Category: Sermons

The Way that Seems Right

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This Sunday we kicked off a brand-new teaching series. Before Jesus departed the scene physically, He left His disciples some final marching orders. They were to make disciples everywhere they went. They were to be His witnesses locally, regionally, and internationally. They were to proclaim and advance the Gospel. The Christian faith has always been a missionary faith. In recent years in this country, though, being on mission for God has become an increasingly difficult task as our culture continues down the road of becoming post-Christian. How are we supposed to share the Gospel in a post-Christian culture where faith is no longer assumed? For the next few weeks, we’ll be talking about that very thing. This week we are starting with a topic that has to be addressed first in this effort: truth. How do we stand on the reality of truth in a culture that rejects such notions? Let’s talk about it.

The Way that Seems Right

Have you ever found yourself wishing we could go back to a simpler time in the past? You know, one where neighbors talked and actually knew each other better. Where kids could be sent out to play all day without worrying about where they were or what they were doing. Where so many marriages didn’t end in divorce. Where men were expected and allowed to be men, and women were expected and allowed to be women. One where the country wasn’t so polarized by politics; where the political left and the political right at least both loved America, and the ideas the nation stands for. Where most people went to church and you could pray and talk about the Bible in schools and in public, and the people who didn’t already believe it responded with repentance rather than persecution. 

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Celebration Sunday 2026

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Each year at my church we have a special day called Celebration Sunday. We take the whole day to do nothing but highlight and celebrate all the great things our God has done in our midst over the past year. It’s a ton of fun. We’ve done things in the past as big hanging streamers and balloons and batting beach balls around the room. We’ve handed out party hats. Everybody went home this Sunday with a cookie (and some of the kids left armed with several cookies to the…delight…of their parents). I’m not going to try and put the whole transcript for the service on here because I’m not the only one who spoke, but I do want to share some highlights and the video of the service with you because I think what’s going on right now in my church is pretty exciting. If you are local and don’t already have a church home, we would sure be glad to have you join us. Without further ado, then, here is Celebration Sunday.

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The Way to Life

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In Psalm 139, David celebrates the detailed and intimate knowledge God has of him; that He has of all of us. In the second part of the psalm, he continues to celebrate that knowledge with some of the most important pro-life themes in the Scriptures. But then he makes a turn to expressing his passion for God in a way that is deeply uncomfortable for modern readers. What are we supposed to do with all of this? That’s what we are talking about today as we wrap up our series, Fully Known. Read on to find out.

The Way to Life

Little kids can get excited. Like, really excited. If you have little ones at home or still remember when yours were little, you perhaps know what I’m talking about. Little kids can get so excited they can’t hold it in, and they’ll start to do silly things to let it out. They’ll run in place, run all over the place, yell and scream, just kind of vibrate where they are standing, and so on and so forth. It can be pretty entertaining to watch. The nice thing about little kids and their excitement, though, is that they don’t tend to get destructive with it. Older kids and adults, on the other hand, can’t say that quite as consistently. 

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God Knows

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Happy New Year! We’re finally back and will pick back up our Romans journey tomorrow morning, Lord willing. For today, here is the first part of a quick New Year’s series reflecting on the extent of God’s knowledge of us and how we should react to that knowledge. Today as we dive into Psalm 139, we will marvel with David at God’s intimate knowledge of us and talk about some tools for remaining in that knowledge. Enjoy!

God Knows

A paradox is when two ideas which seem contradictory of one another are nonetheless simultaneously true, and we live in a world that’s full of them. Consider one particularly glaring one. We live in a world full of people screaming to be known. Depression and anxiety are off the charts these days in part because so many people feel isolated and alone, like no one really knows who they are. In response to this, and with the help of social media, many will invite the world into their most intimate spaces and times just so they can feel like somebody, somewhere, knows them. Of course, just because you show someone something intimate or personal about yourself doesn’t mean they really know you at all. Really knowing another person and being known by them takes relational investment over time. Without that, the presumed knowledge is merely a mirage. It may be a mildly comforting one (which is why so many people clamber for it), but when we are forced to face the truth, the shock of the cold water of reality can be debilitatingly intense. 

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The Miracle of Mundane Moments

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We look to stories in the Bible as incredible tales of amazing people doing utterly remarkable things. The truth, though, is that most of them lived most of their lives in moments that were utterly mundane. That wasn’t just the case for characters in the Scriptures. It’s the case with our lives today too. And yet, as ordinary as most of our lives are, we long to experience the extraordinary. We want to be special, to know that we are more than we seem. This is where the wonder of the Christmas story comes racing to center stage. As extraordinary as we imagine that story to be, most of it was very, very ordinary. What made the difference in these ordinary moments was the movement of God in their midst. Today, as we wrap up our series, When Heaven Met Earth, we are talking about the ordinary moments in the lives of ordinary people, and how things can become entirely more extraordinary than that. Let’s get started.

The Miracle of Mundane Moments

Sometimes the most extraordinary things can happen out of the most ordinary circumstances. Consider something that every single person in the room has in their kitchen, and which most of us have used at least once in the last 24 hours. In 1945, Percy Spencer was working as a radar researcher at Raytheon Labs. Raised as an orphan who never finished elementary school, Spencer taught himself physics and advanced mathematics, joined the Navy, and through that discovered his penchant for science. One day, Spencer was working in the lab with a radar magnetron. That’s basically a tube that converts electrical signals into electromagnetic radiation. It had been invented a few years before and was essential to the invention of modern radar. As Spencer worked with this magnetron, he noticed that a bar of chocolate in his pocket had melted. 

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