This week, Jeff Verkaik helped us learn from the short and often forgotten story of Philemon. What can we learn from this man and his relationships with Paul and Onesimus? Paul’s letter to Philemon used words that bring unity and not division. Listen here and learn how he did that and how we might learn to do the same in our lives and in our time.
What can we learn from Priscilla’s story? There is so much to learn from her brief appearance in the Bible. Listen here as we discover the relationships Priscilla fostered and how she invested in her priorities. And if we’re willing to dig just a little deeper, we find that Priscilla’s story is like so many others in the Bible…a story of God using those who were not valued by society, and using them in big ways. There is much to be learned from this story that is often overlooked, or even forgotten.
Psalm 104 and Psalm 8 remind of that God’s glory can be seen in all of creation. We are reflections of God’s glory, a picture of God’s creativity!
This week, in our Psalms series, we looked at Psalm 77. The Psalmist wasn’t afraid to ask hard questions, but he also was able to look back to remember a specific time when God was faithful. The Psalms remind us to look back at what God’s done, so that we can claim that God will be faithful again in the future.
The Psalms invite us into a life that is truthful and transparent with God. This can make us feel uneasy – can we say these things? Won’t God get mad? Are we being unfaithful if we do? Listen here for week 2 of our series on The Psalms.
We started a new sermon series this week, The Psalms. We will speak, sing and practice many of the Psalms and hopefully let them permeate our hearts and lives, as they certainly influenced Jesus’ life, identity and ministry.
Each week, we’ll be given suggested Psalms to read, pray & meditate on. Here are this week’s Psalms:
Monday: Psalm 1
Tuesday: Psalm 19
Wednesday: Psalm 100
Thursday: Psalm 34
Friday: Psalm 63
A simple way to read and reflect on a Psalm (or any Scripture) is to read it slowly 3-4 times. Pause in between each reading, asking God to open your heard and mind. As you read, be open to a word or phrase that begins to stand out. Be curious about that word or phrase. How might it encourage or challenge or instruct you? What does it tell you about God? About you? About the world? Does it call you to respond in any way? Confession? Action? Service? Song? A final step could be to re-write the Psalm, or a portion of it, in your own words.
To wrap up our Inhabit series, we invited 2 couples to share stories about life in their neighborhoods, how they’ve built relationships, and how they’ve influenced the flavor of their neighborhood.
What can the taste of honey teach us about our neighborhoods? And how does that help shape how we can live incarnationally in our places? Listen here.
We all long for security. But all of our efforts don’t seem to be producing the security we long for. Listen to this week’s podcast as we see how Pentecost leads us to true security.
It’s not enough to just see beauty around us. We are also invited to experience that beauty by entering in to the places where God is already at work. Where is their beauty in my neighborhood? What would it look like for me to enter into and experience that beauty? How might God want to re-ignite my imagination?
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
Henry David Thoreau
What do we see? How easy is it for us to see the less important things? How common, in our context, to become hyper-fixed on what is wrong, broken, dysfunctional? (is this easier? easier to keep our distance through complaint and hopelessness). AND, how easy it is to be distracted or anesthetized? What if we regained our sight for those things that are already beautiful? What if we had eyes to see the mundane, even the broken, as aspects of God’s work among us?
When we regain our sight, it leads to remembering that God is good, which leads to trust, hope and truth.
We learned some Greek this week during the sermon! Sounds a little intimidating, but it’s actually very helpful to understand what Paul was trying to say in Romans 14. What are we doing when we judge someone else? Does that lead to building each other up or to division?
We continue our study of Romans 14, learning how God calls us to navigate conflict. What is our posture? Do we value being right over being in relationship? Is everything we do out of a desire to honor God? Listen here for a sermon that challenges us to think differently about our posture as we find ourselves in places of conflict.
This week we started a new series, using Romans 14 to learn how we can best navigate conflict in our lives. It’s all around us and, if handled poorly, leads to destruction and division. But there is a way to navigate conflict so that it brings people together and builds relationships up. In this first week, we ask the question “In times of conflict, what is our aim?” Is our aim to win and defend ourselves or is our aim resurrection: for harmony and building each other up?
This Easter, we are reminded that hope and new life can come from pain and loss. The journey isn’t pretty or easy, but the resurrection reminds us of our hope. He is risen! He is risen indeed!
This is our last sermon in the series about the wilderness. Our journey took us through simplicity and lament, and showed us lies that we are tempted to believe about our identity. This week, we turn to find our true self. What can we learn about our own identity from Jesus’s responses to the tempter in the wilderness?
When Jesus was in the wilderness, the devil tempted him with things like power, prestige, possessions and control, all in an effort to make Jesus act in a way that was not true to his identity. We are tempted in the same way. What false things are we being tempted to believe? And what do we need from God to remember our true identity?
As a culture, we too often skip over lament. We like to ‘roll up our sleeves’ and get to work fixing whatever is broken. While there is good in doing that, we miss the opportunity for growth and transformation if we skip the step of lament. It is modeled for us in the Bible over and over again. There’s even a whole book devoted to it! Listen as we learn about and practice lament and in so doing, we find hope.
The first ten minutes of this week’s podcast is an overview of our local and global mission partners. The sermon on lament begins after that (at minute 10).
The wilderness is a place to wrestle with our identity. It’s a place where we must face and respond to our temptations. And it’s also a place where we experience God’s provision.
We know the wilderness to be a place that is harsh yet stunning, barren yet beautiful. It is an in-between place, to be sure. And when we willingly enter its vastness, there are things we discover about ourselves, our world and our God. Perhaps that’s why the wilderness shows up time and time again in the biblical story. From Abraham to David to Ruth, God’s people are led into those places where they must wrestle with who they are and who they trust.
Listen here as we begin our Lenten journey through the wilderness.
