Kaleo Church Podcast

Sometimes God gives us a glimpse of something so great that we fear. Some may try to convince us that we should give up faith because it is too good to be true, or that we should be afraid of something so magnificent. However, godly fear doesn't drive us away from God but to him. It is this fear of God that brings holiness to completion in our lives driving us to respond to the promises and presence of the living God by drawing near to the Lord Almighty. He is our joy. He is our peace. He is our fear.  

  How do you keep your heart open to loving people after having it broken? In 2 Corinthians 6:11-13, Paul responds to being hurt by the Corinthians by telling them that he is going to keep his heart wide open towards them, regardless of the suffering it may lead to. Where does Paul find the courage to keep his heart open to people who have hurt him? And why does Paul believe that keeping his heart wide open is so important? In this message, we will explore the essential connection between love and vulnerability. We will also see how seeking to limit our vulnerability will ultimately restrict the love we can both give and receive.

The promises of God to his people and the presence of God with his people set them apart as the temple of the living God. Therefore, those who trust in Jesus are called not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers. They are a new creation and are called to live out their new creation identity in union with Jesus Christ.  

One of the hardest things to deal with in any relationship is coming to the realization that you love the other person more than they love you. Often, our first response to this realization is to pull back and seek to even the imbalances of love by loving less. In 2 Corinthians 6:11-13, Paul highlights the imbalance in love between himself and the Corinthians, but then he models for us another way to respond. In this message, we will consider why Paul’s response is so beautiful and how he was able to do it.

Suffering changes us. Suffering can make us angry and bitter as it hardens our hearts, or it can soften us by growing our patience and genuine love for others. Paul believed that the way God used suffering to soften him and increase his patience and genuine love for others commended the Gospel message that he proclaimed. In this passage, we will discuss some of the things that motivated Paul to endure amid great affliction.

When you picture God watching you mess up, what sort of face is he making? All of us have images of God that come to mind when we think about Him; the question is, are the images that come to our minds biblical? What about beautiful? Is the God we picture when we are going through difficult times a God that we find beautiful? In 2 Corinthians 5, Paul will tell us some of the things that make our God so beautiful, and he will seek to shatter some of the distorted images of God that we have projected onto Him.

2 Corinthians 5:17 makes the bold claim that if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation! Then you might wonder, "Why don't I feel more like a new creation?" Listen to hear how this new identity in Christ assures us of his great love for sinners like us and empowers our transformation to be more like Jesus as we die to self and live for Christ.  

For most people, the heaviest thing they have ever endured in their life has involved suffering. The loss of a loved one, the betrayal of a friend, the rebellion of a child, or perhaps the death of a dream, but here Paul describes the heaviest suffering you can imagine as light. How can Paul possibly say that with a clear conscience? That is one of the questions we will consider in this passage.

 What compels us to persevere in loving hard-to-love people and to share the gospel with people who openly resist it? The Apostle Paul was compelled to preach the gospel and proclaim the praises of God in the presence of others, and his motivation for doing so is found in our passage today. May we also be a people who cry out with the Apostle Paul, "We also believe, and so we also speak!"  

Shame flows from the feeling that we are not enough. It finds its power in the fear that our flaws will be exposed and inevitably lead others to abandon us. In this message we will consider the antidote to shame and to help us do that we will look at Peter and they way the risen Jesus rescued him from his shame.

In this second sermon on beholding Christ's beauty, we will contemplate how that beauty leads to a changed life. Using Paul's statement in 3:18, we will look at Revelation 1-3 through that lens. Listen and hear how Christ's beauty transofrmed churches in the first century and continues to do so today. 

 In this passage, Paul reminds us just how serious a thing it is to dwell among immortals and seek to point them to Jesus. But who is sufficient for such a massive calling? Paul helps us answer this question by exposing some of the false places we look for confidence and then showing us where it is that our ultimate sufficiency is to be found.

We are all drawn to beauty. In a sense, beauty transforms us all. For followers of Jesus, this means that true transformation can only happen by beholding the pinnacle of beauty. Listen and hear how the gospel transforms us by beholding.Thanks!

One of the things that makes sharing the Gospel so difficult is the prospect of being rejected. Often, we spend a lot of energy trying to discern if people are ready to hear the Gospel or if they will be offended by it or if they are going to shut us down. We love sharing the Gospel with people who want to hear it, but we don’t see much good in sharing the Gospel with people who don’t seem very open. In this passage, Paul shows us that we are to share the Gospel without being controlled by how people respond. You see, the seeds of the Gospel were always intended to be planted in fields of rejection. 

Have you ever felt called to do something good for the glory of God only to find that something came up and ruined your plans? Why? Why does God allow the good plans that we have to fall through? In this message, we will consider how God wants us to respond when we find ourselves standing in the rubble of our broken plans.