Sunday Sermons

We now reach the last part of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6 and it covers something that we may not give much thought to in our prayer lives, temptation and evil. Matthew 6:13 is an acknowledgement that evil truly exists and that we are vulnerable without the protection of God. And so our Lord commands us to include these things in our prayers to God.

After a week in First Kings, we are back to the Lord’s Prayer. And in verse 12, we are taught to pray for our forgiveness. In fact, verse 12 is such a key part to Jesus’ teaching in this section that he adds commentary in verses 14-15. How we approach forgiveness is a chief indicator of the condition of our hearts.

In reflecting on a great week of VBS, we took a slight detour this Sunday from the Sermon on the Mount to look at the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal from 1 Kings 18. It serves as a reminder that the Lord we worship really is the One True God.

In Matthew 6:11, we come to a short petition asking for God to give us our daily bread. And while this may be a familiar phrase to many of us, our regularity in praying this way might be lacking. In this verse, Jesus is teaching us something very important about God and the way that we daily interact with him.

***Due to storms during service on 6/16/24 we lost power several times. You will notice breaks in the audio/video during these times.***

We continue through the Lord’s prayer in Matthew 6:10 with a plea from Jesus concerning the kingdom. He is teaching us to have a heart that prays for the Kingdom’s arrival and willing obedience from its citizens to the King. Though the words of this verse are often repeated weekly in churches without much thought, it is a request for the up-ending and restoration of everything.

This Sunday, we start to narrow our focus onto individual sections of the Lord‘s prayer. And while this may be a passage that is very familiar to many of us, there is much to glean from looking at it so closely. In 6:9, we see how Jesus addresses the Father as well as a prayer concerning his name.

This week, we begin a new chapter in Matthew and a new section of our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount. Here, Jesus warns his listeners of practicing their righteousness before others in order to be seen. It is a message that shows us that God not only cares about what we do, but why we do it.

We now come to the end of chapter 5, as well as this section of the Sermon on the Mount. This section concludes with a command that, at first glance, might make us think that Jesus couldn’t actually be serious about. He calls us to be perfect. And while our normal use of the word “perfect” might cloud our understanding, it is a command we are meant to obey.

In this final paragraph of Matthew 5, Jesus gives a teaching that is truly emblematic of the high calling of being a citizen of  the kingdom of heaven. We are called to love our enemies. While this certainly would have been radical in Jesus’ day, it's still radical when it is truly lived out today and confounds a world that is watching.