Weekly Messages

Have you ever experienced that moment when you hear something or see something–something you swear you’ve never heard or seen before–but from that moment on, you cannot help but hear or  see it everywhere…

Jesus teaching us to pray for our Heavenly Father to lead us and deliver us helps us to see things he sees, things that have always been there, things we will never not see ever again.

We have arrived at the most difficult phrase in the Lord’s Prayer:

and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

The expectation is that Jesus’s followers are people who “Ask, and Pass It On.” Easier said than done. Let’s talk about it.

Prayer is many things to many people, but at its simplest and most obvious, it is asking God for help. This is how most people in the world, religious and non-religious alike, understand the word, and to a certain extent, they are right. It is really one of the most natural things in the world to ask God for things. This week we will talk about one thing in particular: Daily Bread. 

Riots in the streets, teens being shot for approaching the wrong house, and fentanyl killing over 150 people everyday. The hope of humanity is the return of Christ to set up His righteous Kingdom. So, we pray ‘Thy Kingdom Come’. Listen as we look at this all important prayer.

“Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name!”  Could this be the battle cry for the church in the 21st century?  We’ll look into this possibility Sunday morning.

As we prepare our hearts to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ let’s pause for a moment and remember why He died—that we might have life, with a new identity and a new future. Come and see what the Lord has done.

The Bible is so good! This weekend is both Palm Sunday and Communion Sunday at North Highlands and our text for Sunday, Psalm 118, is intimately linked to BOTH! Seriously, if this wasn’t already one of your favorite Psalms, it will be.

Hebrews 11 opens with the declaration that for the follower of Jesus, faith is not wishful thinking, naive or blind hope that something is true, but it is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

Faith then is entirely rational. Make no mistake, there is certainly more involved in Christian faith than rationality, but not less. All this means that we believe not because want Christianity to be true or because we need Christianity to be true, but rather we believe because it is true.

Come, let us behold the empty tomb together.

One of my favorite lines from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy comes after the infamous ring has been destroyed at Mount Doom. Sam Gamgee wakes up from his sleep surprised he is alive and surprised to see Gandalf alive as well. This prompts him to ask the question, “Is everything sad going to come untrue?” I love this line!

The answer we hold as followers of Jesus to this question is—”Yes. Everything sad is going to come untrue!” Jesus once gave a wedding party a foretaste of this beautiful truth.

Pastor Rick Chitwood shares a message from the book of Job and looks at why bad things happen and what we can do.