Litchfield Church of the Nazarene Podcast

Thank God I found my wallet. Thank God it's Friday. Thank God I got a good parking spot.

Darlene Stratton, back at Litchfield Nazarene in an interim role, wants to know whether any of that counts as fervent.

In the second half of a series she started in July, she goes to Luke 17 and the ten men with leprosy who were all healed and all did exactly what Jesus told them to do. One turned around and came back. Jesus asked where the other nine were, and Darlene spends a while being honest about why she can't be too hard on them.

Then she goes underneath the story. Most Bibles split Luke 17 into three separate pieces with headings, and she argues they were never meant to be read apart. What sits right before the ten lepers is a request. What sits right after is a group of people missing the whole thing.

There are also two different Greek words for healing in that passage, and only one man got the second one.

Preached Sunday morning, September 13, 2026. Part two of Thank God, from Luke 17 and Romans 1.

Litchfield Church of the Nazarene is a welcoming, bilingual community of faith in Litchfield, MN, whose mission is to produce fruitful disciples of Jesus Christ. We gather every Sunday at 10:45 AM. New messages drop on the podcast each week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. Learn more at litchfieldnaz.com.

Our whole culture is trying to answer one question, and Jon Stoe thinks it keeps handing that question to things that were never built to carry it. Politics. Sexuality. Feelings. Other people's labels.

Who am I?

In the last message of Battle in the Heavenly Realms, Jon traces identity back to Genesis 1, where God says something about us before anyone else got a word in. Then forward through the fall, where he says something more than innocence was lost, and into what the cross actually restored.

Along the way he stops at Luke 10, where seventy-two ordinary people come back from a preaching trip stunned that even the demons listened to them, and Jesus answers with a sentence about lightning and then a second sentence almost nobody quotes.

He closes at the armor of God, and makes a case that the six pieces Paul lists are not six things at all.

Preached Sunday morning, August 30, 2026. The final message in Battle in the Heavenly Realms, from Ephesians 6, Genesis 1, and Luke 10.

Litchfield Church of the Nazarene is a welcoming, bilingual community of faith in Litchfield, MN, whose mission is to produce fruitful disciples of Jesus Christ. We gather every Sunday at 10:45 AM. New messages drop on the podcast each week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. Learn more at litchfieldnaz.com.

If you have ever tried to quit something, really meant it, and then done it again a week later, Jon Stoe has a word for what you're dealing with.

Part three of Battle in the Heavenly Realms moves from where the battle started to where it actually gets fought. Paul locates it precisely in 2 Corinthians 10, and it isn't out there somewhere. It's in your head.

Jon works through what a stronghold is, why it's different from just a bad thought, and the progression the enemy has been running since Genesis 3. A question, then doubt, then deception, then disobedience. He also explains why you can't demolish a stronghold by deciding harder, using the image of a demolition crew standing outside a building and shouting at it.

He closes with something he asked his wife's permission to tell, about the first years of their marriage and what she couldn't sleep through.

Preached Sunday morning, August 23, 2026. Part three of Battle in the Heavenly Realms, from 2 Corinthians 10 and Ephesians 6.

Litchfield Church of the Nazarene is a welcoming, bilingual community of faith in Litchfield, MN, whose mission is to produce fruitful disciples of Jesus Christ. We gather every Sunday at 10:45 AM. New messages drop on the podcast each week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. Learn more at litchfieldnaz.com.

Here's a question most people have never thought to ask. Why was Lucifer in the Garden of Eden in the first place?

Not how he got in. Why he was there.

Jon Stoe spends part two of Battle in the Heavenly Realms on that question, and the answer comes from an unlikely place. A prophecy in Ezekiel 28 aimed at the king of Tyre, in what is now Lebanon. Except halfway through, the prophecy stops describing a human king and starts describing someone else entirely. Someone called the seal of perfection, covered in precious stones, and given a specific assignment.

From there Jon traces the line through Isaiah 14 and Revelation 12 and lands back in Genesis 3, where the enemy walks into paradise carrying no weapon at all and does something far more effective.

Preached Sunday morning, August 9, 2026. Part two of Battle in the Heavenly Realms, from Ephesians 6, Ezekiel 28, and Genesis 3.

Litchfield Church of the Nazarene is a welcoming, bilingual community of faith in Litchfield, MN, whose mission is to produce fruitful disciples of Jesus Christ. We gather every Sunday at 10:45 AM. New messages drop on the podcast each week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. Learn more at litchfieldnaz.com.

In the late 1800s, doctors believed disease simply appeared out of nowhere. Then a French chemist named Louis Pasteur said something that sounded absurd: there are living things too small to see, they're on your hands and your food and everything you touch, and they can kill you.

Jon Stoe opens a new series with that story, and then asks whether we're making the same mistake about something else.

Paul spends five chapters of Ephesians on ordinary life. Marriage, parenting, work, getting along with people. Then chapter 6 arrives and he says something that barely seems to belong in the same letter: your real struggle is not against flesh and blood.

Jon works through what Paul meant, what Jesus said to the religious leaders in John 8 that Jon calls genuinely unsettling, and the two lies he thinks the enemy leans on hardest. He closes on a distinction worth the whole message: we are fighting from victory, not for it.

Part one of Battle in the Heavenly Realms, from Ephesians 6.

Litchfield Church of the Nazarene is a welcoming, bilingual community of faith in Litchfield, MN, whose mission is to produce fruitful disciples of Jesus Christ. We gather every Sunday at 10:45 AM. New messages drop on the podcast each week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. Learn more at litchfieldnaz.com.

A woman who had worked the front desk of his church for thirty years told David Graves she missed him. He asked what she missed, expecting something about his preaching. She said she missed his smell.

That turns out to be the sermon.

In the last message of the week, Graves goes to 2 Corinthians 2, where Paul describes God leading us in triumphant procession. It's a specific image. A Roman triumph was the parade a conquering general received, and Rome required four conditions to be met before granting one. Graves walks through all four, shows how Jesus met every one, and asks what that means for people who assume they're still fighting for a victory rather than from one.

Then there's the incense carried at the back of that parade, and a dry cleaner in Olathe, Kansas named Mona.

Morning service, Sunday, August 16, 2026. A bonus episode from our 2026 Prairie Lakes District Assembly and Family Camp. Theme: The Next Yes, Becoming Christlike Disciples.

Litchfield Church of the Nazarene is a welcoming, bilingual community of faith in Litchfield, MN, whose mission is to produce fruitful disciples of Jesus Christ. We gather every Sunday at 10:45 AM. New messages drop on the podcast each week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. Learn more at litchfieldnaz.com.

Growing up in a pastor's home meant that whoever turned up at church on Sunday came home for lunch. Five kids, plus company, and the company got served first.

David Graves remembers counting the pieces of chicken as the platter went around. He also remembers what his mother said every week when it finally reached him.

He returns to 2 Corinthians 9 for a second look, this time at what God provides and why. Not so anybody can be comfortable. So that we'll abound in every good work, which turns out to mean something more ordinary than it sounds. Taking an interest in somebody. Getting involved in a life. Saying an encouraging word to a person who isn't expecting one.

He tells about an 83-year-old church pianist in a town with one stop sign, and the teenager next door who used to show her his art projects over the back fence.

Evening service, Saturday, August 15, 2026. A bonus episode from our 2026 Prairie Lakes District Assembly and Family Camp. Theme: The Next Yes, Becoming Christlike Disciples.

Litchfield Church of the Nazarene is a welcoming, bilingual community of faith in Litchfield, MN, whose mission is to produce fruitful disciples of Jesus Christ. We gather every Sunday at 10:45 AM. New messages drop on the podcast each week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. Learn more at litchfieldnaz.com.

God is able. Most people in a church can say that sentence without thinking about it.

David Graves spends a morning asking whether anyone actually believes it. He works through five verses in the New Testament that each say the same thing a different way. He is able to keep you from falling. He is able to guard what you've entrusted to him. He is able to help you when you're tempted. He is able to save completely. He is able to do more than you can ask or imagine.

Along the way there's Mabel McCorder, a woman in her eighties who called his house on Saturdays to ask what he was preaching the next morning, and what her daughter said to him at the funeral.

And there's a granddaughter, a diagnosis before she was born, and a list of things the doctors said probably would not happen.

Morning service, Saturday, August 15, 2026. A bonus episode from our 2026 Prairie Lakes District Assembly and Family Camp. Theme: The Next Yes, Becoming Christlike Disciples.

Litchfield Church of the Nazarene is a welcoming, bilingual community of faith in Litchfield, MN, whose mission is to produce fruitful disciples of Jesus Christ. We gather every Sunday at 10:45 AM. New messages drop on the podcast each week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. Learn more at litchfieldnaz.com.

If a stranger stopped you in the Walmart parking lot and asked what the driving force in your life is, what would you actually say?

David Graves opens with that and then runs through the answers he's collected over decades of ministry. Success. Family. Pleasure. Belonging. None of them wrong, exactly.

Paul gives his own answer in 2 Corinthians 5. Christ's love compels us. Graves digs into that word compels, which in Greek carries two things at once: something that drives you forward, and something that keeps you between the lines. He connects it to the inflatable bumpers in a bowling alley gutter and to what the early church called the walk unto death.

He closes with a 24-year-old working the register at a gas station in Joplin, Missouri on May 22, 2011, and the words he gave a reporter who asked him why.

Evening service, Friday, August 14, 2026. A bonus episode from our 2026 Prairie Lakes District Assembly and Family Camp. Theme: The Next Yes, Becoming Christlike Disciples.

Litchfield Church of the Nazarene is a welcoming, bilingual community of faith in Litchfield, MN, whose mission is to produce fruitful disciples of Jesus Christ. We gather every Sunday at 10:45 AM. New messages drop on the podcast each week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. Learn more at litchfieldnaz.com.

There's an official definition for a collectible. An item worth far more than it originally sold for, because of its rarity, its popularity, or its condition.

David Graves has boxes of Topps baseball cards his grown sons keep refusing to take off his hands. He also has a point to make about where value actually comes from.

The text is 2 Corinthians 4, where Paul calls us jars of clay. Graves explains what a clay jar really was in the first century. The cheapest vessel in the house. The one a thief would walk right past. Sometimes used for garbage, sometimes for worse. And then what Paul says is inside it.

He also explains, by way of a 44-ounce drink from Sonic, why some of us ask God to fill us and don't feel much happen.

Morning service, Friday, August 14, 2026. A bonus episode from our 2026 Prairie Lakes District Assembly and Family Camp. Theme: The Next Yes, Becoming Christlike Disciples.

Litchfield Church of the Nazarene is a welcoming, bilingual community of faith in Litchfield, MN, whose mission is to produce fruitful disciples of Jesus Christ. We gather every Sunday at 10:45 AM. New messages drop on the podcast each week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. Learn more at litchfieldnaz.com.