A charge given to our new elder, Don Smith.

Drawing from 1 Timothy 3 and Hebrews 13:17, pastor Harold Guptil taught us about the weight of the office of overseer and the congregation's reciprocal duty to submit, edify, and encourage. Elders are appointed by God to care for souls with patience, humility, and mercy upon mercy, and the flock is called to be no drippy faucet of criticism but a joy to those who watch over them.

The tenth commandment is the mirror Sinai holds up to the soul, revealing that God is not merely after our behavior but after our hearts. Every broken commandment traces back to a coveting root, and every coveting heart is really an accusation against the Shepherd who has measured out our portion. The cure is not getting more, but looking up to see the One who did not spare His own Son, and learning at last to say with David, "I shall not want."

Each week at The Shepherd’s Church, we preach short homilies on the law of God and have decided to share those here as a resource to the people of God. This week, the command not to bear false witness.

In this final sermon of the series, we uncover what the resurrection actually means and why it demands more than escape or empty optimism. Jesus, the risen Gardener, breathes new creation life into His people and sends them out to cultivate the world He is restoring, one field at a time. This message will reshape how you see your identity, your mission, and every sphere of your life as part of Christ’s unstoppable kingdom.

This sermon unfolds the resurrection as far more than a miracle to admire, revealing it as the decisive turning point of all creation. Beginning in the darkness of the garden tomb, it traces how Christ rises on the “eighth day,” inaugurating a new world, a new humanity, and a new relationship between God and man. Through rich biblical patterns, from Eden to the Ark, from Adam to David, it shows that the empty tomb is the new mercy seat, the cherubim no longer guard the way, and the exile is over.

At the center stands the risen Christ, the true Gardener, the new Adam, calling His people into a restored family, a redeemed creation, and a future already breaking into the present. This sermon presses the staggering reality that the resurrection does not merely promise a distant hope, but announces that the new creation has already begun, and that every believer is now living in the first light of that eternal day.

The Eighth Commandment reaches far deeper than stolen property and exposes a far more pervasive sin: the theft of time from God Himself. This Easter homily confronts the quiet ways we squander the very days He has entrusted to us, revealing a debt we can never repay. Yet in the risen Christ, who perfectly fulfilled every moment and bore the weight of our wasted years, time itself is redeemed. The resurrection does not merely promise life after death, it reclaims every hour of the present, calling us to live each moment under the joyful lordship of the One who purchased them with His own blood.

In this Good Friday message, Pastor Kendall Lankford traces the crucifixion of Jesus as the precise and stunning fulfillment of the Passover lamb — examined for four days, slaughtered at the right hour, bones unbroken, blood applied with hyssop. Drawing from Genesis through John, he shows how Jesus, the new Adam, wears the curse of thorns, is stripped bare in the place where Adam was first clothed, and breathes His last on Day 6 — closing the book on the old creation with a single declaration: It is finished. This message invites you to see the cross not as tragedy, but as the last sentence of a broken world — and the ground from which something entirely new is about to rise.

What if Holy Week isn't just a passion narrative — but a seven-day dismantling of the entire created order? Day by day, Jesus walks through creation in reverse, undoing what the first Adam broke, so that on the eighth day He can rise and remake everything from scratch. This Palm Sunday, discover why the true Adam didn't come to prop up the old world — He came to crush it, and from that crushing, bring forth a brand new one.

Each week at The Shepherd’s Church, we preach short homilies on the law of God and have decided to share those here as a resource to the people of God. This week, the command not to commit adultery.