Category: Sermons

Smiling couple walking through a busy evening street market

Becoming a Soulmate

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We’re going to go with a throwback post today. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about relationships and what it takes to really get them right. As a pastor, I tend to hear about everybody’s junk at some point. It may not be because they tell me about it directly, but I almost always manage to hear about it anyway. I can think of at least three couples who are at various points of struggling in their relationship without really trying. And, wouldn’t you know it, one of the posts that went live today almost ten years ago was a sermon I preached in a series on marriage. Our culture preaches the gospel of soulmates. According to this gospel, there is a person out there who is your soulmate. All you have to do is find them, and everything will be sunshine and rainbows from that point forward. And yet, what if something happens that leaves you thinking the person you thought was yours…isn’t anymore? Does that mean you were wrong this whole time? Nope, it means you’ve been thinking about it wrong the whole time. Let’s talk a walk down the blog’s memory lane today and have a conversation about relationships and marriage that still feels remarkably fresh almost ten years later.

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Real Faith Reaches Out

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For the last three weeks, we have been talking about who we are as a church; who God made us to be. Hearing the basic idea each week is good, but sometimes we need to dive a little more fully into the ideas to make sure we are all on the same page together. We have so far talked about being a people with whom anyone can connect, and growing in Christ together. Both of those are necessary and important parts of who God made us to be, but they aren’t the end of the journey. Having a faith in God that means something means reaching out to advance His kingdom. That’s what we are diving into this morning as we complete this journey. Let’s dig in together.

Real Faith Reaches Out (James 2:14-26)
October 4, 2026 

I loved doing worksheets when I was in school. I loved them. Yes, I have long since owned my nerdiness. When teachers would start handing out worksheets—especially in math classes—while all the other kids would groan (often loudly), I would be secretly celebrating. I could sit there and do those for hours. When I was in eighth grade, I had a science teacher who was a very nice man, but not a very organized teacher. He handed out these enormous packets of worksheets about the various systems of the human body, but then he decided not to actually assign them and made them just extra credit. I did every single one of them anyway. I think the reason I loved them so much is the perfectionist in me. I could get them done, I could mostly do them right, and when you got to the end of the worksheet, that job was finished. They delivered me the same dopamine hit that accomplishing objectives in a video game gives you. 

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Team Sports

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No one really accomplishes anything on their own. As we go through our journeys, there are all sorts of people who are pouring into us and enabling us to accomplish the things we do. Some of this is formalized and intentional; a great deal of it is unplanned and circumstantial. But all of it shapes and directs where we go and what we accomplish on the way. This is true about life in general. It is even more true about the growth and development of our faith. As we continue our look at how God designed us to be as a church today, we are talking about the second part of our identity: growing. Growing in Christ is never something that happens on its own. Let’s talk about how it actually works, and what that means for us.

Team Sports

On occasion the world discovers an athlete who seems to have gotten really good at some sport entirely on his own. In the 2024 Olympics in Paris, there was a member of the Turkish shooting team named Yusuf Dikec who took the world by storm and was the source of an endless number of memes. In the 10-meter pistol competition, while all his other competitors had expensive headphones and glasses and guns and uniforms, Dikec was just…casual. With his rumpled shirt and shorts, a pair of Dollar Store ear plugs, and his normal, everyday glasses—and his non-shooting hand stuffed casually in his pocket—he calmly won the silver medal. Everyone else absolutely looked the part. Dikec looked like somebody’s dad who had woken up late and just slid into the parking lot in time to make his scheduled slot in the event. His nonchalance instantly became legendary. As much as they made for fun stories and speculation, the truth is a little more complicated than that. 

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The Gospel Is for Everybody

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This week we are kicking off a brand-new teaching series. God has been doing a pretty incredible work at my church. We are experiencing explosive growth thanks to the movement of His Spirit in our midst. We are also on the cusp of breaking ground on an expansion and renovation of our current facilities. It’s a pretty exciting time, and we are most definitely going somewhere. But in order to make sure we are truly heading in the right direction, we need to remember who God made us to be. For the next three weeks, we are going to be explore afresh the basic elements of our identity as a church. Thanks for coming along for this journey with us.

The Gospel Is for Everybody

Social media can be a great tool for the advancement of the Gospel. But social media can also be a place where people vent their spleen without really thinking through what the full consequences of their words might be. I won’t ask you to raise your hand if you’ve ever posted something you later wish you hadn’t and even perhaps had to take down because of the negative impact it was having. And the thing is, because none of us are particularly disciplined with our words on a good day—whether they are coming from our mouths or our fingers—all of us are susceptible to this kind of thing. Even pastors. 

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Love Always Looks Up

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For the last few weeks, we have been talking about marriage from the standpoint of the Scriptures. We have talked about the main problem in marriage (sin), what God created it for (to make us more like Him), as well as some practical things we can do to make it better (practice submission and aim for holiness). Today we are finishing up this series by talking about the thing that has been rather noticeably missing in our conversation thus far: love. The Beatles were wrong that love is all you need, but it’s really important all the same. Let’s talk about how we can get that right to the benefit of our marriages and all the other relationships in our life.

Love Always Looks Up

When I do premarital counseling with a couple, one of the things we always talk about toward the end of the journey is where their expectations for the marriage are versus what the reality of marriage will likely be. It’s not necessarily an encouraging conversation (although I try not to make it too much of a bummer), but it is often a helpful one. What we do is that I give them a list of statements describing various aspects of marriage and how they think it will be. The couples are then supposed to mark which of the statements they think are true, and which are false. 

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