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It’s Going to Be A Battle (But Jesus Wins)
The Big Idea: Fighting against sin allows Christ to do for us what we could never do for ourselves. Why do so many men seem to be living mediocre lives, trapped in complacency, addiction, and compromise? Why is it so easy for men to “just get along” being nice guys but not really living with…
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Do Something Great With Your Life!
The Big Idea: The greatest mission to which a man can aspire is to be a disciple-making disciple. How do you think you will be remembered? How do you want to be remembered? In this final “5 Weeks To Live” message, we’re going to explore God’s way to do something great with your life. Every…
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Fulfilling God’s Plan For Your Life
The Big Idea: I want to be so utterly convinced I am doing God’s will that I wouldn’t change a thing. One day St. Francis of Assisi was out hoeing a row of beans when a passerby asked, “What would you be doing right now if you knew this was the last day of your…
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Finding Respect and Honor at Home
The Big Idea: The turning point of our lives is when we stop seeking the God we want, and start seeking the God who is. Imagine the doctor just told you, “I’m sorry, but you only have five weeks to live.” What would be important to you? What would you want to do, and with…
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Leadership Now!
In extraordinary times, extraordinary leadership is needed. All times are extraordinary! Today Peter talks about the singular importance of leadership and how godly leadership affects God’s flock, Christ’s church, His body which is to be at point for extending the Kingdom of God in our day and age. Dr. Pete Alwinson talks about a subject…
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Finding a New Best Friend in Your Wife
The Big Idea: After God, but before all others, make your wife your top priority. What is your wife’s greatest need? What does it look like to be your wife’s best friend? These are questions we’ll be answering in this message. PLUS you’ll walk out with some very practical “deposits” you can immediately start making…
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Finding a Deeper Personal Relationship with God
The Big Idea: The turning point of our lives is when we stop seeking the God we want, and start seeking the God who is. Imagine the doctor just told you, “I’m sorry, but you only have five weeks to live.” What would be important to you? What would you want to do, and with…
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Did Someone Tell You Christianity Was Going To Be Easy?
The Big Idea: Because God is faithful, I can do my best in the midst of suffering. Maybe you heard it at a youth camp, or in a sermon, or from a well-meaning friend: Becoming a Christian is great! It solves all your problems and makes life so much easier! Here’s the truth: Christianity is…
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How You Can REALLY Make A Difference
The BIG IDEA. To be a Christian is to love everyone and want God’s best for them. Imagine your neighbor. He knows you’re a Christian. You know he’s not. He’s constantly testing your patience, puts everything you say under a microscope, and needles you for “believing” whenever he gets a chance. Or maybe it’s a…
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Resilient Marriage
Do men really lead their wives and families any more or do wives do most of the family leadership? In a world that’s growing progressively against Christian themes, how can our marriages last and make a difference? Dr. Pete Alwinson continues 1st Peter and talks about how Gospel-produced resilient marriages are more powerful and impactful…
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The Only Way to Really Live
The BIG IDEA. Real manhood follows full surrender. We can all agree that it’s tough for many men today to figure out how to keep their priorities straight in this weird world. There are so many distractions that pull at us, and so many forces trying to influence the direction we go. Do you feel like…
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Things To Do While Living In Rome
The Big Idea: Live such a good life that people know where to turn when Rome burns. In Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Francis Schaeffer found five attributes marked Rome at its end: a growing love of show and luxury, a widening gap between the very rich and very poor, an obsession…
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Becoming The Man People Turn To When Life Gets Too Weird
The Big Idea: Walk in the world like a priest, and there are many of us. We’ve been looking at how we can keep ourselves straight, even as the world gets more and more weird. But what about the people around us? Where can they turn when their lives start getting a bit too weird?…
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Finding Truth You Can Trust
The Big Idea: You only have two choices: live in the Word, or die in the world. If you’re like most men, there are areas of your life where you wish you were doing better. And yet we can go weeks, months, or even years without seeing any real improvement. The temptations and distractions of…
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Building a Life of Integrity
The Big Idea: A life of integrity is built on: Hope in God, Holiness like God, Reverence for God In a world that’s getting weirder, it can be hard to find solid ground to stand on. How does a Christian build a life of integrity when the values and truth seem to be disintegrating? Brett…
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Where Were You When the World Went Weird?
The Big Idea: Be a thermostat, not a thermometer. While we probably have many different opinions about how we got into the current situation, we can probably all agree that the world is getting a little crazy. It’s a weird time to be a Christian. Yet as we’ll see in 1st Peter, it has always…
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Habit #6: Spiritually Happy Men Are “Part” of a Church
The Big Idea: Don’t be estranged from your Father because a few siblings let you down. Most of us have heard someone say, and many of us have said ourselves, “I know I should be more committed, but I just don’t feel challenged and inspired by church. Besides, I’m getting everything I need in my…
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Habit #5: Spiritually Happy Men Are Generous
The Big Idea: Have you ever known a spiritually unhappy man who tithes? Every “on fire” Christian would love to be tithing. We all know men who are, and we’d love to be more like them—if for no other reason than to be as spiritually happy as they are. But how? Is generosity something you…
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Habit #4: Spiritually Happy Men Pray With & For Their Wives
The Big Idea: Praying with my wife brings the Greatest Power in the universe into my most important earthly relationship. Prayer is powerful. It puts us in a conversation with the perfect Father who loves you more than anyone ever could, and has more power than anyone you could ever know. So it makes sense…
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Habit #3 Spiritually Happy Men Serve
The Big Idea: You need to have a deep, intentional, spiritual impact in one person’s life. (You’ll love it and God gets the glory.) We live in a culture that relentlessly pushes us to think about ourselves. Look out for #1. What do you need to be happy? How about this new car, new relationship,…
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Habit #2: Spiritually Happy Men Are in a Small Group
The Big Idea: The Rat Race is the conflict between who I am created to be and who I am tempted to be. The proverbial questions of the rat race–“What’s it all about?” and “Is this all there is?”–have tortured us all at one time or another. So let’s kick off this new series by…
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Habit #1: Spiritually Happy Men Read the Bible Regularly
The Big Idea: Your life will never change in any significant way apart from the regular study of God’s Word. What differentiates joyful men from the rest of the pack? In this new series, we’re going to explore six foolproof habits that set genuinely happy men apart from men who feel like lasting happiness eludes…
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Character-Building Struggle
The Big Idea: Our job as fathers is to build strong resiliant kids through our presence, process and prayer. We all want our kids to succeed, to avoid our mistakes and the consequences. How do we walk with our kids through struggles that will form their character, rather than save them from every little bump…
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You Can Always Be a Great Dad
The Big Idea: Encouragement is the food of the heart, and every heart is a hungry heart. Every Christian dad wants to be a great dad. In this lesson we’ll see how those good intentions sometimes go astray, but also how easy it is to be that great dad we all want to be. It’s…
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Finding Work That Makes You Feel Alive
The Big Idea: I will feel fully alive when I truly believe God gave me this work for a reason. We are made for tasks—to work, to serve, to contribute, to add to the greater good. But if you’re not happy in your work, you’re probably not happy anywhere. So, what if you don’t like…
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If Work Is a Blessing, Why Does It Feel Like a Curse?
The Big Idea: We glorify God in work when, in spite of brokenness and sin, we reflect His image to the world. Work can bring some of the highest highs and also the lowest lows. Closing the deal, finishing the project, meeting the sales goal — the feeling is amazing. Having a project go bad,…
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There’s No Such Thing as a Secular Job
The Big Idea: My work is not just a platform for ministry, it is ministry. Half of your waking hours revolve around work. Yet most of us have not been trained on how to live out our faith in the workplace. In this first of three lessons on the subject, we’re going to focus on…
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Love on the Rocks: Navigating Struggles and Conflicts
The Big Idea: Communication will not resolve every conflict. But no conflict can be resolved without it. Life struggles can bring out the worst in marriage and dating relationships. Communication breaks down, feelings get hurt, and you just want to escape a painful situation. But in the worst of times, even when you don’t think…
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I Married a Woman I Couldn’t Change
The Big Idea: I let you be you, and you let me be me. If you knew then what you know now, would you still get married? Some might say, no. But for the vast majority of us the answer is, yes. But we’d also like some help figuring out what to do about those…
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The Role of a Husband
The Big Idea: If you don’t step up, she can’t come alongside. If you knew then what you know now, would you still get married? Some might say, no. But for the vast majority of us the answer is, yes. But we’d also like some help figuring out what to do about those “irreconcilable differences?”…
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Spending Money God’s Way
The Big Idea: If your priorities don’t determine your spending habits, your spending habits will determine your priorities. Money causes stress. When you don’t have a handle on your finances, it makes the rest of life more difficult. Most men have had trouble at some point falling asleep with thoughts of bills, debts, saving for…
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Making Money God’s Way
The Big Idea: Few things reveal my true heart as much as money. It’s a challenge to discuss making money God’s way—not because the Bible says so little about it, but because it says so much. So where do we start? How does God Himself advise us to make money? And how do we want…
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When Money Was My God
The Big Idea: Few things reveal my true heart as much as money. When I started out my life philosophy was, “Money will solve my problems, and success will make me happy.” But the opposite happened. Money created as many (maybe more) problems as it solved. And success made me miserable. Like all of us,…
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How To Discuss Sex With Your Children
The Big Idea: Out: having “the talk.” In: an ongoing conversation about sex. For many of us, sex was taboo in the homes where we grew up. Not many of us had a parent give us “the talk.” For those who did, it was usually awkward. It may even have gone like this: “Son, you…
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Holy Sex
The Big Idea: A husband needs to be loved physically so he can love emotionally, and a wife needs to be loved emotionally so she can love physically. As a man, is there anything you daydream about more than sex? Probably not. So why did God make us this way? Why do we even want…
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Phony Sex
The Big Idea: Sex is too dangerous to be played with and to sacred to be exploited. How do we treat sex the way God wants us to when we live in a sex-saturated and sex-perverted culture? Actually, the culture of the New Testament was not really all that different from ours. So how did…
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A Men Reaching Men Celebration!
The Big Idea: It takes a man to teach a man to be a man. Men are often frustrated because they know “what” needs to be done, but not “how” to do it. That’s why in this series we focused on proven, easy-to-execute ideas to reach other men. And it’s working! You guys have gone…
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What Are The Questions For Which Christ Is The Answer?
The core issues men face are not that different than they have ever been—finding significance and love, resolving loneliness and guilt, contemplating one’s own mortality, coping with the emptiness of material success or lack thereof, broken relationships, pride, fear, anger, lust, and sin—to mention some of the most obvious ones.. God inserted Jesus into human…
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The Indispensable Necessity of Connecting Men to Church
The Big Idea: A real man invests in his church, then helps other men do so as well. Many men today consider church to be optional or a low-priority item on their list. But after you connect with a man who wants to grow in Christ, the reality is that it will be impossible for…
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Getting a Man to Say Yes
The Big Idea: An intentional spiritual friendship is built over time. It’s a relationship, not a transaction. So how exactly do men develop relationships? We tend to bond in shared experiences (verses shared conversations), and there’s a definite progression. You can see it in the way that Jesus built a seemingly random group of strangers…
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The Ministry of Giving a Nudge
The Big Idea: Just help a man go as far as he wants to go toward Jesus at that moment. We’ve been learning that reaching men is pretty much doing what we do every day, but with a view to building intentional spiritual friendships. So let’s say you’ve had that cup of coffee, helped a…
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How to Handle Disappointment
The Big Idea: Jesus called us to go, not to wait and see if they come to us. In the previous two messages, we’ve been given several ways to get involved in a man’s life and help him move forward in his walk with Christ. But anyone who has ever tried to help another person knows…
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Next Step Triple Threat
The Big Idea: Be a friend. Pray. Serve. Give. The challenge in the previous message, “How a Cup of Coffee Can Change the World”, was to begin the process of engaging another man in conversation and begin to get to know him. Great. Now what? Introducing the Next Step Triple Threat. Like the great “Read Option”…
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How One Cup of Coffee Can Change the World
The Big Idea: Discipleship is one man caring enough about another man to help him build a relationship with God, a worldview that’s biblical, and a lifestyle worthy of Christ. Let’s presuppose that, like Peter, James, John, Paul, Timothy and others, you’re a true believer that making disciples is the main work of a Christian.…
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Why Knowing We Should Make Disciples Isn’t Enough
The Big Idea: The more consciously you witness in the power of the Holy Spirit, the more consistently you will see lives change. In His final messages, Jesus told the disciples to carry on His mission—to go and make disciples. But Jesus apparently knew that wouldn’t be enough. I agree. In a career that spans…