Better News Podcast Ricky Alcantar - Cross of Grace Church

In the most horrible times of your life, you may have wondered where is God? He couldn't possibly be watching us go through misery and be okay with it, right? Not like ourselves, His commitment never wavers. We will go through turmoil but He promises to be with us. With that kind of hope, we can go on. As we’ll hear in today’s teaching, God's commitment to His people is steadfast. They can't see beyond their current circumstances but God knows the plans He has for them and He will be there.

Giving your life to Jesus doesn't immediately make all your problems disappear. In fact, you may face new ones. Fully breaking away from our old lives is not an easy transition. As we’ll hear today from Exodus, God’s people were so fixated on the uncertainty of being in the desert that they started to look back on their lives in slavery as being better. When we begin to look back on our days without the Lord as having been easier, we need to remember the end game of that path and focus on renewed life in Him.

Throughout our lives, we’ll experience battles great and small but none are so vital as the one for our souls. For the unbeliever, God is fighting every moment to draw you near, for the believer that hard-fought struggle has been won. As Pastor Ricky will remind us in this study in Exodus that our bondage to sin has been broken just as the children of Israel were free from slavery in Egypt. The effects of sin still remain though but none as blinding and oppressive as those chains that bind unbelievers.

Our God is a fighter. We don't often think of Him that way but He's in a battle for us constantly. We have the greatest warrior on our side yet we still like to try and control the many universes we've created around ourselves. In today's teaching we’ll discover a better way. We can be still while God blazes forward on our behalf. When God's people were let out of Israel they sought to know what was coming next. They saw their enemies and wanted to take action to protect themselves but all the while God went before them.

When you gather to celebrate a person's birthday, it's a special time to acknowledge their place in everyone’s heart. But just because you have a party one day a year doesn't mean you forget them the other 364 days. Gathering together to worship and honor God on a regular basis is one way that we can remember God's place in our lives. Sometimes we may struggle and having fellow believers to give you a boost and remind you of all He’s done can help you to regain your focus on what matters.

The Word of the Lord should permeate our lives. The birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus shouldn't be remembered once a year but be ever-present.