What is faith? How does faith “save” us? Is it even our faith that does save us? This week we explore how the faithful obedience of Jesus is setting all things right and freeing us from our burdens. It is His faith that God is using to set the world right again. And because we follow Jesus, we too get to participate in this faith. It is offered to us freely as a gift.

Text: Galatians 2:15​-21

Have you ever encountered the liberating love of God? It frees our hearts in ways we never thought possible. It can be very easy though to get distracted and to turn our heart towards other things in search of freedom.

Text: Galatians 1:1-7

Why do you go to church? What if the church was a place where you put aside your own needs and interests to pursue the best for others? Does that sound like a strange concept? Turns out, the Apostle Paul had a very similar vision for the church. In this third and final sermon in our series “Assembly Required”, Teaching and Research Intern Phill Coselli walks us through just how beautiful the church is when we are there for one another.

Text: Ephesians 5:1-5

What does it mean to “show up” at church? Does it mean just listening to the sermon every week? Maybe singing during worship? Or does going to church involve more than that? This week, our Teaching and Research Intern Phill Coselli will wrestle through these very questions with us!

Text: Ephesians 4:21-24

What is the church? What is supposed to happen at church? Do you go to church or are you the church? This week our Teaching and Research Intern Phill Coselli explores what exactly the church is. Some assembly required!

Text: Ephesians 2:19-22

Do you belong in God’s story? Most of us struggle to feel like we truly belong; like we truly have a seat at the table. Tragically, some of us have felt more like our presence in His church is offensive than welcomed. There might be things about us – our gender, our race, our sexual orientation, our career choice, our mental health – that don’t naturally align with the rhythms of the world around us. This leaves us feeling like strangers and like we don’t deserve space among God’s people. Others of us have suffered abuse or injustice and have never received justice, reconciliation or reparations for the wrongs committed against us or our people. When this happens, we may struggle to feel like we belong anywhere, much less in God’s church. And still for some of us, feeling like you don’t have the right background, the right spiritual resume or the right moral qualifications can hold you back from experiencing the richness, beauty and wonder of following Jesus. However, if we look at Christmas through the eyes of the wisemen, we may see that our belonging has nothing to do with being the right person. While there may be parts of our lives that we have never felt fit in anywhere, the beauty of grace is that it is making space for you! So stop trying to be the right person! And come to Jesus as you are with what you have! That’s all the wisemen did, and they found themselves right in the middle of God’s epic story to change the world. You can too!

Text: Matthew 2:1-12

What brings chaos into your life? Where have you made peace with chaos and brokenness in your life? What do you look to for peace? Christmas is about peace! It is about peace breaking into our chaos and bringing rest and stillness to our lives. This message of peace was first entrusted to a couple of outsider and is now available to all of us! Come look at the peace of Christmas through the eyes of the shepherds!

Text: Luke 2:1-20

Step aside boys! While most of the rest of the world, and its powerful people, missed what God was doing during the first Christmas, it was the women of the Christmas story who had the insight to see it. Mary and Elizabeth have something to say about the first Christmas and the whole world needs to hear it! Christmas is about the Light breaking into the darkness. It is about turning the unjust power structures, and those who keep them in place, upside down. It is about bringing justice to the marginalized and returning dignity to the dismissed. When all other voices were silent, it is the voice of the women during the first Christmas that announce hope to a weary world. And it is through their eyes that we will begin to see the good news, the gospel, the true spirit of Christmas, emerge. Through the faith and courage of a young Mary, God will begin the restoration of all things. She saw what no one else could see and the world changed forever!

Text: Luke 1:26-55

How prepared are you for God to change your world? Advent is a season of expectation and hope as we look towards the coming of the Messiah. Yet for many of us, waiting for God to show up and do something miraculous or unexpected seems implausible. Others of us have come to expect that our relationship with God is mundane, predictable or even boring. But looking at the birth of Jesus through the eyes of Jospeh can give us hope that there is more! More to knowing God than just showing up at church on Sundays and asking Him to bless the food we are about to eat! There is beauty, intrigue and excitement in knowing God and following His plan, if we will just have the humility to see it!

Text: Matthew 1:18-15

R E S T

Has there ever been a time that we have longed for it for, but struggled to find it? In our final sermon of our pre-launch sermon series “God has you Covered” we look at the kind of R E S T God desires to give us. Rest from our weariness. Rest from our burdens. Rest from the inhuman rhythms that seemed to control so much of our life.

Leviticus 25:8-24