Text: Ephesians 1:3-14 | Listen to Message Don’t Waste Your Life There’s a power-packed piece of advice that goes something like this: Ask yourself what’s really important and then have the wisdom and courage to build your life around your answer.* Modern people tend to build their lives around some combination of career, possessions, a few key relationships, and the constant drive to be happy, comfortable, and successful. In the end, they die and go to meet God. How does that conversation go? “I’d show you my vacation home and my boat, God . . . but I wasn’t able to...

Text: Acts (various) | Listen to Message High Impact Church Planting It’s an age-old debate: Was the book of Acts meant to be descriptive or prescriptive? Is it telling us what to do or just how things were? Acts is a true history of the Early Church and the expansion of the Gospel outward from Jerusalem. But it’s admittedly a very selective history – and a pedagogical history at that. In other words, Luke has chosen and crafted his stories carefully in order to teach us important lessons about the nature of God and His work in our world. One of...

Text: Luke 24:44-53 | Listen to Message The How And Why of Mission No shortage of material has been written on “The Great Commission” – Jesus’ call to his followers (including the modern church) to go into all the world and proclaim the Gospel. Usually the emphasis falls on the command part of this, which is a call to make a certain kind of proclamation: “[You] . . . go make and mature disciples of Jesus Christ.” It’s a simple fact that the mission of Jesus lives on through the witness of his church. If people are going to believe in...

Text: Luke 24:13-45 | Listen to Message The Heart & Soul of The Whole Bible It’s such an odd and inexplicable story. How could some of Jesus’ closest friends walk and talk with him for hours and not even recognize that it’s him? I’m referring, of course, to that first Easter Sunday when Jesus joined two of his disciples on the 7-mile road to Emmaus, “but their eyes were kept from recognizing him” (Luke 24:16). There had been an unprecedented whirlwind of activity in Jerusalem that week. It was Passover; so the streets and Temple Mount were crowded with Jewish worshipers...