With a great deal of prayer and many conversations with the LORD, I’ve been prompted to focus my YouTube channel conversations in a duel track or focus. Over the coming months, my primary focus will be Redemption Stories with this channel.
In time I can see also hosting a second theme which is Growth Stories. Both our redemption and growth is all of God’s grace. It’s not about us ultimately. It’s about God redeeming people through normal Jesus people sharing the Gospel day-by-day mainly. More and more I see that God is reaching a hurting and dying world through us, normal Jesus soaked folks. The more God shows me this, the more I want to highlight these Redemption Stories. Our growth stories are also very much God working through others, however, which is fascinating. It’s fascinating to see how our vertical growth with God has a lot to do with our horizontal walk with others – believers and unbelievers.
As an example, as we study God’s Word, many of David’s prayers have very much to do with struggles with other people, friends and foes, yet his resolve is to look to God and praise Him and trust Him.
In the same way, may we grow in grace as we look back at the cross and remember all He did for us on the cross already. May our growth in God working in us and through us be a result of His redemption still! God redeems us in justifying us and in sanctifying us! God makes us righteous positionally, but He also purifies us degree by degree, day-by-day!
Preaching regularly has been such a blessing over the last year as it’s given me more time to really pray and soak in God’ Word on top of my regular quite time life with God. It’s also drawn me into regularly thinking about those I’m bringing God’s Word to, which have been different communities of believers. This has been special because I’ve had a more broad consideration of believers that look very different from each other. God has been warming my heart for folks of very different walks of life from one another. I’m deeply humbled by this and grateful for this! I’ve gotten to serve those literally living around me in my tiny village of Snelling and those up in Tuolumne County where I’m from, and a couple of different churches in Atwater, CA, a town that’s growing on me here in Merced County the more the Lord leads me there to serve in pastoral ministry.
God is working, and the Ephesians 4 reminder He gave me about a decade ago keeps coming up. There is something really holy and amazing about remembering that God is redeeming this world through us… normal Jesus folks. Yes, we want to be courageous and lead and step up and be bold and godly and faith-filled and confident in love and grace and so on… Yet, if we can remember that no matter how confident and public or private our lives are, God is redeeming this world through us as Jesus’ followers. We need to remember that God is on the move whether our story is loud or very, very quiet. My prayerful hope is in these conversations to partly be modeling encouraging other believers in their calling and purpose no matter how quiet their path may be. God showed me something when we moved back to California which was, “Go home, and multiply.”
What I thought that meant was to move back to Tuolumne County and to do so as soon as possible, so I jumped the gun and moved us up to Twain Harte within the first two years of being back. This wasn’t very healthy for us as we hadn’t really established our business in Merced as well as we should have before we did that. God then brought me through page after page of humbling experiences including a really special but hard season of house church planting following Francis Chan’s movement called We Are Church. I’m not dogging on WAC but God did humble me that He had greater intentions for the church in Merced County than trying to re-shape it into a house church network. He loves His people and He isn’t about our form so much as our function and fellowship. May God be glorified in this CONVERSATIONS focus as believers get a chance to share their testimonies and God’s continued work IN and THROUGH them for His glory!
Much love, friends!
Torrey
Grounded Gospel 