Highway Sermons

A Table in the Wilderness, places our wilderness experiences in the story of God guiding His chosen people after the Exodus through the Sinai Desert. After a year there, God instructed His people to celebrate Passover to remember their deliverance from Egypt. The table in the wilderness for us today is celebrating the Lord’s Supper, symbolizing our deliverance through Christ’s sacrifice. People of faith rehearse God’s rescues.

2020 has been a year of unprecedented twists and turns. But through it all, our vision for what it means to be a church community continues to remain rooted in the story of the first church in Acts 2. As we transition from the summer into the fall, we consider some of the ways that we endeavoring to reflect and embody that first church community at Highway.

We conclude our Arrow Prayers series a prayer uttered by none other than Jesus himself, in the midst of a moment of tremendous struggle. Jesus models the importance of creating consistent rhythms that enable us to keep on praying, and allows God to shape our own will, according to his own.

The arrow prayer “praise the Lord” is an imperative that is incomplete without a response. Deborah, a Judge and prophetess in Israel, wrote a song peppered with “praise the Lord”, followed by descriptions of what the Lord had done. May we pray this prayer and fulfill its command by recounting the Lord’s gracious deeds.

Praying the arrow prayer, “Give thanks in everything” launches our daily search to find and declare God’s presence and goodness in our lives, no matter the circumstances we find ourselves in.

The arrow prayer, "Lord, answer me!, prayed by the prophet Elijah in his showdown with false prophets on Mount Carmel, invites God to reveal Himself in a special way in order for a person to see the true God and the truth about life. When we've said what can be said and prayed what can be prayed, "Lord, answer me!" invites God to make Himself known in ways that only He can.

Today we study the prayer of a woman who was in such distress that she flouted all the cultural and historical conventions of her time to become the first and only woman in the Bible to go up herself before God’s presence to pray. The heart of Hannah’s arrow prayer are the words “remember me.” Join us as we look at three things these words teach us about how to handle our own distress: what it means to pour out our suffering before God, to ask him for our desires while releasing ownership of the outcome, and to see through our prayer how God can reveal Himself in a way that gives us unconditional joy.

Initially, the disciples tried to block a father with an epileptic son, described as an evil spirit set to destroy him. When Jesus questions his faith, the father responds, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” We’re often in situations where we want to believe that God will act according to His nature and purposes, but we’re honestly struggling. This father’s arrow prayer should be ours, “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief!” That’s the most honest, faith-filled way to pray as we struggle to walk by faith, not by sight.

While Psalm 51 is a classic arrow prayer for confession, “Lord, forgive me”, less practiced is the corporate version of that prayer, “Lord, forgive us.” While many of us wrestle with shouldering the collective ownership of others’ sins and participate in corporate confessions, the Bible is packed with examples of exactly that. The message, “Lord, Forgive Us” focuses on Daniel’s corporate confession of sin in Daniel 9:1-19. May “Lord, Forgive Us” be added to our quiver of arrow prayers.

This arrow prayer emerges from Psalm 51, a penitential psalm inspired by a dark and disturbing story from the height of David’s rule as Israel’s king. Psalm 51 provides an incredible glimpse into David’s soul, and serves as a model prayer of forgiveness. It reminds us that forgiveness requires a humble awareness of sin, and a turning to God that is always met by God’s unfailing love and great compassion.