I looked for him everywhere. Our church meets in a high school, and he’s not usually hard to find. I gave up the search and walked into the auditorium to pray before our next service started. I glanced up at the balcony where our production team works the magic...
Hey, I’m Hayden. For this season of my life, God has called me into the tech field. I work as a UX designer for Shopify in Canada. By studying the Bible, I’ve learned how beautiful work can be when we do it for God's glory! Here’s a truth to sink your teeth...
The more we pray, the more our desires are shaped by God’s Spirit. The more our desires are shaped by God’s Spirit, the more our requests align with His will. The more our requests align with His will, the more we will see God answer when we call.
We are a generation of women who have been told we can have it all. We can break that glass ceiling, raise intelligent STEM geek children, be our husbands biggest cheerleader, cook all organic meals for our family and be the number one church volunteer. And when we don’t or can’t do all of those things we are left feeling like we have missed our calling and that we are missing out.
We visited Hoover Dam today. Nothing can mentally prepare you for the sheer size of this engineering masterpiece. There is enough concrete in the dam structure to build a 4-foot wide sidewalk around the equator of the earth! That’s a lot of cement. As we toured...
Today’s guest feature from Karen Cooper focuses on the legacy left by her father. His Depression-era faithfulness to the Lord showed clearly through his everyday work, a forced career-path many today would find disappointing and difficult to embrace. Join us as we turn back the pages with Karen to see what faith and work lessons we can learn from the Greatest Generation.
We have a passion for unreached people groups here at The Stone Table. Three billion people around the world have no adequate witness of the Gospel, and a major portion of our mission investment is aimed at proclaiming Jesus and planting the Church in these...
It’s been a tough week. The world lost two famous faces to suicide – fashion designer Kate Spade and culture and travel television host Anthony Bourdin. Coincidentally, the CDC just released new statistics showing suicide rates have increased 30% in half the...
People so often think of work as a burden. But work is everything I do from the moment I get out of bed to the moment my head hits the pillow at night. My work includes loving my husband, taking care of our home, praying for our kids, volunteering, exercising, running a business, being a listener and (sometimes) an advisor, enjoying time with friends, and, even, watching a few TV shows.
This is the work that my heavenly Father has set out for me to do. Every part of me is being used every day to work in some way.
Our everyday work is actually a response to God’s lead and surrender to His will. That’s the fuel. If we want more power in our everyday work, we need to stop trusting so much in our own human willpower and place our dependence where it belongs – in the finished work of Jesus.
So, what is the Great Commission? Do you know? The Great Commission is Jesus’ last instructions to his disciples as he ascended into heaven. These instructions weren’t just for professional pastors and missionaries. Jesus’ words were aimed at all of us who call him “Lord,” including those of us with marketplace jobs. Look at Matthew 28:19. It says, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” It says “go,” to move out, to train up followers of all nations. And the Greek word here is actually ethnos. It’s ethnos or a people joined by similar customs or culture. We can better translate this word, not as geo-political nation states, but as people groups. And Jesus said to go make disciples of all of them. But the Joshua Project estimates there as many as 7,400 unreached people groups in the world today. These 7,400 people groups total 3.1 billion people or 42% of the global population. And for many of these people, were not just talking about a general disinterest in Christianity, we’re talking no access to the Gospel. If you are born into this 42%, there is a good chance that you will live and die without ever as much as meeting a Christian let alone hearing the life-giving message of Jesus. And this should disturb all of us. See, if you belong to Jesus, the Great Commission belongs to you.
That’s why two recent Barna surveys on global missions and evangelism really shocked and troubled me. Maybe you saw these. According to Barna, over half of all churchgoers, 51%, are completely unfamiliar with the concept of the Great Commission. But I think even more disturbing, they found almost half of practicing Christian millennials believe that evangelism is wrong. And perhaps these responses reflect a rejection of some historical missions’ missteps that were rooted more in western colonialism than the gospels full redemptive work. Perhaps, but I fear something worse. I fear God’s people may actually be losing God’s heart for the nations. I fear we’ve turned the Great Commission into more of a great suggestion. If we really love people, won’t we move heaven and earth to tell them how their sins can be forgiven, how they can find union with their heavenly father, and how they can function in the fullness of the resurrection power of Jesus Christ. The answer is yes, and we passionately believe that mobilizing entrepreneurship, business, and the marketplace is a vital part of that Great Commission calling.
You know when we talk about the gospel, we often think about something kind of ethereal and in over here. It deals with our spiritual life and so, when we go to work every day, when we engage in the realities of our everyday life, it’s like we know those two things go together but kind of you know the gospel is more spiritual. It’s over in this realm and you know then I gotta deal with my business, I gotta deal with my work and strategy and marketing and finance and all of those different kinds of things. And we don’t really connect to those things, but I was reading in Romans one this morning. In Romans one there’s this famous verse says, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ. For it is the power of God.” The gospel is the power of God. I just got to thinking about that within the context of our everyday lives, including our everyday work. You know the gospel is not just some other good moral philosophy, it’s not just another interesting religious story. The gospel is literally power. The gospel is power. The gospel actually does something in us and around us and through us. The gospel is intended to be fuel for everyday living, our faith, our work, our home lives, our finances. The gospel is power; the gospel is not just another interesting moral philosophy. The gospel is power. So, I just want to encourage you with that this week, to think about how you can tap into the gospel. The power of God. It is there as a gift for you, it is not just some spiritual aspect of your life to be relegated to the spiritual or ethereal realm. It is the power of God for real everyday living. You can tap into it; your work can tap into it. It is the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes.