In California, there's a vineyard that pays every worker the same — first hour and last. Jesus told a story like that. It still makes people furious. 

In Matthew 20, a landowner hires workers at dawn. Then at noon. On and on, until 5 o'clock, an hour before quitting time. And he pays every one of them the same. The crew that worked twelve hours in the sun is livid. And here's the uncomfortable part: they're not entirely wrong. Something in this story violates every instinct we have about fairness and effort and getting what we 'deserve'. 

That's not the flaw of the parable. That's the point of it. If you've been working since dawn and quietly keeping score —this one's for you. If you've been standing around all day wondering why nobody has ever come for you —this one is especially for you.

What do you do with the people who make you feel unsafe?

In Luke 10, a religious expert asks Jesus a simple question — 'Who is my neighbor?' — hoping to draw the line somewhere comfortable. Jesus answers with a story so scandalous that we've spent two thousand years softening it: it's the 'first misnamed parable' (Copan). But, to the original audience, "good" and "Samaritan" didn't belong in the same sentence. The hero of the story is the person you were raised to hate. 

In this message, we walk the dangerous road between Jerusalem and Jericho, discovering why your brain is wired to see 'not like me' as a threat, and to sit with the question Jesus refuses to let us dodge: not who counts as my neighbor? But what kind of person am I becoming? Along the way — a conversation with a stranger, on a plane, that turned this whole parable inside out. 

You've heard this story. You haven't heard it yet.

You've heard this story so many times you can't hear it anymore. In Luke 15, Jesus tells a story about two sons — one who runs into self-destruction and one who stays home and turns to stone. Most of us know it as "the Prodigal Son." Most of us have heard it wrong. 

In this first week of The Parables of Jesus, Pastor Greg unpacks why Jesus told parables designed to break open your view of the world — and why this one has been working on him for ten years. 

You'll wrestle with the stories you tell yourself, why you do that, and why both 'finding yourself' and 'being a good person' leave you lost. Whether you've walked away from God, never met him, or have been quietly resentful in the back of the sanctuary — this story ends without an ending on purpose. The question is...what will you do with it?

God does not heal the brokenhearted by erasing their pain or scars, but by binding up our wounds through Christ. He explicitly took up our plight in His mission (Isaiah 61:1), bore our sorrows, and calls us to wait in honest hope at His table until He restores the years the locusts have eaten.

You prayed. Something happened. Then you wondered if that was really God... or coincidence... or just in your head. It's the same question Esther forces us to ask. And refuses to answer.

It's the one book in the Bible that never mentions God. No miracles, no prayers, no voice from heaven — just a hidden queen, a cousin named Mordecai climbing a pagan empire, a genocide plotted with a roll of the dice, and a rescue messy enough that by the end the people of God start to look uncomfortably like the villain they defeated. In this final message of our Esther series, we sit in the discomfort of a victory that doesn't feel clean and a festival named after random chance, and we ask the question running underneath the whole book: How do you learn to see God when, by every appearance, He isn't there?
 
Part of "(Un)Hiding Your Face," our series in the book of Esther.
Scripture: Esther 8–10. New Story Church | Phoenixville, PA

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There's something in all of us that wants to destroy us. And the terrifying part is — it usually looks like a strength.

The Book of Esther introduces us to a man named Haman — one of the most psychologically precise portraits of pride in all of Scripture. He has everything: wealth, power, access, honor. And none of it is enough. Because one man won't bow. What follows is not just a story about an ancient villain. It's a mirror — a portrait of the particular kind of self-destruction that comes from needing to be unlike everyone else, above everyone else, feared by everyone else. Haman chases it all the way to a 75-foot monument he builds for someone else's execution. (You can probably guess how this is going to end.)

This is Week 4 of our series through Esther — a book that never once mentions God, and yet somehow can't stop pointing toward him.

Download the group discussion guide here.

Most of us never find out who we really are. Not until something forces the question.

This week we hit the turning point of Esther. For years she's hidden who she really is, her faith, her people, to survive at the top of a world that runs on power and appearances. Then the crisis comes, and she can't hide anymore. Speak up and she might die. Stay silent and she'll lose something worse.

Most of us know something about that. We all have a version of ourselves we've worked hard to protect. The one with the career. The one everyone likes. The one that finally got invited in. And we rarely ask who we really are underneath it, until something forces the question.

Esther 4 forces it.

Some people just seem to be born lucky. And some people don't. Everything seemed to be falling into place for Esther and Mordecai. She "just happened" to be in the right place at the right time — and became queen. He "just happened" to overhear an assassination plot and saved the king's life.

Lucky. Lucky. Lucky. Until it wasn't.

Old wounds resurface. Old enemies reappear. And with the roll of the dice, God's People suddenly find themselves powerless to stop what's coming. Which raises a question that might sound familiar. And might make you uncomfortable.

If you've forgotten God, will He forget you too?

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There's a book in the middle of the Bible where God never shows up. Not once.

No miracles. No prayer. No divine intervention. Just a young woman hiding who she really is — her identity, her faith, her people — in order to survive in a world run by powerful, fragile, drunk men.

And somehow that made it into our Bible.

This week we open the Book of Esther. It's strange, morally complicated, and honestly a little unsettling. Which might be exactly why it's there.

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Most of us are lonelier than we’re willing to admit — and we’re not telling anyone about it.

This sermon is about the most ordinary thing in the world: a table. A meal. It turns out that simple thing might be the answer to something much larger.

Drawing from the story of Jesus eating with the people no one else would eat with (Luke 5), Acts 2, the neuroscience of bonding, and a Van Gogh painting about Belgian coal miners — this sermon makes the case that God has always worked through ordinary tables. From the first meal in Genesis to the final feast in Revelation, the table isn’t incidental to the story. It is the story.

You’ll wrestle with why belonging still feels so dangerous even when you want it. You’ll encounter a Jesus who doesn’t wait until you’re ready to pull up a chair. And you might leave with one idea that changes how you think about every meal you eat for the next 70 days.

Jesus keeps setting the table. The question: what are we going to do?