from Psalm 121
Walter Bruggemann says of the Psalms: “On the one hand, Israel’s faithful speech addressed to God is the substance of the Psalms. The Psalms do this so fully and so well because they articulate the entire gamut of Israel’s speech to God, from profound praise to the utterance of unspeakable anger and doubt. On the other hand, as Martin Luther understood so passionately, the Psalms are not only addressed to God…They are the voice of the Gospel, God’s good word addressed to God’s faithful people.”
Where do you need to be given permission to be honest with God? With what you are feeling. With your frustration. With sadness, or disappointment, or fear, or anger. With great joy and thanksgiving. This summer journey with us as the reality of what it means to be human collides with the goodness and unending faithfulness of God.
w/ Jacob Lancaster
from Psalm 13
Walter Bruggemann says of the Psalms: “On the one hand, Israel’s faithful speech addressed to God is the substance of the Psalms. The Psalms do this so fully and so well because they articulate the entire gamut of Israel’s speech to God, from profound praise to the utterance of unspeakable anger and doubt. On the other hand, as Martin Luther understood so passionately, the Psalms are not only addressed to God…They are the voice of the Gospel, God’s good word addressed to God’s faithful people.”
Where do you need to be given permission to be honest with God? With what you are feeling. With your frustration. With sadness, or disappointment, or fear, or anger. With great joy and thanksgiving. This summer journey with us as the reality of what it means to be human collides with the goodness and unending faithfulness of God.
w/ Jeff McClain
from Psalm 63
Walter Bruggemann says of the Psalms: “On the one hand, Israel’s faithful speech addressed to God is the substance of the Psalms. The Psalms do this so fully and so well because they articulate the entire gamut of Israel’s speech to God, from profound praise to the utterance of unspeakable anger and doubt. On the other hand, as Martin Luther understood so passionately, the Psalms are not only addressed to God…They are the voice of the Gospel, God’s good word addressed to God’s faithful people.”
Where do you need to be given permission to be honest with God? With what you are feeling. With your frustration. With sadness, or disappointment, or fear, or anger. With great joy and thanksgiving. This summer journey with us as the reality of what it means to be human collides with the goodness and unending faithfulness of God.
w/ Jeff McClain
from Luke 5:12-16
Healing Service
We are all in some way, desperate for the healing touch of Jesus. Do you recognize the areas in which you need to be made whole? Are you willing to humble yourself before the Lord and receive the wholeness that He offers? Imagine what shape your life might begin to take if you sought Him for all He can offer…and imagine the way you might begin to reach into the brokenness of others and offer them Jesus.
w/ Vern Collins
from Ephesians 3:14-21
Over the course of these 7 weeks, our prayer is that we are able to wrestle back from the world, and allow Scripture as well as the life of Jesus redeem for us what we understand love to be.
What would it look like to begin to prioritize seeking the loving heart of God over other things that we tend to make more important in our lives? What would it look like to allow ourselves to be truly loved by God…to prioritize reaching out in love for those around us? How might your life begin to look different? How might the church begin to look different if this is where the emphasis were placed? Not that seeking wisdom and the exercising of the gifts ceased to be important, but were never MORE important than the task of loving God and loving others…
w/ Vern Collins
from 1 Corinthians 13:1-3
Over the course of these 7 weeks, our prayer is that we are able to wrestle back from the world, and allow Scripture as well as the life of Jesus redeem for us what we understand love to be.
This week we consider what it means to make love the foundation of all that we are and all that we pursue in this life.
w/ Ed Glaize
from Luke 1:39-56
There is a longing for home within each of us. Try as we might to fill that longing with promises of this world, with relationships, with achievement, or any other number of things in which we seek to find meaning and identity, there is only one place we are meant to be “at home.”
In the season of Advent we celebrate that God did not leave us to wander alone looking for home, instead, in Jesus He came to find us that we might find our home in Him.
On the 3rd Sunday of Advent we consider the joy that was so present in Mary and Elizabeth’s encounter. Is that type of joy possible still? What serves as the root of such joy? How might we live in a posture of joy in a world that seems bent in the opposite direction?
w/ Vern Collins
from Matthew 11:28-30
In Biblical writings, the heart is not understood as something that is connected to emotion in the way that we think of the heart. Rather the heart is the driving force behind our hopes and dreams; behind our drive and determination. Where the heart is bent, so goes one’s life. For these 6 weeks we are going to examine the heart and consider not only how it informs our understanding of Stewardship, but more importantly, how it informs who we are in Christ.
We begin this week by looking at the heart of Jesus. In order for us to understand and be honest about the condition of our own hearts, we may just want to listen to the invitation of the One Whose heart is, “Gentle and Humble.”
w/ Vern Collins
from Philippians 4:4-7
Anxiety and worry have become so deeply woven into the fabric of our culture and our daily lives, and we often try to do little more than keep those feelings at bay in order to be able to function…yet, there is a promise in Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi that invites us to live and operate, not from a place of trying to stay of anxiety in order to function, rather to live in the promise of God’s peace and presence with us regardless our circumstances.
w/ Vern Collins
from 1 Peter 1:3-9
In our seven week series, “All Things Made New,” we consider the work that Jesus is doing in this world…a work that we don’t have to wait until time has reached its fulfillment to experience, but that we can experience and be a part of now!
As we conclude our series, we are faced with the question, “In what or who do you anchor your hope?” So often we find ourselves let down or disappointed by people or things of this world, and while we were made for relationship and we were made with this longing for that which is NEW, we were meant to find the fullness of both, not in people or earthly pursuits, but in Jesus-the One Who makes possible for us a hope that is enduring and unchangeable!
w/ Vern Collins
from Lamentations 3:22-24
In our seven week series, “All Things Made New,” we consider the work that Jesus is doing in this world…a work that we don’t have to wait until time has reached its fulfillment to experience, but that we can experience and be a part of now!
When trying to live into the new life that God has made possible in Christ…when trying to bring His New Kingdom to bear on this earth, what happens when the troubles and trials of life seem too much to bear?
We look to each day as a gift…and each rising of the sun as a tangible example of God’s mercy and faithfulness.
w/ Ed Glaize
from Romans 4:4-6
In our seven week series, “All Things Made New,” we consider the work that Jesus is doing in this world…a work that we don’t have to wait until time has reached its fulfillment to experience, but that we can experience and be a part of now!
When we’ve said “yes” to the new work that Jesus wants to do in us and is doing in this world, but the “novelty” feels like it begins to wear off because the worries of this life begin to crowd in, or we find ourselves slipping back into old pursuits, we must lose heart…instead we find hope in the fact that we have been welcomed by Jesus, empowered by His Holy Spirit, and set free to pursue all that God has for us to be and do.
w/ Vern Collins
from Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 85:6 reads, “Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?”
This longing undergirds our series and this season of revival we are asking God to bring. What is hindering your rejoicing? What is getting in the way of you living completely surrendered to the love and presence of God in your life? Where do you need revival?
As we open this series, we are invited to consider two things: 1) that even in the most seemingly impossible situations, God has the power to revive; to restore life; to make new, and 2) God isn’t after only the form or appearance of life, rather God longs to send His Holy Spirit that we may KNOW and EXPERIENCE life!
Where are the dry bones in your life? Where is the valley of death in which you need the Holy Spirit to come?
w Vern Collins
from Acts 1:6-11 and Isaiah 43:18-19
In Isaiah 43:18-19a we read, “Forget the former things do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” In Revelation 21:5, we hear the words of Jesus captured by John, “He who was seated on the throne said, ‘I am making everything new!’” Since the beginning, God has been in the business and the process of taking that which is broken, and rebuilding it…making it new!
How many times over the past 14 months have we heard or uttered some version of the statement, “I can’t wait until things go back to normal…until they go back to the way they were?”
Is it possible that our longing for what is familiar is hindering our ability to see the possibility of God doing something new?
w/ Vern Collins
from John 20:1-18
Are those things in this life in which you have placed your hope able to bear up under the weight that you place on them to hold you up when you face life’s challenges?
There is One Who will not only always bear up under the weight, but will bear you up when the weight is too great!
Jesus Is Alive!
w/ Vern Collins
from Matthew 21:1-11
The season of Lent is a time of reflection. It is an opportunity to examine our lives before God and invite the Holy Spirit to reveal to us those things that are hindering our relationship with God and with those around us…and it is an opportunity to invite God to go to work in our lives…the hope which makes all of this possible is the Cross of Jesus toward which we are journeying.
But what if Lent wasn’t just about seeking forgiveness for and repentance from our sin…what if God was able to take our mess and redeem it? What if it’s not just about doing away with something, but about God taking our lives and turning them into something beautiful for His Glory?
On this Palm Sunday, we are brought face to face with the very clear statement Jesus makes about the king of King He came to be. For the people of Jerusalem…for many of us…the kind of King Jesus came to be is not the kind of King we WANT Him to be, but if we are willing to humble ourselves before Him, we find that Jesus is exactly the kind of King we NEED Him to be.
w/ Vern Collins
from Isaiah 9:1-7
Perhaps more than ever we are desperate for Christmas to mean something more than gifts under the tree and time spent with family. What if, in this season of Advent, we didn’t just go through the motions of preparing for Christmas…what if we didn’t celebrate an “Almost Christmas,” but instead gave ourselves fully to the expectation…to the anticipation of what Christ’s coming means for this world?
In our first week of Advent we are invited to wrestle with the question, “What are you hopeful FOR…and more importantly, who or what are you placing your hope IN?” Is your hope rooted in something eternal, or is your hope misplaced, leaving you desperate? Shackled? In the dark? Isaiah reminds us that into that darkness of our misplaced hope, light shines.
w/ Vern Collins
from Ephesians 5:6-21 and Philippians 4:15-17
While we have a tendency to hear the discussion of stewardship (that is, how we use out Time our Talent and our Treasure) as little more than an ask or a demand on what can feel like an already strained life, the reality is that the way we steward what we’ve been given is about so much more than what we GIVE…it’s about what we believe is happening when we do.
What if the way you used your time was about more than just time management or doing “more” for the Kingdom of God, what if the way you leveraged the time you have reflected the hope that is to come and carries the potential to bring that future hope into present reality?
w/ Vern Collins
from Philippians 3:1-14
While seasons of struggle are challenging for a number of reasons, perhaps the thing that makes them most uncomfortable, most unnerving…the thing that makes us want to be on the other side of those challenges, is that they challenge our understanding of who we are in ways that we are often unprepared for.
What if instead of fearing what is revealed about our identity in those difficult seasons, we saw it as an opportunity to examine that upon which we have built our lives? What if we saw it as an opportunity to consider that the fullness of life can only truly be found in Jesus?
w/ Vern Collins and Jeff McClain
from Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, Isaiah 43:1-3, 18-19, 2 Corinthians 4:16-18
How might you walk through seasons of challenge differently if you knew that you were not alone? How might you do so if you knew that God was with you? What if the challenge of this season is not meant for discouragement, but for hope…hope that God is not done with you…hope that God is doing a new thing?!
May you fix your eyes in Him in this season of challenge.
w/ Lory Beth Huffman and Laura Byrch
