Steve Fry Podcast

The starting point for Christian community is not our need for relationships or connection; it is our common loyalty to Jesus.  The Lord has chosen to express His identity on the earth through The Church. We can only flourish as the Body of Christ when we rest in our intimacy with Jesus and let the Holy Spirit continually show us Jesus’ beauty.

The intensity of God’s desire for you is perhaps the greatest manifestation of His beauty. Jesus’ death on the cross is the greatest display of God’s desire for you ever given!  The Cross actually abolishes all sense of personal shame and unworthiness, because if God desired you this much to have already died for you, holding on to shame and unworthiness is totally absurd.

You don’t need to fight for your freedom if you know Christ is holding everything together. In fact, since you know Christ is holding everything together, you can focus on contending for righteousness. America is unique, there is a record of evangelical shaping. The more Christian we are as a nation the more we should want people of other faiths to come so we can demonstrate just how amazing Christ and His gospel is!

We get to live from abundance, rather than striving for abundance. Abundance is reflecting the beauty of the Lord though every circumstance that He is controlling anyway. God’s love is what makes Him beautiful and that love creates peace and joy. His peace and joy equals life!

Dependence on God is not a feeling of trust.. it is an act of abandonment to God. His beauty is found at the edge of our complete dependence. That is where we find our purpose and our calling- to behold God’s beauty and to reflect God’s beauty.

When Jesus died on the cross, God made a way for us to be restored to relationship with Him. We don’t have to rely on ourselves, we can rely on Him, we can trust in Him! By trusting in what Jesus did and surrendering our life to Him, the power of self is broken and we can discover our identity in Christ! A sermon by Steve Fry. 

Christian maturity is not being weaned off of dependence on God; it is an ever increasing dependence on God! We aren’t called to manage our burdens better; but rather quickly and repeatedly we cast our burdens on Jesus. A sermon by Steve Fry.

We will only know joy in prayer when we really believe that God is sovereign. If we are in Christ, then our prayer does not come from our attempts to persevere, but our enjoyment of his presence.

Obedience is meant to be motivated by the joy of God’s closeness, rather than an obligation to comply with God’s commands.  Yielding to His Spirit results in the rhythms of contentment: a life of joy and peace. We yielded to God’s initiative when we were first saved; now we just keep yielding to the Holy Spirit’s initiative in us as we continue to be saved!

When we see our purpose as joining The Father in bringing everything under The Headship of Christ, we enter into the current of God’s love and discover the most fulfilling life possible.  We bring things under the headship of Christ by making everything an expression of intimacy to Jesus.  If God’s purpose and mission becomes our purpose and mission we will have strong, sustainable joy. 

We know that we love God because He first loved us but we also chose God, because He first chose us.  To be chosen is to live perpetually in and under God’s favor. Living truly under God’s favor is not a free pass to disregard sin; but it does transform the motivation of why we confess and repent of sin.

“In-Christ-Intimacy” is a new identity- your old condition was insecurity, your new condition is SECURITY. Your old condition was lost, your new condition is FOUND.  Intimacy begins with security. We need to understand our union with Christ to truly grasp the security we are meant to know in our relationship with God.

Intimacy is our greatest need- a relationship where we can be vulnerable, honest, and transparent. Our ‘in-Christ-intimacy’ is the key to living a blessed life, staying obedient, experiencing healthy church, and engaging the mission of The Gospel with joy. Sermon by Steve Fry. 

The aim of the Holy Spirit is to make us like Jesus. We need to take a good long look at God’s original design and decide if we will allow the Holy Spirit to align us to that. When we give place to the life of Jesus within us we are living out our purpose! 

Our life is no longer our own, we belong to Christ. Putting the past behind us we press on toward the prize which is experiencing Christ living His life through us. This fulfills our greatest longing; intimacy with God. 

Prayer is the doorway to encouraging yourself, it’s your escape hatch from the prison of impossibility. Prayer is the evidence you have joyously abandoned your life to Christ. God wants us to know how to persevere with Him, so that we can persevere through every hardship and we do this by bringing everything to Him in prayer.

Christ’s body is an ecosystem of Jesus followers who function as a community together. Being in the Body of Christ is why love is a starting point, not just a character goal. Being the body of Jesus is our core mission.

As a new creation in Christ, we have a new heart. That new heart operates from an environment of love - Jesus in us! Love is your new condition; you don't work at it, but instead receive it. Rather than seeing loving others as an outcome of our efforts, see love as our permanent starting point, our source. Love in this sense is not a discipline, it is freedom from self - it's all from our source - Jesus, and that sets us free to experience joy in loving others! 

We gather together to be renewed in Christ’s love, we experience that love together in community, and this results in a joy that frees us to reach out to people far from God and invite them in. Mission is meant to flow from the joy of loving one another. John 13:35- “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Sermon by Steve Fry.

One of life's biggest challenges is dealing with people. especially when they have attitudes and behaviors that are irritating and obnoxious. But Jesus gives us a model of how to handle relationships when they are difficult. Knowing how to yield to the Spirit when faced with "people stuff" is one of the most practical ways we experience the Holy Spirit's power.