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Sermon Series
- Ephesians: Together in Christ 10
- Fight for Joy! 8
- Fighting Fear with FEAR 6
- From the Garden to the Cross 3
- Heartbeat 5
- Hebrews: Jesus is Better 11
- Jesus' Heartbeat 3
- Joy Full 20
- Legacies Are Unavoidable 1
- Living for Jesus as the Nation Heaves 2
- Mission Conference 1
- Praying For... 5
- Press Pause 4
- Rethinking Suffering 6
- Share a Meal With Me 2
- Speak! 3
- Strange Encounters 3
- The Doctor's Cure 17
- The Final Countdown 27
- The Last Words of Jesus 8
- The Story of (Your) Life 12
- Transitions 6
- Truth Be Told 5
- Upside Down Christmas 3
- Visions of Hope 6
- Visions of a King 4
- Welcome Home 5
- What If? 2
- Which Kind of Parenting is Best? 5
- Worth the Wait 3
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Welcoming the Stranger
Kyle Kauffman
It’s easy for the church as a whole and us as individuals to drift in the direction of an inward focus. There are so many needs within the church that we can spend all of our time simply focused on meeting them. But God has given us a mission, and that mission requires us moving out. Moving outward with a welcoming mindset towards those outside the church is uncomfortable and challenging. And yet as we move outward, we do so in the love of Christ, by the power of Christ, with faith in the promises of Christ. As part of God’s family, we can all take steps to move outward and extend welcoming arms toward others in hope that God will use us as a part of welcoming them into his family as well.
Luke 6:32-36
Welcoming the Children
Kyle Kauffman
The tendency in our modern world is to either see children as a burden (keeping us from our dreams) or to see children as an idol (having our dreams wrapped up in them). Children can be seen as an inconvenience or distraction getting in the way of what really matters. God shows his value for children in the fact that He himself became a child. Jesus then demonstrated that children are a gift by welcoming them into his life. We have a God who loves children and welcomes children to himself. The church can and should also look for ways to love and welcome children into our lives in an effort to point them to the God who loves them and wants them to be a part of his family.
Mark 10:13-16
The Welcoming Home
Kyle Kauffman
It is so easy for us to view our homes as our own private refuges and fortresses. They can quickly become the places where we seek to escape the burdens of other people. What would it instead look like if we saw our homes as welcome centers: places where we could invite others in so that we could get to know them and encourage them? What if, ‘Do you want to come over for dinner?’ was a common invitation in our church? What if it was expected that we will regularly sit around a table with others in our church?. What effect might this have on the church? What effect might this have on others looking in on the church? How might God use that?
1 Peter 4:7-11
The Welcoming Church
Kyle Kauffman
The church is meant to be a community that looks and feels different then the world outside of it. The church is meant to be a place where people feel known and seen, loved and valued. We are called to put on display in our culture what we believe in our doctrine. Therefore, if we truly believe God is a welcoming God then we should seek to be a welcoming place and people as the church. However, this does not happen by accident. It happens as God’s grace changes us and motivates us to do the challenging work of welcoming others in. The gospel not only gives us the model for how we are to welcome one another as a church, but it also helps to overcome the fears and desires that would prevent us from being a welcoming people.
James 2:1-13
We Fight Together
Joel Wood
One of the storylines we can find traced throughout the Bible is that there is a cosmic, unseen, spiritual war that is happening throughout history. It is not simply a war of good vs. evil or of two equally competing powers. Rather it is a war between God and Satan. It is a war that Satan started when he attempted to take God’s place and yet it was a war that was futile from the start. God has decisively won this war at the cross through Jesus’ death and resurrection. We know because of Jesus the war ends with Satan’s defeat. But until that final ending there are still battles that rage on. As a result, we find ourselves in the middle of this war. We find ourselves engaged with an enemy who wants to steal, kill, and destroy our faith and the life we have in Christ. And yet we find ourselves with resources that far outweigh our enemy’s ability to harm us. We are meant to fight together by exercising the weapons God has given us as we rely on him till the day when the war is finally over.
Ephesians 6:10-24
Gospel-Shaped Relationships
Kyle Kauffman
Our relationships with other people can simultaneously be one of the greatest gifts we experience in this life and one of the greatest challenges we face in this life. This is especially true in our closest of relationships with the people that we live with, work with, and see every day. The gospel is the good news of how we can enter back into a relationship with God. But it is also the good news that shapes all of our relationships with other people as well. Paul demonstrates this by bringing the gospel to bear on some of our closest relationships in Ephesians 5:22-6:9. While there is much that can be learned about each one of these relationships, there is also certain gospel principles that we can find in these verses that can impact and shape all of our relationships.
Ephesians 5:21-6:9
We’re All (Not) So Different
Joel Wood
The church is designed to be full of people that are different. The church is not meant to be built on the ground that we look the same, talk the same, vote the same, enjoy the same hobbies, have the same culture, or even speak the same language. Rather the church is meant to be built on the ground that we are all united together in Christ. It is our common identity in Christ that is meant to supersede all other identities and preferences we may have. It is Jesus who has torn down all the walls that may have separated us. And because of Jesus we are meant to welcome one another and seek to tear down or remove any walls that may separate us today. The more centered our lives are around Jesus, the more united the church will be with Jesus as the bond that holds us together. And the more the world will see a testimony to how great Jesus is.
Ephesians 2:11-22
A Passion for Living Authentically
Kyle Kauffman
One of the things we can’t escape as we read through the Psalm is how honest and raw the psalmists are in their worship of God. They lay before God their struggles, doubts, difficulties, pains and more. And they lay these things bare before other people as well. It’s so easy for us to hide what is really happening within us in our hearts either from God (who already knows) or from other people. The Psalmist’s show us that glorifying God is not putting on a nice face and act, but rather it’s found in wrestling with the difficult and painful realities of life in God’s presence. We glorify God by laying our hearts bare before him and walking with him through the painful, discouraging, and overwhelming moments of our lives. We also glorify God as we share our struggles with others and invite them in to support, encourage, and pray for us.
Psalm 13
Pause to Relate
Kyle Kauffman
There is a constant danger in our lives to prioritize things that don’t really matter and deprioritize things that do really matter. Or to prioritize things of less importance of things of greater importance. Part of the danger of being so busy and never (or rarely stopping to rest) is that we never get the chance to ask, “What really matters in this life?” At the top of our list should be relationships. Both our relationship with God and our relationships with other people are meant to be of greatest importance in our lives. This is why God’s greatest commandment is to love Him and love your neighbor. But these relationships get displaced by all sorts of other (often good) things. Pausing both helps us to remember how important relationships are and provides us with the time and space to enjoy the relationships we have.
Luke 10:38-42; Luke 14:16-24; Matthew 22:34-40
The Joy of Sacrificial Love
Kyle Kauffman
The church is not meant to be a place where we smile at each other, make small talk with one another, but secretly we are indifferent to each other or harbor hateful thoughts and feelings toward each other. Too often this is what we settle for: a smile on the outside with a heart of indifference or hate on the inside. This is no different than Cain. We find the power to really love each other when we are living in confidence of God’s love for us. And we find the pattern for loving each other in the way that Christ has loved us. We are called to real love because real love changes people. Afterall it was God’s real and costly love for us that has changed us.
1 John 3:11-18