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Topic: Love
Unexpected Enemies
To follow Christ is to live a life of love. Love is at the center of Jesus’ message and is the central teaching given in the Sermon on the Plain. To love like Christ is to love even when it is not deserved or expected. It is a radical love that calls us to love our enemies. The call to love also includes loving those who are close to us, even when it’s messy. Read More
The Outsider’s Kingdom
The Kingdom of God is incredibly different from any kingdom of this world. One of the major ways this is so is in the way that God’s Kingdom includes everyone in its benefits. When it comes to God’s love, no one is left as an outsider! Read More
VIM Past the Attack
God’s love is perfect. As disciples of Christ, it is important to know and accept that God loves us. It is from His love that we are able to return love to God, ourselves, and then others. However, we have an enemy that wants to keep us from understanding and receiving this love. Read More
A Place to Belong
Every human being is designed with basic yearnings and desires. One of our most basic desires is the need to connect with one another. However, in the overwhelming demands of modern life, we often do not listen to or even acknowledge these desires. Our lives and relationships look more like fragmented pieces than complete and meaningful masterpieces. To live out a beautiful life of belonging in God’s kingdom is to live in covenant community with one another. Read More
You Ain’t No Cinderella
As Christians we believe that God, out of love for us, set-aside his divinity and became a finite human being in order to bring humanity to redemption. Despite knowing this truth, we can sometimes feel as though God sent Jesus to live and die among us as a sort of “fallback” plan. The common view of the cross can sometimes become a “plan B” theory. However, the idea that God sent Jesus after every other effort had failed, is not Biblical. Read More
Mary, the Favored One
Greg’s sermon this week broke down into three parts. The topic was the meaning of the angel’s words when the angel told Mary that she was favored (Luke 1:28). Part I of the sermon focused on what “favored” does not mean. Part II focused on what it does mean. And part III examines why the word “favor” is used at all. Read More
The Enemy Within
Jesus gives us the greatest commandment, to love God, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. We’ve all heard this command, but we tend to resist the basis for loving our neighbors — loving ourselves. The “small story” we often live in focuses on what we’ve done, what was done to us, and what we dislike about ourselves. The Big Story is the eternal perspective. It includes not only us, but what God has done, is doing, and will do through us. In Christ, we are to see our story as part of the Big Story. With God’s help we can embrace this process to overcome the evil within. Read More
The Incarnational Community
Central to Greg’s message today was that the incarnation was not simply a historical act that ended at Christ’s ascension. It goes MUCH further than that! The Church IS the Body of Christ – we are the hands, the feet, the ambassadors, the temple, the Body through which God works. Therefore, we must share Christ’s attitude summed up by this phrase: be present, in love, without judgment. Read More
The Kingdom’s King
Lately, Greg has been talking about the importance of being “awake” and “single-minded.” In this sermon he discussed how both of these things are understood most fully in Christ. He focused on Christ’s compelling love and the distinction between saying that you believe something and allowing a truth to penetrate so deep into your very being that it compels you. Read More
