The Branch Church

Most every parent names their child with some measure of thought. And that includes God Himself. God had a name in mind from the very beginning… Because there was a story He wanted to tell with that name.
“…and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:21)

This weekend we come to the end our series, Strangers and our journey through I Peter. Peter closes by talking about something he hadn’t mentioned yet...
It has to do with a culprit we don’t see - though we see the symptoms of his involvement in our lives.
An invisible enemy.

Resilient: (a) capable of withstanding shock without permanent deformation or rupture. (b) tending to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.
There are times where we will suffer for God’s will – sometimes it’s tied to us denying ourselves and sometimes it’s tied to how others are responding to us. Whatever it may be – don’t back off – commit yourselves to God
who is faithful and continue to do good. Let us be resilient.

You’ve probably heard someone say of another “He/She’s been to hell and back.” We’ll touch on one of the strangest passages about Jesus in Scripture this weekend.

We’ll be walking through 1 Peter 3:8-22. There’s so much more than this strange verse that will speak into our lives this weekend!

This weekend in Strangers, I Peter 2:11-3:7 has something to say to all of us this weekend. Of all things, it's about our relationship with our governing authorities. We’ll talk about far more than that this weekend because Peter covers a lot of ground in this next chunk of his letter.

The opening words of this week's passage in 1 Peter are, “As you come to Him....”

We don’t ever stop coming to Him.

As our Strangers series continues, we’ll be in 1 Peter 2:4-10.

In week three of our journey through 1 Peter 1 Chris talks about growing older and growing up. A lot of people are born again in Christ but don’t grow up in Christ. They grow older, but they don’t grow up in the most important of ways. We’ll explore what this means and why it matters in 1 Peter 1:15-23. Let’s continue to grow together!

You're not from around here, are you?

This weekend, Chris shares with us how our Living Hope is going to empower us to live strangely – we’ll make some different choices and have some different values than the world we live in.

Joy, peace, and hope are available for you today.

There will be times, as a disciple of Jesus, when we will feel like a stranger in the culture we occupy.

It’s not fun feeling out of place.

There are times when we feel like a stranger because our surroundings have changed. And then there are times when we feel like a stranger because we have changed.

Some pull back from the culture, some fight back, some blend in, and some stand out.

With the letter of 1 Peter as our guide, we’ll learn how to live with the tension of feeling “out of place,” without it stealing our joy or intimidating us.

Have you ever reacted in a way that you later regretted? We all have. Reacting in anger when we are "on the spot" is a trap we all fall into from time to time. How do we guard against it? It has something to do with what we do when we're "off the spot."