Category: Sermons

A Bold Movement

Leave a comment

This week we are continuing our new teaching series on the story of the early church in Acts. This incredible story helps us grasp more fully where we came from so that we better understand where we are going. After the church fairly well exploded into existence after the coming of the Holy Spirit and Peter’s sermon at Pentecost, a happy end to the story if we were writing it would be for the church to sail on forward to accomplish its mission without anything getting in its way. That is not, however, how life works. Challenges started coming the church’s way left and right; inside and out. How did the church navigate her way through all of these? That’s what we’re talking about today. Keep reading to find out.

Just as a heads up: I’ll be traveling some this week. Posts will still go up, but they may not be as long or as early as usual.

A Bold Movement

Do you remember the first time you got burned? I don’t necessarily mean physically burned. I mean, do you remember the first time something happened to really shake your confidence? When I was six my parents took me on a mild roller coaster ride at Silver Dollar City in Branson, MO, called Fire in the Hole. The idea was that you were on a mine train that keeps nearly crashing into a burning building. At each such junction the train makes a quick drop and turn. It was all inside and didn’t really have any high hills or crazy turns. But I was always kind of a cautious kid, and as we were waiting in line I began to lose my nerve. At this point, my parents were presented with a choice: have one of them take me on the chicken exit while the other enjoyed the ride with my sister who was much braver at three than I was at six, or take me on the ride over my increasingly insistent protests in hopes that I would see that it wasn’t nearly so bad as I was thinking. They didn’t know it—and indeed no parent recognizes this in the moment—but this was one of those parental judgment points where there’s really not a right answer, but whatever you decide is probably going to have lasting implications.  They decided to go with the latter option on that list. When the terror-ride finally ended I was traumatized. As I bawled my eyes out I swore to myself that I would never again ride a roller-coaster or anything even remotely like that. I got burned and I wasn’t about to reach my hand back out there again. My nerve was shot.  

Read the rest…

Explosive Beginnings

Leave a comment

This week we are kicking off a brand-new teaching series. Over the next few weeks, we are going to be journeying through the first part of the story of the early church in Acts. We will be looking together at how the church got its start and what that means for churches today. This is an incredible set of stories that you will not want to miss a single part of. In this first part we are talking about the church’s explosive start and what exactly it was that fueled it. Read on and find out for yourself.

Explosive Beginnings 

One of the things we so often miss when we go to the Scriptures is the humor. We start reading and even in our heads put on our “Bible reading voice” and make it sound all dry and boring. The truth, though, is that it is anything but boring, and it is often very funny. Our passage last week as we challenged our graduates (and, really, all of us) is a perfect example. You can’t help but to appreciate the humor of Moses’ doing his best to wiggle out from under the thing God was calling him to do (and which He was abundantly clear was going to end successfully if he would just go do it). But one of the passages that has long been the funniest to me comes right at the beginning of Luke’s historical record of the early church we call, “Acts.” 

Read the rest…

How to Respond to a Great Opportunity

Leave a comment

This past weekend we celebrated our graduates. We had a group of 18 terrific kids to show off from preschool through college. It was a ton of fun. Given that graduation season often coincides with a season of transitions in which God calls us to something other than we have been doing, we gave some attention to how we should respond to those calls. Let’s take a look today at the story of Moses’ call to action and how to respond to God’s calls in our own lives.

How to Respond to a Great Opportunity

Did you know that toothpaste doesn’t dissolve very well? In my freshman year of college, I took a chemistry class called Quantitative Analysis. The class was foundational for everything else we would be doing and especially in the various labs we would take because it was all about how to figure out precisely how much of one thing you had in something else. Honestly, that’s the basis of a lot of chemistry—finding out how much of something you have in something else. If you learn how to do that really well, everything else is bonus. In any event, I didn’t particularly enjoy the class in spite of a great professor because it was thoroughly lab-based and practical and I much preferred theoretical and classroom instruction. Also, I was the black sheep of the chemistry department. 

Read the rest…

How to Be Free

Leave a comment

This Memorial Day Weekend we took some time together to reflect on the incredible gift of freedom we have been given by the sacrifices of those brave men and women who have served in our various armed forces. Their gift is a precious one indeed. The question we wrestled with is how we can be honor their gift. With some help from the apostle Paul, let’s explore that together.

How to Be Free

One of the more badly cliched ideas floating around out there about freedom is that freedom isn’t free. As cliched as the idea itself may be, though, it is nonetheless true. Freedom always has a cost associated with it. That cost has to be borne by someone. If you were not the one to pay it yourself, then it was paid by someone else. That’s simply the nature of freedom. It never exists on its own terms. It is consistently provided by someone else. 

Read the rest…

A Significant Invitation

Leave a comment

This past Sunday we got to celebrate new journeys after Jesus by baptizing some of His followers. It was a pretty exciting day. Below is the challenge I gave to the church once we were finished. It is one for you to consider as well. May this point you – and your church – in the direction of becoming more fully who Jesus made you to be.

A Significant Invitation

Days like this are why we do what we do. 

Days like this one get right to the heart of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. That applies both for folks in and out of the tank this morning. For the folks I had the privilege of baptizing a little while ago, they were being directly obedient to Jesus’ command that those who follow Him be baptized. For this church, we were commanded as Jesus’ followers to make disciples and baptize them. Here we are. What’s more, we’re doing all of this right out in front of God and everybody. If you are a follower of Jesus, this is what you should be all about: seeing people profess in about as public a way as they possibly can that they are a follower of Jesus. 

Read the rest…