Faith in Focus is a weekly reflection on what God has been teaching me throughout the week regarding my faith. Whether it’s personal interactions, reading, or the Sunday sermon, God speaks through it all, and I hope this helps you focus on His mission.
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Sermon Reflection
The gospel isn’t a gift to admire from a distance. In 2 Corinthians 6:1–7:1, Paul calls believers to receive God's grace, endure hardship without surrendering their hope, and turn away from the loyalties that pull them from Jesus. The question isn’t simply whether we’ve heard the gospel, but whether it’s forming the people we’re becoming.
Based on the sermon by Jonathan Land, Connection Church Sioux Falls, October 25, 2026.
Don't Waste the Grace of God
A gift card can look like money and still be worthless.
Imagine buying a stack of gift cards for a restaurant, carefully setting them aside, and returning months later to discover the business has closed. The cards are still in your possession. The promise they represented was real. But the opportunity to use them has disappeared.
It’s a funny story until the analogy turns toward something far more serious.
In his sermon on 2 Corinthians 5:20–7:1, Jonathan brought the image of an unused gift into Paul’s urgent appeal to the Corinthian church: don’t receive the grace of God in vain. Paul’s not suggesting that God’s grace is an ordinary commodity, subject to expiration dates or the changing fortunes of a business. He’s confronting the tragedy of hearing the gospel, professing faith, and then living as though Jesus has made little difference.
We can know the right answers. We can attend church, listen to sermons, and accumulate more Christian teaching than previous generations could have imagined. Still, the question remains. Is the gospel forming us?
The challenge isn’t simply to know more about Jesus. It’s to become people whose lives increasingly resemble him.
The World Behind the Text
Corinth was a city in which the Christian faith had taken root amid competing loyalties, religious practices, and social expectations. Paul had helped establish the church, but his relationship with its members had become strained. His letters reveal a community that needed correction, and his second letter shows him defending a ministry whose credibility some people questioned.
Paul’s opponents apparently offered the sort of credentials people naturally admire. They appeared impressive, persuasive, and well connected. Paul, by contrast, could point to hardship, opposition, and suffering. By the world’s usual calculations, his record looked less like success than failure.
Yet Paul insists that his ministry must be evaluated by a different standard. His account of suffering and perseverance in 2 Corinthians 6 isn’t a resume designed to impress. It’s evidence of a life being shaped by the crucified Christ.
The historical setting also helps explain why Paul’s words about separation from idols and the temple of God were so consequential. In Destroyer of the Gods, historian Larry W. Hurtado examines how early Christianity challenged established religious loyalties, formed identities that crossed ethnic and social boundaries, and called believers to a distinct way of life. The first Christians weren’t simply adding another religious preference to an otherwise unchanged existence.
They belonged to Jesus. That allegiance reached into their relationships, habits, worship, and treatment of others.
Paul’s concern for Corinth was therefore deeper than a disagreement over leadership styles. Would this church be shaped by the values of the surrounding culture, or by the gospel it had received?
That question has never disappeared.
Walking the Passage
Paul begins with reconciliation. God acts through Christ to bring sinners back to himself, and those who’ve received this reconciliation become ambassadors, carrying the message of peace with God to others. The foundation isn’t human achievement but the work of Jesus, who bore sin so that those who trust in him might receive God’s righteousness.
Then comes the appeal: don’t receive God’s grace in vain.
The order is essential. Paul doesn’t tell people to make themselves worthy enough for God to welcome them. He announces what God has accomplished in Christ and calls them to respond.
Grace is a gift, but a gift that transforms its recipient. To receive it while refusing its direction is to contradict the very purpose for which it was given.
The sermon pressed this urgency into the present. We often postpone obedience until circumstances improve, questions disappear, or a more convenient season arrives. We tell ourselves we will repent later, forgive later, pursue Christian community later, or surrender the relationship or habit we know is drawing us away from Jesus later.
But later isn’t a promise we possess.
For someone exploring Christianity, the invitation isn’t to manufacture perfect certainty before considering Jesus. Honest questions deserve attention, and doubts shouldn’t be brushed aside. Faith doesn’t require pretending every question has an easy answer. The invitation is to consider whether Jesus is worthy of trust now, even while questions remain.
For the believer, the same urgency takes a different shape. Perhaps there’s a sin to confess, a debt of resentment to release, or a commitment to reconsider. The point isn’t to produce a frantic burst of religious effort. It’s to stop treating obedience as an appointment that can be rescheduled indefinitely.
God’s grace has come near. Respond to him.
Paul follows his appeal with a catalogue of hardships: affliction, imprisonment, sleepless nights, hunger, and more. Then he describes the qualities through which his ministry continues: purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God.
The contrasts that follow are striking. Sorrowful, yet rejoicing. Poor, yet making many rich. Having nothing, yet possessing everything.
Christian joy isn’t denial. Paul doesn’t pretend that suffering is pleasant or that grief is an illusion. His sorrows are real. So are the reasons he has to rejoice.
The difference is Jesus.
The cross stands at the center of Christian faith because it declares that suffering and apparent defeat don’t have the final word. Christ’s death was real, and his resurrection vindicated his victory over sin and death. The believer’s hope rests not in a life free from hardship but in the risen Lord who remains faithful through it.
Pressure, then, can expose what we’ve been trusting. When life becomes difficult, do we cling to Christ, or do we assume his goodness has disappeared because our comfort has?
This is also why charisma can’t substitute for character. A gifted speaker may attract a crowd. A powerful personality may command attention. A public platform may make someone appear successful. None of these things, by themselves, demonstrates spiritual maturity.
Paul’s ministry bore the marks of endurance and costly love. The question for the church isn’t merely who can draw a crowd, but who is being formed into the likeness of Jesus.
We should be careful here. Suffering doesn’t automatically make someone righteous, and hardship should never be romanticized or used to excuse abuse. The passage commends faithfulness through suffering, not suffering inflicted by irresponsible leaders. Christian endurance means remaining faithful to Christ, including when faithfulness requires seeking safety, speaking truth, or confronting wrongdoing.
The gospel produces resilient people, not people who must pretend they’re unhurt.
Paul describes his heart as open toward the Corinthians, even while confronting their failures. His appeal carries both affection and authority. He loves them enough to tell them the truth, and he tells them the truth without withdrawing his love.
This is the taste of the gospel in a community.
We’re often tempted to choose between compassion and conviction. Compassion without truth can leave people trapped in what’s destroying them. Conviction without compassion can turn truth into a weapon, wielded without patience or love.
Jesus offers neither indifference nor cruelty. He comes near to sinners and calls them to repentance. He knows the full truth about us and doesn’t abandon those who come to him.
The church should reflect that same pattern. We need tender hearts and steadfast convictions. We need the courage to speak honestly and the humility to remember that we, too, live by mercy.
This has implications for disagreements within the church, for relationships strained by sin, and for the way Christians engage people who don’t share their beliefs. Our mission isn’t to win arguments at the cost of the people standing in front of us. Nor is love a reason to conceal the truth about Jesus.
We’re ambassadors of reconciliation. Our manner of speaking should make the message of reconciliation visible.
The final movement of the passage turns toward allegiance. Paul warns the Corinthians against being unequally yoked with unbelievers and asks what fellowship light can have with darkness, or what agreement God’s temple can have with idols.
This language is often applied exclusively to marriage. Marriage is certainly an important application, but Paul’s wider argument concerns the loyalties and partnerships that can pull believers away from faithfulness to Christ. The immediate context is a church tempted to embrace influences that undermine its gospel identity.
A yoke joins animals together so they can pull a load. If they pull in opposing directions, their work becomes difficult and disordered. Paul uses this image to ask whether our commitments are drawing us toward Jesus or away from him.
The question reaches beyond romance. What are we financially committed to? Which relationships shape our decisions? What habits consume our attention? What responsibilities have we accepted that leave us unable to worship, serve, rest, or care for others faithfully?
Not every friendship with a non Christian is a compromise. Paul doesn’t call believers to disappear from the world or withdraw from people who need the gospel. Christians are sent into the world as witnesses. The concern isn’t contact with unbelievers, but binding ourselves to loyalties that require disobedience to Christ.
And Paul grounds this call in an extraordinary promise: God’s people are his dwelling place. He will be their God, and they will be his people. He welcomes them as sons and daughters.
Only then does Paul call them to cleanse themselves and pursue holiness.
That order is the gospel. We don’t cleanse ourselves to persuade God to adopt us. We pursue holiness because, through Christ, God has welcomed us into his family.
Obedience isn’t the purchase price of belonging. It’s the fruit of belonging.
A Fair Counter-Reading
Paul’s language about separation can be misunderstood if we detach it from the rest of Scripture. Read carelessly, it could encourage Christians to isolate themselves from neighbors, treat unbelievers as contaminants, or assume that every relationship across a difference in faith is forbidden.
But Paul’s already described believers as ambassadors of reconciliation. His wider ministry sends Christians into the world with the good news of Jesus, and his earlier counsel to the Corinthians recognizes that believers may remain in marriages with unbelieving spouses rather than abandon those relationships (1 Corinthians 7:12–16).
The distinction is between loving people and surrendering our deepest allegiance. We can welcome, serve, listen to, and befriend people without making every value or desire they hold our own.
Likewise, the call to holiness must never become a license for spiritual pride. Christians don’t stand apart because they’re inherently superior. We stand by grace, and grace leaves no room for boasting.
Separation from sin should make us more available for loving service, not less compassionate toward those who need Christ.
The Turn
The final word of this passage isn’t condemnation. It’s belonging.
The promises come first. God welcomes his people, gives them a new identity, and calls them to live accordingly. That’s why the Christian life can’t be reduced to moral self improvement. We’re not simply trying to become better versions of ourselves. We’re learning to live as people whose lives have been claimed by Jesus.
Consider the people Paul describes. They’re misunderstood, wounded, poor, and sorrowful. Yet they possess a joy the world can’t manufacture. They endure because their hope is anchored somewhere deeper than public approval or personal comfort.
Jesus embodies the pattern perfectly. He was rejected though he was righteous, became poor for our sake, bore our sin, and died so that we might be reconciled to God. Through his resurrection, death doesn’t have the final word. Through his grace, those once alienated from God can be welcomed as his children.
The church’s life together should make that reconciliation visible. Different people, with different histories and burdens, become a community united by Christ. We learn to forgive because we’ve been forgiven. We serve because Jesus served us. We speak truth because love refuses to leave people without hope. We carry the gospel beyond our gatherings because reconciliation is a message meant to be shared.
This is the rhythm of Connection Church’s framework of gospel, community, and mission. The gospel is the foundation. Community is where its transforming work becomes visible among people who need grace. Mission carries that grace into neighborhoods, workplaces, families, and the wider world.
The question is no longer whether we have access to Christian teaching. It’s whether we’ll let God’s Word shape our loves, decisions, and relationships.
The gift’s been given. The promises are in Christ. Now we live in response.
Carry It Into the Week
Start with one honest question: Where’s the grace of God reached my understanding without yet reaching my habits?
Don’t answer by making a sweeping promise to change everything overnight. Choose one faithful response.
Receive grace today. Name the repentance, confession, or act of trust you’ve been postponing. Bring it honestly before God and, where appropriate, invite a mature Christian to walk alongside you.
Examine what’s shaping you. Take stock of your commitments, relationships, spending, media habits, and use of time. Ask whether they’re helping you follow Jesus or steadily pulling you in another direction.
Practice compassion with conviction. If a relationship needs an honest conversation, pursue it with humility and love. If you need to forgive someone, begin by bringing the wound to God. Forgiveness doesn’t require denying harm or removing wise boundaries.
Let suffering deepen your dependence on Christ. You don’t need to disguise grief with religious language. Bring your sorrow to God and allow trusted believers to share its weight with you.
Make the gospel visible to someone else. Serve a neighbor, encourage a struggling friend, give generously, or speak about Jesus with gentleness and clarity. Let the grace you’ve received become grace that others can encounter through your life.
And return to Scripture. Not merely to complete a reading plan or collect another set of notes, but to know God’s character, understand his promises, and learn to recognize the ways your heart needs to be reshaped.
The goal isn’t to measure spiritual growth by how impressive your progress looks to other people. It’s to grow in faithfulness to Jesus, together with his people, for the good of the world he loves.
Song of the Week: demons - Josiah Queen
This week marks a first for Song of the Week. We have our first artist returning for a second feature, and with his new album, Damascus Road, dropping, it’s only fitting to highlight one of the songs that’s been on repeat for me ever since it was released as a single, long before the album was available. That song is “demons.”
This song has become an anthem for me in the middle of my own struggles. The chorus rings out like a battle cry, “Tell those demons, run and hide. They tremble at the name of Jesus every time. Fear ain’t got a home here up inside my mind. Darkness has to leave up in this light.”
These words have become especially meaningful as I continue battling certain sins in my own life. There have been moments when I’ve found myself singing this chorus as a way of pushing back against the darkness, reminding myself that I don’t have to surrender to temptation. It’s a reminder to turn my attention back to Jesus when my focus starts shifting toward the struggle in front of me.
But as powerful as this song is, it’s just a song. The name of Jesus is the key to the entire message. The music can encourage us, the lyrics can remind us of truth, and singing along can help us refocus our minds, but the power doesn’t come from the song itself. It comes from Jesus.
We can sing about fighting darkness, but we also need to turn to the One who’s overcome it. When trouble comes, we need more than a catchy chorus. We need to lean on Jesus, spend time in His Word, pray, and remember that we aren’t fighting these battles alone. That doesn’t mean every struggle disappears overnight, but it does mean we have someone greater than ourselves to turn to when we feel weak.
John 8:12 reminds us that Jesus is the light of the world. Darkness can’t overcome His light, and we don’t have to let our struggles define us when our identity is found in Him.
My prayer is that we would all fall back on the name of Jesus when things get rough, when temptation feels overwhelming, and when we feel like the enemy is closing in. Let this song be a reminder to turn our eyes toward Christ, because He is the ultimate light, and He is the One we need in every battle.
Week in Reflection
Coming off another busy weekend and heading into an in office week at work really delays and demotivates me when it comes to being productive. So, once again, I apologize that there was no Faith in Focus last week.
Lately, I’ve also been feeling deeply that I’ve been going too hard for too long. So much of my time has been filled with writing and editing. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy it immensely, and I’m grateful for the opportunities God has given me to pursue photography and writing. But sometimes I just want to sit back and read a book, play a video game, or hang out with friends more often. Those simple things have been pushed to the side in this season of overbooking my calendar, and even this series has occasionally been affected. That’s something I absolutely do not want to happen.
It’s been a reminder that just because I can fill my calendar doesn’t mean I should. There will always be another show to apply for, another article to write, another photo gallery to edit, or another opportunity to pursue. The challenge is recognizing that I can’t do everything, nor am I supposed to. Saying yes to one thing often means saying no to something else, and I need to be more intentional about what I’m choosing.
So I continue to pray. I pray that God would help me lower the number of commitments on my calendar and open up my life to other things. I want to be intentional with my time, making sure my relationships don’t get neglected while I chase the next opportunity. I pray that I would be more selective with my photography opportunities instead of applying for everything under the sun. I’m becoming increasingly aware of how some of the music I photograph impacts me, and I need to be mindful of what I allow into my life.
I also want to make sure that the things I enjoy doing for God don’t become distractions from spending time with God. My writing, photography, and involvement in church are all things I care deeply about, but none of them should come before my relationship with Jesus. I want to serve Him faithfully without losing sight of the One I’m serving.
Thank You, Jesus, for being my firm foundation in the middle of all this busyness. Thank You for giving me the foresight to recognize when I’m taking on too much, and for reminding me that I need to be intentional about how I spend the time You’ve given me. Help me learn when to say yes, when to say no, and when to simply slow down and rest in Your presence.
I pray that this next season will be one of greater intentionality, not simply a fuller calendar. I want to continue pursuing the opportunities You place before me while also making time for the people, relationships, and quiet moments that can so easily get pushed aside.
My prayer moving forward is simple: help me put You first, be faithful with my time, and remember that I do not have to do everything to be faithful to what You have called me to do.
And remember, Jesus loves you, and so do I.
Connection Church in Sioux Falls is a gospel-centered community committed to helping people follow Jesus through authentic relationships, biblical teaching, and everyday mission. Rooted in historic Christian belief and aligned with gospel renewal movements, the church exists to see lives transformed by Jesus. Learn more: https://siouxfallsconnection.com/who-we-are
