Summit Drive Church

In Matthew 13, Jesus gives us these parables, these “portraits of the kingdom,” to confront our false expectations and help us reimagine what the kingdom of heaven is really like and how it is coming. Why? To get us on board with God and his ways.

This week, we will explore Jesus' parable of the weeds and the wheat and the question, "Why does evil persist?" We'll see that God graciously allows good and evil to grow together until Jesus' return so that as many as possible can be saved. Then, we will be invited to shift our identity from those who 'pull weeds' to those who 'sow seeds.'

This week, we explore how our actions speak louder than our words as we look at the Parable of the Two Sons in Matthew 21. We will see that there is "work" to be done but that the "work" has to do with enjoying and glorifying God.

As we begin our series on the Parables of Jesus, the Parable of the Sower (Mark 4) introduces us to the fact that parables are not cute stories, meant to simplify complex spiritual ideas, but they perplex. They subvert. They get behind our defences and gives us a new imagination for seeing the realities of God’s kingdom. In this parable, we see how Jesus is deeply concerned about our commitment to hearing what he has to say – which is, in the end, a function of our hearts’ openness to Jesus.

This week, we finish Ephesians by exploring the armour of God. We will discuss the realities of evil spirits in some technical detail and then see how, for most of us, most of the time, our spiritual warfare is what we have come to see as normal Christian discipleship.

Paul describes the reality of a spiritual struggle against spiritual opponents, which is not often how we envision the world. This text opens us up to see more clearly that the nature of reality, our true opponents, the real struggle, and finally, how to be equipped to “stand” firm.

This week, we continue our look at Paul's household codes and approach some lessons for how we can be spirit-filled in our family and working relationships.

The Spirit is the power we need to fuel the Christian community to live in a revolutionary way: to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Over the next two weeks, we’ll see how Paul offers a revolutionary word on how that kind of mutual submission works within a household. This week, we’ll key in on Christian marriage.

As we look at Ephesians 5: 7-21, we see how Paul uses this powerful metaphor of how Jesus’ followers are light in the Lord and that our missional call is to essentially “leave the light on,” that in the power and filling of the Spirit, our lives illuminate the darkness and bring more and more people to the light.

In Ephesians 5: 1-6, Paul is defining the culture of the Kingdom. We see in this text that the contours of the Kingdom name both positive features to embody, and negative ones to avoid. At the heart, Paul makes the staggering claim that we are to be “imitators of God,” which is only made possible because we are already God’s “beloved children.”