Before the church is called to do something, we are given an identity.  The doing is how we express that identity, and that identity is our vocational calling.  In today's sermon we are going to spend some time talking about the original vocational call of Israel and its expansion beyond borders into the church.

Jesus is the new Moses giving a new law to a new people.  Today we took some time to identify, define, and explain who the people of God are.

Today begins a new series on Jesus' most well known sermon, The Sermon on the Mount. Today's message introduces terms, creates framework, and gives thought to what it means to engage this sermon in a more practical way. 

James’ junk drawer (the remaining sections of the book) contains what I believe to be an ancient version of what we call the first rule of resiliency - be here now. As we wrap up our series on James, the sermon serves as a call to our church specifically and the importance being and living deeply right where we already are.

If the previous three sermons were a mini series on wisdom, today is the spin off.  Today we read the text, travel in to the esoteric, and then back into the tactile.  Using our limited words, we dive into the idea of what it means to live on into the world to come. 

If any book in the New Testament can be categorized as wisdom literature, it is the book of James.  For the past three weeks we have been discussing the idea of wisdom as God's creative power creating order out of chaos. In today's message we get into the nuts and bolts of the wisdom of the world vs. the wisdom of God.  

We dive into how wisdom was understood in the ancient world, a world that understood wisdom to be much more than good decision making skills, but rather the literal power of God to create a good order.  Furthermore, this wisdom was not simply God's to use, but an energy that God assigned to his people in order to follow in his footsteps as his image bearers to create the order of God out of the order of chaos.

Wisdom is often reduced to a thought process, but for the ancient Jews true wisdom impacted the world you lived in with creative power.  Join us in this first part as we recap the first half of the book and set the foundation for a discussion on Wisdom.