Real Peace. Real People.

You can look at a lot of your life like a donkey might look at theirs. In other words, you can see without really seeing. It can be so bad that you can even look at your own salvation and hee haw over it. This is a sermon that seeks to undo that blindness so that the listener can see Jesus for who he is and understand what he’s doing in their life.

This is a Peace Academy session further developing the teaching in Judges 14.

There is an age old story here. This is the story of what happens when a young man - or any person really! - hangs out in a place where he shouldn’t have been hanging out and looks at someone he shouldn’t have been looking at. This sermon seeks to examine through that story the power of lust, the destruction of lust, and the power of love, which conquers lust. Listen in!

What do we do with Samson’s Dad, Manoah? It’s a key question for the narrator of Judges for many reasons. It’s also a key question for us. What do we do when we are comfortable with our own lives? What do we do when we are good with being good enough? What do we do when we are secure with our insecurities? These are the questions that lead us to call out to God for help. What’s his answer? Listen in!

There are some relatively unhelpful places you can go to when it comes to this Scripture, the great love chapter of the Bible. This is a sermon that seeks to move the listener out of those relatively unhelpful places into the place the Spirit of God intended it to go. More than that, it’s a sermon that matures people in Christ to do what this Scripture calls for us to do: to love. Listen in.

Christians tend to be drawn based on their giftedness to one of two places: feelings of self-loathing or feelings of superiority. Both of these responses to our giftedness make us self-conscious and - for different reasons - cause the rest of the Body of Christ to suffer. This sermon seeks to remove both sets of feelings from the listener and, finally, to lead the listener to their identity in Christ and the joy of self-forgetting.

There are times when it feels like coming to church is our greatest bain instead of our greatest blessing. Why is that? And how do we overcome that? How can we make coming to church feel like it’s Christmas every week? This sermon seeks to address those questions through a better, clearer understanding of God. The goal is for each of us to be unleashed for unparalleled and joyful service to Jesus. Listen in!

Leviathan is so powerful. He attacks us and we tend to get overwhelmed. That’s clearly a message in Job 41. The sense of powerlessness and victimization that he engenders through that can be leave us far from God - despairing of his justice. This is a sermon designed to put Leviathan back in his place so that our trust in the Lord’s power and justice can grow. Listen in!

It’s time to talk about suffering and take the topic straight on. That’s what the Lord does here. He comes straight at suffering by giving Job his vision of his creation. We need that vision - to be broken out of the smallness of our vision of suffering and to gain what this sermon calls an eagle’s eye vision of what’s actually happening in our lives through suffering. It’s how the Lord takes the suffering out of suffering while it’s happening in our lives. Listen in!