The Upper Room Fellowship

Some seasons of life look like a loss. A diagnosis, a broken relationship, a prayer that hasn’t been answered in years. In Acts 7, we meet Stephen, a man chosen to help feed widows who now stands on trial for blasphemy against the temple and the law. Instead of defending himself point by point, he tells the council their own story.God spoke to Abraham in Mesopotamia, far from any temple, and promised a nation to a man with no children. God was with Joseph in a pit and a prison, and used his brothers’ cruelty to save Israel. God met Moses, a fugitive shepherd, in a burning bush and called a patch of desert holy ground. Again and again, it looked like God had lost. Each time, He was at work.Stephen’s words cut the council to the heart, and they stoned him. As he died, he saw Jesus standing at the right hand of God, and he prayed for the men killing him.We can’t keep God inside a building, a set of rules, or one corner of our lives. He is with us in the mess, and He is still in control.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

Sermon Summary:We pick up in Acts 5 with a church that looks nearly perfect. Barnabas lays the money from his field at the apostles’ feet and earns a nickname. Ananias and Sapphira watch, and they want a little of that honor. They sell their land, keep part of the money, and let everyone believe they gave it all.Peter reminds them that the land and the money were theirs the whole time. Nobody required the gift. The trouble was the lie.We see ourselves in this story. We let people think we pray more than we do. We say we’re fine when we’re drowning. Jesus said our hearts follow our treasure, and James invites us to confess to one another so we can be healed. God treated hypocrisy seriously at the very start of the church because what gets set at the beginning runs through everything after it.God also gives us time, and we shouldn’t assume there will always be more of it. So we bring our real selves to him. We can start with one honest sentence. God, this is where I really am.Scripture in this message. Acts 5 and 6, Joshua 7, Leviticus 10, Psalm 32, Matthew 6:21, Luke 12:1, James 5:16, 1 Corinthians 12. Watch the full message, share it with a friend, or join us for a service this Sunday.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

Sermon Summary:Peter and John walk up to the temple at the hour of prayer, and a man who has never taken a step sits at the gate called Beautiful. Peter looks him in the eye, has no silver or gold, and gives what he has in the name of Jesus. The man walks, then jumps, and goes into the place he spent his whole life sitting outside of.Peter and John soon stand before the same council that condemned Jesus. The leaders see their calm and realize these ordinary men have been with Jesus. A life changed by God leaves very little for us to argue about.Then the early church prays. They spend most of the prayer remembering who God is and what he has said, and only then do they ask for boldness. The room shakes, and they speak the word of God boldly.Boldness is behavior born from belief. What we believe decides how we act. It can look like inviting a coworker to church or handing someone a book. God is still active, and we are invited into what he is doing in our generation.Scripture covered in this message is Acts 3:1 through 4:31, with Acts 1:8, Psalm 2, and Psalm 118. Watch the full message, share it with a friend, or join us for a service this Sunday.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

Sermon Summary:

Most of us know the feeling of being handed something big before we feel ready. The first followers of Jesus knew it too. They waited in Jerusalem as he told them, and on the day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit came on all 120 of them. Ordinary people began declaring the wonderful works of God in languages they had never learned, and a crowd from every corner of the known world heard it in their own tongue.This week we lingered on that gift of tongues. We saw that it is mostly a way of speaking to God, a prayer language where our spirit reaches him beyond what our minds can put into words. Romans 8 reminds us the Spirit helps us when we don't know what to pray.We also saw how gently the Spirit works. He never forces anyone, and this gift was never meant to rank believers or prove anything. Paul prayed in tongues often in private and kept his public teaching plain and clear.So we can ask. If there is more in our hearts than our words can carry, God welcomes that request, in his time and his way.Scripture referencesActs 2:1-15, 1 Corinthians 12:11, 1 Corinthians 12:31, 1 Corinthians 14:2, 1 Corinthians 14:14, 1 Corinthians 14:18-19, Romans 8:26, Ephesians 4:8, Ephesians 5:18Watch the full message, share it with a friend, and join us for a service this Sunday.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

Sermon Summary:We're starting a new series in the book of Acts, the story of what happened after Jesus left the earth. Acts doesn't read like a theology book or a biography. It reads like history, and it's the only book in the New Testament that doesn't really end. Luke sets the pen down mid-story because the story is still going, and we're part of it.In Acts chapter 1, Jesus gives his followers one instruction before he ascends to heaven. Wait. Wait for the Holy Spirit. Even the risen, glorified Jesus relied on the Spirit's power, and he tells his disciples they'll need that same power to be his witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. We look at what it means to be baptized in the Spirit, why Jesus stayed vague about timing, and the different ways people in Acts end up telling their story, from Peter's bold preaching to a blind man who just keeps saying what he knows. We close with two simple steps for anyone who wants more of that promised power, being a child of God and asking to be filled.Scripture references: Acts 1:1-11, 1 Corinthians 15:6, John 16:7, Luke 11:13, Ephesians 5:18Join us in person or online as we walk through Acts together. Watch, share, or bring a friend next week..URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

Today we paused our regular series to celebrate Move Up Sunday and to talk about the kids and teenagers in our church family. Looking at Mark 10:13 to 16, we saw how Jesus stopped the disciples from turning children away and told the adults in the room that they were the ones who needed to change, not the kids.We walked through four things that make up what the Bible calls childlikeness. Trust, because children receive everything as a gift instead of earning it. Wonder, because kids never get bored with the good things in front of them. Presence, because they live fully in today instead of worrying about tomorrow. And forgiveness, because they know how to let something go and get back to playing.We ended by praying over every child and teenager in the room, asking God to protect their hearts and remind us that a calling from God does not wait until someone grows up.Scripture referenced: Mark 10:13-16, Psalm 63, Psalm 134, Luke 18:9-14, Psalm 95:7-8, 1 Samuel 3, Luke 2:41-47, Jeremiah 1, 1 Timothy 4:12, Acts 2:17.Watch the full message above, and if you'd like to join us in person, we'd love to have you at an upcoming service.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

We spent this week on the fourth core value of our church, knowing our greatness. We started in Ephesians, a letter written to a small group of believers living in the shadow of a massive pagan economy. Paul spends three chapters reminding them who they are before he ever tells them what to do. Then he pulls out an image every Roman would recognize, the victory parade thrown for a conquering general, where captured treasure was handed out to the people. Paul says Jesus did exactly that after the resurrection. He took the spoils of his own victory over sin and death and gave them straight to us, in the form of our gifts.

From there we looked at Bezalel, a craftsman filled with God's Spirit to build the tabernacle, and at Jesus himself, who spent eighteen years as a carpenter before he preached a single sermon. We talked about how the church in Corinth ranked gifts by how flashy they looked, and how Paul corrected that by comparing the church to a body, where the hidden parts are often the most essential. We are not spectators. Every one of us carries something the world needs.

Scripture references: Ephesians 4:7-11, Psalm 68, Exodus 31:1-6, Mark 6:3, 1 Corinthians 12:4-6, 12:14-21, 1 Peter 4:10

We started this morning in a strange place for a Sunday, an orphanage in Romania in the early 1990s. When Ceausescu's regime fell, workers found thousands of children who had stopped crying because they had learned no one was coming. Psychologists called the pattern they saw in these kids indiscriminate friendliness, kids so starved for touch they would wrap themselves around a stranger's leg for a few seconds of contact. Most of us never lived through anything close to that. But a lot of us carry the same quiet belief. There is not enough love, not enough grace, not enough security, so we grab what we can get and hold on tight.We call that the orphan mindset, and scripture names it too, using the word slave. A slave lives in someone's house but never belongs to the family. From there we walked through Mark 5, the story of Jairus and his dying daughter tangled together with the story of a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years. She reached out and touched the tassel on Jesus' cloak, believing the healing promised in Malachi was woven right into it. Jesus stopped everything to find her, not to shame her, but to call her Daughter, the only time in the New Testament he uses that word for a woman. Then he walked into a dead girl's room and said two words that meant get up, honey.Both stories point the same direction. Wealth couldn't buy Jairus a single minute. Poverty couldn't disqualify the woman from being healed. Uncleanness and death, the two most contaminating things in that culture, both got overpowered by what was in Jesus instead of the other way around. Paul says the same thing in Romans 8, that we were not given a spirit of slavery back to fear, but a spirit of adoption. We looked at how that plays out practically, in our emotions, in how we treat people, in how we handle being wrong. The invitation this week is simple. Stop sneaking around God hoping he won't notice your mess, and let him call you what he already calls you.Scripture referenced: Mark 5:21-34, Psalm 23:1, Malachi 4:2, Romans 8:15Watch the full message, share it with someone who needs it, or join us in person for the rest of the Pursuit series.

We thrive through relationships with others as we show up authentically, with kindness and honor. That is one of our core values, and this week we dug into why something we were built for can feel so hard.We started with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who ran an underground seminary in Nazi Germany and later wrote about what he called the wish dream, the fantasy version of community we carry in our heads. He warned that if we love that fantasy more than the real, flawed people in front of us, we will end up destroying the very community we wanted.From there we walked through First John, a letter written into the wreckage of a church split. John keeps pointing back to one command, love one another, and traces contempt and grudges all the way back to Cain and Abel. Jesus does the same thing in Matthew 5, saying that anger and contempt live in the same family as murder.We looked closely at 1 John 3:17, where the Greek word for our gut, our internal organs, is splagchnon. John uses it to talk about where compassion actually lives, or gets shut off. He is saying love is not just a head belief, it has to move into the deepest part of us and then out into our hands and feet.We also leaned on C.S. Lewis, who said that protecting our heart from love does not keep it safe, it just locks it in a casket where it slowly hardens. And we talked honestly about the difference between forgiveness and enabling harm. You can release bitterness toward someone while still setting firm boundaries to protect yourself and your family.The hope underneath all of it is this: we are not called to love people in our own strength. We are already fully known and fully loved by God, and once that truth reaches our gut, love has somewhere to flow from.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

We opened a new six-week series called Pursuit, and right away we drew a distinction between a value and a pursuit. A value can sit framed in a lobby and never touch your life. A pursuit means you are running after something, even when you are stumbling.The pursuit we started with is this one: we treasure God's presence. And treasure is a big word. We looked at Jesus' parable in Matthew 13, where a man finds something buried in a field and sells absolutely everything he owns just to buy that patch of ground. That is what treasuring looks like. You trade it all, and you do it with a smile.We walked through three ways God's presence shows up in scripture. His omnipresence means he is in every room, every parking lot, every hospital corridor, holding it all together. His indwelling presence means that when you follow Jesus, the Holy Spirit moves in permanently. And his manifest presence is when God becomes undeniably felt, when your worn-out soul gets a deep, real rest.We spent most of our time in Isaiah 6. The year King Uzziah died was a year of national grief and political fear. And into that specific moment, God showed Isaiah a throne that had never once been empty, covered by a robe whose train filled the entire temple, a record of every kingdom under his authority.Three things happen when Isaiah encounters that presence. He sees God clearly. He sees himself clearly, specifically naming the sharp, anxious, fear-driven words that had been coming out of his mouth. And then the coal from the altar touches the exact thing he confessed, and the guilt is gone.After that, when God asks who will go, Isaiah does not ask for the job description. He just says, send me. That is what an encounter with God's presence does. It reorders everything without argument.We closed with communion and with this invitation: come into the presence, let your problems get right-sized, let the fire touch the broken places, and get ready to be sent.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship