The Lake Forest Sermoncast

What does it mean to follow Jesus without copying him note for note? Drawing on a story about Rick Ruben and the art of improvisation, this sermon from Romans 12:1-8 explores how we grow more fully ourselves as we grow more like Christ.

Paul's "therefore" turns from theology to practice: because of God's mercies, we offer our whole selves and discover that "individually we belong to each other." Along the way, we ask a hard question: who is not in the room? We also look at what stewardship really is, the unglamorous stage and amps that let the music of our gifts reach the room.

All Saints Sunday: The Good Life of Christ

Who are the saints you remember today? The teachers, friends, aunts, uncles, mothers and fathers in the faith who poured their love into you? On All Saints Sunday, we remember them, and we look for the regular, everyday, broken yet open saints still among us: the poor, the peacemaker, the mourning, the merciful.

In this sermon on the Beatitudes, we hear Jesus proclaim not that the good life is coming someday, but that it is already here. We don’t have to wait for a promotion, a retirement, or the day our foundation repairs are finally done. We are God’s children now, comforted by the God who knows our names and by the people who carry us home. Come with your sorrows, your names, and your tender, open hearts. There is room for all of you in the good life of Christ.

This final Sunday in October, Jesus is asked which commandment matters most. His answer, love God and love neighbor, is one his questioners already knew by heart. The harder question is whether what we know ever makes it out of our heads and into our hands.

Drawing on Thomas Aquinas’s definition of love as willing the good of the other, a story of Denver-area churches making their city better, and the old question “who is my neighbor?”, this message invites us to start somewhere small and ordinary: a name, a meal, a little curiosity about the neighbor we’ve already made up our minds about.

You don’t have to get it perfect. You only have to begin.

Most of us thank God for our blessings. 

Our guest preacher asks a harder question: why did God give them to us?

Frank Twum-Barimah is a humanitarian leader and a graduate of Maryville College and the University of Tennessee. He has led emergency responses with World Vision International, including in Ukraine, and he co-founded the Orange Feather Community School in Accra, Ghana. He joins us for our Rooted and Reaching stewardship season with a message drawn from Colossians 2:6-7, Mark 10:13-16, Matthew 25:35-40, and God’s promise to Abraham: “I will bless you, and you will be a blessing.”

Frank tells of a tired child walking home in the Ghanaian sun who rests under a tree he never planted. He shares how a missionary who noticed him as a young man changed the course of his life, and how that gift became his calling. He asks whether we are simply blessed or are being a blessing, and whether we notice the people God has placed in front of us. 

Sometimes our blessing is someone else’s answered prayer.

What can we do when we’re homesick for a place we can't visit? 

This week, Rev. Rachel Penmore expands upon the idea of homesickness with the German word fernweh, asserting that homesickness is not just a longing for places we’ve been, but also places we’ve never been. 

Drawing on her experience of college ministry, Rachel points out that people are often homesick for the past and longing for the future, and thus struggle to be in the here-and-now. Similarly, Christians struggle with the “Already-but-not-yet,” where Jesus has come to show us a new way, but has not yet returned to make all things new. 

Referencing Luke 21:25-36 and Mary Oliver’s “Instructions for Living a Life,” Rachel encourages us to let the longing for the “not-yet” remind us that while the world is not yet finished, we can slowly build the Kingdom of God here.

Have you ever had to prove your street cred? On World Communion Sunday, we turn to Paul's letter to the Philippians, where the question of who belongs was anything but casual. Some teachers insisted that Gentile believers take on the marks of Israel's culture first, and then they could be part of the family. Paul, who had more credentials than anyone, counts them all as loss for the sake of knowing Christ.

This sermon explores how World Communion Sunday began in the Presbyterian church in 1933 and what it means to find unity without uniformity. It asks what keeps us going when life piles up, and why we persevere because of our belonging rather than to earn it. Because at Christ's table, where Christians around the world share the same bread and the same grace, no receipts are required.

Which one did his father's will? In Matthew 21:23-32, the chief priests and elders challenge Jesus about his authority. He answers with a question of his own, and then a short parable about two sons.

This week's sermon looks at the gap between what we intend and what we actually do. Along the way: a UT architecture student's reminder that a building is never exactly what the blueprint says, Tony Campolo's distinction between power and authority, and the story of Mother Teresa on her knees before a city council.
The life of faith isn't about correct opinions, sound doctrine, or impressive titles. It's about living faithfully, and living faithfully doesn't require perfect follow-through. It requires letting our feet catch up with our hearts. Being rooted in Jesus means the invitation is small and hard: one act of love, offered to one neighbor, today.

What happens when grace refuses to play by the rules of fairness? 

In this week's sermon, we sit with Jesus' unsettling parable of the workers in the vineyard — a landowner who hires laborers at dawn, at noon, and even an hour before quitting time, then pays every single one of them the same wage.

Drawing on a story about becoming "founding member" of Atlanta United, this sermon digs into why this parable feels so instinctively unfair to us — and why that discomfort might be exactly the point. It explores how comparison functions as a "ladder" we build out of other people, how grace dismantles that ladder rather than simply redistributing the wage, and what it might mean to be seen — and to see others — with the same unranked attention as the landowner in the field.

A word for anyone who has ever measured their own worth by who's standing beneath them: step off the ladder. There's enough of God's goodness to go around.

This week, continuing our journey through Matthew 18, Pastor Chad wrestles with one of Jesus' toughest teachings on forgiveness — the parable of the unforgiving slave. What does it mean to forgive "seventy-seven times" in a world addicted to urgency, collection, and getting what we're owed? Drawing on the story of Undue Medical Debt (a nonprofit that forgives medical debt at pennies on the dollar) and Fr. Greg Boyle's words on tenderness, this sermon explores forgiveness not as private weakness but as communal, structural grace — a foretaste of God's kingdom breaking into car notes, mortgages, and grudges alike. A call to live tenderly, patiently, and graciously in a world that has little patience for any of it.

In the final week of our "Faces of Our Faith" summer series, Pastor Chad turns to Acts 8 and the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch — a court official who travels to Jerusalem to worship, yet living in a body the law would have turned away at the temple gate. Reading from the prophet Isaiah on a wilderness road, he meets Philip, and together they practice the ancient Jewish art of havrutah — reading scripture as dialogue, as companionship — until the eunuch asks the question that ends in baptism: "What is to prevent me from being baptized?"

Drawing on Isaiah 56's promise to the excluded, Jesus' words on eunuchs in Matthew 19, and even a detour through Dolly Parton's gift for writing "stories from below," Pastor Chad asks who we still leave outside the assembly today — and what it might mean to go on our way not just relieved, but rejoicing.