NewLife Living presents the bible teaching of Pastor Alan Brooks of NewLife church in Rio Rancho, NM, a group of God’s people seeking to know Jesus and to make Him known.
Through His people and by the Holy Spirit, God's kingdom grows and advances. God has a message to communicate and a people to develop. He will accomplish it from start to finish and the fruitful result will be entirely to His credit and glory. Today, we continue to learn and apply what we see God doing all along, since the beginning of the Church.
God is doing a multi-faceted work through Peter's first sermon that has ripple effects to us today. He is continuing the work and ministry of Jesus the Messiah, through the church and is accomplishing it in the same way He did through the Holy Spirit in Jesus' life and actions. God is further developing and equipping His people for the work of ministry. Today we are participants in receiving Jesus through faith as well as undergoing development and growth to become more like Him.
After the supernatural outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles, Peter stands and gives the church's first recorded sermon. In part one we examine how Peter explains the supernatural effects the crowd has witnessed by referring to a widely known Old Testament prophecy and how he calls them to account for their actions and disbelief in the person of Jesus.
In the United States the fourth of July celebrates our nation's freedom from England's governmental control, but what is freedom? Talk to enough people and you come to realize it means different things to different people. And sometimes one person's pursuit of freedom can result in the loss of another's freedom. In this teaching rather than looking to man for an answer to the question we will look to God for His understanding of freedom.
God wants to do more. The first disciples were given both the internal presence of the Holy Spirit as well as the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. Pentecost became the fulfilled Jewish feast which launched a bunch of rag-tag followers of Jesus and transformed them into the bold and courageous first generation of the Church, a group that has exploded into a world-changing force because of God's fueling and equipping.
In the second half of Acts chapter one we find the Apostles waiting for the promise of the Father and deciding to replace Judas in the aftermath of His betrayal of Jesus. How they wait and ultimately make decisions are insightful and practical to our modern personal lives.
Psalm 23 is one of the most well-known and repeated passages in the Bible. In this teaching we will see how these praises shine a light of reflection on our human soul and what we can do to maintain a healthy one.
In seeking a biblical understanding of who and what the church is there is no better place than the book of Acts. This message launches our verse by verse study of the NT book sometimes called the Acts of the Apostles. This first installment looks at some important instructions that Jesus gave His apostles in building His church in preparation for His coming Kingdom.
In our culture, we have so much at our fingertips. Sometimes that is a tremendous blessing and other times those resources are the very things hindering our spiritual growth and effectiveness in the Kingdom of God. How do we rely on God and use stuff, while not relying on stuff and using God? This will be a key to our relationship with God, personal growth and effectiveness as a church community.
If we have received Jesus and believe in His name, we are now children of God! Yet, we can suppress what He wants to do in our lives. This week we will discover what it means to quench the Spirit and even what it means for a person to "blaspheme" the Holy Spirit. Growing in awareness of Him will allow us to deepen and grow in our relationship with the Holy Spirit.
