Do you want to be healed? In this teaching, we sit with the question Jesus keeps asking, and we're invited to name the thing, physical, emotional, relational, or spiritual, from which we long to be made whole. Moving through two scenes in John, we first meet a royal official who travels a day on foot and humbles himself before Jesus, begging healing for his dying son, and who takes Jesus at his word with almost no information at all, reminding us that it's not the amount of faith that matters but the object of it. Then, at the pool of Bethesda, Jesus finds a man who has been an "invalid" for 38 years, a word this world used to say he was "not valid," and declares what the cross makes true of every person: you are validated, an image-bearer worth more than anything money can buy. Jesus tells him to take up his mat and walk, carrying the very thing that once marked his pain as a platform for God's glory, because your past no longer gets to define your future. Along the way we're confronted with a hard truth, that sometimes we don't want to be healed, because our pain has become our identity or our excuse. This is an invitation to want to be made whole, to stop lying back down in the filth of old sins, and to bring yourself, or someone you love, before the Great Physician in prayer.

The road never changed, but the travelers did. In this teaching, Brett walks us through Luke 24 and the story of two disciples heading home from Jerusalem, sad, disappointed, and hung up on the crucifixion, unable to move toward the joy of the resurrection even after the tomb was found empty. Then a stranger draws near. Brett draws out three simple, steadying truths for anyone clouded by disappointment: Jesus walks with you, joining us on the hard road not always to remove the difficulty but to offer his presence, as he did with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fire; Jesus listens to you, unhurried and uninterrupting, inviting us to come as we are and pour out our honest hearts the way David does across the Psalms; and Jesus reveals himself to you, not through a shortcut but through the Scriptures and, finally, in the breaking of bread. When their eyes are opened and they recognize him, the disciples ask, "did not our hearts burn within us while he talked with us on the road?" This is an invitation to let Jesus walk your road, to be authentic with him, and to ask whether your heart is still burning, because following Jesus isn't ultimately about information but about knowing a person.

The last thing Jesus did before his death wasn't leave an instruction manual, it was share a meal. In this teaching, given while much of the staff was in Kenya serving with Remember Nhu, Kelsey and Garrison bring their own dining room table on stage and walk the congregation through a full Passover Seder to help us hear Jesus' words at the Last Supper the way his disciples would have. Moving cup by cup and element by element, from the salty herbs of oppression to the unleavened bread of trust, from the bitter herbs to the lamb, they trace four truths at the heart of the gospel: God sees you wherever you are, God loves you, God has adopted you as his own, and God dwells in you. Along the way Jesus keeps going "off script," washing feet a rabbi would never wash, calling the bread his body and the cup his blood, and giving the ancient festival a new and cosmic meaning. The blood on the doorposts was a declaration of belonging, and if Jesus is the new Passover Lamb, then sin and death have no claim on those adopted into God's family. We are now the temple, the dwelling place of God. This is an invitation to let that truth sink past head knowledge into the core of our being, so that, like the International Worker who looked at armed soldiers and said "they are just boys, they do not know what they are doing," we come to see the world with the same eyes as Jesus, loving it despite its brokenness.

Where's my place? In this teaching from Luke 14, Tina opens with a confession about walking into a gym and going from confident to small in an instant, same person, same identity, different room, and asks what it takes for any of us to feel like we belong. At a Sabbath dinner in a prominent Pharisee's home, Jesus has three interactions Luke wants us to notice: a suffering man everyone else is using as bait, guests jockeying for the best seats, and a host who has carefully decided who deserves the guest list. Through all of it, Jesus disrupts their understanding of place. He beholds the man everyone overlooks, not as a theological argument but as a person he loves. He frees us from needing the best seat by showing us the freest person in the room, one who lives from his belovedness rather than for it. And he gives us a place at the table by inviting us to see ourselves on the guest list of the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind, because we all come to God empty-handed and are welcomed anyway. This is an invitation to receive the place grace has already set for you, so that you're free to stop fighting for one everywhere else, and to start pulling up chairs for others. Because the church is meant to be a small working model of the kingdom that's coming, and until the great banquet arrives, we practice.

This week, guest speaker Ben Hurst, an International Worker being sent with his family to serve the Fulani people of Guinea, West Africa, shares from Luke 10 and the story of Martha and Mary.

Drawing on God's sending heart from Genesis to the Great Commission, and his father's phrase "there is no go without lo," Ben reminds us that mission flows out of intimacy with the mission-giver: we listen before we serve. This is an invitation to stop living under the fear and demands of people, to sit at the feet of the One who doesn't need you but wants you, and to carry his presence wherever you are sent.

Would you join us in praying for Ben and Lauren and their children as they follow God's call and prepare to move to West Africa? If you'd like to receive updates through their newsletter or partner with them financially, you can do both here: https://linktr.ee/laurynbenhurst?utm_source=linktree_profile_share<sid=7e0d244f-fdc1-4023-8bc8-313b48cf7097

This week, Keith shares how the story of Zacchaeus, the wealthy chief tax collector of Jericho, the most hated man in town, who climbs a sycamore fig tree just to catch a glimpse of Jesus. Against the backdrop of a lonely age where a third of people feel unseen almost all the time, we watch Jesus do something remarkable: he stops, looks up, calls Zacchaeus by name, and invites himself over for dinner. No sermon, no four spiritual laws, just a shared meal, and what a thousand sermons from a thousand Pharisees could never accomplish, Jesus accomplishes at the table. Zacchaeus encounters grace and rearranges his entire life, giving half his wealth to the poor and repaying those he cheated four times over. When the crowd mutters "not him," we're confronted with our own instinct to draw boundary lines around the table, and invited instead into biblical hospitality: philoxenia, love of the stranger, a welcome we actively fight for rather than passively offer. This is an invitation to look up and see the overlooked, to learn a neighbor's name, and to remember that while we were still far off, Jesus climbed a tree too, and was nailed to one, so that we could be brought near. Because there is always room for more at God's table.

Dinner with Jesus: Unexpected Guest with Keith. Would we see a masterpiece, or just the mud? In week two of our series on the table in Luke's Gospel, Jesus accepts a risky dinner invitation from Simon the Pharisee, and the meal is interrupted by a woman with a reputation, who breaks from the crowd, kneels at his feet, and pours out worship in a way that scandalizes everyone in the room. She weeps, she loosens her hair, she empties her alabaster jar. And Jesus, who could have pulled away to protect his reputation, receives her. As the whispers rise, Jesus tells Simon a story about two debtors, and reveals a stinging truth: this woman knows the weight of her debt, and Simon does not. The more aware we are of our need, the more open we are to grace, and the more love flows out of us in response. Simon sees only her past; Jesus sees the wounds beneath it and speaks the words she has likely never heard from any man: your sins are forgiven, go in peace. This is an invitation to reclaim the table for the sake of others, and to become people who look beyond the mud and call out the masterpiece.

Dinner with Jesus: Jesus' Table with Keith. Christianity didn't take shape behind pulpits or on altars, but around the table. In this teaching that opens a new series, we notice how Luke's gospel is saturated with meals, Jesus is always either at a table, going to one, leaving one, or making one, and how at those tables he broke every dining rule of his day. We land in Luke 5, where Jesus calls Levi the tax collector, a traitor and outcast barred from the synagogue, with just two words: "follow me." Levi leaves everything, then throws a party and fills his house with fellow sinners, and Jesus doesn't hesitate to pull up a chair. When the religious elite grumble about the company he keeps, Jesus answers that it isn't the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. Along the way we're confronted with the modern-day Pharisee in each of us, and reminded of two things: you cannot out-sin the cross, and to follow Jesus is to leave everything and shift from living "for the sake of me" to "for the sake of others." This is an invitation to reclaim the table in an age of division, to take just "one of 21" meals each week to sit with someone far from God, and to pray over every table, "Lord, at this table as it is in heaven."

In this message, Pastor Tina walks through the story of Nicodemus in John's Gospel to explore what Jesus means by being "born again." Drawing a vivid picture from natural birth, she reminds us that the evidence of new life isn't a prayer we prayed once in the past but a life now lived in continual dependence on the Spirit, "kept on being filled" day after day. Tracing Nicodemus from his cautious nighttime visit to his bold, public devotion at the cross, Tina invites us to consider our own response: whether we're curious seekers at the start of the journey, weary believers in need of a fresh filling, or ready to place the full weight of our trust in Jesus for the first time. This is an invitation to abundant life that we could never manufacture on our own.

Practice of Scripture: Study with Tina.

What if the goal of studying Scripture isn't information, but formation? In this teaching, Tina reframes study not as a task for scholars and pastors but as a means of becoming like Jesus, because you can win a Bible trivia contest and still be impatient, anxious, and controlling. Looking at Jesus' temptation in the wilderness in Luke 4, we see a man so saturated in Scripture that under pressure, weak and hungry, his gut response is to quote Deuteronomy. The wilderness didn't create his trust in the Father; it revealed what had already been formed in him. Which raises the question for all of us: what comes out of you when you're squeezed? Woven through the teaching is Tina's own story of being delivered from a years-long fear, and how learning to glorify God on a hundred-mile bike ride became a journey of surrender, trust, and receiving what she could not produce in herself. She offers practical guidance for studying the Bible as a library and a unified story leading to Jesus, while sounding a sober warning from John 5: it's possible to know the Bible and miss Jesus. This is an invitation to position yourself before God through study, so that when life squeezes you, Jesus is what comes out.