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.

Can you keep sinning and still go to heaven? Is it okay to support a friend who just told you she had an abortion? How do you honor a parent who says they're a Christian but doesn't live like one? These are the kinds of questions most people are afraid to ask out loud.

In this Fire Away Q&A service, Pastor Brian and Pastor Brandon sit on stage together and answer the questions our congregation texts in live. No script, no preselected questions, no editing. Just real pastoral answers to the things people are actually wrestling with.Pastor Brandon opens with the apologetic question: how do you reach a family member who loves history but is on the fence about the gospel? He points to the historical credibility of the gospel accounts, especially the witness of the women at the resurrection in a culture that did not value women's testimony, 1 Corinthians 15 where Paul says you could still go talk to people who saw the risen Jesus, the work of scholars like Wes Huff and Lee Strobel, and the wild improbability of the disciples inventing a story they would die violent deaths to defend.The conversation gets harder fast with the abortion question. Pastor Brian and Pastor Brandon walk slowly through what it means to love someone who has done something Scripture calls sin without endorsing the sin. Be available. Play the long relational game. Pray that one day God uses you to point them not just to the gravity of what they have done, but to the cross that has already paid for it.On honoring a parent who says they are a Christian but does not live like one, Pastor Brian unpacks the difference between obey and honor, why honor has to transcend even decades of disappointment, why dishonor is just drinking poison and hoping the other person dies, and why the deeper question may not be "how do I confront this person" but "does this person actually need to be born again?"They tackle tattoos (mostly a conscience question for New Testament believers, not the Old Testament Canaanite context many people assume), the best advice for newlyweds (Pastor Brian's encouragement to pray together out loud regularly, and Pastor Brandon's reminder to find a community of other young couples who love Jesus), and they close with one of the most asked questions in modern American Christianity. If I keep sinning, can I lose my salvation?Pastor Brian's answer here is worth the whole service. You did not behave your way into salvation, and you cannot behave your way out of it. But do not play games with God either. The reason you are saved is to be sanctified. If your sin is bothering you, lean into that conviction. A bruised reed Jesus will not break, and a smoldering wick of faith he will not put out (Isaiah 42:3).If you have ever had real questions about heaven, sin, family, marriage, or doubt that nobody around you was answering, this teaching is for you. Skip to the chapter that sounds most like your story, or watch the whole thing.

When God feels painfully late to show up, what are you supposed to do? When you have prayed, trusted, and stayed faithful, and the relationship still fell apart, the door still closed, the diagnosis still came, the child still kept running. This sermon walks straight into that tension and refuses to look away.Pastor Josiah opens with a question most of us are quietly carrying. How do we trust Jesus when his timing breaks our expectations? He starts with a story you have probably felt a version of, the marathon of waiting in line at Disneyland, where everyone is asking the same question. Is it worth the wait? Then he names the harder version of that question we ask in real life. What if God could just give us a timeline? What if he would say, the grief lasts eight months, the anxiety lifts in a year, the prayer gets answered Tuesday at 4:15. But that is not how faith works. God rarely gives us a timeline. Instead, he gives us himself.From there, Pastor Josiah moves into John chapter 11, the story of Lazarus, Mary, and Martha. Jesus gets the message that his friend is sick, and what does he do? He waits two more days. The verse says it almost shockingly. Although Jesus loved them, he stayed where he was. Pastor Josiah unpacks three truths from this chapter that meet you exactly where you are when life feels stuck.Delay is not denial. The love of God is not always proven by the speed of his response. Sometimes it is revealed in what he is producing through the waiting. Some of God's deepest work happens in the waiting room, between the test and the results.Don't forget who he is. When Martha runs out to meet Jesus, she leads with disappointment. But Jesus responds not with a fix, he responds with his identity. I am the resurrection and the life. Faith is not built on outcomes. Faith is built on a person who is still faithful, still sovereign, still near, still good.Gratitude comes before the movement. At the tomb, with Lazarus still dead inside, Jesus thanks the Father before anything visible has changed. Anyone can worship after resurrection. Mature faith thanks God while the situation looks exactly the same.Pastor Josiah lands on the most beautiful picture of the gospel in the whole story. The only barrier between Lazarus and Jesus was a stone. The only barrier between you and God is sin, and Jesus is the one who rolls the stone away and calls dead things back to life. Then he turns to his people and says, unwrap him. The church is invited into the slow, sanctifying work of walking with people coming out of the grave with their grave clothes still on.If you have been spiritually exhausted, carrying disappointment so long that hope itself feels dangerous, this teaching from Pastor Josiah is for you.

Why doesn't God answer the prayer you have been praying the longest? The one for the marriage that fell apart anyway. The one for the loved one who still died. The one for the addiction you keep falling back into. If unanswered prayer has shaken your faith, you are not alone, and this sermon was made for you.In this message, Pastor Brandon walks through Luke 18:1 through 8, where Jesus tells a strange and surprisingly hopeful little story about a powerless widow, a heartless judge, and the kind of prayer that simply does not give up. Jesus actually tells Luke ahead of time why he is telling this parable. Verse 1 says it plainly. So that we should always pray and not give up. That is the whole point.Pastor Brandon is honest about something most pulpits quietly avoid. Unanswered prayer is one of the most common reasons people walk away from their faith. He is not talking about small prayers for a parking spot or a suit that fits. He is talking about the prayers that come out of desperation. The ones whispered through tears at 2 AM. The ones that get a deafening silence in return.The widow in the parable is helpless, voiceless, with no one in the world to fight for her. She is the picture of someone who has nothing left but a plea. The judge has all the power but no heart. He does not care about God or the woman. Eventually he gives her justice just to get her off his back. Then Jesus flips the whole thing. He says, if even that judge eventually came through, how much more will the just, loving, compassionate Father bring justice for his chosen ones who cry out to him day and night.Pastor Brandon also walks through the story of Joseph from Genesis, a 17 year ordeal of pits, slavery, false accusations, and dungeons. At every step, Joseph almost certainly prayed for one thing, to get back to his family. God answered, but in a way Joseph could never have scripted. The prayers were never ignored. They were folded into a bigger plan. In the end Joseph could look his brothers in the eye and say, you intended this for evil, but God intended it for good (Genesis 50:20).One of the most arresting lines in the message is this. God will always answer your prayer. Every prayer. But it is going to feel unanswered. Because God's timing is not Amazon Prime. He does not give a delivery date. He guarantees a delivery. And when you finally see what he was doing in the silence, you will realize his hand was in it all along.The whole teaching lands at the cross and the empty tomb. The greatest injustice in human history did not get the final word. God rolled the stone away. And because Jesus rose, you can trust that whatever pit you are sitting in, whatever prayer feels frozen, God is still moving. He is moving every chapter toward the day when he makes all things right.

Why can't you stop worrying, even when you know it is not helping? Why does your mind keep spinning at 2 AM about things you cannot control? If you have ever wondered whether something deeper is going on underneath your anxiety, this message will name it.In this sermon, Pastor Brandon opens up Matthew 6:25 through 34, where Jesus addresses some of the most worried people on the planet. And he does not address it the way our culture does. He does not just tell them to think positive or take a few deep breaths. He does something stranger and more powerful. He kneels down in a field, picks a flower, and points to a flock of birds in the sky.Pastor Brandon walks through three layers of worry that Jesus speaks to in this one conversation. The intellectual layer, where worry is exposed as ineffective and a waste of time. The spiritual layer, where worry reveals a quiet theology of fear, a hidden belief that God might not really be in control or might not really care. And the emotional layer, where Jesus does not roll his eyes at the swirl of anxiety inside us. He meets it. He calms it. He shepherds his worried people the way no one else can.What makes this teaching land so deeply is one phrase Jesus uses that almost slips past us. He does not say a Father in heaven. He does not even say the Father. He says your heavenly Father. Pastor Brandon unpacks why that one little word changes everything. The God of the universe is not distant, cold, or indifferent. He is a Father. Your Father. He is near, he sees you, and he already knows what you need. The biggest problem with worry is not that it is annoying or unproductive. It is that, somewhere in our chest, it slowly crowds out our memory of who God actually is.The sermon also gets honest about a connection many of us have never noticed before. Worry can be the on ramp to sin. The more you worry about money, the easier it becomes to justify greed. The more you worry about your kids, the easier it becomes to drift into control. The more you worry about your reputation, the easier it becomes to bend the truth. Pastor Brandon names that pattern in a way that most of us will quietly recognize the moment we hear it.The good news at the heart of the message is that worry has met its match in Jesus Christ. Through his life, death, and resurrection, the broken relationship between you and the Father has been made whole. You are not a spiritual orphan trying to manage the universe alone. You have a Father who clothes the grass and feeds the birds and counts you immeasurably more valuable than either.If you have been quietly carrying more than you know how to carry, if your mind has been louder than your peace for a long time, this message is for you. There is real rest available, and it comes from a Savior who already knows everything that has been keeping you up at night.

Why does carrying a secret you cannot tell anyone feel like it is slowly draining the life out of you? If you have ever hidden something so long that it started to show up in your sleep, your patience, your relationships, even your body, this message names exactly what is happening to you and offers a way out.In this sermon, Pastor Brandon opens up Psalm 32, one of the most personal and disarming chapters in the entire Bible. It was written by King David after he covered up one of the worst things he ever did for an entire year. And what David describes is not just a spiritual problem. It is a whole person problem. He writes, when I kept silent, my bones wasted away. My strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. Hidden sin does not stay hidden. It turns inward and starts to corrode.Drawing from Psalm 32, Proverbs 28:13, 1 John 1:9, and Isaiah 53, our pastor walks through what David finally learned the hard way. You cannot flourish without forgiveness. And you will not find forgiveness without confession. Real confession is not explaining yourself, defending yourself, or softening what you did. It is simply agreeing with God about it. No spin. No editing. No vague language. Just the truth. And on the other side of that truth is the blessing David promises in verse one, the deep contentment of being fully known and fully forgiven at the same time.Along the way, our pastor shares his own story of being a 22 year old petty officer in the Navy, deployed in the Gulf, trying for six months to be a better man on his own willpower and watching the weight of it slowly crush him. He talks about the night he finally collapsed in his ship's workshop at 11 PM and surrendered everything to Jesus. He shares the wisdom of a former district superintendent who used to pray, Lord, let the littlest sin bug me in the biggest way. And he reminds us that the heavy hand of God on our hearts when we are hiding is not cruelty. It is mercy. It is a Father who loves us too much to let our sin live in us comfortably.The good news at the very heart of this teaching is that God can cover your sin because he uncovered his Son. Drawing from the suffering servant prophecy in Isaiah 53, our pastor explains why confession actually works. Your sin is not ignored. It is paid for. It is not tolerated. It is transferred. The cross is not God shrugging at your secret. It is God taking it seriously enough to bear it himself, so that you can finally stop carrying what was never meant to live inside you.If you are exhausted from holding something in, if your body is starting to feel the weight of what your soul has been pretending, if you have ever wondered whether confession actually sets you free, this message is for you. There is real freedom available, and it comes from a Savior who already knows everything and loves you anyway.

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself this question? When you fall short, when you blow it, when you do the very thing you swore you would never do again, how do you actually think God views you in that moment? That one question, maybe more than any other, will shape how you walk with God for the rest of your life.In this week's sermon, Pastor Brandon opens up Luke 15 and uncovers something that almost sounds too good to be true. Jesus tells three back to back parables, the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin, and the parable of the prodigal son. Each one is aimed straight at the lie so many of us believe in our bones, the lie that we need to clean ourselves up first before we can come back to God.We continue our series on fighting temptation by zooming in on what happens after the fall. Because if we are honest with ourselves, most of us intellectually believe in a grace based gospel but emotionally live by a works based gospel. We pull back from prayer. We close the Bible. We avoid the people of God. We tell ourselves we will turn back to him once we feel a little less ashamed. But the God of Luke 15 will not stand for that.The shepherd does not begrudgingly throw the sheep on his shoulders. He joyfully carries it home. The woman does not roll her eyes at the missing coin. She turns her whole house upside down and throws a party when she finds it. And the father does not wait for the prodigal son to crawl back. He runs. In a moment that is often missed, he also walks out to his angry older brother and reminds him that everything he has is his too.This sermon is a reminder that there really is joy in heaven over one sinner who repents. God's joy over sinners is not reluctant or measured out. It is full. It is warm. It is the face of a Father turning toward you the very moment you turn toward him. Returning to God after sin is not a long climb back into his good graces. It is a single step in his direction.If you have ever wondered how God sees you in your worst moments, this message is for you. Our prayer is that it stirs your heart toward repentance, toward growing in Christ, and toward the kind of deep joy that only comes from being found by him.

Have you ever found yourself going back to the same habit, the same sin, the same pattern — even knowing it never really satisfies?You're not alone. And this week's message goes straight to the heart of why that happens.We're in a series called The Good Fight, and this week Pastor Josiah opens in Genesis 25 with one of the most honest, human stories in all of Scripture — the moment Esau trades his entire birthright for a bowl of stew. One impulsive decision. One moment of hunger. And a future forfeited for something that was gone before he even stood up from the table.It sounds almost too simple to be our story too. But it is.Because temptation doesn't usually come in the form of obvious rebellion. It comes in the form of exhaustion, urgency, and the quiet lie that this time it will actually satisfy. That's how sin works — it inflates a temporary craving until it feels ultimate, and shrinks something eternal until it feels optional.This message asks a hard and beautiful question: How do we stop trading what is eternal for what is immediate?Together, we walk through three honest truths from God's Word.You can't resist what you haven't recognized. Awareness is where the battle begins — not condemnation, but the kind of honest, Spirit-led examination that Psalm 139 invites us into. Search me, O God, and know my heart.Resistance requires endurance. Galatians 6:9 reminds us that Paul doesn't warn us about getting tired of doing evil. He warns us about getting tired of doing good. Because obedience is often exhausting, unrewarded in the moment, and invisible to everyone around you. But God's harvest is real — it just comes on His timeline, not ours.You were made to be a vessel, not a consumer. Esau's deepest failure wasn't impatience — it was identity confusion. He forgot what he was made to carry. And when you forget who God made you to be, you start living for what you can get instead of what you were called to pour out.This isn't a message about trying harder. It's a message about trusting deeper — trusting that what God has for you is genuinely better than what's right in front of you.If you've been wrestling with the same sin, the same pattern, the same discouragement — this one is for you.