Oaks Chapel Bible Church

In this message, Charlie unpacks why favoritism is rarely loud. Most of the time it’s quiet. It’s the person we walk past without noticing, the hospitality we aim at people who look like us. James doesn’t answer with guilt. He points us to the glory of Jesus, the inheritance every person in Christ shares, the call to move toward people the way Jesus moved toward us, and the mercy we’ve all been shown. Mercy triumphs over judgment. To find out more about Oaks Chapel, visit OaksChapel.org.

There's a gap between the person you want to be and the person you actually are. Most of us feel it. The dad who swore he wouldn't yell. The person who knows all the right things but still keeps doing the wrong ones. James felt it too, and he wrote about it two thousand years ago in a way that still hits. In this message, Charlie walks through James 1:19-27 and identifies four places where that gap usually lives. Anger that crowds out listening. Pride that resists change. Knowledge that never becomes action. And religion that worships the things pointing to Jesus instead of Jesus himself. But this isn't a "try harder" sermon. Charlie makes the case that the gap doesn't close by grinding. It closes by fixing your eyes on the right thing. When we genuinely see the goodness of God, it starts to reorder everything else. The why behind the what. That's what James is after. To find out more about Oaks Chapel, visit OaksChapel.org.

Most of us spend a lot of energy worrying about the wrong things. Bear attacks. Plane crashes. The big dramatic event that might derail our life. But James has something different in mind, and it's a lot closer to home. In this message, Charlie walks through James 1:12-18 and makes a case that the greatest threat to our faith isn't what's coming at us from the outside. It's what's already living on the inside. Desire that goes unchecked. Sin that starts small and feels friendly. The thing we keep telling ourselves isn't that bad, right up until it is. But James doesn't just leave us there. He pivots in verse 16 to something beautiful. The way we fight the pull of desire isn't only by white-knuckling our way through it. It's by learning to hear a better song. God's generosity. His unchanging love. The first fruits of something far greater still to come. Charlie lands on a line from Viktor Frankl that ties the whole thing together: he who has a why can live to bear any what. That's what James is building toward. And it's worth your time. To find out more about Oaks Chapel, visit OaksChapel.org.

James doesn't waste any time getting uncomfortable. Two verses in and he's already talking about money, status, and the stories we tell ourselves about both. In this message, Charlie walks through one of the most countercultural passages in the New Testament. James takes two people, one poor and one rich, and flips everything our culture has already decided about them. The person with nothing is told to boast in a high position he can't see yet. The person with everything is told he's a wildflower in the heat. Here today, gone tomorrow. That's not just a warning about wealth. It's a diagnosis of where we're all tempted to put our security. Money isn't neutral. It lies to us. It tells us we're more stable than we are, more important than we are, more in control than we are. And James wants us to see that before it's too late. But this isn't a guilt trip. Charlie makes the case that James is actually offering something better. A security that doesn't rise and fall with the market, the job, or the season. The one who endures, James says, receives the crown of life. Not because they endured perfectly, but because they didn't quit.

In this first message of Between Sundays, a series through the book of James, Charlie digs into why James would say something so jarring to a group of scattered, struggling believers who had lost just about everything. And the answer is not what most of us expect. James is not telling them to fake it or feel something they do not feel. He is pointing them to what the trial is actually doing. Testing produces endurance. Endurance finishes the work God is doing in you. And the person who comes out the other side is more complete, more whole, less dependent on the things that were never going to hold anyway. There is also something in this passage that is easy to miss. Right in the middle of all of this, James says if you do not know what to do with any of it, ask. God gives wisdom generously and does not hold your asking against you. That posture, the willingness to ask, turns out to be the foundation everything else in this letter is built on. This is not a message about pretending hard things are not hard. It is about what hard things are actually for. To find out more about Oaks Chapel, visit OaksChapel.org.

Most of us know that following Jesus is supposed to be more than a Sunday morning thing. We just are not always sure what to do about it the other six days of the week.

In this message, Charlie walks through Oaks Chapel's definition of discipleship, an active process to know myself, know God, and make him known, and roots it in Matthew 28. But before he gets to the three parts, he makes something clear. This is not a do more, try harder message. Discipleship is not about performing for God. It is about being honestly formed by him.

Knowing yourself means being honest about how much you need God, not as a shame exercise, but as the only real starting point for any genuine growth. Knowing God is more than collecting information about him. It is a relational, lifelong process that changes how you handle the dark nights. And making him known is the natural overflow of what happens when the first two are actually working in your life.

Charlie also says something worth sitting with. You are being formed by something right now whether you chose it or not. The question is whether you are paying attention to what it is.

And the change? It is slow. Slower than we want. But the slow work of God is still the work of God.

To find out more about Oaks Chapel, visit OaksChapel.org.

We are living in one of the most hopeless moments in recent memory. Costs are rising, trust is collapsing, and for the first time in American history, a generation is less hopeful than the one before it. In 1 Peter, Peter writes a letter to a group of people who are about to face serious persecution. They feel homeless. They feel forgotten. And he starts not by giving them a pep talk or a list of things to feel better about. He starts by pointing them to something that already happened. In this message, Charlie walks through 1 Peter 1 and unpacks one of the most important distinctions most of us have never considered. Hope is not an attitude you have to conjure up inside yourself. It is a possession. Something outside of you that has already been secured. It cannot perish. It cannot be polluted. And it will never, ever lose its beauty or its power. In a world where everything eventually fades, that is a pretty remarkable claim. And Peter says it is true because of one thing. Jesus rose from the dead. And that changes everything. To find out more about Oaks Chapel, visit OaksChapel.org.

We talk about freedom a lot in this country. Freedom from control, freedom from interference, freedom from other people's expectations. And most of the time, that is where the conversation stops. But Paul has something different in mind in Galatians 6. In this message, Charlie walks through one of the most countercultural ideas in the New Testament. Biblical freedom is not just freedom from something. It is freedom for someone. For the people around you. For the community you are part of. For the ones who are carrying something they cannot lift on their own.

Charlie traces through three ideas in the passage. Fighting for the good of others when they are caught in sin, and doing it with gentleness, not judgment. Allowing yourself to be carried, which is actually the harder one for most of us because we are fiercely independent and far too proud to admit we need help. And taking honest stock of our own work and responsibility in a way that leads to gratitude instead of comparison.

This message is for anyone who has ever confused freedom with doing whatever you want. And for anyone who has ever been too proud to let someone else help carry the weight.

Reflection Questions: Whose burden has God placed close enough for me to help carry? Where am I refusing help because I do not want anyone to see that I need it? Who needs to hear what the Spirit taught me through the Scriptures today?

Most of us have done it. We have a church version of ourselves, a work version, a school version, a sports sideline version. We compartmentalize. We keep Jesus in his own little box and only bring him out when it feels safe. In this message, Nick walks through Matthew 5 and the moment Jesus tells his followers, many of whom had literally just started following him, that they are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Not someday, but already. The distinction Nick draws is one worth sitting with. Personal faith and private faith are not the same thing. Faith was never designed to stay invisible. Salt only works when it comes into contact with something. Light only does its job when it is not covered up. And a city on a hill, Jesus says, cannot be hidden. He does not say it should not be. He says it cannot. To find out more about Oaks Chapel, visit OaksChapel.org.

We live in a culture that has never been more focused on itself. We carry mirrors in our pockets. Algorithms show us exactly what we want to see. And somewhere along the way, the default posture of life became inward, not outward.

In this message, Charlie traces that problem all the way back to the invention of the mirror and then asks what the church is supposed to do about it. He lands in two places. Jeremiah 29, where God tells his people in exile to stop waiting to go home and start building houses, planting gardens, and seeking the welfare of the city around them. And 2 Corinthians 5, where Paul says the love of Christ compels us, not our love for Christ, but his overwhelming love for us, and that love is what frees us from living for ourselves in the first place.

The cross did not just buy us out of our sin. It bought us out of ourselves. And that changes everything about how we live in a culture that is constantly turning the mirror back toward us. This message is about what it looks like to be a selfless church in a world that is deeply, deeply selfish. And why the world actually needs to see that.

To find out more about Oaks Chapel, visit OaksChapel.org.