy does God pursue us?  Is He a control freak?  Are we mere puppets on strings?  Is following a Jesus about a list of do's and dont's, or is there more?  God simply wants a relationship with each of us, and relationship trumps religion every single time.  Religion shuts doors while relationship opens them.  In the story of the prodigal son, we see the contrast of religion and relationship and what set free was relationship.

Send us a textHow do you spend your life?  Every human on the planet has the same amount of time and access to that time/ 365 days in a year, 24 hours in a day, yet 1 life to live.  Are you wasting your life building your own sandcastle kingdom?  Or are you living a life that will live beyond your human years on this tiny blue dot we find ourselves spinning on?

Send us a textWhen we encounter God and we find ourselves forever wrecked, how do we maintain that heart change?  How do we ensure that it wasn't just a camp buzz, conference high, or believe the lie that nothing actually changed?  When I struggle with sin that I once repented of, did Jesus not forgive me or set me free?  How do we go home different and truly walk this thing out?

Send us a textAs believers, what's the first thing that we ask when the storm hits?  Where is God?  Why has He left me?  Is He not listening to my cries for help?  Could it be that our questioning of Jesus, especially in the midst of hard times, points to a deeper issue that we don't fully know who He is?  All throughout Scripture, we see story after story of those who have found Jesus right in the middle of their mess, even when they themselves were a hot mess.

Send us a textCould it be that our lives are so consumed with self and what others think of us that we are missing out on the bigger picture of God using us to display His glory?  Have we exchanged the glory of God for the cheap praise of man?  Gideon proves to us that when we believe the truth of who God says we are, then God can rewrite the history books for His glory, fame, and honor.

Send us a textWhat does Resurrection Sunday mean for us as believers?  Is there more to it than "Dead Jesus, quiet Jesus, alive Jesus, hooray"!?  The exact life and death and resurrection of Jesus was actually a blueprint for you and I and yet, we often want the resurrection power life without first dying to self.  There could be no empty tomb without first a crucifixion.  Only in the dying of ourselves and sinful, selfish ways will we be resurrected with Christ and find the newness and abundance of life that we were designed for!

Send us a textIf God's Word doesn't return void and is powerful and active, then why do we often not see good fruit growing in our lives?  We often waste incredible seeds of truth that are planted in our hearts not because it's too high and lofty or something that is unattainable for us to grasp, but simply because the soil of our hearts is hard instead of being good soil.

Send us a textGod created each of us to live legendary lives; lives that are full and rich, far bigger than anything we could ever hope for or imagine.  What if our tiny stories of pain and brokenness were actually apart of something much bigger that we can't always see and understand?  We will never live out the part we have to play in this big story if we don't understand the Story that's being written and you cannot possibly understand the Story when you don't know the Author.  Because there are going to be chapters of your story that are hard and painful, confusing at best.....but when you know the Author, you can point back to their heart and trust that they are writing something far better than you ever could.  So what does a wee little man and Whataburger wrappers have anything to do with it?  Everything, because it's all a part of knowing the Author of our stories.

Send us a textJesus coming to our earth to be born as a baby reminds us of the constant tension we face between the reality of our world as we know it and the truth of God's Word and yet in the midst of that tension, Christ still chose to come...Immanuel, God with us.