Text: 1 Thessalonians 2:1-12 | Listen to Message Check Your Commitments Our culture’s idea of a good family man is someone who’s committed to providing for his wife and kids – especially one who provides material things and fun experiences. If your garage is overflowing with bikes, scooters, skateboards, and skis, and your basement is piled high with toys and dvds, and every weekend’s adventure looks like a photo shoot straight out of Outside Magazine, you’re probably in the running for “The World’s Greatest Dad.” Somehow, somewhere along the way, Christian fathers bought into this definition of successful fatherhood. And we...
Text: Luke 12:13-34 | Listen to Message You Can’t Take It With You The American Dream is little more than the glorification and worship of profit, consumerism, and leisure. Pursuing this “dream” is about like saying, “My ultimate goal in life is to maximize my own personal comfort, satisfaction, and wealth – often at the expense of others.” So, of course, no one says that. We try to be a little subtler about our covetous, materialistic sense of entitlement. “I’m just being a good steward and putting aside a little nest egg for the uncertain times ahead.” Uh huh, right. If...
Text: Luke 12:4-12 | Listen to Message Standing For Christ In A Culture That Doesn’t Many American Christians will live and die without ever leading a single person to faith in Christ. Many will never even try. They are content to go to heaven … alone. Evangelism, soul-winning, sharing the Gospel, even simple invitations to church – these are best left to the experts and the extroverts, right? Wrong. The Christian who doesn’t share Christ needs to hear Jesus’ sobering warning in Luke 12: If you don’t acknowledge me before men, neither will I acknowledge you in heaven. In other words,...
Text: Luke 11:37-12:3 | Listen to Message Let’s Stop Pretending It’s easy to spot the tiniest speck of hypocrisy in others but we’re reluctant to see even the most blatant duplicity in ourselves. No one wants to admit there’s a disconnect between my stated beliefs and my actual behaviors – that there’s dissonance between my reputation (who I portray myself to be) and my character (who I really am when no one’s looking). And because recognition is the first step to repentance, this is often the reason we spiral further into hypocrisy: we’re not willing to confess to ourselves and to...
Text: Luke 11:14-28 | Listen to Message Presence, Not Performance Imagine your city is being invaded by a murderous foreign army hell-bent on your destruction. Each passing day, the enemy lines inch closer and the sounds of war grow louder. The air is filled with the stench of gunpowder, smoke, and death. Soon, you can see the conflict from your front porch. Knowing you need to take decisive action, you rally your family together: “All right, everybody, here’s what we’re going to do: we need to clean the house like we’ve never cleaned before!” Whaaaat?! That’s absurd! Everyone knows a clean...
Text: Luke 11:1-13 | Listen to Message Gospel-Driven Prayer The attached sermon unpacks 6 “P’s” of Christian prayer from this text of Scripture: The Priority, The Privilege, The Pattern, The Persistence, The Promise, and The Presence of it. While these are all important for a comprehensive understanding of the whats, hows, and whys of prayer, let’s just focus on just the last two here. The Promise of Christian Prayer In verses 9-10, Jesus tells his disciples, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks...
Text: Luke 10:38-42 | Listen to Message Busyness: Its Cause, Effects, And Solution Busyness is one of the preeminent virtues of postmodern, Western culture. Somehow we’ve convinced ourselves that we’re supposed to keep the pedal to the metal and go a million miles an hour, overcommitting ourselves to all kinds of responsibilities, tasks, and events that pull us in several different directions at once. We’re more productive and less present than perhaps any culture in history. The results of this busyness are well documented. Physically, we’re restless and exhausted, our immune systems are shot, and heartburn, migraines, and heart attacks are...
Text: John 20 | Listen to Message Isn’t It Just A Legend? There are a number of reasons why people say they cannot believe in the bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Some of these objections, at least on the surface, are rational barriers: “Hasn’t science proven that a dead person can’t come back to life after a few days?” Other objections stem from personal barriers: “If Jesus is alive, then why have I gone through such painful, traumatic experiences in my life?” But many skeptics today have never really thought it through and reasoned it out. Most have never even attempted...
Text: Luke 10:25-37 | Listen to Message Christ’s Neighborly Love In Part I, we saw 4 qualities of Christ-like neighborliness that are illustrated by Jesus’ parable of The Good Samaritan: a good neighbor sees, feels, risks, and sacrifices. Furthermore, the truly compassionate understand that “neighbor” is not something you have but something you are. But, strictly speaking, these good principles are not good news. You see, most of us do not instinctively act this way toward our neighbors – and none of us treat all of our neighbors this way all of the time. In the area of loving our neighbors...
Text: Luke 10:25-37 | Listen to Message 4 Qualities of A Good Neighbor In Luke 10, Jesus tells the familiar parable of “The Good Samaritan” from which we can distill four principles of what it looks like to be a Christlike neighbor. 1. A Good Neighbor Sees. It’s a simple fact that the Samaritan saw what the priest and Levite had already seen that day: a beaten, bloody body lying in the road. But where the religious leaders had seen only a problem to avoid, the Samaritan saw a neighbor to help. If your eyes are open, of course you see...