There is a moment in Exodus where Moses asks God for a name, and God refuses to give him one. "I AM WHO I AM." It is less an answer than a declaration that God cannot be categorized, cannot be placed on a shelf next to the other options. That refusal sets the whole story in motion.We follow Moses back into Egypt, where Pharaoh asks a question that sounds ancient but lands close to home: "Who is the Lord that I should obey?" The ten plagues are God's answer. One by one, every power Egypt trusted to keep the world stable gets exposed. The Nile. The sun. The livestock. The gods the empire had named and organized and counted on. All of them fall silent.But God was not just making a point to Pharaoh. He was making one to Israel. Four hundred years in Egypt had shaped the way those people thought about safety, identity, and survival. God was not simply getting his people out of Egypt. He was working to get Egypt out of his people.We look at the Passover and find something that cuts through every religious instinct we carry. Two households. Two very different people. Both covered by the same blood. The safety of the house did not depend on the quality of the faith inside it. It depended on the blood of the lamb on the door.That image reaches all the way to the cross. Jesus, the lamb without defect, painting the wood with his own life so that our record reads covered. Not the Sunday morning version of us. The Tuesday afternoon version. The one who is still figuring it out.So we are invited to audit what we are actually trusting. To stop bargaining with the burning bush. And to leave, even before the bread has time to rise.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

Our journey through the sweeping narrative of Scripture brings us to a moment where everything seems to have gone completely sideways. Humanity is scattered, language is divided, and the divine image in us appears deeply bent. God responds to this global chaos not by choosing an obvious, powerful empire, but by calling a seventy-five-year-old pagan moon-worshiper named Abraham from the middle of nowhere. This establishes a comforting pattern that repeats across the entire Bible. God consistently chooses the unlikely vessel so that the ultimate rescue cannot be credited to human strength.In Genesis 12, Abraham receives a massive invitation to leave his country, his people, and his inheritance. He is asked to walk away from his entire identity and move toward an unknown destination. God attaches five beautiful promises to this single act of movement, anchoring a covenant that vows to restore the original blessing to every family of the ground. When we take matters into our own hands because the divine timeline feels too slow, we create relational wreckage. Yet, even in our failures, God pursues the vulnerable. The very first appearance of the angel of the Lord occurs in the wilderness to Hagar, a pregnant runaway with no power. She gives God the name El Roi, the God who sees me.This story carries us through generations of waiting, laughing at the impossible, and enduring extreme testing on a mountain peak where God dismantles the violent expectations of ancient religion. The gods of the nations consume, but our God provides a substitute. The promise survives a brutal four-hundred-year furnace of Egyptian slavery where a community identity is forged in the mud and bricks. From the courageous civil disobedience of two midwives to a baby floating in a basket down a dangerous river, God protects the deliverer. We are the current links in this ancient chain. We are uniquely crafted works of art, carrying the blessing forward to a world waiting to be seen.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram:   / urfellowship  ➤ Facebook:   / urfellowship  

This week we walked through one of the hardest and most necessary sections of Scripture: the fall. Genesis 3 opens with a serpent making a familiar move, taking the generous goodness of God and reframing it as restriction. The offer to Adam and Eve was a claim to authority: stop receiving wisdom from your Creator and become the definer yourself. They took it. And everything changed.The consequences spread immediately. Shame flooded in. Relationships fractured. Work became hard. Death entered the story. And then, from Genesis 4 through 11, we watched sin do what it always does: escalate. A garden becomes a murder field. A murder becomes a brag. Civilizations organize themselves around rebellion. By Genesis 6, God grieves over what his creation has become.But even inside the consequences of the fall, God plants a promise. Genesis 3:15 hints at an offspring who will crush the serpent. Something has to die to cover human shame, and that thread runs all the way to the cross.Romans 5 gives us the frame for all of it: two men, two acts, two results. Where Adam grasped, Jesus emptied himself. Where Adam hid in shame, Jesus endured it publicly. Every move of the first Adam is reversed by the second. When we put our faith in Christ, we are joined to that second Adam, and the bent image begins to be straightened from the inside.Scripture references: Genesis 3-11, Romans 5:8, 18-20, Romans 8:22, 2 Corinthians 3:18, Matthew 27:51URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

Most of us are living from a story about ourselves that was written by someone other than God. This week we looked at the gap between the false self, the identity we absorbed from our wounds, our failures, and the people around us, and the true self, the one God had in mind when he formed us.Psalm 139 gives us the foundation. God knitted us together with the same deliberate care a weaver gives to the loom. He was present in the formation. He knew what he was making. He liked what he was making. The ancient world said humans were disposable labor. Psalm 139 says you were known before you were formed.We traced this pattern through Scripture. The Israelites at the edge of the promised land called themselves grasshoppers, and that became their ceiling. A man named Salim carried a false identity as a failure and a disappointment until he brought it honestly to God and received a true name instead. Jacob wrestled through the night and had to say his own name, the deceiver, before he was given a new one.The honest middle comes before the new identity. You bring the real thing. God speaks the true thing.We closed with three questions to bring to God: What is the most important thing you want me to know right now? Where am I not living in truth? And what do you call me?You cannot give away what you do not have. Letting God name you is not indulgent. It is generous.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

This week we opened Genesis 1 and 2 not as a science debate or a piece of poetry, but as something more specific: a temple-building text. Using the work of scholar John Walton, we traced how the six days of creation follow a forming-and-filling pattern, and how day seven is the moment God moves into what he has made. The cosmos is his temple. His rest is not exhaustion. It is delight. He settled in to be with his people.From there we looked at what it means to be made in the image of God. In the ancient world, kings placed statues throughout their kingdoms to announce their authority. Genesis says God did something similar, except his images walk around, eat breakfast, and drive to work. We are royal representatives, image bearers placed in the world to reflect God's rule into every corner of it.Genesis 2 zooms in close. God kneels in the dirt, forms a man like a potter works clay, and breathes into him face to face. The first human's lungs were filled with the breath of God. Then God plants a garden and places his image bearers in it with a commission: cultivate and spread it. Eden was the seed. The whole earth was the field.Three practices came out of this: receive your identity from God before the world tells you who you are, take the gardening commission seriously in whatever corner of life you have been placed, and understand that the whole story is moving toward one thing: presence. God with his people. That longing we feel for things to be right is not nostalgia. It is the image of God in us remembering the garden.Scripture references: Genesis 1-2, Psalm 132, 1 Kings 8, Colossians 1, 2 Corinthians 3, Revelation 21URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

Why does God allow suffering? Before we can walk through the biblical story, we have to be honest about the hardest question in it. This week we looked at three layers of suffering: human freedom used destructively, spiritual powers working against God's purposes, and a creation groaning under the weight of consequences it did not choose.We started with love. Genuine love requires genuine freedom. Freedom means the real possibility of choosing against love, and choosing against love is the root of evil. God knew the cost. He decided the world he was after, a world where love is real, was worth it. This is not a picture of God orchestrating evil. Scripture shows Jesus treating sickness and death as enemies, as things that do not belong in his Father's world.So what does God do with a world in pain? He enters it. He took on a body. He suffered. He died. He rose. The resurrection is the first fruits of a coming harvest, proof that restoration has begun. Paul says God works for good in all things. He redeems. He transforms. Nothing is wasted.We are not passive observers. We lament honestly, pray into the gap between heaven and earth, show up for one another, and carry the presence of the Spirit into a broken world. The tomb is empty. Suffering will not get the final word.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

We began our nine-week journey through God's unfolding kingdom by addressing the foundation: Can we actually trust the Bible? If Scripture is mythology or ancient speculation, we're wasting our time. But if God is truly revealing himself through these pages, everything changes.The New Testament was written remarkably early. Most scholars agree all 27 books were written before AD 100, with Paul's letters dating to the 50s and 60s—less than 30 years after Jesus died. This matters because eyewitnesses were still alive to verify or contradict what was being written. The gospels were composed between the 60s and 90s AD, well within living memory of Jesus's ministry.We have overwhelming manuscript evidence. Over 5,800 Greek manuscripts show 99.5% agreement across centuries and continents. Compare this to other ancient texts we accept without question: our earliest complete Plato manuscripts come from 1,200 years after he wrote.The church didn't create the canon arbitrarily. They recognized books that were written by apostles, used widely from earliest times, and conformed to apostolic teaching. The Spirit guided this process over centuries.We're not claiming every translation is perfect or that the Bible is a science textbook. We're saying Scripture reliably tells us what God wants us to know about himself, ourselves, and his rescue plan for the world. The Spirit who inspired Scripture illuminates our reading of it today. We can build our lives on this foundation.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

We gathered this morning to celebrate what the Holy Spirit has done through our capital campaign. That total represents kitchen table conversations, prayers, and willingness that runs counter to human nature.In 1 Chronicles 29, we see David preparing materials for a temple he would never set foot in. After being told he wouldn't build it himself, David gave massively from his personal treasury and rallied the nation to participate. His prayer reveals the truth behind all generosity: everything we give comes from God's hand first. We're returning what already belonged to him.David's framework redefines generosity. We tend to see it as subtraction (I have less now), but scripture presents it as return. God measures our giving by what it costs us, not by the amount. When hundreds of people in Columbiana commit to a building campaign despite tight budgets and financial pressures, that willingness comes from the Holy Spirit rewiring priorities and creating generosity where fear should dominate.We gave toward people who don't know our names yet. A family about to fracture. A teenager losing hope. They'll walk into a seat we helped fund and encounter Jesus in a way that changes everything.At communion, we remembered the ultimate gift: Jesus, who was rich, became poor so we could become spiritually rich through his poverty. The bread and cup remind us what freedom cost and what it provides. One day we'll gather at a different table and see how every sacrificial gift echoed into forever. And with David, we'll say: who are we that we should give like this? Everything came from you. All glory belongs to you.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

Easter raises a question most people never think to ask: why does Christianity still exist?Every major movement in history follows a predictable pattern. Unrest, a charismatic leader, a compelling message, a growing following. The leader dies, and the followers carry the ideas forward. Islam, the civil rights movement, countless others. The pattern makes sense.Christianity doesn't fit.Jesus never talked about overthrowing anything. He told people to pay their taxes and said his kingdom wasn't even of this world. The crowd that cheered him on Palm Sunday turned on him by Friday because he refused to be the liberator they wanted. And the core problem with his message was that Jesus placed himself at the center of it. He didn't ask people to trust his ideas or his principles. He asked them to trust him.So when Jesus died, everything died with him. His closest followers scattered. Peter denied him to a middle school girl. There was nothing to pass on because the message was a person, and the person was gone.Then Sunday happened.Mary shows up at the tomb expecting a body. The stone is moved. She assumes theft, not resurrection. The men think she's out of her mind. Peter runs in. John outruns Peter (and makes sure we know that). They find burial linens, folded and empty.And everything changes.Those same scattered cowards walk into the streets of Jerusalem with one message: you killed him, God raised him, we saw him, repent.The resurrection is the only explanation for the church. And for followers of Jesus, it's something more personal. It's a receipt. Proof that the debt has been paid in full.If you've been on the fence, this is the weekend to step off it.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

Sermon Summary:Palm Sunday is more than a parade. It is a case study in what happens when people see what they want to see instead of who is actually there.The crowd that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem was desperate. Rome was occupying their land, and Passover week was saturating the air with stories of the God who had defeated Pharaoh. When word spread that the Messiah was coming down the Mount of Olives, the crowd responded with everything they had. Palm branches. Cloaks. Shouts of Hosanna. They were ready for liberation.One week later, much of that same crowd was calling for his execution.The difference was not what Jesus did wrong. The difference was what he failed to deliver. He did not fight Rome. He did not rally an army. He got arrested. And once he stopped performing according to their category, they stopped seeing a person. They saw a failed label. And failed labels are easy to discard.This sermon traces that dynamic into our own lives. The human brain categorizes constantly, and that capacity becomes dangerous when the category replaces the person. Paul's phrase in 2 Corinthians 5 is kata sarka, seeing according to the flesh, sorting people by surface and deciding they are the sum of one characteristic.Jesus refused that. He sat down with tax collectors. He looked at Matthew in his booth and saw someone worth calling. He kept finding the actual person underneath what everyone had already decided.And at the cross, the most powerful labeling device the empire had, he prayed continuously for the people killing him. No enemy list.The invitation is to let what God has already said about us free us from needing to label others. The love of Christ compels us. The Spirit changes what we see first.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship