Hill Country Bible Church Dripping Springs Sermons

In today's sermon, we dive into The Church as Christ's primary instrument for advancing His kingdom. As believers, we should make it a priority to pray for The Church -- especially for her purity, her unity, and her mission.

What if you trust God completely and still end up embarrassed? Still end up with nothing? That fear keeps more people from fully surrendering than almost anything else. In this message from Psalm 25, we look at the prayer King David wrote when his enemies were circling and his past was catching up with him and we find four moves a praying heart makes to trade anxiety for real, grounded trust.

Shame tells you that you've gone too far. It tells you that God is waiting for you to clean yourself up before you come back, and that the worst thing you've done is the truest thing about you. But that's not what the Bible says.

In Psalm 51, King David writes one of the most honest prayers in all of Scripture, not after he had things figured out, but from the bottom of one of the worst seasons of his life. His prayer shows us how the Lord wants us to understand shame, guilt, and the character of God.

The psalmist's image of a deer panting for water is vivid imagery of our need for God. It is a matter of life and death. In our darkest moments, when tears become our daily bread and enemies taunt "Where is your God?" we discover our deepest need isn't relief from suffering but MORE of God Himself. This is the beginning of hope, recognizing that circumstances may overwhelm us, but God's presence sustains us. 

Ever lie awake while your mind replays every worst-case scenario? You are not weak, and you are not alone. Long before therapists talked about anxiety, a future king named David was on the run, terrified, and hiding in enemy territory. Out of that low moment he wrote a prayer that still speaks to anxious hearts today.

In this sermon we walk through Psalm 34:4-7 and discover that God does not wait for us to calm down before He draws near. Sometimes He changes our circumstances. More often, He delivers us from the fear itself, even while the storm is still standing right in front of us.

Most of us have prayed "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil" thousands of times. In this final sentence of the Lord's Prayer, have you ever stopped to ask what Jesus actually meant and why He stopped with this final instruction?

In the final sermon of our five-part series on the Lord's Prayer, we find three things. First, we are weaker than we want to admit. Second, there is a real enemy who studies our patterns and times his pressures in our weakest moments. Third, the prayer Jesus gives us is not a request for protection from the sidelines. It is a petition that allows us to step onto the field.

Matthew 6:12 holds what may be the most searching line in the entire Lord's Prayer: "Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors." Most of the prayer asks God for things. This line ties what we're asking God to do to something we are supposed to be doing. 

In this sermon we work through why Jesus uses the language of debt and not just sin, what daily confession actually is and isn't, what it really demands of us, and why forgiveness costs the forgiver but holding onto to bitterness costs far more.

What if the most spiritual thing you could do today was ask God for groceries? Jesus had five petitions to teach his disciples to pray and the first one about human need wasn't forgiveness, or deliverance, or wisdom. It was bread. When we look at the Lord's Prayer from this perspective, we find that it's not a throwaway request. It's a window into the character of God, a diagnosis of one of the deepest idols of the human heart, and an invitation to a completely different way of moving through your week.

You feel it. The sense that something is deeply wrong with the world — and with you. That ache isn't an accident. Jesus had a name for it, and a prayer that speaks directly into it. Matthew 6:10 might be the most radical sentence you've ever casually repeated.

Praying to a God you don't really know will feel like an empty prayer. We are so familar with calling God "Father" that we don't realize how radical it sounded to His disciples. This sermon unpacks why starting the prayer with "Father" changes everything, why "in heaven" keeps us from shrinking God down to our size, and what it means to sincerely pray "hallowed be your name".