New Story Church

The first time I prayed for my enemy, I said the words, but I felt hollow. 

In Matthew 5, Jesus dropped the line early Christians quoted more than any other — love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. It's the sentence that made them recognizable in a world that had never seen anything like it. It's also the one we skip. So, we go back to what Jesus was actually quoting and what he means by a word we translate 'perfect' — which turns out to be different than what we originally thought.  

Then, we stop talking and try it. 5 minutes. 4 names. 4 words. You may find out your love has edges. That's not failure. That's a road that's torn up, and it's the one He's putting back together.

You can do everything right and still come apart. That's Martha in Luke 10 — busy, resentful, and missing that God is standing in her living room.

Most of us aren't falling apart because we're doing something wrong. We're falling apart because we're doing too many things right — and somewhere in all of it we've lost track of why we started.

Luke has a word for that. So does a sixth-century pope who ran a collapsing city and still found time to pray. So, it turns out, does the research. This message is about what it takes to stay whole when everything in your life is pulling in a different direction — and why a five minute prayer practice might just be the difference.

Then we're going to try it. Five minutes a day for thirty days, starting together at the end of the message.

Which, if you've ever tried to pray, kind of sounds ridiculous.

But it's true. You should pray.

In this series, we'll look at four prayer practices that will change your life and our world. But before we can go there, we have to make sure we're talking about the same thing. What kind of prayer actually changes us and our world?

Three words: Hear. Awe. Behold.

We'll sit with the prayer Jesus prayed every morning and every evening, ask what could possibly make a distracted/divided person fully present, and look at how the earliest Christians drew themselves when they prayed.

Someone throws the party of a lifetime. Everyone is invited, then only a few show up — and their excuses are completely reasonable. In Luke 14, Jesus is at a dinner table where everyone's working the room, angling for a better seat. So he tells them about a banquet where the guest list gets thrown out, and the host sends his servant to the streets — then out past the city — until the house is full.

The people in the story say, 'Please excuse me, I can't come. They're just busy. A field. A purchase. A wedding. Good things, all of them. This week: what it costs to be reasonably, responsibly occupied — and what it means that the host keeps going further out to find the one who'd never believe there was a seat for them. 

If you've been working the room your whole life — this one's for you. If you've been sure you were never on the list — this one's especially for you.

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

Download the group discussion guide here.

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.