At sunrise on Easter Sunday, Steve unpacks a Greek word — anthrakia — which means charcoal fire. It appears only twice in the entire New Testament, both times in John's Gospel, both times with Peter standing nearby.

The first is the night of Peter's denial. It's cold, there's a charcoal fire burning in the courtyard, and Peter warms his hands at it while he disowns Jesus three times. That smell — charcoal smoke — becomes the smell of his worst moment, the night he became someone he didn't recognise.

The second is the resurrection beach scene in John 21. Peter has gone back to fishing, broken and unresolved. At dawn, the risen Jesus appears on the shore — and He has a charcoal fire burning. Same word. Same smell. John chose it deliberately.

Jesus doesn't meet Peter with a lecture on failure or a theological discussion about grace. He cooks breakfast. And that smell hits Peter before Jesus says a single word.

The sermon's heart is this: Jesus doesn't redeem us by pretending our worst moments didn't happen. He walks back into them with us. The charcoal fire that once smelled like shame now smells like forgiveness — because Jesus lit it that way on purpose.

Easter, Steve argues, isn't just an empty tomb. It's a risen Jesus who spent His first free morning going looking for the one who failed Him worst — and cooking him breakfast when He found him.

He is risen. And He is here.

On Good Friday, Steve spoke about how we create God in our image rather than the other way around. He opened by painting a picture of Judas — likely connected to the Zealots, an armed revolutionary movement — who had spent three years watching Jesus command storms, heal the sick, walk on water, and dismantle the Pharisees with a sentence. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to the crowd's coronation shouts of "Hosanna," Judas believed this was finally the moment. The revolution was coming. The kingdom was here.

It wasn't.

Instead of rallying the crowds against Rome and taking a throne, Jesus went to the temple and taught about His own death. He washed feet. He prayed in a garden. The Messiah Judas had spent three years constructing in his imagination refused to show up. Steve argued that Judas's betrayal — thirty pieces of silver, the price of a slave — was possibly a desperate attempt to force Jesus's hand. A manufactured crisis to compel Him to finally reveal His power. It was a catastrophic miscalculation. Jesus didn't fight back. He submitted.

When Judas saw the verdict — condemned — he was seized with remorse. But critically, he ran to the religious establishment rather than to Jesus. He confessed to the whitewashed tombs who had used him and then discarded him. He went to church instead of to Christ. And he ended his life — three days before the resurrection. Three days from discovering that everything he thought was defeat was actually the hinge point of all human history.

Steve noted that tonight — April 3, 2026 — is exactly 1,993 years to the day from the crucifixion. Seven years short of the 2,000th anniversary of the moment everything changed.

Steve then turned the mirror on the congregation. Judas, he said, is not a monster. Judas is a mirror. How many of us have built a Jesus shaped around our comfort — one who endorses our lifestyle, blesses our ambitions, never inconveniences our plans? A Jesus who is essentially us, with divine authority to validate whatever we've already decided? And when we encounter the actual Jesus — the one who says take up your cross, who redefines greatness as servitude, who says to find your life you must lose it — how many of us quietly walk away? Not with a kiss. With our absence. Our silence. The slow drift from anything He actually asked.

He closed with the vision of Revelation 19 — the rider on the white horse, eyes like flame, robe dipped in blood, King of Kings and Lord of Lords — and pointed out that this King, Jesus at his second coming, was what they were actually expecting the first time. 

The question of Good Friday is not whether Jesus is the Messiah. The question is whether we are willing to let Him be the Messiah He actually is — rather than the one we would have preferred.

Is He Rabbi — as Judas called him around the table - the teacher you learn from at a safe distance?

Or Kyrios as the 11 called him — the Lord you actually surrender to?

The Pike Effect: Steve Deal speaks about an old experiment conducted in the 1950s involving a pike fish. Scientists placed the pike in a tank with minnows, then inserted a glass partition. The pike lunged repeatedly, failed repeatedly, and eventually gave up. When the scientists removed the glass, the minnows swam freely around it — and the pike starved to death surrounded by everything it needed to survive.

Using Gideon, Moses and Abraham, Steve posed some questions and challenges to the congregation by asking:

• What barrier have you accepted as permanent — that God removed long ago?
• Are you living in response to what is — or in bondage to what was?
• What if the thing holding you back no longer exists?

The central thread running through all three men was this: none of them felt ready. All of them had histories of failure, fear, or inherited defeat. And in every case, God didn't argue with their past or offer self-improvement strategies.

He spoke to their future instead.

The challenge Steve left the congregation with was direct — God called Gideon a mighty warrior before he'd won a single battle. He's doing the same with you.

What would you attempt if you genuinely believed the glass was gone and that God was absolutely with you every step of the way?

Johny Harris kicks off a series in "The Sermon on the Mount" with the first instalment - Kingdom Happiness. Johnny declares that Matthew's gospel burns with one blazing purpose, to unveil Jesus the King. Starting in Matthew 5:1-12 The Sermon on the Mount rings out like a royal decree unveiling the breathtaking principles of the Kingdom of God.

The Sermon on the Mount is His royal manifesto: the blueprint for life under God’s rule right now.

The Kingdom is already here — God’s authority breaking into history wherever people submit to Jesus — yet not yet fully realised. It’s an upside-down society of grace, righteousness, and joy in the Holy Spirit.

The eight Beatitudes reveal true Kingdom Happiness:

    •    Poor in spirit (the gateway)

    •    Those who mourn sin and the world’s brokenness

    •    The meek, hungry for righteousness, merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers

    •    The persecuted for Jesus’ sake

Even persecution cannot steal this unshakable joy — it proves we belong to the King.

Steve Deal speaks about the story we are all born into — the grand biblical narrative running from Eden to the New Jerusalem. Using Genesis 12 as his launching pad, he argues that God's promise to Abraham only makes sense when you understand everything that preceded it: Lucifer's rebellion, the fall, the corruption of humanity in Genesis 6, the flood, and the scattering of the nations at Babel, where God assigned each nation to a member of his divine council. All those nations went their own way and fell into idol worship — and it was into that context that God called one man, Abram, to be the beginning of something entirely different.

Steve shares his belief that Eden, Jerusalem, and the New Jerusalem all occupy the same plot of ground — the place where God has always intended to meet with his people face to face. This is why the enemy concentrated his forces there. The Canaanites filled that sacred ground with child sacrifice and the worship of fallen beings, and the giant clans that had re-emerged after the flood were clustered specifically in that territory — the enemy closing rank around the very place God would one day reclaim. Everything in between — the tabernacle, the temple, the sacrificial system — was a shadow pointing back to the original Eden and forward to the New Jerusalem. The whole Bible, Steve argued, is the story of God recovering what was lost and returning to dwell with his people on that same ground.

Steve then traces the thread of "the seed" from Genesis 3:15 — where God promised the serpent that the offspring of the woman would crush his head — all the way through to Abraham and ultimately to Jesus, citing Paul in Galatians 3:16. The virgin birth, the cross, the resurrection — all on that same hill — were the fulfilment of a plan announced in Eden before Adam and Eve had even left the garden.

He closes by landing the whole message in the present moment, reminding the congregation that we live between the cross and the New Eden. The cosmic battle has been won, billions of souls are coming into the kingdom, and the invitation is simple — believe, repent, be baptised, and be filled with the Holy Spirit. The promise that began in a garden, he said, has been travelling through six thousand years of history to reach each person in that room.

Steve Deal speaks about the calling of Abram in Genesis 12 — and how the story of one man leaving everything behind in ancient Iraq is really the story of every person who has ever heard God's voice and struggled to follow it. He unpacked the world Abram was living in: Ur of the Chaldeans, one of the most powerful cities on earth, built around the worship of a false god. God didn't call Abram out of desperation or poverty — he called him out of comfort, success, and a life that was working just fine. Sound familiar?

The heart of the message was about what happens between the call and the destination. God spoke to Abram while he was still in Ur — but his father Terah stepped in front of that calling and took the family only as far as Haran, a crossroads, where he eventually died. Steve showed how the names themselves tell the story: Terah means wanderer, Haran means crossroads, and Canaan means the humbled place. Many of us, Steve suggested, are sitting in Haran right now — not because we disobeyed God, but because someone else's unfinished story became the walls of our world.

The sermon then pointed everything toward Jesus — the one who faced every possible hijack of his calling, from his family, the devil, his closest friends, the crowd, and even his own humanity in Gethsemane — and completed the journey all the way to the humbled place. Where Abram stalled, Jesus didn't. And the invitation was simple: stop striving at the crossroads, let the old man die, and follow the One who already finished the journey on your behalf.

This past Sunday, Steve unpacked Genesis 10–11, focusing on Babel and its lasting ripple effects.At Babel, humanity united in prideful rebellion—building a tower to make a name for themselves and defy God’s command to fill the earth. God confused their language and scattered them, dividing one people into 70 nations (Genesis 10’s Table of Nations).The concept that those nations were assigned to spiritual beings from God’s divine council (Deut. 32:8), many of whom later rebelled and corrupted their oversight (Psalm 82).Babel grew into Babylon—the enduring symbol of human autonomy, pride, and godless world systems that oppose God, running from Genesis to Revelation’s final fall.Yet God’s redemptive plan endures: He claims His own portion and ultimately triumphs through Jesus.

Johnny Harris speaks on the love of God - How it is indiscriminate, deeply compassionate, it honestly warns, calls everyone to salvation and how the cross of Christ is the greatest expression of that love. 

Steve Deal opens up Genesis 8 and 9 where we arrive at the lowest point in human history — God has hit reset on the entire world remembers Noah. The flood proves what moral progressivism refuses to accept — that human nature cannot be repaired from the outside. Not by a flood, not by politics, not by ideology. God says so Himself in verse 21, using almost identical language to Genesis 6:5. Same diagnosis before and after. The flood changed the geography of the earth. It didn't change the geography of the human heart.

Candice Hewitt shares a beautiful and insightful message drawn from Psalm 23, exploring the different seasons we walk through in life under the care of our Good Shepherd. Candice challenges us to recognise the season we're currently in, and walk faithfully in obedience to the Lord.