April Free Gift
If you have never contacted Focal Point before, we have a free gift for you. The Booklet: Easter & the Grace of God by Pastor Mike Fabarez
grace
The Joy of True Repentance
We should seek to find true joy in repentance – our own and others’ – as we celebrate grace and purpose to genuinely love other forgiven brothers and sisters.
Aiming to Be a Blessing
Our love for God’s people ought to drive us to a purely-motivated loving service and care that goes even beyond what we think is possible.
Restoration
As we read through the Book of Jeremiah we are confronted with a very familiar refrain, “God would never do that!” This is what the Lord’s faithful spokesman encountered when he exposed the gaping distance between the standards God had commanded in his word, and the values…
The Basis of Real Comfort
We should be prayerfully confident that God will orchestrate and apply comfort to our hearts as we draw near to him and each other in the midst of difficult times.
June 20, 2024
Questions in this episode: – What does the Bible verses the Roman Catholic church say about sin, it’s consequence and confession? – Should I be in an employee job at a church: Pastor, Ministry Director or work for the church? – Does the physical act of baptism save you as those who believed in …
The Power of Integrity
Just as Paul was brought before earthly tribunals to be examined, we need to be sure by faith we avoid God’s tribunal and prepare to stand to give an account before Christ’s tribunal.
Grace, Patience & Persistence
We should give thanks for all of God’s kind provisions as we patiently and uncompromisingly stand up for Christ in our increasingly hostile culture.
March 28, 2024
Questions in this episode: – It was mentioned by a paster that there was a pagan god of spring named Ishtar and that name eventually got translated into Easter. Can you expand more on that? – Have you heard of a perverted version of the Bible named the Queen James version? – Why did …
The Gift of Repentance
God graciously works through a variety of means to bring us to repentance, both at the outset of the Christian life and throughout it, so that we might walk in fellowship with him.
The Grace of God
We need to understand God’s amazing grace and sincerely respond to it with our whole hearts in light of the sinfulness of our sin.
Generosity
We all love generosity—that is, when others are generous to us. Christians, of all people, should appreciate the value of generosity, being the recipients of the most extravagant and undeserved generosity from…
Misunderstandings & Accommodations
Strategic accommodations and biblically allowable personal adjustments will be necessary as we face the painful misunderstandings sure to continue among God’s people, this side of heaven.
Amazing Grace
The doctrine of God’s grace reminds us that not only do we not deserve God’s love and forgiveness, but we actually deserve nothing from God but his exacting judgment. And not the kind of judgment which we would incur were we to sin against a fellow citizen, some high ranking diplomat, or even an exalted and holy angel…
Taking Comfort in God’s Expressions of Grace
We must work to be aware, reflective, and profoundly grateful for God’s grace in forgiving us, kindly upholding us, and providing us with a secured eternal hope.
Keeping Grace in View
We are prone to forget, especially as we compare our relative righteousness, that our salvation is all of grace. We must never fail to remember that everything about our lives – our spiritual efforts, our moral resumes and our celebrated accomplishments – are all exchanged for Christ’s. Our salvation is secured in the same way
Hell
Hell. No one likes to think about it. The world attempts to dilute its force by using the word as an expletive or as an impertinent adjective. But much like tax day
Assessing Motives
Unfortunately Christians these days routinely and confidently assert their supposed insight into the thoughts and motives of those with whom they disagree. God’s people are regrettably mirroring the practice of the world by all too often claiming to know what others are thinking. While it is common to routinely impugn motives
Good News
To trust in Jesus as the sole provision for my acceptance before God is the essence of the gospel. But by definition this gospel cannot be the same as a gospel which allows you to trust in Jesus plus something else. Many are glad when they find those who “love Jesus” and are quick to consider them
Seeing God’s Gifts as We Should
God is the source of all good things, which are designed for and gifted to his people to be gratefully received, enjoyed, and fully appreciated.
Loving God
When the call of God on our lives and the message for us in Scripture is distilled into one line it reads like this: “Love God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength.” This was the central command of Old Testament Judaism (Dt.6:5) and it was the primary imperative…
Grace & Works
The gospel guarantees immediate, full, and unearned forgiveness based on God’s grace alone through faith alone, instructing us to commence with a life of doing good.
Joyful Thanksgiving
Psalm 96 calls us to “Sing to the Lord” (Ps.96:1a). Regardless of our present pains or disappointments, the Bible assumes that if we are recipients of his grace and mercy, we have a lot to sing about. And the focus should not only be historical (i.e. what God did for us in years past), but our attention should also be on…
Grace
God’s grace is the theme of the New Testament and yet with all this scriptural emphasis it seems we are still slow to rightly understand it. We either tend to think that it is some kind of extra credit that adds to our goodness, thus making us acceptable to God. Or we secretly tend to believe it is a “get out of jail free” card that allows us to dabble in sin without consequences. Both are obviously a…
Worship Always
The suffering of Job was intense. To bury all of your children after a catastrophic storm is doubtless a devastating pain that would cause many to shake their fist at God. Instead, as you know, Job did not. He did take on the ancient near-Eastern sign of a person in…
Cornelius: Drawn to Seek God
We must value and celebrate the pre-Christian grace of God, which he clearly demonstrates in drawing people to a receptive hearing of the gospel of Christ.
God’s Forgiveness
Our theology regarding justification is often revealed by how we embrace God’s forgiveness when we sin. On the one hand, we may say that we heartily affirm the orthodox doctrine of justification by faith (i.e. that we are accepted as perfectly righteous before God by our trust in Christ, without the aid of good works), but on the other hand…
Saul: A New Family
We must see the importance of being a highly-committed and fully-invested participant of a healthy (albeit imperfect) church knowing it is an indispensable part of the Christian life.
Antinomianism
From time to time we speak of the error of “antinomianism” – the belief that for Christians the rules of the Bible don’t apply. “Anti,” of course, means “against,” and “nomos” is the Greek word for “law.” “Antinomians” are opposed to the rules – they do not see…
Grateful for Secondary Benefits
We are called to verbalize to our generation the saving grace of the gospel of Christ, while always promoting the preserving and enriching grace of good and beneficial deeds.