“Welcome one another just as Christ has welcomed you."

Not tolerate. Not agree, but patient, forgiving, and proactive.

And you can only give what you've already received. Christ welcomed you first.

Now go and do likewise.

This is the sermon our former Sr. Pastor, Kevin Germer charges and challenges Jeremy and the Christ Pres family to do.

You will want to take notes for this sermon!

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

The welcome Paul calls us to is not tolerance or agreement. Instead it is active reception, making room, drawing one another in.

• Genuine welcome is expressed through patience, forgiveness, and proactive generosity toward others.

• The welcome we are called to extend is grounded in and made possible by the welcome we have already received from Christ.

• When a community welcomes one another this way, something true about God becomes visible to the watching world.

THE CHARGE:

Welcoming One Another Patiently

Patience is a posture that gives space and time for love to do its good work. Where in your relationships, whether at church, at home, or at work, do you find it hardest to hold that posture? What tends to make you rush?

Welcoming One Another with Forgiveness

We have many ways of making others pay for the hurt they cause us: a sharp word, cold professionalism, gradual withdrawal, gossip, comparison, suspicion.

• Which of these patterns do you recognize most easily in yourself?

• Which is hardest to see?

• What does it actually look like to absorb the cost of an offense instead of dishing it back out into the body?

• Is there a relationship in your life right now where you are being called to do that?

We have many ways of making others pay for the hurt they cause us: a sharp word, cold professionalism, gradual withdrawal, gossip, comparison, suspicion.

• Which of these patterns do you recognize most easily in yourself?

• Which is hardest to see?

• What does it actually look like to absorb the cost of an offense instead of dishing it back out into the body?

• Is there a relationship in your life right now where you are being called to do that?

Welcoming One Another as a Gift

It is easy to receive someone externally while keeping them at arm’s length.

• Have you ever been in that position, present but not truly open?

• What would it take to move from a surface-level welcome to genuine openness?

Jesus’ welcome is proactive. No one in the room found Jesus; he found them.

• How does that shape the way you think about moving toward others rather than waiting for them to come to you?

The Welcome We Have Received

Every day of your life has been lived inside the patience of God.

• Does that feel true to you?

• Is it easy or hard to believe that God is not holding your sin against you?

• What gets in the way?

Paul says this welcome is for the glory of God: when a community welcomes one another this way, something true about God becomes visible to the world.

• What do you think the world sees when it looks at your church?

• What do you hope it sees?

“Welcome one another just as Christ has welcomed you." Not tolerate. Not agree, but patient, forgiving, and proactive.

And you can only give what you've already received. Christ welcomed you first. Now go and do likewise.

This is the sermon our former Sr. Pastor of 17 years, Kevin Germer charges and challenges our new pastor Jeremy Skaggs and the Christ Pres family to do.

You will want to take notes for this sermon!

The Messy Middle | Nehemiah 4.1-9

Week 5 - Direction Draws Fire, pt.2

There’s a stretch in every calling that nobody warns you about. Past the excitement of the start, before the finish is anywhere in sight, your own strength simply runs out.

Nehemiah’s builders hit it and said it plainly:

“By ourselves we will not be able” (Nehemiah 4.10).

This week we’re calling it the messy middle.

The end of yourself is not the end. It’s holy ground.

It’s the very place God has been leading you, off your own strength and onto Him.

Come prayerfully expectant, because the Holy Spirit moves in power, and He meets His people right where they’ve run out of their own.

Direction Draws Fire | Nehemiah 4.1-9

Week 4

The wall sat in ruins for 140 years untouched.

The opposition only came when God’s people started to build.

This Sunday we walked through Nehemiah 4.1-9 and what it means to keep going when the pushback comes.

Sermon & Small Group Notes

Nehemiah had every reason to look the other way.

• He was safe.

• He was comfortable.

• He had a good job in the king’s palace, hundreds of miles from the trouble.

But when the news came about a broken city and a scattered people, he did not shrug it off and move on. He sat down and wept. For over a hundred days.

What could grip a man that deeply about people he had never met and a place he had never seen?

This message walks through the opening of Nehemiah to uncover a burden that did not come from Nehemiah at all. It came from God.

And the same God still breaks hearts today, not to crush us, but to send us.

If you have ever wondered whether your prayers are meant to reach past your own needs, or whether God could actually use someone as ordinary as you, this one is for you.

Press play, and let’s ask the question together: Are we burdened by what burdens God?

What happens when the leader you’ve relied on is suddenly gone? That moment reveals something surprising about God: His mission never dies with the man.

This sermon speaks directly to the questions we face in real life: how to handle changes in

• Leadership

• stay unified when things shift, and

• keep following God without getting stuck looking backward.

You’ll discover why God’s plan comes with clear instructions:

• stand strong,

• stay on His path, and

• remain rooted in His Word.

It’s not about human strength or strategy; it’s about stewarding what God has already promised.

Ready to see how this ancient story speaks to your next step? Hit play and let the message challenge and encourage you right where you are.

Most of us grew up thinking that getting along was the same as being unified. It is not.

Tolerance keeps people in the same room. Unity keeps people moving in the same direction.

And that difference is costing churches, families, and teams more than most of us realize.

In this message, we open Genesis 11 and discover something surprising in the story of Babel.

Those people were not a cautionary tale about pride alone. They were a masterclass in what genuine unity looks like, and what goes wrong when that unity is aimed at the wrong thing.

Along the way we look honestly at two kinds of tolerance quietly destroying the church today, and why Jesus Himself called silence in the face of compromise a sin.

• They had witnessed miracles.
• They had seen God show up in the most extraordinary ways.

• they wept,
• panicked, and
• begged to go back to Egypt.

David was a man after God's own heart. And yet his greatest failure did not start with a dramatic rebellion. It started with a quiet decision to stay home when God called him to the battlefield. One idle evening. One rooftop. And a chain of consequences that cost him everything he never intended to lose.

Most of us do not fall all at once. We just slowly stop showing up. We get tired. We find reasons that sound perfectly reasonable. But the rooftop is always the next stop after you decide to stay home. And sin never stops with just you.

If you have ever felt the slow pull of disengagement in your own life, this message is for you. Listen now and find out what it looks like to get off the rooftop and get back to your post.