Alliance Church - Hortonville

Does the Bible actually contradict itself? It is one of the most common accusations people throw at Scripture, and honestly, most Christians have never been given a straight answer for how to handle it. Pastor Brandon walks Alliance Church Hortonville through exactly what to do when two Bible verses seem to sit in direct tension with each other.

This sermon is part of an August teaching series at Alliance Church on how to actually study the Bible for yourself. Pastor Brandon opens with a bold claim. What looks like a contradiction almost never is. The Bible is 66 books written by around 40 authors over about 1,500 years, and every one of them fits together with a coherence that is honestly a little mind blowing. But there are moments where two truths in the Bible feel like they cannot both be true at the same time. What do you do with that?

He gives a working example that most Christians have felt in their bones. Does God control every single detail of the universe? Yes. Hebrews says Jesus upholds all things by the word of his power. Jesus himself said not a sparrow falls apart from the Father's care. Proverbs even says when you roll the dice, God decides how it lands. And yet the Bible also demands that human beings take real responsibility for their choices. Deuteronomy 30. Joshua 24. Romans. Galatians. If God is truly in control, how are we responsible for anything? And if we are truly responsible, how is God's sovereignty not somehow limited?

Pastor Brandon offers three Bible study don'ts that will change how you read Scripture. One, do not interpret a verse without the rest of the Bible. Two, do not build your theology on one verse. As A.W. Tozer said, nothing less than the whole Bible can make a whole Christian. Three, do not choose sides when Scripture seems to conflict. Hold both truths as true and trust the resolution lives in the mind of God.

Then he walks through Peter's first sermon in Acts 2, where Peter looks at the same crowd that had shouted crucify him just weeks before and tells them the death of Jesus was both handed over by God's deliberate plan and carried out by their wicked hands. Both. At the same time. And into that impossible tension, Peter preaches the gospel and 3,000 people receive the promise of forgiveness that day. The same crowd that crucified Christ became the first great outpouring of the Spirit's work in the early church.

If you have ever wrestled with the Bible feeling contradictory, or if you have ever been afraid that your past disqualifies you from grace, this teaching from Pastor Brandon is for you. There is no crowd God cannot forgive. Including the one you are part of.

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What does Romans 8:28 actually mean? A lot of Christians quote it in the middle of pain, but not many of us have stopped to ask if we are using it the way it was actually meant to be used. In the aftermath of the EF3 tornado that hit the Fox Valley, Pastor Brandon takes on what may be the most commonly misapplied verse in the Bible and walks the church through what it really says.

This sermon kicks off a new August teaching series at Alliance Church on how to read the Bible well. Pastor Brandon opens with a simple principle. Get to the point. The most important question you can ask about any passage of Scripture is not what does this mean for me, but what was the author trying to say? He walks through five questions that help you actually wrestle with the text before you ever try to apply it. What kind of writing is this? Where does it fit in the Bible's big story? Who wrote it, and to whom? Why was it written? And finally, what was the author trying to say?

Then he applies those five questions to Romans 8:28. He reads the whole passage, Romans 8:17 through 30, not just the isolated verse, and shows something that reshapes how most Christians read this promise. The good that God is working all things for is not material comfort. It is not financial rebound. It is not the guarantee that your house gets rebuilt. It is the good of being conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. And that promise is not made to everyone. It is made specifically to those who love God and are called according to his purpose.

Pastor Brandon does something rare in this sermon. He treats grieving people as adults. He does not soften the tornado into a lesson. He does not offer a spiritualized shortcut. He simply says this. For the Christian, even the worst of suffering cannot escape the redemptive purposes of God. That is not a smaller promise. It is a bigger one.

Whether you are wrestling with grief right now, trying to understand a verse that has felt hollow, or simply want to learn how to read the Bible well, this teaching from Pastor Brandon is for you.

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What do you do when everything you built is taken from you in a single storm? Almost no one thinks that question will ever land on them personally, and then one day it does. Pastor Brian preached this message to a congregation whose city had just been devastated by an EF3 tornado, and the answer he gave is one every person is going to need at some point.

In this sermon, Pastor Brian opens with a hard truth. On July 27, 2026, an EF3 tornado over a mile wide touched down for more than twenty minutes and tore through the neighborhoods of Appleton, Menasha, and Neenah. Miraculously, no one was killed. But the loss will take generations to rebuild. And in a moment like that, everyone around you starts watching to see how you respond. Not because you asked for the spotlight, but because the world is quietly asking a question in every disaster. How do Christians handle storms?

Pastor Brian says the answer is that Christians are different. Not weird. Different. Christians still grieve. Jesus himself grieved the death of Lazarus in John 11, even though he was minutes away from raising him. Grief is not weakness. It is honesty. But the way a Christian grieves is otherworldly, because our identity is anchored in a King whose kingdom is not of this world.

Then Pastor Brian walks through two storms in Scripture that reframe everything. In Luke 8, Jesus calms the storm on the Sea of Galilee, and the disciples' response is not relief but fear, because they realize they had no idea who was in the boat with them. And in Matthew 27, at noon on the day Jesus was crucified, the sky went dark and Jesus cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Psalm 22:1). He names what the cross actually is. It is the storm that defines Christians. You and I were asleep in a sinking boat we did not even know we were in, and Jesus went into the water for us. We may not get every "why" answered on this side of glory. But we know the why of Jesus. His why was you.

That is why Christians are different about home (we build houses, not homes, because only Jesus is home), different about neighbors (we can be generous because we gave up everything to Christ already), and different in storms (we do not have all the answers, but we have the God who understands the tears).

Eight people gave their lives to Christ in the seven days after this tornado through Samaritan's Purse and community ministry. The house may fall. The eternal work never does.

If you have been through a storm you cannot explain, or you are watching one right now, this teaching is for you.

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Why is God allowing what you are walking through right now? A lot of us have hit a season that makes no sense. We did not choose it. We did not deserve it. We just woke up one day inside a life we would not have picked. Pastor Paul walks through an ancient king whose story speaks directly into that feeling.

In this sermon, Pastor Paul preaches on King Jehoiachin from 2 Kings 24. Jehoiachin was 18 years old when he became king of Judah. He inherited a mess his grandfather had held together and his father had unraveled. Three months into his reign, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon showed up at Jerusalem's gates. Jehoiachin surrendered. He was hauled off to Babylon in chains along with 10,000 exiles, and the temple was stripped bare.

By every measure, Jehoiachin was done. He spent 37 years in prison. Not weeks. Not months. 37 years watching his life quietly waste away in a foreign country, while everything he had ever known was destroyed back home.

And then Pastor Paul pulls up something remarkable. Around 1900, a German archaeologist named Robert Koldewey was excavating near the Ishtar Gate in Iraq and found 300 cuneiform tablets. Four of them mention Jehoiachin by name, listing the food rations he received in Babylon, calling him "Jehoiachin, king of the land of Judah." His name was still on the palace ledgers. He was still recognized as king. The last living king of the line of David.

And then the epilogue. Both 2 Kings 25 and Jeremiah 52 end the exact same way. After 37 years, a new Babylonian king released Jehoiachin from prison, gave him a seat of honor at the king's table, and provided a daily allowance for the rest of his life.

Then Pastor Paul lands the payoff none of us would have seen coming. Matthew 1:11 lists Jehoiachin (spelled Jeconiah there) in the genealogy of Jesus. God spared Jehoiachin's life for one massive reason. The Messiah had to come from the line of David, and Jehoiachin was one of the last standing links. Every quiet, invisible year in that prison cell was God keeping the promise of Jesus alive.

The takeaway is a sentence you will want to carry into this week. God sees you, and he is working where you cannot see. Not once did Jehoiachin get an answer to why. But we, on this side of history, get to see exactly what God was doing.

If you have been walking through something that makes no sense to you, this teaching is for you.

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Why can't I change? If you have ever promised yourself that this time would be different, only to end up right back where you started, this message is for you. Real change never comes from trying harder. It comes from something far better than willpower.

In this sermon, Pastor Brandon walks through the life of Zedekiah, the very last king of Judah, found in 2 Chronicles 36:11 through 16. Zedekiah knew exactly what God wanted him to do. He had the prophet Jeremiah speaking directly into his life. And yet he could not bring himself to obey. Pastor Brandon traces four snapshots of a failed king: a man who knew God's word but would not obey it, a man whose fear became his functional king, a man who listened to the wrong voices, and a man who tried to save himself and lost everything.

Sound familiar? We are remarkably optimistic about our future selves. We tell ourselves that next time we will be more patient, more faithful, more disciplined. But if the answer to fixing your life is more willpower, you will keep looking to yourself to fix a problem you have never been able to fix. As Pastor Brandon puts it, maybe our deepest need is not a stronger version of ourselves. Maybe we need a better king.

Fear is sneaky that way. In Jeremiah 38:19 Zedekiah admits it out loud: I am afraid. Fear of people, fear of losing control, fear of what obedience might cost. When fear runs the show, it quietly becomes the king of your life, and it will lead you exactly where it led Zedekiah. The same is true of the voices we listen to. Zedekiah surrounded himself with people who told him what he wanted to hear, and it cost him everything.

That is where the good news of Jesus comes in. Where every other king failed, Jesus succeeded. He died for failed kings and failed subjects, He rose victoriously, and now He invites anyone who will listen to surrender to Him, to walk with Him as a friend, to learn from Him as a teacher, and to worship Him as a Savior. Your identity is not something you achieve. It is something you receive. Real transformation happens not by trying harder for Jesus but by belonging to Jesus.

Whether you are exhausted from fighting the same battles, skeptical that faith could actually change anything, or simply curious about what the Bible really says about transformation, Pastor Brandon's message will meet you where you are with honesty, humor, and hope.

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Are you too far gone for God to forgive you? It might be the quietest question people carry into a Sunday service, or refuse to say out loud at all. Some of us have done things we cannot forget, and we are half convinced God cannot either. And some of us have the opposite problem. We are bothered by the idea that God would forgive certain people, and we do not fully know why that offends us so much.In this sermon, Pastor Brandon opens with three things he says Americans struggle with. The offsides rule in soccer. The metric system. And the fact that God forgives people who have done truly terrible things. He then walks us straight into 2 Chronicles 33 and the story of King Manasseh, the man the Bible describes as the worst king in the entire history of Judah.Manasseh was 12 when he became king and reigned 55 years. He tore down every reform his father Hezekiah had built. He filled the temple with idols. He practiced witchcraft, divination, and demon worship. He sacrificed his own sons in the fire. And 2 Kings 21:16 says he filled Jerusalem from end to end with innocent blood. Pastor Brandon does not soften any of it. Because the point of the sermon is not that Manasseh was not that bad. The point is that he really was.And then rock bottom hits. The Assyrians captured him, put a hook in his nose, and dragged him to Babylon in chains. And there, in shackles, this man finally humbled himself. He cried out to the same God he had rejected for over fifty years. And the sentence that follows is one of the most staggering in the Bible. "The Lord was moved by his entreaty and listened to his plea. So he brought him back to Jerusalem and to his kingdom. Then Manasseh knew that the Lord is God" (2 Chronicles 33:13).Pastor Brandon lands the point that most modern Christians have never fully wrestled with. God's forgiveness does not minimize sin. It magnifies grace. Every objection our hearts raise when God forgives a person we think should be beyond forgiveness reveals a version of the gospel we have not fully understood yet. Because the gospel has never been about God forgiving people who deserve it. It has always been about God forgiving people who do not.He tells the story of David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam killer, to make the modern version of Manasseh painfully real. And then he brings the whole thing to the cross. Centuries after Manasseh, blood would fill Jerusalem again. But this time the King would shed his own. Jesus was treated like Manasseh so that Manassehs could be treated like Jesus (2 Corinthians 5:21).If you have been carrying a story you think has disqualified you, this teaching is for you. And if you have been quietly angry that God would forgive certain other people, this teaching is even more for you.

Why does life feel so far from God right now? Nobody wakes up one morning and decides to walk away from him. It happens quietly. Slowly. A thousand small decisions that eventually add up to a place you never meant to end up. And then one day, you look around and cannot remember how you got here.In this sermon, Pastor Brandon opens with a jarring picture. Imagine waking up on July 5, the day after celebrating 250 years as a nation, only to find your family taken, your home gone, your voice silenced, and you marching in chains to a foreign land. That is exactly where the northern kingdom of Israel found itself under their last king, King Hosea (2 Kings 17:1 to 8). And Pastor Brandon walks us through what actually caused it, because it was not what most of us would guess.Israel did not fall because Assyria had a bigger army. Israel fell because Israel had spent hundreds of years drifting from God. King Hosea took the fall, but he was not the worst king. He was just the one holding the empty box after generation after generation had already eaten through it. He ate the last bowl of cereal, but he did not eat the whole box.Then Pastor Brandon pulls six steps straight from verses 7 through 23 that trace the downward spiral almost anyone can slip into if they are not paying attention. Forget the God who rescued you. Start imitating the culture around you. Trade the real God for whatever idols the world offers. Ignore the Word when it starts to correct you. Reject the covenant relationship God has extended to you. Refuse to repent when he calls you back. That path always ends the same place, in what he calls spiritual exile. Not that God stops loving you. But that you find yourself living far from the joy, peace, and freedom your soul was built for.And here is where the message takes a turn most religious talks never do. Pastor Brandon flips those six steps into the road home. Choose to repent. Embrace the covenant Christ purchased for you. Listen to God's Word until it stops being information and starts being transformation. Destroy the idols that compete for the throne of your heart. Imitate Christ. And remember God, not as a fact but as a daily rhythm.The pivot from avoidance to embrace is the whole gospel. It is not about staring at the Doritos you cannot eat. It is about a ribeye and mashed potatoes so much better in front of you that the Doritos disappear from your mind entirely. That is what Jesus is. Not a list of rules to avoid. A person to feast on. And the wildest promise of the New Testament is not just that Jesus shows you the way home. He is the way home. And when you trust him, he makes his home in you (John 14:6, John 14:23).If you have felt distant from God for a while and are ready to come home, this teaching is for you.

Why does God allow suffering when he's supposed to be in control? Most of us have asked it quietly, especially when we hear about Christians around the world losing everything just for following Jesus. The answer is something nobody can give you better than someone who has lived through it.In this sermon, Pastor Job from Burkina Faso (the president of the Burkina Faso Alliance and a partner of our church for more than a hundred years) speaks to our congregation about what God is doing in West Africa right now. The story is hard and the story is glorious. Churches in Burkina have been attacked. Buildings have been destroyed. Pastors and coworkers have lost their lives. Brothers and sisters have been displaced by violence. And in the middle of all of it, the church has not stopped advancing.Pastor Job anchors the whole message in Matthew 16:18, where Jesus says, "I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not overcome it." The point lands differently when it comes from a man whose congregation has actually been hunted. The church does not belong to us. It belongs to Jesus. He is the one who builds it. He is the one who protects it. He is the one who keeps it advancing even when everything looks like it is being torn down.To illustrate it, Pastor Job tells the story of a king and his servant who repeated one line all the time: "everything God does is good." Even when the king lost his thumb in a hunting accident, the servant said it. The king threw him in prison for it. Then later the king got captured by people who tried to sacrifice him to their god, but they let him go because he was missing a thumb. He went home, freed the servant, and finally understood. Everything God does is good. Even the things we cannot see the purpose of yet.The numbers Pastor Job shares should silence the skeptics. In the first six months of this year alone, in a country being torn by violence, 10,500 people came to know Jesus. 745 baptisms. 38 new churches planted. 24 new missionaries sent to unreached people groups (the Lobi, Bidifor, Dagara, Djan, Senufo, Wara, and others). The gates of hell are not winning. They never were.The sermon closes with Romans 8:35 to 39. Nothing, not persecution, not famine, not danger, not death, not anything in all creation, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. And the parable of the body reminds us that every part of the church matters. Some are called to go, some to give, some to pray. All of it is the work of the same church being built by the same King.If you have ever wondered whether God is still building his church in a world that feels like it's falling apart, this teaching will move you.

Why do you secretly feel like a fraud? Most of us have a gap, sometimes a small one and sometimes a canyon, between the person other people see and the person we know we actually are. And underneath all of it is a low grade exhaustion of pretending.In this sermon, Pastor Brandon opens the second week of our Counterfeit Kings series with a king almost no one has heard of, Abijah (also called Abijam), and uses his story to expose something deeply true about most of our lives. Abijah has two biographies in Scripture. In 2 Chronicles 13, he stands in front of a hostile army outnumbered two to one and delivers a speech so confident in God that you would cast him as the hero of a movie. In 1 Kings 15, the same man is summarized in one sentence. His heart was not fully devoted to the Lord, and he repeated the sins of his father.Pastor Brandon shows that these two biographies are not a contradiction. They are the same king described by two different writers, to two different audiences, asking two different questions. Kings is asking, how did we get here? Chronicles is asking, where do we go from here? And the painful thing is that most of us have the exact same problem. There is a version of us our family sees, our coworkers see, our social media followers see. And there is a version of us only God sees. And the gap between those two is the most exhausting thing about being human.Pastor Brandon does not let the question sit theoretical. He asks it straight. If God wrote your biography today and pressed print, would you stop the press? That is the diagnostic.The fix is not better performance. It is not polishing your image. The fix is wholehearted devotion to God in every compartment of your life, including the ones you have locked the door on. Pastor Brandon takes us to Psalm 139:23 to 24 ("search me and know me"), and reminds us that the unexamined life is not worth living. He challenges men in particular this Father's Day, because the people who suffer most from our two biography living are our spouse and our kids.And then the message lands at the cross. Jesus is the one king whose public and private life matched perfectly. He loved the Father with all his heart, all his soul, and all his much. On the cross, he was treated the way we deserve, so we can be treated the way he deserves. In his resurrection, he does not just forgive your divided heart, he moves in. The very life of God fuses to yours. He does not say "now do better." He says "now I will help you."If you have been carrying the weight of a hidden chapter, this teaching is for you. The good news is God is not done writing your biography.

Why does your spiritual life feel stuck right now? You know you are supposed to love God with everything you've got, but it feels more like an obligation than a fire. You sing the songs. You show up. You try to want it. And still, something feels distant.In this sermon, Dr. Mark Harris opens our brand new series Counterfeit Kings by walking us through the only person in the entire Bible of whom it is said that he loved the Lord with all his heart and all his soul and all his very. The Hebrew Shema in Deuteronomy 6:4 to 5 is the most famous text in all of Jewish life, repeated every morning, every night, taught to children before anything else. Jesus said this command is the foundation of every other one. And yet only one person in the whole biblical narrative is named as having fully obeyed it.That person is King Josiah, and the wild part is that Josiah came from one of the most disastrous family lines in Scripture (2 Kings 22 and 23, 2 Chronicles 34 and 35). His grandfather Manasseh was the most wicked king in Judah's history. His father Ammon followed the same path and was assassinated in the palace when Josiah was eight years old. The Bible had been hidden or destroyed. Idol worship, child sacrifice, and every false god imaginable were woven into daily life. And yet at 16, this kid made a decision in his heart to seek God. By 20 he was destroying altars Solomon himself had built 300 years earlier. And a few years later, he found the lost Book of the Law inside the temple and tore his clothes when he realized how far his people had drifted.Dr. Mark Harris pulls four characteristics out of Josiah's story for anyone wanting to love God for real and not for show. Need him. Weed the garden of whatever competes with him in your music, your screens, your scrolling, your habits. Feed your soul on his actual word, not just other people's sermons. And lead others toward him because you cannot help it.Dr. Mark Harris closes by tracing the line that finally lands at Jesus. Twenty five years after Josiah died, the Babylonians destroyed the temple and the palace, and Davidic kingship looked over forever. Six hundred years later, Matthew 1 opens with: the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David. The promise did not die. The true King came, not to defeat a foreign empire, but to defeat hell itself for everyone chained to it who did not even know it.If you are tired of going through the motions, this teaching gives you a path back to wholehearted faith.