Send us Fan Mail

Slowing taught us to be with God. Rooting is where we start to become like him, and there's no better place to start than prayer.

In this episode, Pastor Ty Crowder points out something easy to miss about the disciples. They watched Jesus heal, feed crowds, and walk on water, and never once asked him to teach them how. Then they watched him pray, and that's the request that made it into Scripture.

Ty unpacks what that means for a room full of people who mostly treat prayer like a last resort. He walks through the Lord's Prayer as the shape Jesus actually gave us, pulls in the raw honesty of the Psalms, and lands on one simple practice you can start today.

Scripture referenced: Luke 11:1; Matthew 6:9-13

If you're new to Rhythms, this is the opening message of Rooting, the second of three movements this fall at Living Free Franklin, following Slowing (August) and leading into Overflowing (October).

Send us Fan Mail

We handed the mic over this week.

Three couples joined us to talk about the practices we've spent the month on, Sabbath, solitude, and fasting, and what those practices have actually done in their homes. Not theory. Not a wrap-up. Just people telling the truth about what changed.

This closes out the Slowing movement in our Rhythms series before we move into Rooting next month. If you want to hear what these practices look like when they've had time to bear fruit, this is that episode.

Send us Fan Mail

When is the last time you were truly hungry? We have engineered hunger almost out of our lives. There is a snack in the car and a drive-through on every corner, and the second our stomach whispers, we silence it. So it sounds a little crazy that the people of God have walked into that hunger on purpose for thousands of years. They call it fasting.

In week four of Rhythms, Pastor Ty Crowder hands fasting back to the church, not as a diet or a punishment, but as holy hunger aimed at God, prayer with your whole body. This message closes the Slowing month by tracing what fasting really is, what it uncovers in us, and the kind of fast God actually wants, one that turns us outward toward the hungry. And it lands where the hunger was always meant to land, at the table, where Jesus says, I am the bread of life, whoever comes to me will never hunger.

One gentle word: fasting looks different for every body and every season of health, and no one should feel shamed into it or out of it. If you shouldn't fast from food, fast from something else and let it become a prayer.

Send us Fan Mail

Before the sun came up, while the whole town slept, the most wanted man in Galilee slipped out of the house to be alone with his Father. He wasn't escaping people. He was running to a Person.

In week three of Rhythms, Pastor Ty Crowder opens up solitude, and it's warmer and deeper than unplugging or catching your breath. This message walks from the secret place Jesus described, shut the door and pray to the Father who sees you, to the mountain where God met a broken, burned-out Elijah not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, but in a still small voice. The point is tender and it is everything. God usually speaks in a whisper, and you cannot hear a whisper in a crowd you never leave. Solitude is not empty. It is where the real you finally meets the beauty of Jesus and gets loved with nothing to show for it.

If you have kept the noise turned up for a long time, this one is for you.

Text: Mark 1:35; Matthew 6:6; 1 Kings 19:11-13

Send us Fan Mail

The first thing God ever called holy was not a mountain or a temple or a person. It was a day. In week two of Rhythms, Pastor Ty Crowder opens up the biblical vision of Sabbath, and it goes far deeper than taking a day off.

In Egypt, the gods never rested, so the slaves never stopped. Then the true God pulled out a people and taught them to stop, and their rest became the first sermon they ever preached about who their God actually was. This message traces Sabbath as worship and as defiance, the weekly declaration that you are not a slave and God is God and you are not. It moves through the two reasons God gave the command, creation and redemption, the delight the day was always meant to be, and the deepest rest of all, the finished work of Jesus. We do not rest to earn anything. We rest because it is finished.

If you have been making bricks for a god who never loved you, this one is for you.

Text: Genesis 2:2-3; Deuteronomy 5:12-15; Mark 2:27-28

Send us Fan Mail

We may be the most informed followers of Jesus who have ever lived, with more sermons and translations at our fingertips than any generation before us. So here is the honest question. Are we actually becoming like him?

In the opening message of Rhythms, Pastor Ty Crowder names a quiet mistake many of us have made. We have confused knowing about Jesus with becoming like him, and the two are not the same. Information is one thing. Formation is another. Out of Matthew 11:28-30 and Jesus' invitation to take his yoke and learn from him, this message calls us out of admiring Jesus from a distance and into apprenticing to him up close.

Rhythms is a thirteen-week journey into the unforced pace of life with God, learning the practices Jesus kept and keeping them together in community. It starts here.

Text: Matthew 11:28-30
 Series: Rhythms · Learning the unforced pace of life with God

 Living Free Franklin

Send us Fan Mail

A scuba diver can't shoot straight to the surface. Go deep enough, stay long enough, and you have to come up slow, or everything you found in the deep comes out of you wrong. That's exactly where we are at the end of Summer Slowdown.

In the series finale, Pastor Ty opens John 15, the vine and the branches, spoken on the last night of Jesus' life. The question isn't how to rest anymore. We've learned that. The question is how to take it with you when Monday comes and the world speeds back up. The answer is one word Jesus said ten times: remain. Along the way: the difference between visiting God and living with him, why a branch bears fruit instead of manufacturing it, the danger of running on borrowed green, and why the pruning you felt this month was love.

"I am the vine; you are the branches... apart from me you can do nothing." John 15:5

Send us Fan Mail

When I was a kid, I hid under the bed. Not because I was in trouble. I hid when I was mad, when the house got loud, or when I just wanted to be alone. And most of us never really grew out of it. We just got better at it.

Week three of Summer Slowdown is the most personal one. Pastor Ty opens Psalm 139, where David discovers he cannot get away from a God who sees everything, and then does the last thing you'd expect. He asks for more of it. Along the way: the difference between surveillance and wonder, why God knits instead of mass-produces, the inspector versus the surgeon, and why being fully seen and staying in the room anyway is the deepest rest there is.

The July challenge continues: apps deleted, one day a week guarded, four Sabbaths in community. Week four brings the series home: carrying this rest back into an ordinary week.

"Search me, God, and know my heart... and lead me in the way everlasting." Psalm 139:23-24

Send us Fan Mail

You unplugged everything. And the noise kept going.

Week two of Summer Slowdown deals with the discovery a lot of us made this week: you can stop your hands and still not stop your heart. Pastor Ty opens Matthew 6:25-34, where Jesus stands on a hillside pointing at actual birds and tells everyday people not to worry, six times in ten verses. Along the way: why worry is the night shift in your own head, the question about your Father hiding underneath every anxious thought, David's steering move in the Psalms, a story about manna and one man's rotten backup plan, and what Pastor Ty personally does at two in the morning when his mind calls a board meeting.

The July challenge continues: apps deleted, one day a week guarded, four Sabbaths in community. Week three is next: opening ourselves honestly to God.

Luke 10:42 says Mary chose what is better. This week is about where she was looking.

Send us Fan Mail

Martha had Jesus in her house and missed him. Not because of sin. Because of preparations.

In week one of the Summer Slowdown, Pastor Ty walks through Luke 10:38-42 and names the thing wearing most of us down: a life so full of good things that there's no room left to sit at Jesus' feet. Along the way he shares his own confession, a two-week vacation that couldn't fix a hurried heart, and what it took for him to finally see it.

The message ends with a challenge for the whole month of July. Delete the social apps. Keep a weekly Sabbath. Gather with people face to face.

Week one of four. Slowing the outer life comes first. Next week, the inner life.

Living Free Franklin | Franklin, KY | Sundays at 10:30 AM