Guest preacher Dale Thornton opens the book of Amos. Amos was a sheep breeder from Tekoa who later told the priest Amaziah plainly that he was no prophet and no prophet's son. Brother Thornton sets the timeline, the reign of Uzziah in Judah and Jeroboam II in Israel, two years before the earthquake, and reads the opening line where the Lord roars from Zion. The point he draws out is that God does not require professional training to make a man useful to Him. If you have ever decided you were not qualified to be used by God, this message is about a man who was not qualified either.

A study of Isaiah 11. Pastor Robert Rohlin works first through Isaiah 10, where God calls Assyria the rod of His anger and uses a pagan empire to discipline His own people, then holds that empire accountable for its pride. Israel's leaders had written unjust laws, stripped the weak of their rights, and preyed on widows and orphans, and judgment followed. But the judgment is discipline and not destruction, because a remnant survives. Out of what looks like nothing but a dead stump of Jesse a shoot comes up, and the message follows that promise all the way to the kingdom Christ will rule.

Part two of a study on the armor of God in Ephesians 6:10-17. Pastor Robert Rohlin makes a point that is easy to miss: the command to be strong is passive in the Greek, so the believer receives strength rather than manufacturing it. He also notes that Paul never hands one piece of armor to one Christian and a different piece to another. Each of us puts on all of it, because the armor is the whole character of Christ. The message names the real opponent, who is not flesh and blood, and the ground on which he is beaten, which Revelation 12:11 gives as the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony.

The opening message on the armor of God in Ephesians 6:10-17. No soldier walks onto a battlefield without armor, and Pastor Robert Rohlin argues that Christians face a field more dangerous than any earthly one. He works through the first movement of the passage, which is to seek the Savior's strength, since being strong is something the believer receives rather than produces. He also insists on the whole armor rather than the one piece that happens to suit your temperament. Along the way he identifies the enemy Paul actually names, principalities and powers rather than the people in front of us.

A message on cultural decline and the hope that answers it. Pastor Robert Rohlin uses Cole Porter's 1934 song Anything Goes as a marker of the moment moral relativism took hold in American culture, and then tells Porter's own story, which ended in depression, illness, and a refusal of faith to the last. His secretary's remark becomes the image for the whole message, that without faith a person is like a stained glass window in the dark. From there Pastor Rohlin turns to Romans 1 and Luke 17 for what Scripture says about a society that rejects God, and what deliverance looks like. It is a sober message, but it does not end in the dark.

A message on materialism, treated as one of the marks of the last days. Pastor Robert Rohlin opens with Warren Buffett, who still lives in the Omaha house he bought in 1958, as evidence that wealth and materialism are not the same thing. He works through the command in Matthew 6 to stop storing up treasure where moth and rust destroy, and Paul's warning that in the last days men will be lovers of self and lovers of money. He names what materialism costs, starting with contentment, and points to the black horse of Revelation 6 and to Zimbabwe's currency collapse, where a loaf of bread cost more than a million dollars. If money has more of your attention than you would like to admit, this is a plain look at where that road goes.

A Mother's Day message built around Hannah in 1 Samuel 1. Hannah could not have children in a culture that read barrenness as a curse, and she had to live alongside a second wife who taunted her for it. Pastor Robert Rohlin follows her to the tabernacle, where she prayed so hard the priest thought she was drunk, and where she vowed to give the child back to God if God gave her one. The portrait he draws is of a mother who feared the Lord, walked by faith, taught the truth, endured hardship, and kept nurturing anyway. If you are worn down by a burden that has not lifted yet, Hannah's persistence is worth an hour of your time.

Part one of a message asking where America stands with God. Pastor Robert Rohlin starts at the top of the Washington Monument, where the words Laus Deo, praise be to God, are cut into the aluminum tip that the morning sun strikes first, put there for God to see rather than for people. He works down through the cornerstone, which holds a Bible among its buried items, into the question Peter Marshall and David Manuel raised: did God have a particular plan for this country? From there he turns to Isaiah 30, where God's people made their plans without asking Him, and to Christ's warning about salt that has lost its savor. It is a message about national heritage and what happens when a nation stops drawing on it.

A study of Revelation 18 and the fall of Babylon. Pastor Robert Rohlin opens with the Titanic, called practically unsinkable by her own builders and owners, who kept her near full speed through an ice field with the lookouts' binoculars locked away ashore. Two hours and forty minutes after the collision she was gone. That is the picture he sets against Revelation 18, where a world system that believed itself untouchable falls in a single hour. The message is a hard look at human confidence, and at what is actually worth building a life on.

A message that puts Psalm 6 next to 1 Corinthians 15. Pastor Robert Rohlin points out that of the sixty-six books of the Bible, sixty-five are God speaking to man, and one, the Psalms, is man speaking to God. Psalm 6 is one of the rawest of them, a man flooding his bed with tears and asking God how long. The message treats lament as worship rather than weakness, and brings in Elijah under the broom tree asking to die, and Abraham Lincoln writing that he was the most miserable man living. Then it turns to the resurrection body Paul describes, where grief finally meets glory.