The disciples asked Jesus who was the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Instead of ranking them, Jesus placed a child among them and told them that unless they became like that child, they would not enter the kingdom at all. This week we walk through Matthew 18:1–14 and press on what Jesus actually asks of us.

Cut off the sin you have been calling private, because it is not just yours. It is forming the little ones around you. And stop assuming that maturity is measured by how long you have been in the pew. Christian maturity is Christlikeness, and the mature Christian is the one who knows he is still a little one who comes when Jesus calls.

Most Bibles put a subheading between Matthew 17:23 and Matthew 17:24, as if the death Jesus predicts and the temple tax conversation are two different stories. They are not. Matthew placed them together on purpose. The cross interprets the tax. And when we read the passage as Matthew wrote it, we see something remarkable.

Jesus, having just told His disciples that He is about to die, quietly pays a ransom into a temple sacrificial system He is about to fulfill and end. He was free from every obligation. He owed nothing. And He chose to pay it anyway, because a greater ransom was coming, one that would set us free forever. This week we walk through the two payments Christ makes, and the "so now, I" response that flows from a life bought at a price.

The disciples had authority, experience, and years of watching Jesus heal, cast out demons, and feed thousands. And yet when a father brought his suffering son, they could not do what they had been given authority to do.

Jesus diagnosed their problem: little faith. Most Christians hear that and immediately conclude they need to build more of it, but Jesus is not telling His disciples to grow bigger faith. He is telling them that even the smallest faith, if it is placed on Him, moves mountains.

This week we walk through Matthew 17:14-20 and discover the freedom of stopping the effort to hold ourselves up and leaning our whole weight on the One who holds.

As we close the Recovering Context series, we walk into what Psalm 37 actually promises. Not the delivery of what you already want. The reshaping of what you want in the first place. God is working on the desires themselves, and the sign He is at work is not the arrival of the outcome. It is the slow, deep discovery that He is what you were always made to want.

We have all heard someone say, "God will not give you more than you can handle." That sentence has done real damage in the church, and it is not what 1 Corinthians 10:13 actually says.

Paul is not writing about suffering. He is writing about temptation. And the promise he actually makes is one of the most freeing in the New Testament. This week we recover the context of the verse that has crushed people who were already crushed, and discover a God whose sufficiency reaches into the very places our capacity ends.

Jeremiah 29:11 is probably the most misused verse in modern Christianity. We have made it a personal promise about a pleasant future, even though Jeremiah wrote it as a rebuke of false prophets who were promising personal pleasant futures.

The real verse is not smaller than the coffee mug version. It is far larger. It reveals a God whose covenant faithfulness endures even when His people break faith, and who does formative work in the exile that could not occur anywhere else.

This week we recover the context of Jeremiah 29 and discover that the exile is not a season to survive on the way to somewhere better. It is where God is forming us into the people we could not have become anywhere else.

Many people have used Philippians 4:13 to summon the strength to accomplish what they wanted. Paul wrote it from a prison cell about learning contentment in plenty and in hunger. The actual promise is not that Christ will help you win. It is that Christ will strengthen you to be at peace no matter what life throws at you.

Most of us are not refusing Jesus. We are filtering Him. We hear the parts that confirm what we already believed and quietly set aside the parts that would cost us something. We have made Him one voice among many in a life that is already crowded with louder voices.

Matthew 17 is the day The Father settled who Jesus is and how He is to be heard. On the mountain, the Father did not say listen to them all and figure out the consensus. He said listen to Him. This sermon walks through the Transfiguration, the voice from the cloud, and the road down the mountain toward the cross, and asks the question every Christian eventually has to answer. Which voice wins when Jesus contradicts another?

Most of us have softened the call of Jesus until it fits inside the life we had already designed. Most of us have softened the call of Jesus until it fits inside the life we had already designed. We reference the cross, we sing about it, we wear it, but we have not actually taken it up. Matthew 16:24-28 confronts the comfortable middle ground and asks what we are really telling Jesus about His worth when we refuse to carry what He has asked us to. The cross you carry should wound you, and the One who carried His first is worth everything it costs.

When Jesus announces His coming suffering, death, and resurrection, Peter pulls Him aside and rebukes Him, only to receive a startling rebuke in return. This sermon examines Jesus' confession of what lies ahead, the nature of Peter's correction, Jesus' counter-rebuke, and the diagnosis and remedy Peter needed to set his mind back on the things of God.