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Everyone has their own opinion and idea about who God is. While there is much truth in the perceptions that man has about God, nothing holds as much weight as what God reveals to us about Himself. Though simple in understanding, there is great power and direction that comes from our understanding of who God has told us He is!

In life, so much seems out of our control. We can feel helpless, overwhelmed, and outmatched - until we turn our attention away from ourselves, and place it back on Christ. What is the key to accessing this elusive confidence, and what exactly does God require in order for us to acquire it

This is the hope of our time! That the generation of the church which is rising up in this era will be the generation that says, “Enough is enough with this wandering in the wilderness of our half obedience to God! We want to go over! We will face the giants in the land! We will believe the promise of God! We will be the ones who bring Christ to the world like this generation of the world has never seen before!”For us today, Canaan is Christlikeness! The wilderness life is the life of salvation but not surrender. It is a life of frustration, of missing something, but it is not the life we were saved to live! 

Do you want to know what childlike humility and faith are? Study Jesus. He was his Father’s Beloved Son. And there was nothing fake about him. When he laughed, when he wept, when he got angry, when he was frustrated, when he was in prayer, or when he was in a fight. He was his Father’s Beloved Son! It is the childlike heart that opens the Kingdom of God to all who truly want to enter it and live with God, in his plan, with Him at the center. The path of Christlike humility leads us into and forward in all the "Great" ways Jesus has given us in the gospel.

The city, and thereby the people, for whom God is in the midst, at the very center, wil be the people who are unmoved, unshaken by the fear, the offense culture, or the cynicism pervading our time. The cynical person is the faithless person, they have lost the capacity to trust; other people and ultimately God. What is cynicism and how do we overcome it by living with God at teh center of our life?

MBC kicks off Missions Conference 2025 with a great message from Brother Benji Dryden, Caribbean Field Director for Baptist International Missions Inc.

Knowing God is our greatest goal in all of life, ministry, and into eternity. The pathway to knowing God is learning to "Be Still," and that not only means letting go of hurry and busyness and opening space for God to fill our schedules, and ultimately our hearts, but it also means overcoming some barriers to knowing God, which all of us must contend with. One of those is the barricade of Forgiveness. We must learn to let go of offense, bitterness, and anger so that we can know God and by that be ready to carry out the gospel mission of making Him known.

“Be still and know God…”Hurry is a problem. Rushing is not helping. I need more pausing and being present to God.It is so counter-intuitive, that hurry is holding us back. It is true for many of us, I am sure. We see problems, we know the weaknesses of our own souls, and we want to do something about it; we want to rush to solutions, we want to fix the issue, and fix other people.God’s word to us is, “Be still,” learn to ease off the pressure to try and make it right, loosen the tight grip on the problem, let go. What do you need? What is the trouble in your life right now? It probably feels like you need to do something to address it. And you do, we always have something we can do. But the first order of business, if we are ever going to know true victory, is to learn how to trust God in the trouble.

God tells us, “Where there is no vision the people perish” (Proverbs 29:11).To perish is to loosen, meaning, to decline spiritually, ethically, and morally.Vision is divine guidance; it is to hear from God. Not hearing more about God, but to come to the sort of spiritual life in which we can receive directly from God his direction and truth.There are two kinds of letting go. Proverbs 29:11 is letting go of God. Psalm 46:10 is about letting go to God.“Be still…” is no small thing in our day. We are not people accustomed to stillness. We all live in a world of constant noise and restless activity, and we are expected to keep up and pay attention if we are going to make anything of ourselves, or do anything worth being noticed for. Yet, in our most trying moments, the urgent call that comes is most often, “Don’t just stand there, do something!” Yet, in the Bible, over and over, we find that the people of God receive his salvation by that very decisive and obedient act of being still.

There is no other book in all the world, in all of history which is qualified as “The law of the Lord!” The word of the living God of Heaven and Earth! The same God who made the heavens which declare his glory (v.1) is the same Lord who gave us his law, or his book of precepts and statutes for life. Here, contained in this book are all the instructions of life, here is God’s way, in print, and it is settled, it will not change. There are a whole lot of blockades in the modern Christian life to keep us from the word of God. But not one of them is a worthwhile or acceptable excuse. When we neglect the word of God, we are abandoning the greatest source of power in the universe to bring us all that we could ever dream of. So, we need a plan to help us stay in the perfect law of the Lord this year and overcome all the blockades that normally hinder us.

Paul’s theology of money and generosity (And by the way we need to have one too), is that money is a tool for building the kingdom of God and a weapon for fighting in righteousness for the Kingdom of God. He clearly got this from Jesus who teaches us that generosity is not simply an occasional good thing we do, but as he modeled for us, it is to be practice of our daily discipleship to Christ.

In the biblical account of the visit of the Magi we have a powerful challenge to consider as we come to the close of this Christmas season. These wise men came to find Jesus because they had seen his star, and though they did not have all of the answers, they had faith to go search for him. Yet, the priests and scribes who knew the scrolls and the scriptures, knew where to find them, which ones to pull out, and what line on the page to reference, unmoved by the possibility that the long awaited Messiah may have appeared!

Here we are, the final Sunday of 2024. This was the question that came to me early this morning, “If I could go back one year to where I was and what I was expecting, closing 2023 and moving into a new year, what would I have expected to be true about me by now?” Whatever my answer to that question would have been a year ago, I am not satisfied with the answer as it is today. Still, this is a question worth keeping before me, and I think it is a good question for you as well. I see good answers in Hebrews 12, but they are the result of abiding in a particular place which we find in Luke 10.

How peaceful does your life seem right now? Or a better question may be, how are you living in the peace which Jesus brought? Peace means prosperity, quietness, rest. Does your life feel prosperous? What about quiet, or at rest? Why is it that for so many of us who have received the gift of Jesus, we fail to regularly live in the full potential of His gift?

What would a Christmas be without everything normally associated with it except the coming of Jesus into our world? Imagine, no lights, no parties, no trees, no candles, no carols, no gifts, nothing of that sort. What if all we had was a presence to God in which the message came, “Christ is born”? I know how difficult it is for us to even imagine such a thing. But that is precisely what Mary had in store. And nine months before Jesus would be born, he was miraculously conceived in her virgin womb. A holy and gracious act of God which could never have happened otherwise, but a conception that would not have happened in Mary’s heart, mind, and body, without her important part in it all. But it was a season of her life in which it was all about Christ being formed in her and brought forth to the world, which is still the true story of Christmas. If Christ is to be born in us, manifest in our lives into the world this season, we will need both the effort of making room for him to come and the power of the Holy Spirit to bring about the conception. And we must consider, “How?”