Journey Of Life Lutheran Church

This is the money sermon. Learn how the Bible says you should think about your money.

Continuing a summer-long series on stewardship, Pastor John walks us through scriptures that demonstrate God's first desire for his community is love. We live in and grow in that love by living in and growing in the love God has shown for us by Jesus' death and resurrection.

In this episode, Dig Deeper with Pastor John into some aspects of Christian community, including love as the centerpiece, care for the poor, and care for the environment.

Proverbs 4:23 tells us, "Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life." (NIV) Our "hearts" are our inner life -- our thoughts, feelings and ways of looking at our lives. In this edition of Dig Deeper, pastor John starts with Sunday's lessons on stewarding our hearts (taken from the Parable of the Sower) and explores four vital habits Christians need to steward their hearts.

Who teaches whom? What about corporal punishment? How do we teach the next generation? In this half-hour Bible study, Pastor John walks through many of the topics that come up with we think about the fact that we are stewards of the next generation. It is our responsibility to prepare them for life... and to steward subsequent generations. The core idea is of discipleship, raising the next generation to place their hope in God and remember his wonderful works.

This is an in-the-office recording of the sermon preached at Journey of Life Lutheran Church in Orlando, Florida on Sunday, July 6, 2014. The video is of the PowerPoint slides that accompany the sermon.

We are stewards of all that comes our way, including the conflict. Learn from this presentation how to handle conflict God's way.

We continue our "Summer of Stewardship" series, As stewards of our bodies, we care for our bodies not as our own, but as those for whom Christ died and rose again. The decisions we make about how to care for our bodies, what to put into them, etc., grow out of our love for God and our desire to be ready to serve others in love in Jesus' name.

Continuing our "Summer of Stewardship" series, As stewards of our bodies, we care for our bodies not as our own, but as those for whom Christ died and rose again. The decisions we make about how to care for our bodies, what to put into them, etc., grow out of our love for God.

Explore the Pentecost episode and contemplate how the Holy Spirit is one of several gifts that God gives us to enable us to be good stewards of all that he has placed into our hands.

In this episode of Dig Deeper, we begin a fourteen week series on stewardship. We start with the Jesus' ascension at which point he hands off the ministry to his disciples. Then we go back to Genesis and on through the New Testament noticing how God has really given us responsibility for the earth and all the situations of our lives.

This is the first week of our summer series: "The Summer of Stewardship." Stewardship is so much bigger than what you do with your money. It is the way you view your entire life. In this sermon, Pastor John reminds us from Genesis to the New Testament that God really has handed responsibility to us.

This sermon continues Pastor John's series on Psalm 23 as we contemplate verse 4: "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me." We experience many kinds of deaths in our lives, and God walks through them with us.

The underlying assumption in the idea of restoration is that there was an originally beautiful/wonderful/excellent thing that has somehow degraded from its original condition. That is humanity. Humans are not by nature garbage. Humanity is the pinnacle of God's loving creation. This makes a huge difference in how we see others and how we see ourselves.

This sermon begins a reflective Lenten series on Psalm 23. As part of this message, Pastor John encourages people to try the ancient practice of meditation and includes some of the modern scientific studies documenting the positive effects of meditation including lower pain/inflammation response and lower blood pressure without medication (or lowering your dose if you are on blood pressure meds). The guided meditation audio files are available on our web site: www.journeyoflife.org. If you want to see the whole service, that is uploaded as a separate file on our YouTube channel.

Love your enemies and pray for people who are persecuting you. If you love people who love you, big deal! Even crooks do that! If you have kind words only for those who have kind words for you, big deal! EVERYONE does that! Be different -- Jesus of Nazareth (Pastor John's paraphrase of the Matthew 5:43-48). Experience this sermon on Jesus preaching love for all. How do you do that? Where do you get the power? Find out here.

In what must have looked like ultimate chutzpah to the older scribes, Jesus tells his listeners, "You have heard it said... but I say!" Who is this Jesus to speak like that about the traditions that have been handed down from generation to generation?? And what exactly did he say? Get a new word from Jesus in this uplifting sermon from Pastor John at Journey of Life Lutheran Church in Orlando, Florida

Jesus said that the Law of God stands! Our hearts should be filled with life-changing gratitude to Jesus for fulfilling the Law on our behalf, so that in him we are right with God. If we relax God's Law, we diminish God's grace. Contemplate this with Pastor John as we consider that "Jesus Is... the Fulfiller of the Law."

The world is a crazy, mysterious place. Why do we exist? Why do we ask why we exist? Jesus is God's light of revelation into the darkness of our lives. What is God like? How does God think about us? Jesus is the answer. The message was not recorded last Sunday. The link below is for the printed material included with the bulletin this week.

Jesus told several fishermen that if they followed him, he would make them fishers of men. In this passage, we see Jesus calling all of us to use our vocation for kingdom purposes and that replication is part of God's design for the kingdom. Hear more from Pastor John in this encouraging message.