Lucas Shipman
12 Verses To Treasure & Memorize This Year

We have curated 12 passages to memorize this year which are connected to our 2023 rallying cry, "We are humble before and joyful in Jesus!" Let's treasure God's word in our hearts each month. 

January

James 4:10 – Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you. 

12 Verses To Treasure & Memorize This Year
Lucas Shipman
Rally Cry 2023

We are here to make disciples and plant churches by proclaiming and displaying the grace of God to sinners and sufferers. After seeking the Lord we’ve discerned our rallying cry for 2023 is not a new project or hill to charge, but a focus on being:

We are humble before & joyful in Jesus! 

Rally Cry 2023
Ryan Wester
Meet the Aledo Core Team: The Nevels

The road to how we got here is a long one. When you walk into Grace Church and see us with our five teenage boys, with a happy marriage, and the Aledo life it is hard to see where we came from.

Meet the Aledo Core Team: The Nevels
Ryan Wester
Meet the Aledo Core Team: The Hatches

We are thrilled to be a part of Grace Church and serve the children and families of Aledo. Our hope and prayer is to see families discipled and formed into the image of Christ so that the next generation of saints may know, trust, and love our good and gracious God.

Meet the Aledo Core Team: The Hatches
Ryan Wester
Know & Turn From Your Idols

We are created worshipping. We're always pouring out love, adoration, and trust somewhere. The question is if it is Jesus or a false god.

Know & Turn From Your Idols

Evangelism: Teaching The Gospel With The Aim To Persuade

Evangelism: Teaching The Gospel With The Aim To Persuade

A GOSPEL EXPLANATION

Our Creator God is holy, just, and loving. We are his people, made in his image. Though we were once in fellowship with God and loved by him, we are now cut off from him. That separation of God and his people started with a rebellion by our ancestors. At root, the rebellion was our choice not to believe God and to attempt to make ourselves God instead. That treasonous rebellion failed, and the judgment was eternal death. Horribly, the sin of rebellion is passed on from generation to generation as a curse: all people inherit both the sin and the judgment. Our sin nature makes it impossible for anyone to earn his way back to God. 

5 Myths And 5 Truths About Forgiveness

5 Myths And 5 Truths About Forgiveness

Nothing is more important for us than to know what forgiveness is as well as what it isn’t. So what I propose in this study is to look first at five myths about forgiveness; that is to say, five lies many of us have embraced about what it means to forgive another person. Then I will turn to five truths about forgiveness, or five essential elements apart from which true forgiveness will never take place.

Forgiveness Prayer

Forgiveness Prayer

After we discussed forgiveness yesterday the Holy Spirit may convict you that it’s time to forgive someone who has sinned against you or you will in the future. The following forgiveness prayer can be used as a template to guide you in your own prayer to God. You may adapt this one, or read it as your own prayer, filling in the specific offense and name of the one you are forgiving.

Five Indicators Of Individualism

Five Indicators Of Individualism

In Western culture, individualism is like a windshield or a pair of glasses. We’re so used to “seeing through” it that we don’t even see it. We need some help to recognize how our self-centeredness actually manifests itself. Below are some indicators of individualism, some ways it may express itself based on who you are and how you’re wired.

Portrait Of Biblical Repentance

Portrait Of Biblical Repentance

Here is a portrait of biblical repentance seen through six stages to equip you to live a life marked by repentance and belief–turning to and worshipping Jesus. It is taken from Mike Wilkerson’s book Redemption.

CONVICTION

You have to be convinced by the Holy Spirit working through God’s Word that you are guilty of sin. If you move too quickly past this point, you will spin in the cul-de-sac of self-deception because you will end up telling yourself and others that you are repenting of something that you aren’t even convinced is wrong. We do this often because we love looking repentant more than we actually want to love God or others. 

Pretending And Performing

Pretending And Performing

What do you count on to give you a sense of “personal credibility” (validity, acceptance, good standing)? 

As God thinks of you right now, what is the look on his face?

Your answers to those two questions will typically reveal something besides Jesus in which you are finding your righteousness. When we are not firmly rooted in the gospel, we rely on false sources of righteousness to build our reputation and give us a sense of worth and value—to make us feel ok. 

Breaking The Rules Of Legalism

Breaking The Rules Of Legalism

How The Cross Rescues You From The Performance Trap by CJ Mahaney

One of the greatest hindrances to keeping the gospel central in our lives is our creeping tendency toward legalism. It’s an age-old foe to God’s plan of salvation through faith alone. From the earliest days of the church, legalism has thrown Christians off course and sidetracked them all over the place. And it’s just as active and destructive today as it ever was. 

It’s important to understand that a legalist isn’t just someone with higher standards or more rules than you. A lot of us wrongly stereotype a legalistic person as one who doesn’t go to the movies, or who thinks that any music with a beat is evil. Legalism is much more subtle and serious than that. Here’s a simple definition that I use: Legalism is seeking to achieve forgiveness from God and acceptance by God through obedience to God.

Minimizing Sin & Applying The Gospel

Minimizing Sin & Applying The Gospel

Yesterday morning at our first core team gathering we discussed gospel-centrality and one specific component of growing in our awareness of both God's holiness and our sinfulness. Below are the two lists we looked at that described ways we don't grow in our awareness but minimize our sin and examples of applying the gospel specifically (along with the visual of the growing awareness chart).

Planting As A Team: The Oakleys

Planting As A Team: The Oakleys

My wife Ashley and I courted through high school and got married as soon as we graduated in 2005. As young newlyweds, we had set out for ourselves a ‘five year plan’ by which we had determined how we would navigate through this life together; what careers we would pursue, where we would attend school, when we would have children, etc. Six months into our marriage however, the Lord showed us through a positive pregnancy test that His ways are not our ways, and that His thoughts are far above our thoughts. At the time, that’s about as far as we could see in terms of His reasoning for taking us down such a different path than we had wanted for ourselves, or at least, what we thought we wanted.