Steven Furtick's Blog, page 63

Elevation Creative: The Virtual Global Choir

The Church is not a place. It is not some building we go to for a few hours on Sunday. The Church is the global body of believers, joined together through the power of the Gospel. The Church is not limited by walls and is bigger than the boundaries of our preferences. And when we join together to collectively worship God, our unity is strengthened. To help visualize this, our Creative and Worship teams created the Virtual Global Choir. Using hundreds of user-submitted videos from around the globe, we joined them all together to help lead worship during our Code Orange Christmas worship experience.

What the Holy Spirit Is Not

The Holy Spirit is one of those things that we often have a hard time wrapping our heads around. What is it? And what does it look like? Is it in the good emotions we feel during church? Is it some sort of lucky rabbit’s foot we can pull out when times get rough? Or is it something more? In this clip from our series Ghost Stories, Pastor Steven explains that The Holy Spirit’s role is our lives as Christians is not just convenient guest appearances, but meant to be be something much greater.

Fight

Man. He was created in the image of God with a warrior’s heart. Designed to fight. But what does it mean to fight like a man? And how do we arm ourselves in order to defeat the demons that make strong men fall?

Today is the release of Fight, the new book by Pastor Craig Groeschel of LifeChurch.tv, one of our closest friends and a mentor in ministry to all of us at Elevation Church. In his book, Pastor Craig looks at what it takes to fight the battles we need to fight as men – the ones that determine the state of our hearts, the quality of our marriages, and the spiritual health of our families.

So be a man. Decide that this is the day to stand up and fight.

Click here to order your copy today.

When Our Past Makes Us Wary of Our Future

When we struggle with trusting God with our future, often times that skepticism finds it root in the experiences of our past. We have failed too many times. We have wasted too many previous opportunities. Our prayers weren’t answered the way we had hoped. So we guard ourselves, and build walls between us and God. But in this clip from our series Greater, Pastor Steven explains how God, in spite of our own disobedience, wandering, and disappointment, has the ability to overrule our greatest objection.

To close out our series I Don’t Know What I Believe, Pastor Levi Lusko of Fresh Life Church, shared with us his moving testimony of finding hope and purpose in the future, in the midst of painful, life-altering tragedy.

High Mountains and Low Valleys

High mountains can be just as difficult and challenging as low valleys.

Most people tend to associate difficult times in their lives with the idea of being in a valley. Maybe it’s a time of depression. Maybe you’ve lost your job or are struggling financially. Maybe your job performance is just suffering. Or maybe you have neglected your walk with God and now you feel distant.

And it’s true. These seasons are hard. Terribly hard. You don’t know if there will ever be a light at the end of the tunnel. And if it’s coming, it can’t come quickly enough.

But there’s a truth no one ever seems to mention: climbing the mountain is also challenging. The light at the end of the tunnel isn’t a mountaintop you suddenly arrive at with no work involved. It’s the base of the mountain that you now have to climb. And one that you’ll always be climbing.

The times of success in your life and the times when God is blessing you can be just as challenging as the times in the valley. Just in a different way, because now you’re going uphill. And even when you make it to the so-called mountaintop, it isn’t easy there either.

Here’s the truth we want to avoid at all costs:

It’s all hard.

The valleys and the mountains. The low points and getting to the high points and staying at the high points. In the valley you’re trying to survive. And in the mountains you’re trying to thrive. Neither is a walk in the park.

That’s not very encouraging. So why share it?

Because it’s reality. Because it confronts an inane line of thinking that many of us cling to: that life is going to one day get to the point where it’s easy. If that’s what we’re waiting for, we’re going to be waiting a long time.

The goal of life isn’t to make it to a point where we can breathe easy. It’s to get to heaven breathless. Tired because we’ve been faithfully and passionately following Jesus – through valleys and mountains.

So yes, it’s always hard. But our reward in the future makes it worth it. We’ll rest then. And we’ll push on now.

Besides, God is doing more in you and through you in your mountains and valleys than you can possibly imagine. That alone should give you joy. No matter where you’re at.

This entry was originally published March 16, 2011.

When Your Calling Gets Too Hard to Handle

As Christians, we pray that God would do great things for His glory through our lives. We want to make an impact, change the world, and leave a legacy for Christ. But what happens when our calling collides with real life? How do we handle opposition from others and our own internal struggles? And then what keeps us from becoming jaded about who God has called us to be? In this clip from our series INFIN8, Pastor Steven explains the danger in calling our situations like we see them, rather than trusting God and His divine perspective.

Elevation Creative: I Have Decided

At our lowest point, in the middle of our greatest suffering, we wonder how God could ever make something good out our mess. But God has a way of shaping our scars for our good and His glory. He is able to redeem what our enemy had intended to destroy us. In this video from our creative team, Worship Pastor Wade Joye describes the similar circumstances and inspirational origins behind one of the church’s most beloved hymns, “I Have Decided.”

Why We Don’t Have to Be Scared of God

Many of us have this perception of God, that He is sitting in heaven with a big bag of lightning bolts, ready to punish us anytime we do something wrong. But if that really were the case, we would have been dust before we even started. And there isn’t anything we could have done on our own to fix it. But Jesus did. He was the only one able to satisfy the wrath of God on our behalf. So if we have Christ, what do have left to be scared of? In this clip from our series Room 101, Pastor Steven explains the only thing we should ever be afraid of when it comes to our relationship with God.

How to Keep Your Confidence In Uncertain Circumstances

There is no guarantee that once we place our faith in the hands of Christ, that our lives will suddenly, magically improve. In fact, we often find that it’s quite the opposite. But as Christians, our lives fortunately are not dependent on the outcome of our circumstances, no matter how shaky and unstable they may become. And in part six of our series I Don’t Know What I Believe, Pastor Steven explains how to keep our confidence when our circumstances are under attack.

Saturation point

In chemistry, every substance has a saturation point where it can’t take anymore. Nothing has unlimited capacity. For example, a sponge can absorb only so much water. Eventually it will get to the point where it will not be able to soak up any more until it gets wrung out.

The same is true in our lives when it comes to absorbing teaching. That includes teaching from sermons, leadership conferences, podcasts, blogs, books, retreats, or any other venue you can think of.

Obviously I don’t mean that we have a point where we won’t be able to consume and remember new information. But I do believe there is a point when the teaching we’re receiving will stop having the positive transformational effects on our lives that we desire.

Not because we’re not hungry for biblical teaching. Or for that moment when someone says something that completely rearranges our conceptual paradigm. But because we’re not just as hungry to apply biblical teaching. We’re not just as hungry to rearrange our practical paradigm.

I think many Christians have reached their saturation point. Many of us just want to get fed. We want to collect the latest and best “deep” teaching we can get our hands on. The best quote that we can tweet.

What we really need is to wring out what we’re absorbing.

A mind-expanding thought doesn’t become a life-changing one until it becomes reality. The best teaching you’ve heard recently is the teaching you’re applying right now. Deep teaching is teaching that bores through your mind, into your heart, and out through your hands.

Don’t hear me wrong. I wholeheartedly believe in the idea of consuming as much good teaching as you can. I usually have 3-4 sermons running in the background of my office. I study the Bible intensely. I’m constantly reading new books.

So by all means, take in the best teaching you can. Listen to every podcast you can. Go to the best conferences. Read twenty blogs a day.

But whatever you take in, you’ve got to get it out. Or else you’ll soon run out of space to take in anything else.

This entry was originally published October 19, 2010.