Grace Chapel Knoxville Sermons GraceChapelKnoxville

This week we began the Advent season focused on the Hope we have in Jesus. The hope that is offered by the Lord is meant to comfort us, give us a clear path forward, and remind us to rely on Him and His promises not our own strength. May we find hope in this season, and be intentional to encourage one another by sharing the hope we have been given.

Today Pastor Jonathan teaches us about thanksgiving and worship. We take a fresh look at Psalm 100 and we see that every act of worship and thanksgiving is a response to the God who first loved us. He always initiates and we respond.

As humans, we are born with a finite amount of time and individual gifts and talents. It is important for us to identify our gifts and talents and also to steward them well. This week, by looking at the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000, we learned about the importance of rest, tending opportunities to love well, looking to Jesus for solutions, and participating in the miracle that God is doing in and around us. We may feel inadequate, but he doesn’t measure us by how much we have; we are measured by how we use it. If we take our talents to Him, he is the great multiplier and can do things that we cannot even ask or imagine.

This week we finished up our exploration of the spiritual gifts by focusing on the gift of speaking in tongues and interpretation of tongues. While often a controversial topic, the scripture encourages us to seek this gift and gives clear direction on how to handle it in a healthy way that encourages and builds us up individually and corporately. May we always remember that God himself is the gift. Therefore we grow in Him as we cultivate a relationship with the Holy Spirit, we walk in love with one another, and we eagerly desire and pursue the spiritual gifts for the purpose of building up the church.

This week we are continuing our exploration of the Spiritual Gifts as we work through Romans 12 and 1st Corinthians 12. We pray you are encouraged and the whole body is built up, as you discover, use, and grow in the gifts that the Holy Spirit so graciously imparts into our lives.

This week we begin a new section in our series as we continue learning how to operate in love to build up the Body of Christ. We will spend the next several weeks exploring the spiritual gifts. Let’s respond as Paul encourages us in his 1st letter to the Corinthian church, not to be ignorant of these gifts, but open to the Spirit of God and how he chooses to equip us so that we may walk in His Power, motivated by His Love, in order to build up and encourage others!