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You can know Bible stories.

You can attend church for years.

You can believe true things about Jesus, sincerely respect Him, and try to live a good life.

But is knowing about Jesus the same thing as having the life Jesus came to give?

Nicodemus was a Pharisee, a respected religious leader, and a teacher of Israel. He knew the Scriptures. He took God seriously. He even recognized that Jesus had come from God.

Yet Jesus looked at this deeply religious man and said:

“You must be born again.”

Why?

Because Nicodemus needed something his religious background, biblical knowledge, morality, and effort could never produce.

He needed life from God. transcript-93-what-does-it-mean…

In This Episode, We'll Discuss:

• ✅ What Jesus means when He says, “You must be born again”
• ✅ Why being religious is not the same as receiving new life from God
• ✅ How Ezekiel 36 helps us understand being born of “water and the Spirit”
• ✅ What the bronze serpent in Numbers 21 teaches us about grace and faith
• ✅ Why responding to God’s grace is not the same as earning it
• ✅ How Jesus’ death makes eternal life possible

Jesus did not tell Nicodemus to make his old life more respectable.

He told him he needed life from above.

And when Nicodemus asked how this could happen, Jesus didn't point him back to himself.

He pointed him to the Son who would be lifted up.

The life you need is not something you manufacture.

It is found in Christ.

🎧 Listen now to Episode 93: What Does It Mean to Be Born Again? | John 3:1–15

RESOURCES
📖 FREE 5-Day Audio Devotional: Renaming Your Story
Struggling with identity or feeling stuck? Move from pain to purpose to legacy—15 minutes a day. https://sundayrenewal.podia.com/renaming-your-story-devo⁠

✨ For Families: The Devo Kids
Short devotionals, songs, and prayers that help children fall in love with God's Word. Watch on YouTube | Free printable journal pages at thedevokids.com

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If being a good person can’t make you right with God, what can?

Maybe you look at your life and think, Surely I’ve done enough good for God to accept me.

Or maybe you look at your past and wonder, After everything I’ve done, could God possibly accept someone like me?

One person is proud of the record. Another is crushed by it.

But both are looking in the wrong place.

In Romans 3:21–26, Paul turns our eyes away from ourselves and toward Jesus Christ.

After showing us that we cannot make ourselves right with God, Paul gives us two words filled with hope:

“But now…”

God has acted.

The righteousness we could never produce, God provides. The guilt we could never erase, Christ deals with through His death. The salvation we could never earn, grace gives. And what God provides, faith receives.

In This Episode, We'll Discuss:

• ✅ Why your moral or religious record cannot make you right with God
• ✅ What it means to be justified by grace
• ✅ Why salvation is a gift you receive, not a reward you earn
• ✅ What redemption and Christ’s blood reveal about the cost of grace
• ✅ Why the cross shows both the seriousness of sin and the greatness of God’s grace
• ✅ What it means to receive God’s saving work by faith
• ✅ How God can forgive guilty sinners while remaining perfectly just

The gospel does not ask you to pretend your sin is smaller than it is.

It asks you to believe that Christ is greater than your guilt.

Whether you’re proud of your record or crushed by it, stop looking to yourself for what only Christ can provide.

🎧 Listen now to Episode 92: How Can I Be Made Right With God? (Romans 3:21–26)

RESOURCES
📖 FREE 5-Day Audio Devotional: Renaming Your Story
Struggling with identity or feeling stuck? Move from pain to purpose to legacy—15 minutes a day. https://sundayrenewal.podia.com/renaming-your-story-devo⁠

✨ For Families: The Devo Kids
Short devotionals, songs, and prayers that help children fall in love with God's Word. Watch on YouTube | Free printable journal pages at thedevokids.com

Support the show

Support the Show:

Want to help us reach more people with God’s Word? Consider supporting the podcast with a donation. Your generosity fuels this ministry and helps us create even more resources for you. Click here to learn more:
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Maybe you know you’re not perfect.

You’ve made mistakes. Said things you regret. Made decisions you wish you could change. There are parts of your life you know could be better.

But needing to improve and needing to be saved are two very different things.

If your biggest problem is that you need to become a better person, then perhaps more discipline, better habits, and greater effort could fix it.

But what if the problem goes deeper?

In Romans 3:9–20, Paul brings us face-to-face with a difficult truth: we cannot make ourselves right with God.

In This Episode, We'll Discuss:

• ✅ Why being better than someone else cannot make you righteous before God
• ✅ What Paul means when he says we are all “under sin”
• ✅ Why sin is more serious than mistakes, flaws, or bad habits
• ✅ How our words and relationships reveal sin’s deeper reach
• ✅ Why good works cannot erase our guilt before God
• ✅ What it means for “every mouth” to be stopped before Him
• ✅ Why admitting you cannot save yourself is not the same as having no hope

Paul doesn’t prove that you cannot be saved.

He proves that you cannot save yourself.

And once we understand that, we’re finally ready to hear the good news of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.

🎧 Listen now to Episode 91: Why Do I Need to Be Saved?

RESOURCES
📖 FREE 5-Day Audio Devotional: Renaming Your Story
Struggling with identity or feeling stuck? Move from pain to purpose to legacy—15 minutes a day. https://sundayrenewal.podia.com/renaming-your-story-devo⁠

✨ For Families: The Devo Kids
Short devotionals, songs, and prayers that help children fall in love with God's Word. Watch on YouTube | Free printable journal pages at thedevokids.com

Support the show

Support the Show:

Want to help us reach more people with God’s Word? Consider supporting the podcast with a donation. Your generosity fuels this ministry and helps us create even more resources for you. Click here to learn more:
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We trust experienced doctors with our health. Pilots with our safety. Experts with decisions we don’t know how to make.

Why, then, can it be so difficult to trust God?

Especially when the future is uncertain, money is tight, someone has wronged us, guilt resurfaces, or life simply isn’t going according to plan.

In this episode of Sunday Renewal, my good friend Hiram Kemp challenges us to look again at God’s track record.

God has never broken a promise. He has never lost control. And He has never failed to be faithful.

Yet trusting God means more than believing He exists. It means entrusting Him with the parts of life we desperately want to control.

In This Episode:

✅ Trust God when someone has wronged you

✅ Trust God to provide your daily needs

✅ Trust God to work through circumstances you don’t understand

✅ Trust God when guilt makes you question His forgiveness

✅ Trust God to direct your path when the future is unclear

✅ Trust God with the future of His church

✅ Trust God to save you in the end

You don't need to know everything God is doing to have peace.

You need to know the God who is doing it.

His track record is perfect.

🎧 Listen now to Episode 90: Can You Really Trust God? 7 Truths for When Life Feels Uncertain with Hiram Kemp.

RESOURCES
📖 FREE 5-Day Audio Devotional: Renaming Your Story
Struggling with identity or feeling stuck? Move from pain to purpose to legacy—15 minutes a day. https://sundayrenewal.podia.com/renaming-your-story-devo⁠

✨ For Families: The Devo Kids
Short devotionals, songs, and prayers that help children fall in love with God's Word. Watch on YouTube | Free printable journal pages at thedevokids.com

Support the show

Support the Show:

Want to help us reach more people with God’s Word? Consider supporting the podcast with a donation. Your generosity fuels this ministry and helps us create even more resources for you. Click here to learn more:
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What if you didn’t have to prove how strong you are?

We work hard to appear capable.

We hide our limitations. Compare ourselves to people who seem stronger. And sometimes we quietly assume that the more capable we become, the more useful we’ll be to Christ.

But Paul discovered something radically different.

After pleading three times for Christ to remove his thorn, Paul could eventually say:

“I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses.”

What changed?

Not the thorn.

What changed was where Paul placed his confidence.

In this episode, we explore 2 Corinthians 12:9–10 and discover how Christ’s power frees us from proving our strength and teaches us to live confidently, even when weakness remains.

In This Episode, We'll Discuss:

• ✅ How Christ’s power changes the way we see weakness
• ✅ Why comparison keeps our attention focused on ourselves
• ✅ The difference between admitting weakness and glorifying weakness
• ✅ What it means for Christ’s power to “rest upon” us
• ✅ How to find contentment when circumstances haven’t changed
• ✅ What Paul really means by “when I am weak, then I am strong”

Your weakness is not the hero of this passage.

Christ is.

You don’t have to prove your strength when your confidence rests in His power.

🎧 Listen now to Episode 89: When I Am Weak, Then I Am Strong: Finding Confidence in Christ’s Power.

RESOURCES
📖 FREE 5-Day Audio Devotional: Renaming Your Story
Struggling with identity or feeling stuck? Move from pain to purpose to legacy—15 minutes a day. https://sundayrenewal.podia.com/renaming-your-story-devo⁠

✨ For Families: The Devo Kids
Short devotionals, songs, and prayers that help children fall in love with God's Word. Watch on YouTube | Free printable journal pages at thedevokids.com

Support the show

Support the Show:

Want to help us reach more people with God’s Word? Consider supporting the podcast with a donation. Your generosity fuels this ministry and helps us create even more resources for you. Click here to learn more:
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What happens when you’ve prayed for God to change something, and it still hasn’t changed?

You’ve asked Him to heal.

To restore.

To open the door.

To lift the burden.

You believe He can do it. That’s why you keep praying.

But the harder question is this:

Can you trust Christ when His answer is different from your request?

Paul knew that tension.

Three times he pleaded with the Lord to remove his thorn. But instead of removing it, Christ answered:

“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

Paul asked for removal.

Christ answered with grace.

And that changes how we understand unanswered prayer, persistent weakness, and the sufficiency of Christ.

In This Episode, We'll Discuss:

✅ Why persistent prayer is not evidence of deficient faith
✅ How to keep asking while surrendering the outcome to God
✅ What “My grace is sufficient for you” actually means
✅ Why an unchanged circumstance does not mean an absent Christ
✅ How weakness reveals where we’ve been placing our confidence
✅ Why Christ’s power becomes unmistakable when ours runs out

Sometimes Christ removes the thorn.

Sometimes He gives grace to carry what remains.

Either way, our hope was never that our strength would be sufficient.

Our hope is that His grace always will be.

Bring Him what hurts.

Receive what He promises.

Rely on His power when yours runs out.

🎧 Listen now to Episode 88: When God Doesn’t Remove the Weakness: Is His Grace Really Enough?

RESOURCES
📖 FREE 5-Day Audio Devotional: Renaming Your Story
Struggling with identity or feeling stuck? Move from pain to purpose to legacy—15 minutes a day. https://sundayrenewal.podia.com/renaming-your-story-devo⁠

✨ For Families: The Devo Kids
Short devotionals, songs, and prayers that help children fall in love with God's Word. Watch on YouTube | Free printable journal pages at thedevokids.com

Support the show

Support the Show:

Want to help us reach more people with God’s Word? Consider supporting the podcast with a donation. Your generosity fuels this ministry and helps us create even more resources for you. Click here to learn more:
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What if the weakness you keep asking God to remove isn’t proof that something has gone wrong?

We spend so much of life trying to prove we’re enough.

Strong enough.
Capable enough.
Successful enough.
Spiritual enough.

Then weakness enters our lives and exposes what we’d rather forget: we have limits.

The apostle Paul knew that feeling.

After receiving extraordinary revelations from God, Paul was given something completely unexpected: a painful, persistent “thorn in the flesh.”

Why?

Paul tells us twice: to keep him from becoming conceited.

The thorn was painful.

But pride was the greater danger.

Listen to discover how Christ can use the very weaknesses we wish would disappear to deepen our humility, dependence, and trust in Him.

In This Episode, We'll Discuss:

✅ Why Paul’s thorn was about more than suffering
✅ How even God’s blessings can become occasions for pride
✅ Why weakness does not mean Christ has stopped working
✅ The danger of taking credit for what grace has provided
✅ A better question to ask when God doesn’t remove the burden
✅ Why you were never meant to be enough because Christ is enough

We don’t know why every thorn comes.

But we do know this:

Your weakness does not put you beyond Christ’s work.

Sometimes Christ changes our circumstances.

Sometimes He uses our circumstances to change us.

🎧 Listen now to Episode 87: The Purpose of Weakness: What Paul’s Thorn Teaches Us.

RESOURCES
📖 FREE 5-Day Audio Devotional: Renaming Your Story
Struggling with identity or feeling stuck? Move from pain to purpose to legacy—15 minutes a day. https://sundayrenewal.podia.com/renaming-your-story-devo⁠

✨ For Families: The Devo Kids
Short devotionals, songs, and prayers that help children fall in love with God's Word. Watch on YouTube | Free printable journal pages at thedevokids.com

Support the show

Support the Show:

Want to help us reach more people with God’s Word? Consider supporting the podcast with a donation. Your generosity fuels this ministry and helps us create even more resources for you. Click here to learn more:
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What do you do when the God who blessed you yesterday allows something today that breaks your heart?

One day, the flour doesn't run out.

The next day, the widow's son dies.

In 1 Kings 17:17–24, Elijah and the widow are forced to wrestle with one of life's hardest questions: can we still trust God when His ways don't make sense?

This passage doesn't minimize grief or offer easy answers. Instead, it shows us where faith goes when life falls apart; it carries its deepest burdens into the presence of the living God.

If you've ever struggled to reconcile God's goodness with your pain, this message will encourage you to keep bringing your questions, your sorrow, and your hope to Him.

In This Episode, We'll Discuss:

• ✅ Why faith is often tested after God has already been faithful
• ✅ The difference between asking God hard questions and answering them for Him
• ✅ What Elijah teaches us about bringing impossible situations to God
• ✅ Why God's silence doesn't mean His absence
• ✅ How this miracle points us to Jesus, our greater High Priest
• ✅ Finding hope when grief and faith seem to collide

Faith doesn't require having every answer.

It simply knows where to take every burden.

🎧 Listen now to Episode 86| When Hope Dies: Trusting God Through Grief and Loss (1 Kings 17:17–24).

RESOURCES
📖 FREE 5-Day Audio Devotional: Renaming Your Story
Struggling with identity or feeling stuck? Move from pain to purpose to legacy—15 minutes a day. https://sundayrenewal.podia.com/renaming-your-story-devo⁠

✨ For Families: The Devo Kids
Short devotionals, songs, and prayers that help children fall in love with God's Word. Watch on YouTube | Free printable journal pages at thedevokids.com

Support the show

Support the Show:

Want to help us reach more people with God’s Word? Consider supporting the podcast with a donation. Your generosity fuels this ministry and helps us create even more resources for you. Click here to learn more:
One-Time Donation (Paypal)
$3+ Monthly Subscription