Summit Drive Church

Jesus begins The Lord's Prayer by teaching his followers to address God as "Our Father." What is significant about that? Who is "Our Father"? Who is He not? Today, we explore the connection between our thinking and beliefs about God and how that connects to our prayer life.

The Lord’s Prayer is a great gift of Jesus to all his followers that enables us to step inside Jesus’ own way of connecting with God the Father. As we begin our new series, “Our Father: The Necessity and Wonder of Prayer,” we’ll see how this prayer is a gift and we’ll look at the question of our motives for prayer.

In his prayer for us, Jesus emphasizes how the way we live as a community reveals the truth of the Gospel. We’ll explore the importance of unity as we participate together in God’s mission.

Why do we gather on Sunday mornings? In this message, we’ll explore some of our big reasons for why we gather in the first place and why our church services are structured in the way that they are. We’ll talk about what it means to be a community that gathers around Jesus.

As followers of Jesus, we are apprenticing our lives to him – adopting his overall way of life. And, that way values and embraces community, all the way down to the most intimate level of friendship. In this message, we’ll see how Jesus makes us his friends and what he means by friendship. We’ll then get practical about how to be friends like Jesus, and friends for him too – to bear fruit that will last.

Jesus has given us to each other. It is his preferred method for our growth that we grow through deep relationships with one another. If you want to be like Jesus, you need to be around people who are like Jesus.

We, as a local church, are not like a family, we are family. We are God’s Home. Which, like any home, can be complicated, messy, but beautiful all at once. Today, we’ll look at Mark 3 and Mark 10 in particular to see how Jesus is making us into a family around himself, and how we can lean into that form of life together, even when it’s scary.

Modern life is consumed by anxiety about many things. Jesus tells us few are necessary, indeed only one. What is that one thing? How will it help us with all this stress?

We are gathering to celebrate that God has truly come to be “with us” in the birth of Jesus. And, like the Magi we read of in Matthew 2:1-12, when we posture ourselves before the one born as “King of the Jews,” we will bow our knees in adoration, and bring our best gifts. Because, ultimately, we are given the greatest gift of all; the very presence of God, and promise of never-ending love.

Special thanks to Anna and Noah for reading scripture and to Joel Wiest for His song "A Manger His Throne."

If Jesus is King, Herod is not. More to the point: if Jesus is King, I am not. Matthew presents Jesus as the True King, and his rule is a claim to spans all of creation, including my own heart. We’ll explore what it would look like for us to move from “disturbed” by Jesus’ kingship, to “overjoyed,” as the Magi are when they encounter Jesus.