Summit Podcasts: BACK40, Sermon Audio, and Leadership Night

In the final installment of our Jesus Over Everything series, Pastor Jake Schwertfeger from Overland Missions preaches on the sufficiency of Jesus. He presents a thesis that one of the greatest deceptions plaguing the body of Christ today is that we are begging God to receive what Jesus has already freely given and established in us. His message is one of encouragement to embrace what Jesus has already given us and trust Him to work in the most challenging areas of our lives.

In the third message of our series Jesus Over Everything, Pastor Mel explains what it looks like when the Church is in submission to Jesus. When we put Jesus over everything as a church, conflict decreases, health increases, and God's kingdom advances. Mel teaches why the key to healthy relationships is to love sacrificially and resolve conflict biblically. He points out how church health is measured by generosity, salvations, and baptisms. The sermon finishes by highlighting how Jesus was a church planter, Paul was a church planter, the apostles were church planters, and the Great Commission calls on us to be church planters.

Mel, Todd, and Michael discuss common pitfalls associated with prosperity. How can a church enjoy prosperity without becoming corrupted by it? What about for an individual? Staying hungry and maintaining a sense of urgency is crucially important to keeping a proper perspective. They wax esoteric with a deep theological question concerning the difference between God's will and man's will in specific biblical events. The conversation finishes with their attempt to answer the question of whether it's good for your followers to fear you.

In the second message of our series Jesus Over Everything, Pastor Stef preaches a verse-by-verse expository sermon on Colossians 3:1-4. She recalls some of the lessons Mel unpacked from the previous two chapters, and then makes the case for why Jesus should be Lord of our lives. Stef presents a practical dichotomy of what an earthly minded person might say and think over against what a heavenly minded person might say and think. She also explains why the greatest barrier between ourselves and God is not our sin but is our focus. Sin is a barrier, yes, but fundamentally our relationship with God is predicated on our aim. Idolatry is a sin with denotes aim because to have an idol means to allot worshipful focus on someone or something other than Jesus.

"Jesus Over Everything" is our theme as a church for this year. In the first message of our series Jesus Over Everything, Pastor Mel makes the biblical case for the supremacy of Christ. He argues that Jesus is supreme over our lives and over all creation even if we don't accept that He is. Through exposition of Colossians chapters 1 and 2, Mel teaches how Christ is the head of the Church, is the ruler of all kingdoms and all authority, and how Jesus alone is entirely sufficient for us. This section of Colossians also contains the famous warning against being captured by empty human philosophies crafted apart from Jesus, because in Jesus resides all the fullness of God.

Mel, Todd, and Michael discuss whether it's appropriate to pretend certain things around people in order to gain influence with them. They also talk about whether consequences for sin can be permanent in this life, and whether those consequences can invalidate you for specific leadership roles. The conversation turns to a question of whether it's tempting to listen to peers instead of listening to elders.

In this episode of Leadership Night, Mel walks us through a handful of important lessons we've learned from one of history's great leaders - Martin Luther King Jr. He talks about the wisdom of taking action even when fear makes inaction seem rather tempting. A good leader is a leader committed to both intellectual and character growth. Effective leadership involves reading and learning on a daily basis. Mel fields questions in the second half of the episode, and one of the questions is whether ignorance or wickedness leads to worse leadership decisions.

Preaching through Matthew 11:28-30, Pastor Gilbert teaches us how we can find the deepest form of rest. Rest for our souls comes from doing God's work and daily presenting ourselves as a living sacrifice for His purposes. Doing God's work involves surrendering yourself to the yoke of Jesus Christ and learning from Him. If we try to arrive at spiritual rest without Jesus we will come up empty and be left feeling dissatisfied. The pathway to this much-sought-after peaceful condition has already been laid out by God, we just need to see it, understand it, and practice the faith necessary to walk it.

In the most challenging message of this series, Pastor Mel brings a short sermon on Christ as the suffering servant. It's human nature to want to be powerful and even if we don't seek prestige most of us still want the freedom which comes from being in control. Teaching through selected scriptures, Mel explains how the Christian life is about downward mobility rather than upward mobility. We are called to a narrow path marked out by Jesus as one characterized by powerlessness, humility, and suffering. Only once we deny ourselves and accept this truth do we find real freedom in submission to God.

In the third message of our series "It's a Wonderful Life", Mel discusses the human desire to be seen. Using selected scriptures including the temptation of Jesus in Matthew 4, he teaches why it's better to honor God than seek glory for yourself. Mel explains what it means to be a servant of Christ and reminds us that we are a slave to our source. Towards the end of the message, he shows a video of a little boy who demonstrates what it looks like to take your role seriously - even if your role isn't glorified by others. The conclusion of the sermon is that it's better to be loved by God, be a child of God, and be seen by God than to be famous here on earth.