GARDEN CHURCH Podcast

Pastor Bill continues our series "Emotionally Healthy Spirituality" by talking about "generational sins." It doesn't matter if we come from a healthy or a dysfunctional family, but we adopt sins from our families. Jesus gives a model on how to be emotionally healthy apart from our family of origin, but it doesn't come from ignoring our upbringing, but allowing God to redeem it.

We are not just a body, nor are we just a spirit. We are souls, a product of both spirit and body. Each soul is made of five parts: spiritual, social, intellectual, physical, and emotional. This is a core understanding as Pastor Bill begins our newest series, Practicing the Way of Jesus: Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, which focuses on the emotional aspect of being truly human. As he pulls from Pete Scazerro's book Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, Bill teaches us the necessity of truly dealing with our emotions and the journey of connecting them to our behavior. Once we look beneath the surface, we can then take the next step in our discipleship with Jesus.

How does it look like for disciples of Jesus to live in the 21st century? We can easily burn out trying to keep up with the Joneses and lose our identities as children of God in the midst of it. Guest Speaker, Dave Lomas, teaches us how we can match our hearts and minds to Jesus by just leaning back. This is a key journey for us to take so that we can take the essential steps to be with Jesus, to become like Jesus, and do what Jesus did.

t is getting more and more difficult to be a follower of Jesus in our current culture. The system that we are currently living in is designed for disciples to fail. If left unchecked, we can easily get overwhelmed and discouraged to even continue down the path to holiness, spiritual maturity, and purity. Listen as Pastor Darren gives us a call to respond to this time by praying and fasting.

Out of all of Jesus' ministry, the disciples asked Jesus to teach them one thing, "teach us to pray." The church has identified this teaching as the Lord's Prayer. Pastor Darren began an analysis of the Lord's Prayer last week and was joined by Michael Petrila this week as they co-taught the rest of the Lord's Prayer. We learned why it is so important to adopt the template that Jesus lays out, and how it not only forms our prayer life but it forms our spiritual journey with God.

Pastor Darren continues our series Practicing the Way of Jesus: Prayer by dissecting the Lord’s Prayer. The more we understand the template of the Lord’s Prayer, the more vibrant our prayer lives will be. Join us as we dive into prayer, in order to get to know the heart of the Father.

For Father's Day we had our friend Pastor Chris Weinand speak on the role of a father in a child's life. Children experience the truth of the Lord's Prayer and the picture of the Father in heaven by the reality experienced by a father's parenting. This is also a call for us to reshape and acknowledge the false realities we may have experience from the parenting that we have received. As we pray the Lord's Prayer, let us reshape our view of the Father, and reshape our parenting as mothers and fathers.

We are entering back into our Practicing the Way of Jesus series, and we are starting with the discipline of prayer. However, before we start dissecting the why and how we pray, Pastor Bill answered one of the primary questions about prayer, "what about unanswered prayer?" We may get constantly discouraged about prayer because of prayers that do not get answered, but the truth is that our prayers do get answered just not how we usually expect them to.

"Here as in Heaven." For more information visit : garden.church

This Sunday we had a guest speaker, Todd Proctor, who led us through Acts. Todd observed three stories of how God works through the church in unexpected people, in unexpected ways, in unexpected places. This is crucial because the stories in Acts are precursors to the stories that we are now invited to participate in, presently.