Steven Furtick's Blog, page 59

The Dangerous Distractions of Christmas

It is so easy to get lost in the busyness of the holidays. Not only do we have to manage the responsibilities of our jobs and our families, but we have the added pressure of traveling, cooking, buying gifts, attending parties, and trying to keep up with everyone around us. None of these are bad things necessarily. But the enemy doesn’t always need to use something bad to keep us from the presence of God. In this clip from our series I Won’t Survive the Holidays Pastor Steven explains how even the good things can become bad when the enemy uses them to distract us from the best thing – Jesus.

Elevation Worship Free Resources

On January 14, 2014, Elevation Worship will release their sixth album, “Only King Forever.” And together with our video team, we’ve been able to make many helpful resources available for free. At ElevationWorship.com, you can find live videos, lyrics, chord charts, tutorial videos, loops, and more to help equip you in learning and leading many of these new songs. These tutorials cover a wide range – from a full worship band to just a simple acoustic guitar, providing many types of worship leaders the opportunity to share in these new songs. Click here to find out more.

Finding The Purpose In Our Ordinary

Many of us often find ourselves believing that we are too ordinary for God to use. We think working a normal job or being a stay-at-home mom takes us out of the running to receive God’s greater calling. We convince ourselves that God only uses missionaries or pastors or worship leaders to spread the Gospel and show Himself to the world. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. In this clip from the sermon series Do You Hear?, Pastor Steven teaches us that God can speak to us anywhere, at anytime, and He doesn’t wait for us to be great before He desires to use our lives greatly.

The Best Way to Survive Your Painful Seasons

The greatest seasons of faith in our lives don’t occur when we’re on the mountain top, when life is going as planned and God’s favor is most tangible. In reality, it’s when we’re in our lowest valley. When we push against our natural inclination to lock the doors of our heart and wait for winter to pass. It’s there where we learn to fight for our faith, battling our feelings and our circumstances, and allow God to work through our pain to draw us closer to Him. In part 3 of our series Times & Seasons, Pastor Steven teaches us a better way to weather the winter, making our painful seasons more productive for God’s glory.

Can we skip this scene?

There’s a reason we love movies about people overcoming adversity. A reason why we’ll sit through 100 minutes of depressing scenes for 2 minutes of payoff at the end.

It’s because those depressing scenes make the victory and the payoff at the end that much more meaningful. And possible. Without the adversity, there wouldn’t be much worth watching. Or worth cheering for when the adversity is conquered.

What’s interesting is that what we look for in movies we avoid at all costs in life. The life most of us would prefer is a movie no one would want to see. Including ourselves.

Here’s what I mean.

Have you ever found yourself facing a season of setback and challenge, thinking:

God, can we skip this scene?

If you have, you’re not alone.

Joseph would have said it while spending 13 years in slavery and prison.

The apostles would have said it when they were being persecuted for the gospel.

Even Jesus said it before the cross when He was in the garden of Gethsemane.

So it’s understandable to have this feeling. Who wants to go through hell? Who wants to go through adversity? It’s ok to watch on a screen. But who wants to go through it in their own lives?

Yet what we have to realize is that it’s these very moments that make the payoff we’re waiting for worth it. It’s these scenes that build character. That setup for the big breakthrough and climax.

It’s the scenes that we all want to skip that produce the endings we all want to experience.

It was Joseph’s time in slavery and prison that put him in a position to save his family and an entire nation.

It was the very persecution that the apostles would have wanted to skip that ended up being the catalyst for the rapid spread of the gospel.

It was the cross of Jesus that provided salvation for all who would believe.

Nothing of great worth comes at a low cost. The hardest scenes of your life are the necessary stepping stones to the greatest breakthroughs and victories of your life.

I know that doesn’t make them easy. I know you’d still like to skip them. But you can’t.

And it’s the scenes that you’d prefer to skip that God is using to orchestrate an ending you wouldn’t want to miss.

This entry was originally posted March 23rd, 2011.

The Only Guide We Will Ever Need

Most of us would just love for God to give step-by-step directions for our lives. Who to marry. Which job to take. What to do when we don’t know where to go next. But God is so much more than just someone to turn to for advice or direction. In this clip from Christmas at Elevation Pastor Steven explains that while God may not show us exactly where to go, He loves us enough to provide us with a perfect guide to follow – Jesus.

Elevation Creative: Family Seasons

Inevitably, in all our lives, we will experience seasons we wish we could skip. Seasons were we can’t help but to look with anticipation to the next chapter. But God did not create us to simply get through the challenges of life. He wants to draw us closer to Him and give Him glory, no matter how difficult our situation may be. In this video from our Creative Team, we are reminded about the dangers of constantly looking towards the next season when God has put us where we are today for a purpose.

When We Struggle Believing In A Savior We’ve Never Seen

Every Christian has at some point in their faith struggled in their belief in Jesus Christ as Savior. There are times when we just want proof Jesus exists. We want know that He really is the Son of God and that His salvation exists for us. And that’s ok.Thomas, one of Jesus’ own disciples, needed proof of Jesus’ resurrection. But real faith doesn’t walk by sight. So how do we reconcile our need for proof with a faith that we want to be real? In this clip from Uptown Christmas, Pastor Steven explains that to truly see and perceive Jesus, we have to look deeper than the surface.

How to Make the Most of the Time You Have

We when look back on our lives, it’s safe to say that none of us want to feel like we’ve wasted the time we’ve been given. We all want to live with purpose and meaning. We want to know what God wants us do and when He wants us to do it. So how do we figure that out before it’s too late? How do we avoid missing out on what God wants us to be a part of? In part two of our series Times and Seasons, Pastor Steven explains to us how time in scripture can teach us how God wants us to make the most of every moment we’ve been given.

100%

I told this story a few weeks ago during one of our worship experiences, but I thought it was something all of you could be encouraged by. Especially those of you facing difficult circumstances right now.

I’ve told the story of my grandfather before in different venues. Papa, as we called him, was one of the greatest men of God I’ve ever known. But he also experienced one of the greatest hardships I’ve ever seen. Papa watched his wife of over 50 years slowly lose her mind and body to Alzheimer’s. By the end, she started to literally scream curses and obscenities at him. But he handled it with more grace and faith than you can imagine. Regardless of grandmother’s condition, he would go every day to the nursing home and comb her hair and tell her she was beautiful until they would kick him out.

Papa died about eighteen months before Grandma passed away. The final scenes of their marriage were pitiful, really, from a purely earthly perspective. Healing never came. And it broke Papa’s heart. But still, surprisingly, every time you would ask Papa how he was doing, he’d always say the same thing: 100%.

As a kid, it always bothered me that he said that because I felt like it couldn’t be true. His health was getting worse. His wife’s health was getting much worse. And everything he loved in his life and worked to build in his life was going away.

It wasn’t until years later after he passed away that I finally understood why he could say it. I was reflecting and praying about it, about how he could say he was 100% at the worst time in his life. It still sounded like a lie. He wasn’t 100%. He wasn’t even 50%. He wasn’t even 10%.

But then I felt like the Lord spoke back to me a sentence that completely flipped my perspective: It depends on what you’re measuring.

If you’re measuring his circumstances, he’s not 100%. But if you’re measuring his confidence in Christ…If you’re measuring his hope in a future home in heaven and that one day all things will be made new…If you’re measuring the faithfulness of God towards him despite his circumstances, then he was 100% all of the time.

If you were to measure how any of us feel in any given moment, none of us could ever say 100%. Your status is going to change with the shifting sands of your circumstances. You’re going to have bad days. The carpet of your life is going to be ripped out from underneath you a few times in your life. And in those moments, the temptation is going to be to equate your condition with our circumstances.

Don’t.

I don’t know you. I don’t know the circumstances you’re facing. The pain you’re enduring. What I do know is that most of you would say you’re not 100%. In fact, you may think you’re in the single digits. But regardless of what you’re going through, I’d still say the same thing to you God said to me:

It depends on what you’re measuring.

Although it’s difficult, choose to see things with a new perspective. You’re 100%. Not because of your circumstances. But because of the fact that regardless of your circumstances, Christ is 100% with you and for you. 100% of the time.

This entry was originally August 04, 2011.