Highway Sermons

How can the stories of Jesus followers who have gone before us, both long past and in the recent past, guide us in our journey of faith today?

God is already at work in the lives of the people all around you. At your workplace, at your kids school, in your neighborhood, at the dog park. God is already part of the bigger story happening in these lives. Notice in scripture, in the early days of the church, when God calls Phillip to go talk to a person in the desert. Take the pressure off of yourself, and be open to joining God when you get invited into a moment.

Vision for short term missions and stories from Highway's recent Honduras trip.

Does God determine everything, including the details of my everyday life?...? Or maybe just the big stuff...? Or am I the captain of my own ship, determining my every move...? In today's sermon, Adam walks us through the story of Joseph and considers the tensions at play in the way God is faithfully involved in Joseph's life.(Note, today's file from the afternoon sermon preached at True North church and is audio-only due to a recording error at Highway's morning service.)

Is it ok to walk away from a relationship? or from a commitment to a community? And if so, how do we know when, or for how long? This all takes a serious work of discernment and needs to involve trust in God's plans.

To help us in this, we look to the complexities of the relationship between David and King Saul in 1 Samuel 26.

The Grace you experience, you did nothing to deserve; God extends it freely to you. Just as Jonah discovered as he looked out at Nineveh, we also are invited to extend grace freely to others, even to “those people” whom you just don’t want to receive grace. Who is your “Nineveh” that you can extend grace toward because God first loved you?

Prayer can so often get misunderstood as something like wish-listing. What if there is so much more going on? What if, especially in times when we are being-prayed-for, we are both connecting with the Divine but also reorienting ourselves in community with one another?

The call from James to welcome wisdom and the community of peace that wisdom-from-God can bring about.

Which matters more in the spiritual life: what we believe, or what we do? How do we understand the importance of action in the life of faith? Join us as we explore the controversy between faith and works and examine the metaphor that James gives for how to understand the relationship between what we do and what we believe. We will then examine the illustrations James gives us in this passage to look at three different checkpoints for our faith: does our faith change how we live? Do we take risks in faith? Do we move towards those in need?

The call and challenge of James can hit hard: "show no favoritism." Actually it goes a little further than that: "you are inclined to show favoritism to the rich person, so instead Christ follower, intentionally move out of that mindset and care for the widow, care for the orphan, care for the one who has no status or wealth or power".The way of Jesus asks us to live in a specific way, in a way that makes us present to the outsider, that asks us to befriend the lonely, to feed the hungry, and to care for the vulnerable in our midst.