The Midpoint Ministry

Applying our Lives to Spiritual Disciplines (Women's Midweek)

This is a women's devotional on the need for and practical application of applying spiritual disciplines to our lives. This devotional launches us into a women's ministry book project in which we will collect and share our favorite practices with each other. Link for Handout: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bdfMWWYNs08S4nYV4K-__F2HRSQR9PNP/view [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bdfMWWYNs08S4nYV4K-__F2HRSQR9PNP/view]

You Are Here: The School of the Prophets — 1 Kings 18 (TJ Harris)

The role of the prophet was to call Israel back to covenantal faithfulness when they strayed. Elijah is the epitome of a prophet and his confrontation with the prophets of Baal show us the disposition, courage, and conviction of the prophets.

You Are Here: Not Your Grandma's Favorite Psalm — Psalm 29 (Tanner Versage)

Worshipping God is a powerful practice, yet we unintentionally glean so many of our principles of worship from our culture instead of from scripture. Pure worship is illusive. Sometimes we have to aggressively combat the sentimental of our minds and the cute-but-lesser versions of God that the world promotes today. The world is full of vintage-ironic thrift-store versions of Jesus.  You can pick up a Velveteen Jesus at every corner estate sale, and you can worship a consumer-diluted Jesus through so much of our contemporary self-centered spirituality. To recapture His magnitude is a struggle of will. We think it’s more romantic. We think an occasional stroll into nature is an equal match for the heavyweight knockout punches of Satan and the numbing toxins and chains of cultural relativism. Worshipping His fullness is a fight.  It’s a fight against the enemy. It’s a fight against entropy. It’s a fight against ourselves. Psalm 29 is an aggressive Polemic. It puts God on the throne at the embarrassing expense of Baal in an "anything you can do I can do better" display of divine oneupmanship.

You Are Here: At The Throne — 2 Samuel 7 (Clint Larr)

God has given Israel a king after His own heart in David. This sermon unpacks a turning point in Israel's history: God's covenant with David. There are echoes of the promises made to Abraham but more importantly, promises that there will be a king from David's line that will reign forever. New Testament writers and Christians see this fulfilled in Jesus. God's intentions were for Israel to have a king that would lead them in a way that would be a blessing to all nations. It's a continuation of the overarching theme of God acting to reach all peoples.

You Are Here: At The Throne — 1 Samuel 8 (TJ Harris)

Israel asks for a king like "all the other nations" (v.5) so they could be "like all the other nations." (v.20) It wasn't that God never wanted Israel to have a king (cf. Gen 17:6, 49:12, and especially Deut. 17:14-20!) but he did not intend for them to be like all the other nations. They were to be God's treasured possession, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation (Ex. 19:5-6). They were rejecting God as their protector and ruler so they could more resemble the nations around them --the very opposite of holiness! The pressure and temptation to assimilate to the world is as powerful today as it was then.