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Few topics in the church divide as sharply as speaking in tongues. Most conversations about it produce one of two reactions: uncritical enthusiasm or nervous dismissal. This episode offers a third option: careful biblical theology applied with pastoral warmth. Khalil, Sean, and Jeff trace the gift of tongues through Acts 2, 1 Corinthians 12 through 14, and the arc of church history, addressing the most common misconceptions while giving listeners a framework for seeking more of the Holy Spirit without either manufacturing an experience or shutting down the genuine one. This is not a denominational argument. It is a biblical investigation conducted by three pastors who take Scripture seriously and have enough pastoral experience to know that this topic requires both doctrinal precision and relational gentleness. This episode explains the gift of tongues biblically, addressing cessationism, continuationism, and how Christians can seek the Holy Spirit without hype or dismissal. Take the free Spiritual Health Assessment at growgodly.com/health-check.

If you are a Christian who keeps sinning despite genuinely wanting to stop, this episode was made for you. And the answer is not that you need more willpower. The answer is that you have been fighting the wrong way. Khalil, Sean, and Jeff unpack the biblical concept of mortification of sin, what Paul means in Romans 7 when he describes the experience of doing what he does not want to do, and why the Holy Spirit plus genuine community plus sacramental rhythms is the battle plan that actually works. This is not a willpower problem. It is a spiritual strategy problem. The episode covers the difference between putting off the old self and putting on the new, what confession and accountability actually do in the sanctification process, and why grace and effort are not opposites in the Christian life. Welcome to the Table episode 78 explains how Christians can put sin to death through biblical mortification, drawing from Romans 7 and John Owen. If you are a Christian who keeps messing up despite trying to do better, this episode gives you the biblical framework for actually winning the daily battle against sin, not through self-improvement but through the power of the Holy Spirit and genuine community. Related episodes: What Does It Mean to Be Made in the Image of God? (EP 50) | Feeling Like an Outcast: The Bible's Story of Exile (EP 75) | How to Live a Holy Life When Culture Makes Holiness Countercultural (EP 76) Take the free Spiritual Health Assessment at growgodly.com/health-check.

The incarnation is not just a doctrine about Christmas. It is a pattern for mission. Jesus did not commute to earth. He moved in. He shared meals, touched lepers, showed up at weddings. The theological term for this pattern is incarnational living, and it is exactly what most Christians are not doing. Guest Lee Rogers, Director of Student Evangelism for the Assemblies of God, joins Khalil and the team to unpack what Spirit-empowered witness actually looks like in everyday life. The episode is grounded in a simple but radical conviction: small acts of obedience in the right direction produce real transformation over time. You do not have to engineer a gospel conversation. You have to be the kind of person who shows up consistently in love, trusts the Holy Spirit with the openings, and stays present long enough for the relationship to go somewhere. This is how you share your faith without being pushy: you stop trying to be a witness and start being a neighbor. This episode explains incarnational living and how Christians can share their faith naturally without being pushy or preachy. Related episodes: How to Be a Good Neighbor: The Forgotten Mission Field Right Outside Your Door | How to Share Your Faith: The Practical Skills Most Christians Never Learn Take the free Spiritual Health Assessment at growgodly.com/health-check.

Holiness is not a list of things you do not do. It is a participation in the nature of God. When you reduce it to a behavioral checklist, you end up with exactly what the broader culture already rightly critiques: religious performance without transformation. Khalil traces holiness through the lives of Daniel, Israel in Babylon, and the early church, all of whom maintained the distinction of God's people in cultures that actively worked against it, not by isolation but by the depth of their formation. This episode makes the case that the cost of holiness is real, the courage required is specific, and the framework has to be rooted in who God is rather than in the shifting pressures of cultural acceptability. Holiness is not about standing against the culture. It is about standing in the presence of a holy God so consistently that the distinction becomes visible without effort. This episode teaches how Christians can pursue holiness in a secular culture that treats moral standards as outdated or offensive. Take the free Spiritual Health Assessment at growgodly.com/health-check.

There is a growing number of Christians who feel like they do not belong anywhere. The culture does not want what they believe. And their church often does not know how to form them in the direction their faith is pointing. That feeling has a name in Scripture. It is exile. Khalil and the team explore the biblical theme of exile, from Israel's captivity in Babylon to Peter's description of believers as sojourners and exiles, and apply it as a framework for understanding the contemporary Christian experience. God is not surprised that his people feel like outsiders in the culture they are living in. That has always been the shape of the covenant community. The question is not how to make belonging in the surrounding culture more comfortable. The question is how to live faithfully and hopefully as a people whose belonging is rooted in God's eternal family. This episode gives believers a story they can actually live inside. This episode explores biblical exile, spiritual loneliness, and what the Bible's story of the Israelite exile teaches Christians who feel like outsiders in modern culture. Take the Spiritual Health Assessment at growgodly.com

After a year-long break, Welcome to the Table is back, and this episode is an honest account of why it went quiet and what has changed since. Khalil shares his transition out of full-time youth ministry, the launch of Growing Godly as a structured discipleship system, and his marriage. Jeff celebrates the birth of his son. Sean reflects on graduate school and new responsibilities. This is not a polished comeback announcement. It is a table conversation between three people who have walked through significant life transitions and come out with a renewed sense of what this podcast is for: a community of curiosity and conviction for believers who are serious about what it means to follow Jesus in this cultural moment. If you are new to the show, this is where the second chapter begins. This episode introduces the Welcome to the Table podcast relaunch and what listeners can expect from new episodes on Christian discipleship and spiritual growth. Take the free Spiritual Health Assessment at growgodly.com/health-check.

You are anxious — not just occasionally but as a default operating mode. You move fast, stay busy, scroll to decompress, and still feel unsettled underneath it all. And part of you knows the fix is not more information, a better evening routine, or one more productivity system. But you are not sure what it actually is. Forty percent of adults identify as anxious, and that number has not moved in years. Matt Harder has written a book and built a life around one question: what does it actually look like to settle your soul? Not to manage the anxiety, not to suppress it, but to address the root of it with something that holds. He joins Khalil, Sean, and Jeff to bring the framework from his book “A Settled Soul” to the table — five practices that anyone can build, and a posture toward Jesus that has nothing to do with having your life figured out. This episode teaches how to settle your soul using five biblical practices, addressing anxiety, digital consumption, and the patterns that keep believers perpetually unsettled, hosted by two pastors and author Matt Harder. You will learn why Jesus went from his baptism directly into the wilderness — and what Matthew 4 is actually teaching about the pattern of high moments followed by acute testing that most believers are never prepared for. You will hear Matt name social media as a feed — the same word as hunger — and why that framing exposes why scrolling never satisfies, because you were never hungry for what a screen can give you. And you will walk away with a clear picture: none of what the world offers is going to satisfy the kind of hunger that only living water can address, and the settled soul is the one who has stopped going to empty wells. If you have been managing your anxiety instead of addressing it, this episode will show you the difference. A settled soul is not a life without pressure. It is a life rooted in something the pressure cannot reach. This conversation starts that process. Related episodes: The Spiritual Discipline of Silence and Solitude | How Sabbath, Margin, and Stillness Prepare You for the Life God Has Ahead | The Spiritual Discipline of Reflection Take the free Spiritual Health Assessment at growgodly.com/health-check. Chapters:(00:00) Intro and meet Matt Harder(05:00) The five practices of a settled soul(30:00) Name your three things(32:30) How these practices settle your soul

The question “who is my neighbor?” is not new. A lawyer asked Jesus the same thing — and was hoping the answer would narrow the category, not expand it. Most of us are still doing the same thing. We want to love our neighbor without actually knowing them, without any inconvenience, and without having to change our schedule. The Good Samaritan did not have that option. Neither do we. Troy Pomeroy has spent years in post-Christian Seattle asking a harder version of the question: not who counts as my neighbor, but what does it actually look like to love them well in a city where the church has lost cultural credibility and the right to be heard is no longer assumed — it is built. He joins Khalil, Sean, and Jeff to bring Luke 10’s Samaritan story off the page and into your actual street, apartment complex, or cul-de-sac, drawing on Leviticus 19, Acts 2 and 4, and the vision of the home as a kingdom tool. This episode teaches what it means to be a good neighbor biblically, how ordinary believers can build kingdom relationships in their community, and why earning the right to be heard is the foundation of any effective neighborhood witness, hosted by two pastors and a ministry leader. You will learn why the “if you build it they will come” mentality produces churches that attract other Christians but rarely reach the person next door — and how going where people are instead of waiting for them to come to you is the shape of incarnational mission in every neighborhood. You will hear the critical tension between under-adapting — challenging people before you have earned relationship — and over-adapting — surrendering your convictions to fit in — and where the faithful middle actually sits. And you will walk away with one diagnostic question: do the people on your street know who you are, and do they know what you believe? If the Great Commission has felt like something for missionaries and pastors, this episode redraws the map. Your neighborhood is a mission field. Your table is an outreach strategy. And the neighbor you have been passing every day may be the exact person God positioned you next to on purpose. This is where mission starts — not overseas, not at church, but across the street. Related episodes: Living Life on Mission: What Everyday Evangelism Actually Looks Like | Incarnational Living: How to Share Your Faith Without Being Pushy | How to Share Your Faith: The Practical Skills Most Christians Never Learn Take the free Spiritual Health Assessment at growgodly.com/health-check. Chapters:(00:00) Intro and meet Troy(11:30) The Good Samaritan and who your neighbor is(28:30) Practical ways to start at your school and street(36:00) The principles, summarized

Your calendar is full. You know it. And somewhere in the back of your mind is the thought that God has more for you — but getting to it requires getting through everything already on the list. The problem is that list never gets shorter. And the question quietly forming underneath it is whether you are too busy for the future God actually has in mind. Sabbath is the only commandment most Christians brag about breaking. That is not a small thing. The same God who said do not murder also said remember the Sabbath and keep it holy — and somehow one became non-negotiable while the other became a personality trait. Cheree Dale joins Khalil, Sean, and Jeff to ask a question most believers never sit with long enough to answer: what am I doing right now to prepare for what God has for me in the future? The answer almost always involves margin — and margin is something you will not stumble into. It has to be chosen, protected, and defended. This episode explores how Sabbath, margin, and stillness prepare you for the life God has ahead — and why busyness is not just a scheduling problem but a spiritual one, hosted by two pastors and a ministry leader. You will learn why Kevin DeYoung’s picture of Sabbath as an island of get to in a sea of have to may be the most clarifying reframe of rest you have encountered — and why the busyness you have normalized is almost always a symptom of pride and control rather than necessity. You will hear Cheree unpack the Mary and Martha story not as a lesson about sitting still but as a diagnosis of what happens when the urgent crowds out the necessary — and why Jesus names it directly. And you will walk away with a practical exercise: map your calendar as a story and ask honestly whether it reflects a person who trusts God with their future or one who is trying to manufacture it on their own. If you have been waiting for the right moment to slow down and seek God before taking the next step, this episode is telling you that the waiting is the step. Margin is not laziness. Stillness is not wasted time. It is where God does the preparing work that your activity keeps interrupting. This conversation is worth clearing your schedule for. Related episodes: The Spiritual Discipline of Silence and Solitude | How to Practice Sabbath the Right Way (It Is Not Just a Day Off) | The Spiritual Discipline of Reflection Take the free Spiritual Health Assessment at growgodly.com/health-check. Chapters:(00:00) Intro and meet Cheree Dale(05:00) The question that reframes preparation(08:00) Why we resist margin(32:00) Plan, prioritize, practice

You are carrying things you have never told anyone. Not because you do not know you should — you know the verse. But something in you believes that the moment you say it out loud, it becomes more real, more shameful, or more permanent. So you keep it private. And it keeps its grip on you. Confession is not primarily a Catholic sacrament or a step in a recovery program. It is one of the oldest and most misunderstood disciplines in the life of a believer — and according to James 5:16, it is one of the most direct paths to healing the church has mostly stopped walking. Bonhoeffer said it plainly: sin wants to remain unknown, it shuns the light, and in the darkness the whole being of a person is poisoned by it. Augustine called the confession of evil works the first beginning of good works. Khalil, Sean, and Jeff walk through the two-sided meaning of confession — as both a profession of belief and an acknowledgment of sin — and show why what stays hidden stays powerful, and what gets brought into the light gets broken. This episode teaches the spiritual discipline of confession — what it actually is, why avoiding it is costing you more than you realize, and how it becomes the front door to grace, healing, and genuine joy, hosted by two pastors. You will learn why Psalm 51 is not just a beautiful poem but a blueprint for what happens in the soul when someone stops hiding and starts being honest with God — and why that honesty is not a liability but a lifeline. You will hear why the church was always meant to function as a hospital rather than a country club, and what it would look like if it actually did. And you will walk away with a simple invitation: find one trusted person, say the thing you have been carrying, and experience what it actually feels like when sin loses its grip because it can no longer hide. If something has felt stuck in your soul — if growth keeps stalling in the same place, if the same patterns keep cycling back — this episode may be pointing directly at the reason. Not because you are uniquely broken. But because you are uniquely human, and what stays in the dark stays powerful. Confession is where that changes. Related episodes: How to Win the Daily Battle Against Sin | The Spiritual Discipline of Reflection | The Spiritual Discipline of Silence and Solitude Take the free Spiritual Health Assessment at growgodly.com/health-check. Chapters:(00:00) Intro(01:00) What confession actually is(04:30) Why it matters, and what makes it hard(27:30) How to begin

At some point you made a decision. You said yes to Jesus. What you may not have been told is that discipleship is not the moment of yes — it is a lifetime of it. And the deeper question is not whether you are willing to follow Jesus, but whether you are willing to keep following when following gets costly and the destination is still unclear. Lori Warning has spent decades in full-time ministry, most recently as the National Director of AG Girls Ministries, and she is stepping into the next chapter: moving to Cameroon as a full-time missionary. She has seen what it looks like when discipleship produces the real thing — including watching a child she poured into as a kids pastor grow up to become a kids pastor himself. She joins Khalil, Sean, and Jeff to talk about what lifelong discipleship actually requires, why dependency on God is the key word nobody teaches, and what open-handed ministry has cost her and given her over a lifetime. This episode explores what lifelong discipleship looks like, how to give God an open-handed yes, and why abiding in Christ through John 15 is the only foundation for fruitful, sustainable ministry, hosted by two pastors and a missionary. You will learn why dependency is not weakness — it is the entire operating principle of discipleship, because a branch that tries to produce fruit without the vine is not noble, it is dead — and why the church keeps producing striving disciples instead of abiding ones. You will hear Lori describe what it looked like to meet people who had literally never heard the name of Jesus, and what that moment does to any comfortable understanding of calling and comfort. And you will walk away with one challenge: give God your yes before you know what you are saying yes to — and then watch what he does with it. If discipleship has felt like a program you attend rather than a life you inhabit, this episode will reframe the whole thing. It is not about how much Bible you have read or how many services you have attended. It is about how completely you are willing to depend on Jesus and how open your hands are to wherever that takes you. Lori’s story is proof that open-handed faithfulness produces fruit you could not have manufactured on your own. Related episodes: Living Life on Mission: What Everyday Evangelism Actually Looks Like | Incarnational Living: How to Share Your Faith Without Being Pushy | The Spiritual Discipline of Silence and Solitude Take the free Spiritual Health Assessment at growgodly.com/health-check. Chapters:(00:00) Intro and meet Lori Warning(22:00) What discipleship actually means(35:30) Start by sharing your story(40:30) Your next step

Most Christians have more books on their shelf than pages in their body. You buy them with good intentions, start them in January, and find them face-down on the nightstand by March. But the right book at the right time has a way of doing what sermons and podcasts sometimes cannot: it follows you into the slow moments and changes how you think when nobody is watching. This episode started as a simple question — what should a Christian who is serious about spiritual formation actually be reading? — and became a curated conversation about 15 books that belong on the shelf of any believer who wants to grow. The list spans spiritual disciplines, prayer, Sabbath, Gospel fluency, Holy Spirit, formation theology, and leadership, drawing from authors including Donald Whitney, Kosuke Koyama, John Mark Comer, Kevin DeYoung, James K. Smith, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Tim Keller. This episode is a curated Christian reading list covering spiritual disciplines, prayer, Sabbath, the Gospel, spiritual formation theology, and leadership books every serious believer should know, hosted by three pastors. You will learn why Kosuke Koyama's "Three Mile an Hour God" may be one of the most countercultural books a hurried Christian can read — and why genuine formation does not happen at the pace most of us are moving through life. You will hear honest commentary on each recommendation with enough context to help you decide which ones to read first based on exactly where you are in your formation journey right now. And you will walk away with a short list of two or three books that fit your current season — not another pile to feel guilty about, but a specific next step that will actually move you forward. If your spiritual reading has gotten thin — if you are consuming more information than formation — this episode is an invitation back in. The right books do not just inform you. They form you. They interrupt your assumptions and give you language for what God is already doing. This list is a starting place. Related episodes: The Spiritual Discipline of Study | The Spiritual Discipline of Journaling | The Spiritual Discipline of Reflection Take the free Spiritual Health Assessment at growgodly.com/health-check.

You know you are supposed to have joy. The New Testament commands it more than almost any other emotional state. But most of us treat joy the same way we treat the weather — something that happens to us, not something we have any say over. When it is present, we are grateful. When it is not, we wait for it to come back. Nobody told us we are supposed to choose it. Philippians 4:8 is not a suggestion for feeling better — it is an instruction for where to direct your attention. And Psalm 37:4's command to delight yourself in the Lord is not a passive invitation to sit back and enjoy God — it is an active discipline that requires practice, intention, and a willingness to fight for it. Jeff Gowing joins Khalil and Sean to make the case that joy is a responsibility, not a reward — something a believer can take ownership of beginning today, with a set of practices that interrupt the drift toward anxiety and reorient the attention toward what is actually true. This episode teaches how to choose joy as a spiritual practice, why joy is a Christian's responsibility, and how morning praise, biblical meditation, and awe reorient the heart toward God, hosted by two pastors and a ministry leader. You will learn why awe and worry cannot coexist — and what it practically looks like to cultivate awe in a season where you feel far from it and the circumstances are not cooperating. You will hear Jeff's practice of beginning each day by lying on the floor before God — not as a spiritual performance, but as a posture that names who is actually in charge before the demands of the day make you forget. And you will walk away with a daily rhythm you can begin tomorrow: five minutes before the noise starts, directing your attention toward who God is rather than what your day requires. If joy has felt like a distant option instead of a daily reality, this episode will reframe the whole thing. Joy is not a feeling you wait for. It is a direction you choose. And the believer who learns to choose it — morning after morning, season after season — is the one who ends up with a life that looks remarkably different from the anxious default most people are living. Related episodes: The Spiritual Discipline of Reflection | The Spiritual Discipline of Biblical Meditation | The Spiritual Discipline of Silence and Solitude Take the free Spiritual Health Assessment at growgodly.com/health-check.

Most people know God is eternal. Almost nobody has stopped to think about what that actually means — or why it should change anything about Monday morning. Eternity feels like an abstraction, a theological category to nod at and move past. It is not. It is one of the most practically stabilizing truths in all of Scripture. God does not experience time the way you do. He has no beginning and no end. He is not waiting, not anxious, not watching events unfold from a distance hoping they resolve. Augustine wrote that God is the maker of all time, which means time is not a container God lives inside — it is a reality he created and stands entirely outside of. CS Lewis described it this way in Mere Christianity: you travel along a single line on a page, but God is the whole page at once. Khalil and Sean walk through what God’s eternal nature means across Scripture — from the Psalms to the story of Joseph — and show how a God who exists outside of time is the only God worth trusting when your own timeline feels out of control. This episode teaches what it means that God is eternal, why his eternity changes how you live today, and how to orient your daily decisions around a God who is never surprised, hosted by two pastors. You will learn why starting with who God is — rather than how your situation looks — is the discipline that makes faith stable rather than reactive, and why top-down theology is the only framework that holds when circumstances bottom out. You will hear CS Lewis’s picture of God as the whole page while we travel a single line — likely the clearest picture of divine eternity you will encounter outside of Scripture itself. And you will walk away with one concrete shift: living with eternity in mind is not a vague spiritual platitude — it is a way of reorienting every decision around a God for whom the outcome is already secure. If anxiety about the future has become a default setting, this episode names the root: you are relating to time the way God does not. God is not worried. He is not surprised. He is not rushing. And the believer who understands his eternity is the believer who can finally stop white-knuckling a timeline that was never theirs to control. Related episodes: God Is Infinite: How God’s Boundlessness Changes Prayer, Trust, and Faith | God Is Triune: What the Trinity Means and Why It Changes How You Pray Take the free Spiritual Health Assessment at growgodly.com/health-check.

If you have watched someone you love walk away from the faith, you have probably asked why. Not the easy answer — doubt, or a bad experience — but the deeper one. Something about the version of Christianity they encountered did not hold. This episode is willing to name what that something often is, even when the church would rather look the other way. This is Part 2 of Khalil and Sean's breakdown of Carey Nieuwhof's landmark article on why young people are deconstructing — and Reasons 3 through 5 are the ones most churches are least willing to examine. Reason 3: the church has accidentally produced high-performing Christians whose spiritual identity is built on output, visibility, and approval — and when they burn out, there is nothing underneath. Reason 4: many Christian communities have confused conformity with unity, building tight theological tribes where questions feel like threats. Reason 5: political idolatry in the church has turned Jesus into a mascot for a party rather than the Lord of every nation. This episode explores how burnout, conformity culture, and political idolatry drive young Christians away from the faith — and what a biblical, pastoral response to deconstruction actually looks like, hosted by two pastors. You will learn why there is no such thing as a high-performing Christian — because performance was accomplished by Jesus Christ — and why a faith built on performance is a faith that cannot survive a season where you cannot perform. You will hear the critical distinction between uniformity and unity, and why a church that expects everyone to think alike is not a community, it is a tribe — and tribes are fragile in exactly the moments community is most needed. And you will walk away with nine practical steps for anyone in the deconstruction process — not as a formula, but as a map for someone who needs to know there is a path forward through the hard questions. If you or someone you love is in the middle of deconstruction right now, this episode will not tell you the questions do not matter. It will take them seriously — and then point toward a God who is not threatened by them. The faith that survives hard questions is stronger, not weaker. This episode helps build that kind of faith. Related episodes: What Is Faith Deconstruction? | Confronting the Deconstruction Movement | 5 Reasons Young People Are Deconstructing Their Faith, Part 1 Take the free Spiritual Health Assessment at growgodly.com/health-check.