Sermons: Recent Episodes

Waypoint Church

At Waypoint Church we are raising up a people who are passionate about Jesus and His purposes in the Earth. Every Sunday morning we gather in Omaha, NE to be encouraged and challenged as we follow Jesus together.

Amanda Anderson walks us through Nehemiah 4 as we continue in our Nehemiah: Rebuild series. In chapter 4, we see how times were hard for the Israelites that were trying to rebuild the wall; just as times are difficult now! Their temple was destroyed and was not allowed to be rebuilt. In Ezekiel 10, it talks about how the glory of the Lord departed from the temple. After that, they were in exile for 70 years, along with some other difficult situations they had to navigate. But despite the mess and all the things that happened, God was with them and loved them. Through the beginnings of the book of Nehemiah, we see that the Lord sends and protects his people, therefore we do not need to be afraid. The enemy still came, taunted, and even threatened to kill the Israelites, but God was with them and protected them (Neh. 4:1-5,7-8,11, 13-21). This can be paralleled to today. Times are hard and the enemy comes, but God is with us.

In this week's sermon, Pastor Jermaine continues our Rebuild series. He tells us about what Nehemiah did before even having the opportunity to ask the king to go and rebuild the walls of Israel. Through prayer, getting God's heart, and mourning for his nation, God opened a door for Nehemiah to work on the wall that was grieving his heart. Pastor Jermaine also talked to us about honoring leadership. We might not always agree with them, but we are called to honor them. The king that Nehemiah served was oppressive to the Israelites, yet he was seen with high regard in the king's eyes.

In this week’s sermon, Leigh Ann continues our series on Nehemiah. This week, she speaks about Nehemiah’s prayer in Nehemiah 9:1-37. In this passage, Nehemiah and the Israelites are recounting God’s faithfulness from creation until the point of being out of the promise land. God was faithful to them regardless of the faithfulness of the people. God was always pursuing a loving relationship with the people he called his own. Leigh Ann tells her own personal testimony of God’s faithfulness when she was doubting, specifically when she and her husband had moved to Scotland to plant a church.

In this week’s sermon, Pastor Jermain ends our "Towards Unity" sermon series by talking about reconciliation. Through an analysis of 2nd Corinthians 5:11-19, we talk about how we are a new creation in Christ and that through the change that comes from the grace and love of God, we conduct ourselves in a new manner. A butterfly wouldn’t act like a caterpillar after its time in the cocoon. God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, (2 Cor. 5:18) tells us that we are now ambassadors for reconciliation as well.

"In this week’s sermon, Pastor Josh continues us in our sermon series "Towards Unity" through a conversation about forgiveness. Why is forgiveness so important? Without it, we cannot have unity in the body; it also affects our personal health and freedom, and it’s important to know that unforgiveness is a sin; our unwillingness to forgive comes at a heavy price. Through his personal testimony and the Scriptures, we dive into the difficult and personal topic of introspection through forgiveness."

"In this week’s sermon, to kick off our "Towards Unity" series, Pastor Matthew goes over the vision for the year when it comes to unity and the scriptures that go along with it. He also talks about our ashes from past hurts and pain that keep us from getting true healing and unity with each other and the Holy Spirit."

In our last sermon of the Whole series, Pastor Matthew talks about how taking care of our body fits into being people who are whole. We are the house for the Holy Spirit. What does our "house" look and feel like?

We are God’s house, and we see evidence of this in 1 Corinthians 6:19–20, 1 Corinthians 3:16–17, and Hebrews 3:6. In Genesis, God creates the earth for man and woman to live on, as well as for Him to dwell there with them. It’s always been about God dwelling with and having intimate fellowship with us! Fastforward from the garden: God frees the Israelites and gives them specific instructions to construct a temple so that he could dwell among them (Exodus 40:34–38). Once we move into the New Testament and Jesus steps into the scene, He lives and fulfills everything that the Israelites couldn't, and through His death comes a new covenant and His kingdom. When he died, the veil that separated the most holy place was ripped, which was proof that God had left the temple to dwell with us. We should also accept what God has given us and make sure we take care of it. We have all been given bodies; they are all different, but we must take care of them. That can be by eating less sugar, exercising a little more, or putting a little more effort into looking nice. Walking is a great way to help with this! Our bodies are connected to our minds and emotions. In new research coming out about EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), using the left and right sides of the brain through walking, running, or drumming has been successful in treating trauma, mental health challenges, processing emotions, and bringing healing. In 1 Timothy 4:8, it talks about the word godliness, which means a reverence for God when translated from Greek. We need to be living our lives with rhythms that prioritize living for God with awe, respect, and reverence.

It’s also important that we stop using our bodies to cope and sin. Many of us have learned to cope with things by developing addictions, which harm your body and spirit. Some use pornography, food, alcohol, and more to cope. These things are killing us spiritually and physically, but God can set you free!

20% of adults are struggling with mental health today. If you don’t struggle, then you probably know someone who does, but there is hope and healing! There are different ways to receive the healing that Jesus wants for those who struggle with mental health.

We must renew our minds. There are both positive and negative thought patterns. Negative thought patterns can begin with something that happens in everyday life and then spiral down to something that you struggle with frequently.

We must renew our mind (Romans 12:2) in response to negative thought patterns. Renewing means transformation. You have the option of replacing the negative with the positive. Reading and applying scripture is imperative. Know what God thinks of you, and dwell on things that are good and lovely (Philippians 4:8). We also don’t always know the truth! It’s important to find the truth before we jump to conclusions.

We also must stop sinning. All the therapy and counseling in the world will not truly bring the restoration that God has for you if you are living in sin. It can also be helpful to find ways you can impact the kingdom. Sometimes taking the focus off ourselves aids in the healing God has for us. We give God worship, and he in turn gives back to us. When we worship him, it releases dopamine, which is the "happy chemical" in our brains.

What if you can’t renew your mind even though you’ve tried? What if you can’t stop? Sometimes medicine can be helpful! Amanda was able to start renewing her mind and unboxing the trauma she was operating in after she was able to get on medication.

God is the ultimate healer. He is not there to help us cope, but to heal us! We do need good coping mechanisms, but he never wants to stop there. He is here to give hope and healing.

In this week’s service, Pastor Luke kicked us off on a new series called Whole. The heart behind the series is to learn and discuss a biblical response to health and wholeness. Jesus is at the center of it! How do we walk with a clear conscience or be people who are spiritually whole? Our conscience is like a moral compass, and we find the origins in scripture, all the way back in Genesis 2:17 with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was introduced. Our conscience is one of the mechanisms that God uses to help us be people who practice what they preach, and our deeds reflect our doctrine (Titus 1:15, 2:11-14). God has a standard, and that standard is purity. When God talks about purity, he’s talking about our hearts. Purity of hearts means our hearts are completely focused on God and his goals. When our hearts are pure, it leads to pure actions. (Proverbs 4:23)

There are two major hindrances when it comes to living pure: How do you understand grace and how do you engage culture? Grace teaches us to say no to ungodliness and worldly passions. It can be easy to justify ungodly actions with the grace we have received, but that makes the grace we have been given cheap. Conviction is the feeling about your sin that God feels about it, which makes it a good thing. When we disregard conviction in the name of "grace," our conscience loses its edge. We also need to be careful how we interact with culture. Part of being a missional people is being a representation of God in our world.

There are two major ways to interact with culture:

Contextualization: When we’re in a culture as missionaries, we take the gospel in its purest form and apply it to their culture in the way they can understand. It reaches people but keeps the distinctives of the gospel.

Syncretism: You take the distinctives of the culture and the gospel, and they become mixed and a little confusing. It becomes a problem because it adopts things that are not the gospel. It tries too hard to relate to the culture and makes it look like the blend of that and Christianity then loses its purity.

Every generation is called to reach their generation. We are called to be in the world but not look like the world. We must keep our prophetic edge and become syncretistic with it.

Our culture has a conscience of its own- it has values of what is right and wrong. Our culture has a low view of sin because no one is allowed to feel guilt. Guilt affects your self esteem, which is highly regarded. Culture has a very high view of self and it’s become the ultimate authority. God calls for us to say "no" to ungodliness and live self-controlled and godly lives (Ephesians 2:1-3, Galatians 5:19-21).

How do we develop a clear conscience? We need to pick up scripture, read it, and apply it. Our conscience reminds us of what God is and is not, but it must be immersed in Scripture. We also need to be in an authentic community to help keep us aligned and acting according to the Lord’s way. Daily confession is also necessary, just like breathing. We must inhale the truth and exhale the pollution through confession.

In the last part of our All You Can series, Pastor Alex talks about giving all we can. Giving can be seen as one of God’s greatest gifts to his people. God enables us to live lives marked by generosity, hospitality, and the preference of others by choosing to give away our wealth, time, and attention. Throughout the centuries, the Church has been marked by its generosity and hospitality. They are a group of people that caused society to look at them and question, "Why are they the way they are?" or "What makes them different?" In Acts 2:44–47, we see how the early church operated. Hospitals, schools, and many of our systems that we have today originated from the church and people going out of their way to help those in need and improve their quality of life. We earn all we can and save all we can because we want to give all we can.
Through giving, we actively resist our current culture of self and step into the role of God’s people. The big idea is that giving is one of our greatest ways to serve and love God and people. It also actively resists evil. When you give all you can, you turn to God’s design, desire, and purpose for your life.
Giving aligns us with the Greatest Commandment. To fulfill the Greatest Commandment (Matthew 22:36–39), we must align our hearts with what really matters, and we can’t do that when we have lives that are divided and disordered. Matthew 6:24 talks about how no one can serve two masters. To truly love God and love people, we must be focused on the one true God of this world. Giving is also a powerful way to resist evil. In 1 Timothy 6:2b–10, Paul is teaching that our faith is not a means of worldly gain. Great gain is godliness with contentment. We also get to use our God-given design to work, earn, provide, and multiply for a kingdom purpose when we give. We get to be a people who put our finances through the filter of Jesus, which can lead to meeting practical needs in this world. Our world has a lot of needs, but that also means we have a lot of opportunities for us to step up and be the church.
Giving truly is one of our greatest ways to serve and love God and people. Let’s earn all we can and save all we can so that we can give all we can!

You don't want to miss this one! Join us as we dig into our All You Can series--this week's topic is SAVE all you can. In addition, we discuss why Pastor Matthew does NOT believe in the rapture and also dig into how to read your Bible better.

In this week’s sermon, Pastor Matthew continues our series of All You Can and talks about saving! We don’t save because times are rough, or we’re headed to the end of times, or even because resources will be scarce in the future. Instead of being in self-preservation mode, we should look for wisdom. We discussed several Proverbs that talk about money (Proverbs 6:6-8, 10:4-5, 12:11, and 13:11). Proverbs are meant for us to think on and chew on, as they are wisdom for our lives.
We want to save all we can because stewardship is what we are called to do. We don’t own anything! A steward is a person who manages another’s property or financial affairs. We are stewards of all we have, and when it comes to our money, it’s not really ours. Our money isn’t what takes care of us; God does. Saving also helps us not to be frivolous in our spending. Most of us spend money on things we don’t need. It has become very normal for us and what was once a convenience or even a luxury has become a need in our minds (Amazon, Starbucks, YouTube, and more). Having a goal to save can help us reduce our frivolous spending. It can be used as a tool to think through what we are spending before we spend it. Saving also puts us in a position to be generous. It’s fun to give and be generous, but we can’t give what we don’t have. Saving all the money we have puts us in a position to be generous. We save not to preserve ourselves or to live comfortably, but so we can give all we can! Think of the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30); the one that buried his talent didn’t make the money work for him (investing), but instead he feared for his life and went into self-preservation mode and buried the talent. The master rebuked him and said, "Whoever does not have, even what they have, will be taken from them." We make our money work for our master. We save so we can make it work for Him.

In this week’s kickoff sermon for our series, All You Can, Pastor Luke talks about earning all you can. This series is inspired by John Wesley. The reason why we talk about money is that the Bible talks about it often. We want to be good stewards and handle the money well that God has given us. We often say that we need more money in order to give as much money as possible to God’s purposes. We don’t actually need more money, but more wisdom! In Proverbs 2:3-4 and 3:13-14, the scriptures show us that wisdom is better and more important than money. Wealth in and of itself is not bad, but it can lead to problems if not accompanied by wisdom.
Wealth without wisdom is four things: a trap (1 Timothy 6:9); leads to unfruitfulness (Mark 4:19); can lead to greed (Ecclesiastes 5:10); and will become idolatry (1 Timothy 6:10). Again, wealth is not a sin, but wisdom plans for wealth as it has the end in mind. Wisdom also sees work as a calling and not a curse. We spend most of our waking hours working and most of us wrestle with the thought, "Am I operating in my calling? Is what I’m doing even have to do with my calling?" For Christians, work is no longer a curse, and our callings are much broader than we often realize. It was originally created, then corrupted by sin, redeemed by Jesus, and we are now empowered to make a difference in the world! How we redeem it is by reframing how we look at work with God’s vision. We are called to be faithful wherever he places us. A calling means that someone has called you to do something. How we work says a lot about who we are and what we stand for. Our identity isn’t tied to our jobs but to Jesus, which means our work (whatever it is) should be a display of our faith and, in turn, create fruitfulness (Proverbs 22:29)!

"To wrap up our Ignite the Boiler Room series, guest speaker Brandon Seibert shared with us why the Antioch Movement is using this "Ignite the Boiler Room" phrase and what it means to be a house of prayer for all nations. A word that Jimmy Seibert, a leader in the Antioch Movement, had that started this concept was that we were to be like the Queen Mary. It was a cruise ship that was conscripted to become a warship during World War Two. It was special because it had very powerful boiler rooms, which helped the ship move so quickly that it would out-run German boats. The church is not called to be a comfortable cruise liner, but a warship or a troop carrier. The power of the church comes from the place of worship, prayer, and intercession. The power and strength we have is directly correlated to our boiler room. We can’t do more than what we are praying for. He has called us to partner with him through prayer and intercession.

In Isaiah 56:6-7, God is calling and reminding Israel who they are. Our names have meaning. God has a name for his people. God wants to dwell in our midst and to find a resting place in our community. He describes it as a house of prayer in Isaiah 56. Prayer is simply relating to God. This can happen as an individual, in a small group, in a church, or in a community! Being a house of prayer is relating to God, together. A house of prayer has an element of not only relating to God together, but also living life together that lives missionally. We are on a constant journey as a community, ministering, loving, honoring, and serving God. In verse seven, it also talks about sustaining joy in the house of prayer. When we make each meeting about Jesus, we find joy."

Join us as we discuss the personal space of prayer--not as duty but as an invitation to know Him more.

Join us as we talk prayer at Waypoint and answer questions like: what keeps us from praying and what is prayer?

Join us discuss the role of the prophetic church with Pastor Josh.

This week, Pastor Josh continued on with the second half of our ‘Move’ sermon series with a message on what it means to a prophetic people.

We are a part of Antioch, which means that we are an apostolic and prophetic people. We need to understand what this means to fully step into all that God has for us as a people.

What does it mean to be a prophetic people? Pastor Josh made three primary points:

We are called to live in tension

We need to know who God is; His character and nature, and based on that – how we are to live our lives. When it comes to the prophetic, this means seeing and filling the gap between the church and the world. We need to be a people who identify where and how the world is not lining up and fill the gap.

We are called to be guides to the church and signpost to the world.

Being a prophetic people means that we are people who guide. The majority of the world around us is going the wrong way, the broad way, and therefore, the church needs to firmly plant themselves in the road to show the way that leads to life. We do this through living out our values in bold ways. We must be signposts to the people around us, pointing people to Jesus, and true life in Him.

We are called to pull the future into the present

We need to seek the Lord, and as we do so He will give us clues about how we are to encourage, inspire, and warn the people around us of what is coming.

In our world today there is so much coming at us that it’s very easy for us to lose our ability to hear the voice of God. We have too much input, which makes it harder to hear the Holy Spirit. Therefore, we need to be people who fast and pray as a way to clear the air, tune out the distractions, and hear God clearly for ourselves, for others, and for our world.This week, Pastor Josh continued on with the second half of our ‘Move’ sermon series with a message on what it means to a prophetic people.

We are a part of Antioch, which means that we are an apostolic and prophetic people. We need to understand what this means to fully step into all that God has for us as a people.

What does it mean to be a prophetic people? Pastor Josh made three primary points:

We are called to live in tension

We need to know who God is; His character and nature, and based on that – how we are to live our lives. When it comes to the prophetic, this means seeing and filling the gap between the church and the world. We need to be a people who identify where and how the world is not lining up and fill the gap.

We are called to be guides to the church and signpost to the world.

Being a prophetic people means that we are people who guide. The majority of the world around us is going the wrong way, the broad way, and therefore, the church needs to firmly plant themselves in the road to show the way that leads to life. We do this through living out our values in bold ways. We must be signposts to the people around us, pointing people to Jesus, and true life in Him.

We are called to pull the future into the present

We need to seek the Lord, and as we do so He will give us clues about how we are to encourage, inspire, and warn the people around us of what is coming.

In our world today there is so much coming at us that it’s very easy for us to lose our ability to hear the voice of God. We have too much input, which makes it harder to hear the Holy Spirit. Therefore, we need to be people who fast and pray as a way to clear the air, tune out the distractions, and hear God clearly for ourselves, for others, and for our world.This week, Pastor Josh continued on with the second half of our ‘Move’ sermon series with a message on what it means to a prophetic people.

We are a part of Antioch, which means that we are an apostolic and prophetic people. We need to understand what this means to fully step into all that God has for us as a people.

What does it mean to be a prophetic people? Pastor Josh made three primary points:

We are called to live in tension

We need to know who God is; His character and nature, and based on that – how we are to live our lives. When it comes to the prophetic, this means seeing and filling the gap between the church and the world. We need to be a people who identify where and how the world is not lining up and fill the gap.

We are called to be guides to the church and signpost to the world.

Being a prophetic people means that we are people who guide. The majority of the world around us is going the wrong way, the broad way, and therefore, the church needs to firmly plant themselves in the road to show the way that leads to life. We do this through living out our values in bold ways. We must be signposts to the people around us, pointing people to Jesus, and true life in Him.

We are called to pull the future into the present

We need to seek the Lord, and as we do so He will give us clues about how we are to encourage, inspire, and warn the people around us of what is coming.

In our world today there is so much coming at us that it’s very easy for us to lose our ability to hear the voice of God. We have too much input, which makes it harder to hear the Holy Spirit. Therefore, we need to be people who fast and pray as a way to clear the air, tune out the distractions, and hear God clearly for ourselves, for others, and for our world.

This morning, Pastor Matthew starts our new series, "Move", with a message about identity. Culture says that what we do defines who we are, but that drives us to be stuck, burnt out, and more frustrated. Our true and primary identity is that we are children of God. This identity isn’t earned, but we are born or grafted into it. Being a child of God not only defines who we are but also how we operate. In Genesis 1:27–28, Adam and Eve were chosen to be a son and daughter of God, and with that, came a role to fill the earth, subdue it, and expand heaven across the earth. When sin affected that mandate, God later chose Abraham as a vessel for his "heaven on earth" desire (Genesis 12:1-3). Through Abraham, God created the people of Israel, who would bless the earth. Because of what Jesus did on the cross, the Gentiles can also be a part of that covenant and mandate of heaven on earth. Matthew also discussed our identity as people of Waypoint Church. We are apostolic people, which means that we are sent ones. We are called to plant churches as it is an assignment that God has given to us. Apostolic people see gaps, run to them, and then ask the Lord if we are the ones that are supposed to fill them. Living missionally and with a purpose every day is another aspect of life at Waypoint. It’s important that we are constantly led by and dependent on the Holy Spirit. That means we dig deep into the Word so we can hear and know his voice more clearly, which leads to obedience. We want to be people that live differently by the power of the Holy Spirit! We are also people who are all in it for Jesus and the people of the world, which means dying to oneself. This means that we are called to be fathers and mothers in the kingdom of God. It is our heart to have people climb on our shoulders and go farther and be better than we ever could.

Join us as we talk about the 15 year journey of Waypoint--the good, the funny, the hard, and the future.

This week, we celebrated our 15 Year Anniversary and Pastor Matthew shared his heart about the history of the church, the people who have invested into Waypoint over the years, and what God has been doing locally and within the nations.

Join us as we close out our series on being a Witness. We talk to Pastor Matthew about his time overseas and making disciples here in Omaha... we maybe dabble in some end times stuff even.

This morning, Pastor Matthew finished up our ‘Witness’ sermon series.

When we lay our lives down for God we give Him permission to lay His life down through us. We all need to be ready to give answers to why we live the way we live.

There is no other name under heaven or earth by which we can be saved apart from Jesus. His is the only name that saves.

God made the church for His mission. He has always had a mission, that all creation would know His reign and rule through His people. This mission has not changed, and we are a part of it.

God’s mission it to make right all that sin made wrong; a plan that culminated in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. God is in the process of making all wrongs right. The world presses us to live for ourselves, but God calls us to live for Him in the service of others.

God wants to give Himself away through us to a world that doesn’t know Him.

God is on the move all over the world. The same God, doing the same things.

The world needs Jesus, and our city needs Jesus - and thus we must proclaim Him. If we ask Him for opportunities to share, He will give them to us. We all need to practice telling our stories, and sharing with one another.

Pastors Luke and Alex continue the discussion on what being a witness means through discipleship.

This week, Pastor Alex continued on with our Witness sermon series with a message about the how and why of Discipleship.

We have a mandate to be a witness to our city, nation, and the ends of the earth.

Discipleship is Jesus’ model.

We see in the Gospels that Jesus invited people in to follow Him. He taught them, modeled the Kingdom of God for them, sent them out to do the work, and then gave them feedback on their experiences. The life of Jesus displays a model not only of evangelism, but also discipleship.

Discipleship leads to real transformation.

Discipleship is a journey. Isolation is the biggest enemy of spiritual growth within the church, and we need community. We need to not only be saved but transformed, which occurs within the process of discipleship.

We all need to ask and answer the question: who is discipling you and who are you discipling?

Without accountability and discipleship, we are not following Christ.

Pastors Alex and Luke are joined by Hunter as they discuss the importance of prayer that goes into revival--historical revivals and what can come!

This morning, Pastor Luke preached the second message in our ‘Witness’ sermon series titled Revival on Hamilton Street.

The start and foundation of revival is two things; understanding the need, and beginning to pray. Prayer is both the fire and fuel of evangelism and revival. It is what fuels and precedes any great move of God.

Prayer aligns us with God’s heart

Jesus was a walking revival; when people encountered Him they experienced freedom, healing, and salvation. Jesus was and is in a perpetual state of harvest, and thus we must also be.

When we begin to pray, we get God’s heart and eyes – ones of transformation and revival. If we sow sparingly in prayer, we will reap sparingly. If we sow generously, so too will we reap.

Prayer must be focused on God to prevail.

Prayer is not easy, otherwise we would all do it more. We must move past distraction and doubt, and instead our prayers must be sustained by faith in God, and not in our own efforts.

There is a tension that we wrestle with constantly in prayer – the tension between our efforts, and the power of God. God is not impressed by our ability; He is impressed by our faith and our faithfulness, and it is through those things that He moves.

What would God do if we actually put our faith in God instead of our own limitations?

Travail before you prevail.

Travailing means perseverance, to press through, to believe in the God of the harvest. It is a type of praying that doesn’t settle. We must let the Lord stir up our hearts again for the lost.

This week, Pastor Alex introduced our new ‘Witness’ sermon series.

Before Jesus ascended into heaven, He said that we would be His witnesses all over the earth, and thus we must be people who share the Good News with others.

Pastor Alex made two primary points:

A passion for Jesus means that you are compelled to be His witness.

All of us came to faith through somebody being a witness to us, and therefore our passion for Jesus means that we must tell others about Him. People come to faith through hearing, and we all have a responsibility to be witnesses for Jesus in this world.

We live in a world that is in urgent need of a witness.

A recent Barna study listed Omaha as the 34th most post-Christian city in the USA. Additionally, half the people who went to church pre-covid are not going back. Therefore, even living here in Omaha, we all have an urgent responsibility to tell other people about Jesus.

We can be a witness in this world through our lives, our stories, our voice, and His power.

Our lives: we are to live as a reflection of Jesus. Our lives are to reflect His power and relationship in our lives.

Our stories: if we are followers of Jesus, we have a story of redemption. Our testimonies are powerful statements of the power and purpose of God.

Our voice: there is power in proclamation, and we are to be unashamed of the Gospel. Jesus is for the whole world, and we have to get that, speak that, and live that out.

His power: when the Holy Spirit came upon us at salvation, we received His power. Therefore, we carry the Holy Spirit, who is the witness for us. We do not have the have all the answers, we simply have to wait on the Holy Spirit and trust His power to work in the lives of other people.

This week, Pastor Alex finished up our Galatians series with a message out of Chapter 6: 1-10.

Within this Chapter, Paul lays out a series of exhortations to the churches in Galatians, which Pastor Alex broke into three primary points:

1: Growing (verses 1-5)

If we are living by the Spirit, we need to be restoring people through gentleness. We do this as part of making disciples, which includes giving space for correction and feedback. When we see people in sin, it's crucial that we speak truth to them in the right way, with both correction and gentleness. This is part of carrying one another's burdens and therefore fulfilling the law of Christ.

Sowing (verses 6-8)

Sowing into the church includes the giving of our finances, but it also includes the sowing of our time, attention, and resources. In addition to sowing into the church, we also need to sow into the Spirit. Part of this process is soaking in the Word of God. We need to know the Bible so that when things are called into question, we know what God's Word is, we have something to stand on, and we are therefore not simply guided by our feelings.

Going (verses 9-10)

We need to not give up, but instead continue to do good - because in the right time we will reap a harvest. We need to be good and kind, wherever we go - as we are the ones who bring the light of Christ.

This morning, Pastor Luke continued on with our Galatians series with a sermon out of Chapter 5: 16-26.

His message was broken down into three parts:

There is an inward battle going on within us, but not with equal forces.

When we come to Christ, we enter into a battle between our flesh and our Spirit. The battle itself is evidence of the Spirit of God within us. But this is not an equal fight, as the Spirit of the living God is immeasurably stronger than our flesh. If we allow the Lord to work, we are always on the winning side.

Transformation within the Christian life is not optional, it’s essential – and it comes through the Spirit of God.

It is not an equal fight, and so we need to stop hitting snooze on our sanctification. Revival happens when the human heart partners with the Spirit of God within us.

The Flesh

Paul mentions four categories of sin to define what the flesh looks like:

Sexual Relational Excess Religious These categories have not changed over time. It is the same flesh and the same God, just a different day. The Lord came to set us free, so that we can love others fully and walk completely in the purposes of God for our lives.

The fruit of a follower

Jesus embodied the fruits of the Spirit, and they are the litmus test of the Spirit of God within us. As followers of Jesus, the goal is to mature – we want to live, walk, and love like Jesus.

It is the fruit of the Spirit and not the fruits of the Spirit, and therefore we are only as mature as our least mature quality. We all need the Lord to work in our hearts, because we never arrive. This leaves us in a place of great humility, where we consistently need the Lord to search us, know us, work in us, and take us from strength to strength.

One of the paths to maturity is walking through hardships. We all have the opportunity to walk through hardships either with our eyes on Jesus, trusting in Him – or walking in our flesh with discouragement, fear, and panic.

Our lives are to be testimonies to the world that we know and trust in a living God.

This week, Pastor Matthew continued on with our Galatians sermon series with a message out of Chapter 5: 1-12.

One of the most important things that we can do in this life is live by God’s values and truth, and not simply by our feelings. Anything aside from freedom in Jesus bounds us to a yoke of slavery.

We have new life in Christ, which means that we must leave our old lives and its many loves behind. Jesus has provided for us a new mode of transport through this life – a Freedom Boat, who is Jesus.

You are FREE on the Freedom Boat.

We have been set free by Jesus. This includes freedom from shame, guilt, and old patterns of attempting to earn our salvation. Jesus has paid our entrance fee, as He has with everyone else, and thus we are all on the same playing field.

We need to renew our minds, and not get stuck within our old ways of thinking and feeling about the world and ourselves. We have the ability to confront the things that have bound us because the Freedom Boat is not held back by them. The enemy wants us to believe we are bound, but we are not. We do not have to be.

The Freedom Boat is also not affected by sin. When Jesus died for us, the power of sin and death was broken. Sin has no authority anymore, and we do not have to wait for heaven to receive the freedom promised to us. We need to learn more and more to yield to His Spirit within us, which will walk us into more and more freedom as we abide, obey, and follow.

Furthermore, this boat is Jesus’s boat, and therefore demonic principalities and powers have no power over us. With Jesus, we have the power to defeat darkness and we do not need to live in fear. The storms may rage, but will not swallow us up.

You must stand fast on the Freedom Boat.

There will always be temptations to go back to the old ways, but we must resist and stand firm. Jesus has set us free and called us to His purposes, and therefore we must stand firm – being people of forgiveness, as Christ has forgiven us.

Faith works through love on the Freedom Boat!

True freedom is not about using our freedom to do whatever we want – that leads only to slavery. True freedom is instead about faith working itself out through love.

We need to love God, and love others. If we do this, people will see God. If we want to know what love is, we only need to look at Jesus.

Faith moves us to forgive, to love our enemies, to run into the crisis, to speak truth in compassion, to believe in impossibilities, and to lay our lives down over and over again – that is what true freedom looks like.

This week, Pastor Matthew continued with our Galatians series with a sermon out of chapter 4: 1-7.

People have the potential to be enslaved to many different types of influences – both physical and spiritual. Pastor Matthew made three primary points on this topic:

We are enslaved to elemental spirits

These elemental spirits govern the way things are done within our society and culture. They represent ideologies such as politics, religion, militarism, nationalism, imperialism, capitalism, and other societal laws that control and constrain us. They exist before us and outside of us.

Within Galatians, Paul challenges us to examine how these elemental spirits have shaped and continue to shape us – and how they come up against the Gospel and the way of Jesus.

So many of these elemental spirits we are taught not to challenge, and often they are presented to us as being synonymous with Christianity itself. This is very dangerous, and it enslaves us.

God sent Jesus to redeem us and adopt us as sons and daughters.

Jesus paid all and any debts we have. He redeemed us fully and completely. He adopted us into His family as sons and daughters. When Jesus came, He did so free from elemental spirits and He brought with Him a completely new Kingdom and way of life, with a new set of values.

Too many of us fail to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, doing the hard work of renewing our minds through the Word of God.

He has given you His Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is the key. We must be filled with and receive it, learning to yield to the Spirit at all times. The same Spirit that filled Jesus, fills us.

It is the Spirit that empowers us to walk in freedom, who gives us gifts, and who brings us hunger and thirst for the Word. Too many people try to walk the Christian life without yielding to the Spirit of God.

This week, Pastor Matthew continued with our Galatians series with a sermon out of Chapter 3.

This chapter is all about God wanting our hearts. Pastor Matthew made three primary points:

You receive the Holy Spirit through faith in Christ.

They didn’t earn nor manipulate it, it was solely through their faith. Too many of us are trying to live a life with Christ without the power of the Holy Spirit – and it’s not possible.

You are Abraham’s children by faith in Christ.

Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness – that was faith. Similarly, when we receive Jesus through faith we are grafted not only into the line of Jesus, but also into the line of Abraham as well. And thus we have inherited his promises.

Faith is the key to our hearts.

Faith is better translated as trust, and we must put our full weight upon Him in mind, heart, soul, and strength. Going to church does not make us right before God. We don’t come to church to be saved, we come to church because we are saved. We need to stop being “Jesus and” people, which leads to shame, guilt, and fear. Instead we need to fully rely on and trust Him.

This week Pastor Jermaine continued with our series on Galations with a message out of Chapter 2, verses 15-21. Justified by Faith.

Pastor begins the message by setting up the scene: the Jewish teachers had come into Galatia and began teaching old Jewish law to the church. In this passage, Paul comes in to tell the church of Galatia that Jesus has done it all and there is nothing we could do to add to our salvation, like the Jewish leaders were saying.

Verse 16: “We have been justified by faith in Jesus Christ, not by works of the law.” Justification: Legal term, duty of the court to give justice. Acquit: to relieve from a charge of fault or crime; to be deemed not guilty

Paul says the Torah and the old system of the law’s purpose was to expose his sin and the prevalence of sin in man. Romans 8:3- “For what the law was unable to do, God sent His own son as a sin offering.”

Verse 18: Jesus’s death did away with the old system and the law. His work on the cross satisfied the Father’s justice and righteousness. There is a new covenant- we are now one with each other and with Christ because he tore the veil of the old law and created a new covenant. We have died to the law when Jesus died on the cross and are now alive in Jesus Christ.

Verse 20: “I have been crucified in Christ, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” Verse 21: “I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for nothing.” There is no religious duty or sets of moral guidelines we could follow that would make us righteous, except Jesus Christ and His sacrifice on the cross.

Pastor closes with the story of the thief on the cross in Luke’s Gospel. Jesus is suffering on the cross, feeling the weight of sin for the first time and He is praying for the ones who are beating Him. The thief next to Him asked Jesus if He was the Son of God, why won't He get them down? The other thief says, “this man is innocent, we deserve to be on this cross, Jesus, will you remember me in paradise?” And just like that, Jesus says he is justified and he will be with Him in paradise. Jesus saves and justifies the righteous requirements of God for us all.

This week, Pastor Jermaine continued with our Galatians series with a message out of Chapter 2 titled “guess who’s coming to dinner.”

After Paul had left the region of Galatia, other people had come into the region to teach and spread false doctrine. This false teaching included the command to be circumcised.

Within this passage, Paul calls out Peter because he refuses to eat with Gentiles in front of Jews. This was a racial, a spiritual, and a relational issue, as he was not applying the Gospel to every area of his life. Just like Peter, we can have the right doctrine and incorrect practices.

Within Galatians, Paul does not avoid conflict but instead examines his own heart – and then confronts the issues at hand. Sometimes confrontation is inevitable and necessary to enact and live out the heart of God.

The Bible is written in black and white but must be read, interpreted, and understood in color.

Join us as we're back with Pastor Luke talking about GRACE and Paul making the main thing the main thing.

This week, Pastor Luke preached the second sermon in our Galatian series with a message titled ‘keeping the main thing the main thing’ out of Chapter 1: 6-10.

Paul opens the book of Galatians very differently than all his other letters. In this book, he opens with shock and astonishment; not pleased with how the Galatians have been keeping hold of the faith. They had not kept the main thing the main thing, and instead were being swayed and influenced by additional and contrary thoughts and ideologies.

Pastor Luke made three primary points:

The MAIN thing for Paul is the Gospel.

The Gospel means “good news” and Paul went all over the ancient world talking about this good story. A fundamental part of understanding the Gospel is understanding grace; the free and undeserved gift that God has given to us on the basis of faith, and through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. When the reality of grace seeps into our souls, it brings life and utterly transforms us.

When grace gets hijacked.

We can tell that our grace is being hijacked when it’s joyless, fruitless, and faithless.

Paul is very passionate about the separation between works and grace, and that is because his main thing is the main thing: for Paul it must be just Jesus, and anything else added to that is wrong and offensive.

How do we know if grace has been hijacked in our lives?

a) Performance is burning you out.

We do not have to earn or prove ourselves to God before He will love us. The Gospel is the Gospel of grace, and we become sons and daughters solely based on the finished work of Jesus in our lives. It has nothing to do with our own efforts.

b) Shame is destroying you.

We do not understand grace if our identity is rooted in shame.

c) You make it about you.

Christianity has one title in it – Christ. It’s about Jesus, and not about us.

The expulsive power of a new affection.

In order to separate ourselves from the love of this world; we must take our greatest love and attachment and put it on Jesus: this is the message of the Gospel. Jesus must be the only one at the top of our lives. He must be our Lord and our love, and from that place our obedience becomes an overflow our who we are – and not out of performance or a works-based faith. Our love is both a decision and a feeling, and we need to put it fully, completely, and only on Jesus.

Join us as we kick off the new summer series on Galatians with Pastor Luke. We dig into the context of Galatians, the importance of context, the fivefold ministry, and how EVERYONE is called to be missional.

This week, Pastor Luke launched our nine week Summer series on the book of Galatians.

Paul wrote the book of Galatians:

Paul the missionary

Paul had a radical conversion through an encounter with Jesus Himself. Paul was tri-cultural; a Jew, a Greek, and a Roman, and this influenced the way he went about his ministry. He operated in all three cultures, which made him perfect for the job of planting churches.

It’s important to recognize that we will have the greatest influence within our own culture, and if the Lord calls us to minister within another culture – it’s extremely important that we learn it. Paul is famous for becoming all things to all people so that he might win some, and we should do the same.

Paul strategically changed his name from Saul to Paul to reach more people. Saul was his Hebrew name, and in Roman culture it meant to prance, or to waddle. He changed his name in order to be more effective – he was not about his preference, but instead he did everything he needed to, to reach as many people as possible for the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Galatia is a region that Paul visited on his first missionary journey, and thus the book of Galatians is not written to one church but a region of churches.

Paul the Apostle

Apostles plant churches, go to the nations, and never want to sit still. They are ones who want to go. As part of the Antioch network, we are an apostolic people.

We are all called by God to go and be His witnesses wherever and through whatever we are doing. We all have a holy vocation to be His representatives wherever we are. We are a sent people.

Paul the defender

In the book of Galatians, Paul is defending himself, his apostleship, and the church in Galatia. Paul’s Gospel message is that it’s Jesus alone who comes on a rescue mission to free the world and bring them to salvation.

Paul the light in an evil age

Just like Paul, we too are living in an evil age. The spirit of the age is always going to push us away from Christ.

Pastor Luke ended his message by giving us five questions to think through and answer:

Have you actively and intentionally put your faith in Jesus? What’s your mission in life? We are a product of what we read and what we watch. Assess it. Is it sinking you? Our behaviors are reinforced by our beliefs. What do you really believe? Do your behaviors reflect Jesus, His Kingdom, and His values? Trace them to the root. What things do we love and hope for? Is it what matters to Jesus or not?

Alex and Pastor Matthew dig back into vision for 2022 and what God has called Waypoint Church to this year.

This morning, Pastor Matthew preached a sermon with the title “2022: the light has come.”

The church is God’s plan A and there is no plan B because God is the only one who can transform the hearts of men and women. Transformed hearts are the only thing that will make a true difference. The hope for this world lies in the hearts of men and women who have been transformed by the Lordship of King Jesus. We need to be people who submit every single area of our lives to Him.

The best thing we can do for our nation and our world is to obey Jesus and the Great Commission.

If we are going to follow Jesus, we must deny ourselves – take up our cross and follow Him. To follow Jesus is a path of death, suffering, and self-sacrifice. We need to give away our lives, make disciples, and invest in one another for the sake of the Kingdom of God.

Pastor Matthew gave us three application points:

Increase the heat of the boiler room.

We need to be people who pray, listen, and obey.

Get involved with EveryOne.

We need to be people who proclaim the Kingdom of God. It’s not us, it’s Him – His power. We are not responsible for what soil the seed falls on, but we are responsible to sow.

Be generous.

Where we spend our money and time is a great indication of where our heart is.

Join Alex and Hunter as they interview Bec Isaacson and listen to a special, short episode of her podcast "How to live with the Rich" which is now available on all platforms. Bec addresses Jesus' words "the poor will always be with you" and digs into the context of the passage.

This morning, Bec Isaacson led us in the second of a two-part sermon series titled “how to live with the rich” that talks about the Christian, Biblical response to the global poor. This week was all about examining the goal of poverty alleviation, and how we can apply that theory to our practical lives.

The narrative and summary from last week’s message was:

We are very rich.
We can not serve both God and money, and
We are called to live as sacrificial stewards by caring for those in need.

This week, Bec built onto that narrative with two major points:

We are not the definition of life success.

It is very important to have a poverty alleviation goal, because without it we can not find any solutions to the poverty problem, nor can we measure any form of success.

The goal of helping those in need can not be to make them the same as us, because as a whole we are neither happy nor healthy from a Biblical perspective. Our culture is not the standard of what it means to live a successful life, and so we should not invite the global poor to become like us – materially focused, individualistic, wealth driven consumers.

Instead, we need to invite all people (including ourselves) into God’s narrative for their lives.

Human beings flourish when their mind, affections, will and body enjoy loving relationships with God, themselves, others, and the rest of creation.

This begins when we worship God and embrace whole-life transformation for others and ourselves. Poverty is not simply a material problem, and we have the potential to do great damage to others and ourselves when we mistakenly see it as such.

Our economy says that’s greater consumption = better life, but Jesus says that greater service, greater generosity and dying to self = better life both now and for eternity.

The second half of the sermon provided practical steps to action this information, including:

We need to raise our expectations and pick a problem. If we are going to see any significant change within our lifetime, we need to develop a righteous anger that pushes us to put action to our beliefs. We can all pick one problem, and run to the pain. We need to use our wealth wisely; both in how we give it away, and in how we use our purchasing power. We need to be generous people, and we need to be strategic. We need to be good stewards of our lives. This includes volunteering our time and stewarding our resources well.

Join us as we talk about global poverty and the Church's response with author, Bec Isaacson.

This morning, Bec Isaacson led us in the first of a two-part sermon series titled “how to live with the rich” that talks about the Christian, Biblical response to the global poor. This week was all about who is rich and who is poor, and what the Bible has to say.

Bec broke the message down into three sections:

We are very rich.

It is more than likely that by global standards, we are very rich in a world where so many people are poor. As followers of Jesus, we have a choice to be either paralyzed or propelled by this information.

Jesus calls His followers not to lives of ease and comfort, but instead to lives of obedience, selflessness, and restoration – part of which is caring for the poor.

We can not serve both God and money.

The Bible makes it clear that we can not serve both God and money. This is very difficult within our culture, as the love of money is both taught to us and celebrated.

Instead of serving money, we are entrusted to be God’s good and generous stewards who use their money wisely. This includes caring for those in need both locally and globally. Having a “heart for the poor” is useless without the accompanying actions that do something about it.

We are called to live as sacrificial stewards by caring for those in need.

The Bible makes it clear that we are to be cheerful and humble givers who trust the Lord wholeheartedly. It is possible to live in a world without extreme global poverty, and we have an invitation to be a part of global change and restoration.

We need to be invited not only into an abundant life in Jesus, but also into this hurting and broken world. We are to be known by our love for one another, and love for our neighbor – which in a world as globally connected as ours includes the global poor.

Amanda Anderson speaks on what it means to bring life to self, home, and your workplace.

This morning, Amanda Anderson shared a message on the topic of “life.” Because God brings life to every situation, we should strive to do the same.

The very presence of God is connected to life, and when we disconnect ourselves from Him – it ultimately ends in destruction for ourselves and those around us. Therefore, we need to look to God to determine what is best, choosing to do life God’s way.

Three ways to bring life:

Bring life in yourSELF

We need to see ourselves as God sees us, and be kind to the person who God has made us to be. We can experience great life when we understand that we are made in the image of God, and that He has made us good. We need to regularly connect with God in order to grow in this understanding.

Bring life at home

We need to be people who bring life within our homes. We can do this by being people who choose kindness over being right, honesty over stuffing our feelings, and service without the expectation of it being returned.

Bring life at work

No matter where we work, inside or outside the home, we can be people who bring life within our spheres of influence.

Sit down with Pastor Alex (as a guest, not host!) and discuss what it means to give God legal license in your life.

This week, Pastor Alex led us in a message titled “Search me. Know me” out of Psalm 139.

License is permission to do something; especially formal permission from a government or authority. If we are committing to God, we give Him a legal authority into our lives. This means asking the Lord to search us, lead us, and know us at the deepest levels.

Inside all of us there is a desire for control and to be the center of our own worlds, and our own lives. But giving our lives to God means turning both of those things over to Him.

Pastor Alex led us in three primary points:

God wants license into your lives.

We need to give God permission to speak into our lives, to search us and to know us. Within this Psalm, David asks the Lord to know his thoughts and doubts, and to test him. We see more of who God is through times of doubt and testing.

God wants your submission.

Our lives produce lasting change when we fully submit to Him – giving Him control. Jesus needs to be the Lord of our lives, which is a position of full authority.

Submitting to God therefore is what gives Him license to access our hearts, and it is this that produces lasting change within us.

3.God wants to give us His vision.

God sees redemption – and He wants to align us to that vision, and to Him. We need to give God license into our hearts so that we can see this world with His eyes and not our own.

Until we are willing to submit, He can not use us. We must give up control, and give God full license into our hearts.

Special episode where Alex and Hunter interview Josh Ballard and Andrew Bisson who were part of a Waypoint team that went overseas to help at the Ukrainian border.

We end our Get and Up Walk series with Pastor Jermaine's message on Easter Sunday about Lazarus. How do we respond in times of delays and trials? What do we do with the sin in our lives that stinks?

This week was Easter Sunday, and Pastor Jermaine led us in the last message of our “Get up and walk” series with a sermon out of John 11: 1-44

This passage details the story of Lazarus. When Jesus received the news that Lazarus was sick, He stayed where He was for two more days. This did not make sense to those around Him, because during this time Lazarus died. What they didn’t know was that Jesus was designing an extraordinary miracle for them; a miracle that took them to new dimensions of faith.

When Jesus finally arrived, Lazarus had been dead for four days. His sisters were confused as to why He had not come sooner, but they still had some semblance of faith; knowing that even now God would grant Jesus whatever He asked. Jesus asked them to remove the stone, and when they did so Lazarus came up and out of the grave – growing their faith.

One of the lessons we can learn from the story of Lazarus is to trust in the timing of the Lord. Our current trials and delays may simply be the early grumblings of promotion in our lives, and in that way man’s extremity is often God’s opportunity. The question then becomes, what is our response in the delay?

God has purpose in delays. Delay grows and increases our faith; a process that often involves pain and challenges. Delays can also provide the greater growth necessary to bring the Father glory.

In the same way that Jesus called Lazarus out of the grave, He too calls us to roll the stone away and come to Him. Jesus is calling us up and out of the grave.

Pastor Luke, Alex, and Bec dig into the 4-P's from Pastor Luke's sermon: Pits, People, Perspectives, and Personality.

This week, Pastor Luke continued on with our “Get up and walk” series with a sermon out of John 10: 7-18.

The theme of this passage is that Jesus is our shepherd. The job of a shepherd is to provide security, peace, guidance, and safety for their flock, which is exactly what a life following Jesus leads us into. He is the gate, and He leads us into the life and life to the full that is spoken of in John 10:10.

Understanding that Jesus is our shepherd also means understanding that we have an adversary, who is described within this passage as both a wolf and a thief. Our adversary is powerful but our shepherd is always victorious. We can not be destroyed by the world, and we are protected and guided into good places under our shepherd’s care.

“It is not your hold of Christ that saves you, but His hold of you.” ― C H Spurgeon

When we give our lives to Jesus, He first secures our eternal life, then transforms our internal life, which changes our external lives.

We as humans are somewhat like sheep; we have sheep tendencies. We gorge ourselves, we follow leaders no matter who they are, and we fall into various pits. Pastor Luke shared four of these great dangers for humanity:

Pits

These are areas of destruction and sin that trap us such as addictions and temptations. Everyone has different pits, but we all have them.

People

We are often the sum of the closest people around us, and so we have to be very careful to surround ourselves with those who point us to Jesus and righteousness.

Perspectives

Sometimes our perspectives on life can lead us into danger. We serve a God of life and life to the full, and we need to make sure that we live and speak out of transformed and sanctified perspectives.

Personality

We can not blame or hide behind our personality, refusing to change or be changed. It can not be used as an excuse not to engage in the Kingdom of God, or follow the shepherd’s leading.

These four P’s are not only dangers, they are also doors, and we have to be diligent and careful not to walk through them. However, we are never too far gone that we can not return to and follow Him. The good shepherd leads His sheep into good places, and we are never beyond returning to Him.

Join us as we interview our newest pastor on staff, Wyatt Johnson.

This week, Pastor Matthew continued on with our “Get up and walk” sermon series with a message out of John 10: 22-30.

The big idea of his message was that we are God's sheep. He expanded on this idea with seven primary points:

His sheep believe He’s the Messiah. His sheep believe His works.

Jesus’s works confirmed who He was, and we see this thred all throughout John’s narrative. Similarly, His sheep notice the works that Jesus continues doing today.

On the alternative side, people both now and then look for and find reasons not to believe in His works. Works alone will not convince all people of His divinity, but they are recognized by His sheep.

His sheep hear His voice.

God wants us to hear Him more than we want to hear Him. We were made and designed to hear His voice. We grow in the Lord by responding to and obeying what we hear from Him. This obedience sometimes results in rejection, but that only aligns us with Jesus.

How do we hear from God? We make Him Lord, spend time with Him, respond in obedience, and repeat that process.

His sheep are known by Him.

We are called into a relationship with God; to know Him and be known by Him. Of course, He knows everything already – but He still desires to be invited in.

His sheep follow Him.
His sheep have eternal life NOW.
His sheep cannot be taken from Him.

This week, Pastor Jermaine continued on with our “Get up and walk” series, focusing on John 9.

In this passage, Jesus heals a blind man on the Sabbath, which greatly upsets the Pharisees.

Just like the Pharisees, we are often prone to be more concerned with other people’s sins than our own. Likewise, we can care more about the sin itself than the person.

One of the great joys of this passage is that we serve a God who not only sees through people, but also sees people through. He not only reveals our sin and darkness, but walks with us through it and out of it. God doesn’t waste anything or anybody.

The true blindness that is revealed within this chapter is that of the Pharisees. They were more concerned with their religion than the grace, mercy and power of God. On the flip side, the blind man was more amazed by the unbelief of the Pharisees then by His own miracle.

Throughout this passage, Jesus went out of His way to see and heal the blind man, and then later on to find and reinstate him. God will find a way for those who find a way. He sees us when the world does not, and once again declares Himself within this passage to be the living water.

Jesus is the God who sees those who others pass by. He seeks us wherever we are at, and walks us through our sin.

Pastor Matthew Preached on the passage of John 8:12-59 and lets us know how much Jesus being Light also exposes our darkness and the importance of allowing that in our lives.

This week, Pastor Matthew continued on with our “Get up and walk” series with a sermon out of John 8:12-59.

This passage is set within a tense situation. Jesus is in the temple, but it reads more accurately as set within a courtroom. The one on trial within this passage was not Jesus, it was those who opposed Him. Their words and attitudes showed that they did not know the Father, and thus did not know Him.

Pastor Matthew broke his message into two primary points:

The light of the world

Jesus claims that He is the light of the world, and thus declares Himself to be the Messiah. However, a part of understanding this light is the difficult realization that it comes not only to illuminate the world, but also bring judgement to it. If we want the light to shine on us (bringing with it its love, restoration, hope, freedom etc), then we also must accept the fact that it will also shine on the darkness within us as well. This revelation of darkness within our lives is what we need to repent of and respond to, even though our natural tendency is often to want the light without the exposure of darkness that is brings.

Too often we turn the call of being God’s child into a call of living for ourselves, when what we are truly made for is Him, and others. It’s not about us. God brings us blessings in order for us to give them away. As we have been freely given, we must freely give.

The truth will set you free

Tyranny and slavery of every kind thrives on half-truths, evasion and cover up, and therefore the way to freedom is to know the truth. They are inseparable, and Jesus was and still is offering freedom at a deeper level than we can ever imagine.

Although we often don’t like to pay it too much attention, sin is much greater than the sum of its individual parts. Our sin affects not only us, but our families, relationships, communities, and nations. This is why it’s imperative that we seek freedom from our sin in the truth of Jesus, as only He has the ability to truly set us free. Only true members of a family have assurance of their position, and this is what we have in Him.

We are grafted into the family of God, which a family of complete freedom. We want to be people who both walk in freedom, and offer that freedom to others.

Pastor Luke and Hunter talk about our need to run to Jesus as the Living Spring and that we as believers would become springs of living water ourselves.

This morning, Pastor Luke continued on with our “Get up and walk” sermon series with a message titled “Refreshed and Refreshing” out of John 7:37-38.

These verses are set within the context of the feast of tabernacles. During this feast, the people set up booths and tables after the harvest where they read Scripture, shared food together, and celebrated and remembered with one another what God had done. We can read further about the feast of tabernacles in Leviticus 23:36-43.

On the last day, the festival came to a culmination, a thanksgiving celebration of God’s deliverance and protection. It was within this context that Jesus said: “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”

Out of this passage, Pastor Luke made three primary points:

He cried out!

Jesus waited until the very last day of the festival to make this declaration. His big point was “come to me.” At the end of the day, Christianity is all about being reconciled back to God through a relationship with Jesus, and all are invited to come to Him.

We are born into a war story, whereby the souls of humans are at stake. This is why Jesus made His message very emphatic, because it held great weight.

Think about thirst.

Thirst is a lack and a want, the absence of a necessary thing. And just as we can be physically thirsty, so too can be spiritually thirsty. Four symptoms of spiritual thirst:

You are never content. We are the only species inflicted with chronic longing and restlessness.
You can’t figure out the question of why am I here?
You live in constant fear.
You are worried about your eternal destiny.

Jesus says whoever is thirsty can come to Him. To believe in Jesus is to surrender ourselves and come under His Lordship. He provides the answer and peace to all of our spiritual thirsting.

Rivers of living water

Christians are never to be a drain. We are filled with the Holy Spirit, and thus must be people of sacrificial giving. We are also not storage containers, to keep the love of God to ourselves. Faith is not meant to be a private thing. Our love and the living of our faith is to be out loud.

We need to allow the river to flow through us. Just as we have been refreshed, we must refresh others. It’s all about being available to God, for His river of life to flow through us. We want to be people who connect others to the living God.

When we thirst, Jesus gives to us freely.

Pastor Luke, Alex, and Hunter talk about the John 6 message. Jesus feeds the 5000 and provides clarity on who He is and the true cost of following Him.

This week, Pastor Luke continued on with our “Get up and walk” series with a message out of John 6.

Within this chapter, Jesus feeds the 5,000 and then makes four clarifying statements. Each of these statements begin with the words “truly, truly” which emphasizes their importance.

What the people saw was the compassion of Jesus, but what they really needed was His clarity.

Jesus clarifies their motives

Jesus confronts the people who followed Him after the miracle; calling them out for seeking Him only for what He could provide for them. Jesus is not a cosmic vending machine; He does not exist only to answer our prayers and meet our needs. Jesus has a much bigger vision for our lives than simple materialistic blessing.

If we are not following Jesus to simply know and love Him fully, with no other strings attached, then we are going to miss the mark.

Jesus clarifies His identity

The heart of the crowd was cold, and Jesus makes a startling revelation to them: He is the bread of life.

We have to be careful not to place the glory that belongs to God on any person or people. We need to be more excited about meeting with Jesus every day, then by the person (no matter how famous they are) who is delivering the message. We have to be very careful of Christian celebrity culture.

Jesus is the only one who can satisfy and provide for us. What can only be found in the Creator can be not found in creation.

The invitation is clear

Jesus invites the entire world to come to Him, and prior to doing that we are dead.

Practically speaking, too many Christians live like they are atheists. We need to pray continually that we would find in Him what it is that we need and long for.

There is a difference between accepting the compassion of Jesus, and living under His Lordship. Lordship is to recognize Jesus not only as friend, hero, and redeemer, but also as God. We need to give Him full access to rule and reign in our lives, and take our orders from Him.

Join us as we discuss the new sermon series, Get Up and Walk, with Pastor Matthew. We dig into the issue of sin. How much focus should the Church put on sin? What's the difference between legalism and grace?

This week, Pastor Matthew began a new sermon series called “get up and walk” out of John 5-11.

Jesus didn’t replace the Jewish laws and customs, He fulfilled them. In doing so He offers us a new way of living in which we can get up and walk out of our sin, our unforgiveness, our hopelessness, and our former lives.

The Gospels all show us what happens when the true King comes to earth. He didn’t come as they were expecting, as an overthrower. He came instead as a servant leader, who healed the sick, befriended the broken, and revealed a new way.

Too many of us today are trying to get Kingdom of God results, but in our strength.

In order to “get up and walk” in our own lives, we need to lay down the excuses and go after Jesus. The word “get up” used here is regularly used to describe the resurrection, and we have access today to this same resurrection power through the Holy Spirit.

Sin can cause resurrection power to be delayed in our lives, and thus we need to repent and confess our sins to one another. If we don’t, our sin can keep us in bondage for decades.

The world needs the followers of Jesus to stand, walk away from false idols, and share the Kingdom of God with the world.

Join us as we dive deeper into Pastor Jermaine's sermon on prayer and what it means to ignite the boiler room at Waypoint Omaha and in our homes.

This week was World Mandate Sunday, and the last of our “2022: The Light has come” series out of Isaiah 60. Pastor Matthew preached with a focus on verses 1-11.

If we want to change our nation, we have to pray. It is time for us as the church to arise, and shine and share the Gospel. If we want to live without regrets, we need to give it all to Jesus.

There is going to be darkness, and until Jesus comes back it will only continue to get darker. But, the light is so much brighter and never once has darkness defeated light.

The glory of God will be seen upon us if we say yes to Him.

Application for Waypoint Church: ·We have to give ourselves as a church to doing good works both locally and globally. ·We need to cultivate a Kingdom culture that includes people from all people and places of the earth. ·We need to make disciples. ·We need to love God, love one another, and love the lost. ·We need to cultivate joy. ·We need to be a people of radical generosity. ·We will continue on our journey to wholeness. We need to be a healthy people. ·We are going to finish this building. ·We are going to add a campus in Omaha. ·We are going to have 24/7 prayer and worship.

This week, Pastor Jermaine continued with our “2022: The light has come” series with a sermon about the responsibility of being called to be a light. He shared five points:

Intimacy

We are called to remain in Jesus, to abide in Him. It’s an intimate knowing, which comes from proximity to Him. We reflect the light of the Lord, which is why we must remain close to Him. Pursuit of God through His Son Jesus Christ is the call of our lives. We are saved to be in Christ, to draw into Him, to live alongside Him, and to seek Him.

Illumination

The purpose of light is to illuminate, and one of the challenges of being this light is that it exposes all things. The light that exposes the darkness around must first expose the darkness within.

The way to God’s heart is to give Him complete access to our own. Knowing God and being known by God are two sides of the same coin.

Invitation

We have an invitation to not only be recipients of light, but to be light bearers.

God has got treasure for us hidden in plain sight in only we would seek Him wholeheartedly.

We often miss the reward in the busyness of life. God is inviting us to be light, to arise and shine, and to respond to His invitation for partnership within the world.

Illustration

In Christ, we become a prototype for the world to follow. We were not made to blend in, or to be a part of the crowd. Our call is to take up our cross and follow Him. We were made to be amongst and shine upon the darkness.

The light finds the darkness, and we need to look for opportunities to be light in our everyday lives.

Intervention

We are the threat to the powers of darkness. We are the light. God is calling: who will go? To our workplaces? To the nations? To our sports teams? Neighborhoods?

We are children of God, and we are all meant to shine.

This week, Pastor Matthew continued with our series “2022: The light has come,” out of Isaiah 60.

When we step into the light, we become the agent of the world that allows the people around us to see Jesus more clearly. However, as we step into the light, it’s super important that we reflect the right light. If we reflect the right light, the world will see Jesus clearer and clearer as we become more and more like Him.

Pastor Matthew shared seven principles about the light:

Servanthood: If we want to be like Jesus, we have to become servants to all. Jesus was a servant among us, and thus we should be a servant amongst others. Dependence: Jesus was completely dependent on the Father, and thus we must also be dependent people. We must learn full dependence on God. Approval: In Christ, we are approved of in the Lord and that cannot be taken away from us. Only the Father can give us the approval that we need. Meekness: the opposite of self-promotion. Humble, confident, seekers of justice and people who practice mercy. We need to examine our lives as we build our platforms. Empathy: To live with empathy is to be sympathetic with the weak, and mercifully understanding of those who get it wrong and mess up. Optimism: Pessimism and living in the light are at opposite ends of the attitude spectrum, and therefore hope and optimism are essential qualities for the servant of God. We are the light of the world, so if we do not have hope – who does? Anointing: Without the touch of the supernatural, these qualities above are as dry as dust. The Holy Spirit comes and rests upon those who have stepped into the light. We need the anointing and power of the Holy Spirit.

God offers this same anointing and filling that He offered Jesus, which means the question is: will we step into it? Will we receive it?

This week, Pastor Matthew launched our “2022: The Light Has Come” series out of Isaiah 60.

In our culture, we are so used to being individuals that we forget our individual decisions affect the community of believers, and the world around us. Our sin and disobedience doesn’t just hurt and cause death to us, but to those around us – wide ranging implications.

In the same way, our obedience and righteousness have consequences as well. Great consequences, not just for us, but for those around us and those who come after us. God is inviting us into an obedience that leads to life for us, our community, and the whole world.

Isaiah 60 is the word of the Lord for World Mandate Midwest, and for Waypoint Church for 2022 and beyond.

The theme of this message and series is: “Arise, shine, for your light has come.”

This passage is a poem with a chiastic structure, the pinnacle of which is this: nations will rise or fall depending on their submission and service the Kingdom of God (verse 12).

Zion is summoned to enter the light that is hers. If we have given our lives to Jesus, we are representatives of Zion (the city of God, heaven). We are not waiting for the light, the light has come and it is ours to enter into. We can have a real relationship with the real God because He has already come. We are now the light of the world. The light brings new life within. This light is not just for us, it’s for the world, and we must move into the darkness with the light. We must let the light do the deep work within us. We need to stop busying ourselves with things that do not matter in the end. We must rid ourselves of everything that hinders. It’s a total work! The light is for everyone and everything. Nobody has to be left out. There is an appropriate response to the light. What we do with the light matters.

It is time to rise, and shine. It is go time. And our obedience/ disobedience effects more than just us, it effects our entire community and by extension the world. The first step in that is recognizing that we are the light of the world, and that the light has come.

This week, Pastor Luke shared a sermon on Matthew 6:24-25 with the title: “the danger of caring too much about the wrong things and too little about the right things.”

In this passage, Jesus repeats the powerful and potent words of “do not worry.”

Anxiety, worry, and fear are great dangers in our day and age – they cause depression, suicide, and a range of serious mental and physical health issues. It can also affect our spiritual health, revealing our vulnerabilities and our lack of and need for control. Our worries display our lack of faith.

This passage emphasize that God knows, cares, sees and provides for His people. Our faith is in a God good, and that fact should anchor us in times of stress.

We need to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness – in time, preference, and priority. For, when God is not the forefront of our lives, we seek other things (clothes, food, possessions, our future, etc). This sucks us into the rat race and monotony of life, just like the pagans.

A large part of the problem with the Western Church today is that people’s priorities are not Jesus, and His Kingdom. Jesus attitude, ethos, morals and values looked totally different to all those around Him, even though His exterior looked the same as every other Jewish rabbi of the time. We are to be the same, seeking Jesus with all of our hearts. We will mess up and make mistakes, but we will be on the right track.

What does this look like practically?

We need to set our yearly, monthly, weekly and daily goals around Jesus. We need to set our minds and habits around creating healthy, Godly families. We need to set our priorities, start with prayer, and go from there. We need to ask why we feel anxiety, worry, or fear – identifying the lies standing underneath them. We need to decide where we are going to place our worry – and place it on Jesus (as opposed to into addictions, distractions, or sin). We need to persevere, understanding that no matter what happens - God is with us. We need to go into our battlefields wearing the armor that we have at our disposal.

We need Jesus not just for saving faith, but sustaining faith, for disciples of Jesus are to live very different lives than those around us.

This week, Pastor Luke continued on with our Christmas series “The History Channel” with part three; covering the time period from 1800 to modern day.

SECULAR

Queen Victoria popularized Christmas in the 1800’s, and Charles Dickens wrote ‘the Christmas Carol’ in 1843. This invented ‘the spirit of Christmas’ and humanitarian efforts as the center of Christmas; effectively muddying the waters of the spirit of Christ and His coming to earth.

The way that we celebrate Christmas today is therefore only about 200 years old, and we need to be careful not to bury Jesus under a pile of Christmas presents.

SACRED

Pastor Luke used Galatians 4:4-5 as his key passage: “But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.” 1. God knows, plans, and acts.

God’s sovereign hand is all over the details of the Christmas story. The birth of Jesus was strategic, and “in the fullness of time”. Jesus came into the world at the perfect time; when four key things came together:

The Pax Romana (peace and stability in the region) The Roman roads were built and in place (this meant that Gospel was able to travel quicker than ever before) Kione Greek (there was a common language) There was a religious fervor across the empire (people were open to talking about big ideas and religion).

Jesus came in the perfect moment of human history. God knew, planned, and moved in accordance with this moment – the world was ready.

God’s providential hand is all over the Christmas story, which shows us that God is in control, and if we can trust His timing at Christmas – the first advent - then we can also trust His coming for the second advent – when He is coming back again. And this also means that we can trust Him for the details of our own lives as well. We need to stop, slow down and see God in the big and the small details of our lives.

Your nativity set is actually a really big deal.

Our nativity set represents the incarnation – when God Himself came into human history and put on flesh. When Jesus stepped into human history, He truly crossed worlds, and became like us in every way.

Because of Jesus our sins are forgiven, and we can be made right with God. And so when we think about Christmas, we need to be filled with joy, hope, wonder, and awe at the fact that Jesus came. We need to be forever thankful for the reality of both the humanity and the divinity of God.

Many of us stop at this truth; that we are justified, without understanding the second truth – that we are then also adopted as sons and daughters of God.

This means that we are co-heirs with Christ, that we will rule and reign in His new Kingdom, and that we have the same access to the Father as Jesus did.

Sometimes we can get caught up in the secular Christmas traditions, but we need instead to slow down and focus on the one who has saved us. This Christmas costs us nothing, and cost Jesus everything. We are adopted as heirs, and the truth of that is eternal and awe-inspiring.

This week, Pastor Jermaine continued on with Week Two our Christmas Series “The History Channel” with the time period of 0AD – 1800. Every week, this series will be talking about the Sacred and the Secular history of Christmas. SECULAR In the early 17th Century, a wave of religious reform changed the way Christmas was celebrated. The Puritans moved to eradicate decadence from society, and as part of that – they made Christmas illegal. For example, from 1559 – 1681 the celebration of Christmas was outlawed in Boston. This was partly because of the sins associated with the season; greed, drunkenness, thievery, and public havoc. Often, the poorer classes would terrorize the rich during this season, going trawetS eniamreJ rotsaP 1202/21/21 from house to house and demanding their best food and drink. If the rich refused, the poor would cause mischief on their properties. Christmas was an unhealthy mix of the spiritual and the secular, and the thus the Puritans sought to eradicate it in order to focus solely on God. Christmas was only declared a federal holiday in the USA in 1870. SACRED In early Christianity, it wasn’t common to celebrate the birthday of any martyr, including Jesus. Instead, they were honored on the days of their death – as this was recognized as their true “birthday.” Thus, for a long time, Easter was celebrated as the primary Christian holiday. When Christians began to celebrate the birth of Christ, the date was chosen not because of any mentioned date within the Bible, but because it fit into the cultural celebrations of the time. Thus, the date of December 25th is entirely symbolic and somewhat arbitrary. Pastor Jermaine led us through the four “R’s” of the Christmas narrative: responsibility, reality, reassurance, and reply. When Mary became pregnant, she was 14-16 years old and bore a huge weight of responsibility. She lived in Nazareth and in poverty – seeing herself as having done nothing worthy of special mention. Mary had to face the disgrace of being seen as one who became pregnant out of wedlock. It would be a very different story if she chose to say no, and yet she took on the task with grace and humility. Additionally, Joseph’s reputation was also on the line. He could have chosen to make a scene, and bring Mary to trial for her sin – and yet he didn’t. He was a man of low estate but high integrity. From Mary, to Joseph, to the Magi, we see that the Christmas story is interjected repeatedly with the intervention of God – angelic visits, dreams, and alignment of the stars. It would have been so easy for it to be so different, and yet we have the miracle of Jesus birth, and the story that we know and love today. We need to continue being awed by the truth and wonder of the Christmas narrative. God came to earth. The holy, perfect God came to earth and died for us – the unholy and sinful ones. The wages of our sin is death, and yet God came to save us from those just and deserved consequences. We must never became calloused to this incredible truth and reality, and Christmas is a wonderful time to allow the truth and wonder of this miracle sit and stir deeply within us. Our reply, and our response should be that of Romans 10:9: “If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

This week, Pastor Matthew launched “The History Channel,” our Christmas series.

The Christmas that we know and love today is a huge mix between the secular and the sacred, and in this series we will be digging deep into its history - untangling the messy mixed roots from one another and looking at the reasons why we do the things we do.

This week we are going back as far as we can, all the way BC.

THE SECULAR

Christmas has only been a federal holiday in the United States since 1870, and it does have ancient secular toots.

Well before Christ, many cultures across Scandinavia celebrated the Winter solstice, the end of Winter and the coming of Summer. The end of December was often the only time of year that they had a supply of fresh meat. It was a time of rest and celebration for them. There were similar celebrations in Rome at the same time of the year.

There are therefore many things that we do at Christians that come from non-Christian traditions. The Christian faith has long traditions of taking things within our culture and redeeming them in order to meet people where they are at. This is also true of many Christmas traditions.

THE SACRED

We have been grafted into the line of Jesus, which is a great family to be a part of. We have become part of God’s story and inheritance – an amazing lineage of incredible men and women of God.

The story of Jesus is woven throughout the entire narrative of Scripture, from well before He was born on earth. Everyone pre-Christ was waiting and longing for the day that we have had the privilege of seeing. We live in the day that was longed for – we have the King and the Messiah, and He came in the person of Jesus – the Lord and Savior of the world.

As we celebrate Christmas this year, we need to remember God’s story and the fact that we have been grafted into it. It’s the story of Jesus, and we live our lives surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses who celebrate that same story alongside us.

Many longed to see the day that we have seen, so let us not take it for granted.

We must be careful which hills we die on as the people of God. We don’t have to get mad about people saying “happy holidays,” but we also don’t need to get caught up in consumerism and greed. We need instead to be captivated by the King, and both the joy and the heartbreak of the season. Let us be inspired to run the leg of our race well, knowing we are a part of something – an amazing legacy – that is so much bigger than we are.

Christmas has both sacred and secular roots, and that’s okay. We must choose to live our lives captivated by our Christ.

Join us for our last episode of the Take Me To Church podcast series where we discuss the practicals of Living on Mission at Waypoint Church.

Join us as we talk with Pastor Matthew about being a missional presence as part of Waypoint Church's spiritual assignment.

This morning, Pastor Matthew continued on with our Take Me To Church series on the topic of living on mission.

God is not angry, He is good. If God was angry, He wouldn’t have sent Himself. Too many of us live as if God is near, but angry.

He loves us and wants us to be in relationship with Him and one another. God’s plan has always been His people being His Ambassadors spreading His glory in every corner of the earth. From the beginning, humanity’s problem has always been that we think we know better than God.

When we read through the Bible, we see that the narrative has always been – I am going to bless you, now go and be a blessing.

Living on mission is part of God’s design for us. Pastor Matthew made three primary points:

Doing flows from being.

We must be people who start with understanding who God is, and who we are in Him. We go beneath the surface, we become emotionally healthy, and we minister from that place of solid identity in Jesus, and His purposes for us.

We need to slow down enough that we receive from the Lord, and minister and live from that place. When we do flow from being, we find abundant joy and life in Him.

Mission God’s way: with people.

The whole Bible is about God being with people. He loves people, and He desires to be with them. If we are going to live on mission God’s way, we need to learn to be with people.

We have to slow down so that we can actually be present with people. We must allow people to know us, as well as take the time to know others.

Mission God’s way: for people.

Too many Christians have a reputation of being against things, instead of for people. God is not against people. The kindness of the Lord leads people to repentance, and not us being against them.

Jesus did not come to condemn the world, He came to save it.

We take a quick break from the Take Me To Church series to visit with one of our church planters, Jeff Waalkes.

This week, guest speaker Jeff Waalkes shared a message under the topic of: God speaks, people obey, things change.

The Bible narrative is all about the character of God, which culminates in the person of Jesus.

To understand its message we need to start at the beginning (Genesis 1:26-28), with understanding that God functions as we – that all of creation comes out of community; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Men and women were created together to reflect the image of God collectively. Therefore, every person who has ever lived on earth carries the image of God; the Imago Dei, which gives us the foundation of inherent value, basic human rights, worth, anddignity. Therefore, anything that infringes on the dignity and worth of people is sin, and we need work towards changing that.

Within Scripture, God’s starting point for human beings is that they were very good. This is the waypoint that we need to begin with; that all people (including us) are created in the image of God, and that our starting point is one of immense value.

When sin enters the story of humanity (Genesis 3: 2-5), Adam and Eve are tempted by the idea of being “like God.” The problem is, they were already like Him by being made in His image. Right from the beginning they had forgotten their core identity, and it is always a temptation for us to do the same.

Often, we replace walking with God with wanting to know about God. The consequences (as we see from the fall) is that we – like Adam and Eve - become self-focused and full of shame. Their relationship with God and one another became broken, and what started to come out was the pursuit of knowledge in replacement of a relationship with God.

What we see throughout the entire narrative of Scripture is: God speaks – People Obey – Things Change.

We see this in the story of Abram. In Abram’s time, it was a communal culture, and life was about group identity. God asked Abram to move, to leave his people, life, family, country, and culture with no guarantee that it would work out. His only guarantee was the character of God. God did bless Abram, but there were decades in between his obedience and the blessings that came.

We need to never stop being awed by the incredible gift that we have: that the God of the universe desires to speak to us.

If we don’t want things in our lives to change, we should not listen to God. Because often times, when God speaks it involves loss. Therefore, if we are not willing to take personal loss, we can not obey God.

We obey because we love God, not because of any guaranteed outcome, and therefore our posture towards Him has to be “yes – now tell me what to do”, instead of “God give me some options and I will get back to you.”

You can not obey people that you do not trust, and therefore we can not trust God if we do not deeply love Him, and know Him.

We are not responsible for walking into our blessing, we are only responsible for doing what God has asked us to do. Where do we start in this journey of obedience? Jesus summarized it like this: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” The word used here for love is agape, which is an unconditional love.

As Christians, we need to be judged by the world for our love, kindness, compassion and selflessness. If we have to tell people we are Christians, we are doing something wrong. We have made God manageable and small, but He is neither. We should be overwhelmed by Him, when too often we are fascinated by the wrong things.

We are responsible for being a demonstration of God’s agape love to the world, and He is responsible for doing the changing within people. Our job therefore is not to condemn people, it is to express God’s agape love to others. Jesus’s starting point for transformation was agape love, not the law, and like Jesus, we need to cling to the relationship and not to the rules.

God is worthy of our obedience.

Join us with Pastor Matthew as we continue the discussion of multi-ethnicity and Waypoint's vision.

This week, Pastor Matthew continued on with our Take Me To Church Series with part 3 of Beneath the Surface Discipleship.

We as Christians bring the Kingdom of God wherever we go, and God wants people to meet Him through us.

God’s intention for us is a continued growth path upon which we grow deeper and deeper with Him and with others. The problem is that many of us have stopped going deeper.

In this world we recognize our brokenness, but we continue to attempt being our own saviors – redefining what is right and wrong, good and evil. In doing so, the world continues to break. Instead, we need to trust Jesus – we need to seek the Savior, we need to repent, and we need to live our lives in Christ. Part of this is a daily surrender, a daily taking up of our cross.

We are being transformed from one degree to the next into His image, back into the image bearers that we are called to be. This is the process of sanctification and requires a life of obedience.

Before Christ, we are dead because the Spirit of Christ is not in us. We are enslaved to our appetites, and to the flesh. But when we give our lives to Jesus He breathes life into us, and we are reborn. We are new creations, rooted and planted in Him.

However, being new creations does not eliminate the root systems of our prior lives – roots such as our family of origin and trauma that still produce bad fruit within our lives (such as depression, anxiety, anger, etc).

What we need to do is nurture the new root within us (being a new creation), and it will grow a new root system.

How do we do this? It begins with needing to know who we are.

When we don’t know who we are, we end up being tossed back and forth; with good days and bad days, times of uncertainty and times of certainty. But, when we begin to realize who we are in Christ, we discern what things should defines us, and what thing should simply affects us. This gives us courage to ‘go there’, take a deep look within ourselves, and deal with our baggage – because we know who we are, and we know we are enough.

If we have given our lives to Christ, we are His Sons and Daughters – and everything else in our lives is built on that foundation. We are also heirs of God – we have rights to inheritance, and our inheritance is everything. Everything that is Christ’s is ours. We have been given the Kingdom, and therefore we need not waste our time on earthly things.

Knowing we are His children, and heirs of the Kingdom of God changes everything. We need to allow God to take this message deep beneath the surface of our lives. The “stuff” within our roots doesn’t define us anymore, God defines us.

The Bible tells us that we a temple of God, we are chosen by Him to bear fruit, we are saints, we are members of His body. Our family of God replaces our family of origin, but it requires us tending to the root of being God’s new creation.

Join us and Pastor Luke as we discuss the battle of the flesh and the Spirit and our God-given appetites.

This week, Pastor Luke continued with our Take Me To Church series with Part 2 of Beneath the Surface Discipleship.

He spoke out of Galatians 5: 13-25, and the tension between walking in the Spirit and the flesh. He spoke on three levels of beneath the surface discipleship.

1.Level One

We live on a string of constant tension - on the one end there is walking in the Spirit and bearing fruit, and on the other end is dealing with the flesh and its desires. We are made up of two parts; physical and immaterial – our bodies, and our spirit/soul, and these two elements do not always agree with one another.

When we put our faith in Jesus, we die (Romans 6). Our immaterial self is born again, we receive the inheritance of the Holy Spirit, and we are redeemed (justified). However, we still live our lives in the flesh – caught in the in between period between justification and glorification. This time of living in the middle is one of sanctification whereby our choices and lives are making us more and more in line with the character of Jesus.

2.Level Two

Everyone has five God given appetites – food, knowledge, sex, status, and pleasure (comfort). We sin when we satisfy these God given appetites in a non-God ordained way.

We need to rule our flesh in order to walk by the Spirit, because if these appetites remain unchecked within our lives they become addictions, which Paul calls slavery. But we are called to freedom, a freedom in Christ that allows us to choose what is right.

3.Level Three

We face an uphill battle, because our cultural current pushes us toward sin and not sanctification. This is not helped by the message of “self love.”

At Waypoint we absolutely believe in self-care. We believe in counseling, freedom ministry, boundaries, etc. We want people to be whole and healthy, walking in the identity God has given them and truly becoming all that they can be in Him. However, self-love can become dangerous. In our current world we are told to speak our truth, follow our hearts, be true to ourselves, validate our greatness etc. The problem is.. what if speaking our truth is unkind? What if being true to ourselves leads us to sin? What if following our hearts leads to the destruction of others and ourselves?

As Christians, we need to operate as part of a different narrative – one that cares for others, shows restraint, and live in humble submission to the Lord, His truth and His purposes. The fruits of the Spirit in us are primarily for those around us as we live in community.

Four ways to walk in the Spirit and away from the flesh:

·We have to belong to Jesus. ·We need to go to war with our choices. Every choice is a chance to become more or less like Jesus. Our decisions will eventually make us. Life is the sum of many small decisions over many small days, and in all things we need to do as Jesus would do. ·We need to crucify the flesh. This involves a continued lifestyle of confession and repentance, and fasting what is addictive to us. ·We need to walk in the Spirit. We need to slow down to be with Jesus, and allow the Lord to have full access to your life.

Join us as we discuss Inner Healing with Amanda Anderson. Amanda shares bits of her testimony and also how God moved in her life as she received healing.

This week, Amanda Anderson continued on with our Take Me To Church Series by launching our three part set on beneath the surface discipleship. She shared her testimony, specifically in relation to the different stages of inner healing in her life.

Inner healing is a counseling movement that engages the use of prayer, forgiveness and repentance to reject lies and replace them with Biblical truths. Inner healing helps individuals process their painful memories and bring about restoration within their lives.

Part of Amanda’s personal journey of inner-healing included seasons of not feeling God or experiencing God, learning healthy dependence on other people, and working on rewiring her thinking – changing her brain through the reorganization of thought patterns.

At Waypoint we are committed to seeing people whole, set free, healed, and living in the fullness of who they are, and part of this process includes inner-healing and beneath the surface discipleship. This can take many forms, including prayer, counseling, and medication.

Amanda then interviewed Dr. Brian Lubberstedt about the link between mental health and the church. Dr. Brian shared that science and the church are not natural enemies of one another, and as Christians we have to get away from the historical division of the neck – the understanding that anything below the neck is medical, and anything above the neck is spiritual. We need to be consistent, as God can and will use doctors. We can approach our bodies from both a medical and a spiritual perspective, without feeling shame or condemnation about that.

Join us as dig into the practicals of slowed-down spirituality with Pastor Matthew.

This week, Pastor Matthew continued on with our Take Me To Church series with Slowed Down Spirituality Part Two.

Waypoints vision statement is: Waypoint Church is raising up a people with a passion for Jesus and His purposes in the earth. We long to see a church multiplying movement in which the Kingdom of God comes. As a result, deep, authentic relationship with Jesus and with one another becomes a reality, and our city and the un-reached areas of our world are forever changed by His presence.

Deep, authentic relationship with Jesus and with one another is the goal of living a life of slowed down spirituality.

Our world is addicted to speed and hurry, which has resulted in shallow discipleship and mass distraction. If we are too busy to sit in quietness with Jesus, then we are too busy. We need to slow down to be with God, and be centered and still before Him – present to the Lord throughout the day. This process is a journey, and understanding our identity is a key part of the process.

Many of us are afraid to slow down due to fear of what we will discover within us, or what the Lord will reveal to us. We need to do the hard work of spending time with Jesus, and allowing Him to reveal to us who we are in Him – and thus who we are in reality. Part of this process will require us to go back into our past in order to move forward in healing and wholeness with Him. Until we are content with who we are, we will not be able to properly rest.

Several practices to nurture a slowed down spirituality:

Enter into silent prayer through quieting your mind.

Intimacy develops when we are able to be silent in somebody else’s presence, and it is the same with the Lord. Familiarity fosters comfortable silence. It becomes a relationship based on friendship, as opposed to demands.

Encounter God through slowed down Scripture reading.

Our consumption culture has influenced the way that we engage the Bible.

Meditation is the practice of slowly chewing on God’s word until it penetrates our hearts. There are several ways and tools to do this, including Lectio Divina. Lectio Divina involves attentive reading of a small passage of Scripture two or three times over. It recognizes that Scripture is alive and active. As we read, we ask the Lord to help us to locate a word or phrase. We ask, Lord, what is this saying? Holy Spirit, what are you highlighting to me? Spend time reflecting on the text. What is the Lord saying to you through this text? Then the third movement is prayer. This is about our response to God, and it asks the question, what do I want to say back to God in response to this? The fourth step is contemplation and rest in His presence.

Unless we are being immersed in the Bible for the purpose of encountering God, we will find our relationship with Him is limited. We must slow down in order to do this.

Establish new rhythms of the Daily Office and Sabbath.

Part of being created in the image of God is our ability, like Him, to stop. We need to move in that part of His image. We imitate God by stopping from our work and resting.

The Daily Office and keeping a Sabbath provide rhythmic and joyful ways of being in our hectic and fast paced society.

The Daily Office is a turning to God to be with Him, observed multiple times a day. It’s not a quiet time or a devotion, but a set, scheduled practice of turning back to God repeatedly. This practice helps to eliminate the division between the secular and sacred.

Four elements to the Daily Office:

• Stop to be with the living God – trusting that God rules and I do not. • Centering – be still, move into and rest in God’s presence. • Silence. • Scripture. Read a short piece of Scripture.

Sabbath is another important practice – a 24 hour period each week devoted to rest, holiness, spending time with God and engaging in activities that help us to rest and feed our souls. It is a radical and difficult weekly practice that orients our lives around the Lord, and His sovereignty.

Join us as we dive in deeper on slowed-down spirituality with Pastor Matthew.

This week, Pastor Matthew continued on with our “Take Me To Church” series with a sermon about slowed down spirituality.

A shallow discipleship is working against us as we try to navigate the complex issues of the world today, and we need to fix that. We all have issues beneath the surface that influence the way we think, feel, and behave. God wants to transform us, in the deepest parts of us – and in order to do that we need to slow down to be with Him.

Jesus wants to form His life in us, and He wants to transform our entire beings – including the “roots” of who we are. The Bible has a lot to say about our inner-being.

“Christianity in the Western world is often marginalized as a life accessory rather than the means of powerful life transformation” – Rich Villodas

A huge part of the problem is that we live within a culture of speed, shallowness, and distraction. We live in a frenzy of hurry and exhaustion – and as long as we remain in that place we can not become the people that God is calling us to be. Our inability to sit in silence is keeping us from hearing God.

God invites us to a different way of being in the world. He is not in a rush, and if we want to meet with Him, it’s imperative we slow down to be with Him.

“It’s only when we slow down our lives that we can catch up to God” – N.T. Wright

We can not love people well when we are in a hurry. The solution to our hurry culture is to practice a slowed-down spirituality. We must slow down to be with God, to be centered and still before Him, and to be present to Him throughout the day. We are called to live life at a different pace, with different priorities.

The Bible is full of people who slowed down to be with God; Moses, Joshua, Mary, John the Baptist, and Jesus.

“Solitude is to be preserved not as a luxury, but as a necessity. Not for perfection so much as for simple survival in the life God has given you” - Thomas Merton

The rhythms of a slowed down spirituality empower us to not only survive in the world, but to thrive within it. God is inviting us into a reality that fosters deep, authentic relationship with Him and others. We must walk at His pace and develop rhythms of silence and solitude in prayer.

This week, Pastor Matthew launched our “Take me to Church” series.

Our world is broken, and Jesus has a lot to say about it if we slow down enough to listen and hear His voice. We can only make sense of things in and through Jesus.

Pastor Matthew had three main sermon points:

The story of the Bible is all about God being with us.

From Genesis to Revelation, we see that God wants to be with us. God has always wanted to dwell with His creation.

The story of the Bible stresses the importance of the temple.

In the Old Testament, the tabernacle represented God’s presence among His chosen people – it was, like the Garden, the place where God and man could be together.

Then, in the New Testament we see that Jesus is the temple. He is God’s dwelling place. Jesus was not simply with God, He was God – a God that is all about mercy.

The followers of Jesus are being built into a spiritual house (the temple).

The blood of Jesus cleanses the new temple (us!). Why? So He can dwell in us. This is a truth with vast implications. First, that God wants to display His glory through us. We are to be signs to the world of what is to come. We are now the place where heaven and earth meet.

The church is the hope of the world because Christ is in us. We are a part of one another, and the Bible makes that clear. Because of this we need to stop cutting each other up, stop comparing ourselves with one another, and simply obey God and bless one another.

Waypoint is not the church, but it is part of the church – the body of Christ, and all of us have assignments from God. Over this next series we will be looking at this assignment – the assignment of Waypoint Church. We are going to unpack what that means theologically and practically here in Omaha and in the rest of the world.

This week, Pastor Matthew shared the vision of Groups Sunday.

He reminded us who we are, and why we do the things we do.

We are a Spirit-led, Biblically based family of God who is committed to worship Jesus and live out Kingdom values in the context of community. We are called to make disciples and plant churches while embracing beneath-the-surface spirituality and a multi-ethnic church. We aim to impact and transform people in every sphere of our society, as well as the nations of the world for His glory.

The Lord is calling us to move forward in our vision, as now is the time for the body of Christ to mobilize. We need to lift our eyes from everything that has been weighing us down, and instead look to the Lord and His purposes. We need to get our eyes off ourselves and onto the harvest, because people need Jesus.

We say it every week, but we are a people who are passionate about Jesus and His purposes in the earth. We make disciples who encounter God, make disciples, and live on mission. More than anything else in the world, people need Jesus – and they meet Him through the church; a body of believers who lay their lives down for one another daily.

We live out and express our discipleship calling within the five circles of church: me and Jesus, life on life discipleship, Life Groups, the Church Gathered, and Life on Mission.

Why should we be in a group:

We need to have a deep and rich relationship with God, and a deep and rich relationship with one another.
We live in a culture that needs to be reached with the gospel of Jesus again. The best thing we can do for our nation is to be like Jesus – to love and lay our lives down.
One of the best places for discipleship and spiritual formation is groups. Jesus’s Discipleship model was never without mission.
It’s the best place to care for each other.
It’s the New Testament Model.

It is in relationship with God and others that fills us and support us. Relationships with others are difficult, but they are essential, and they are how we grow.

This week, Pastor Alex shared a message on the topic of pride and humility.

If we will learn to walk in humility like Jesus did, we will learn to walk in authority like Jesus did.

We see the story of pride begin all the way back in Genesis, at the beginning. Adam and Eve wanted to be like God; to go from created to creator. This desire to elevate themselves is what brought sin into the world. Pride has always and continues to lead to separation.

Humility, on the other hand, promotes less of ourselves, and submits to God and others. It takes us from the center of our own universes, and places the Lord in that position.

Pride promotes independence, and humility promotes dependence. Humility is the dependence on the truth and not your truth. It recognizes there is more to this world than ourselves.

Humility will lead to reconciliation, as seen by the example of Jesus.. Jesus humbled Himself in obedience to the point of death. This was the birthplace of reconciliation within the world, and we learn to walk in those same ways.

The less we look like Christ, the more we promote the world. Jesus asks us to bare our cross daily, to deny ourselves and to follow Him. In order to do this we must take the position of a servant.

How do we humble ourselves and show Jesus to this world? Pastor Alex suggested a four-fold approach:

Communion. Remembering the sacrifice of the Lord – humility to the point of death.
Prayer. The acknowledgement that we need God in our lives. Set an alarm for 2:05pm each day to pray Philippians 2:5.
Fasting. A choice to humble ourselves and come before the Lord.
Serve. Laying our lives down for the benefit of others.

Let’s be a church that humbles ourselves before the Lord and shows the world Jesus. What does it look like to be Jesus in a world where it’s so easy to be us?

This week, Pastor Luke finished our Hebrews 11 faith series with verses 32-40 in a sermon titled “Heroes.” Pastor Luke broke his sermon down into three sections:

The weak but strong heroes (v32-35)

This passage goes over several very flawed heroes of the faith:

Gideon, a man who destroyed idols and altars but was also a coward who was weak and full of doubt. Barak, who beat the Canaanites but also lived in fear; only going into battle when he had the help of Deborah. Samson who defeated Ammonites, but lived a wild and rebellious life. Jephthah who defeated the Ammonites, but made a sinful vow that resulted in the death of his daughter. David who was a great King, a giant killer and a man of faith, but he also slept with another man’s wife, and then had him killed to cover up his indiscretion.

This passage covers a list of flawed people who did not have clean records. They did not keep the law perfectly. Their confidence was not in themselves, but in a flawless God and therefore this list is more about God than it is about them – about having our faith aligned with Him. The life of faith is one where we recognize our strengths, leverage our weaknesses, and depend on God with all of it.

The life of faith is not so much about our qualifications, but about God’s qualifications.

We need to recognize our weaknesses and therefore our need to God. As C.S. Lewis says, true humility is not thinking less of ourselves but thinking of ourselves less.

The other heroes (v36-38)

This passage then goes on to talk about various heroes of faith that were tortured and killed in all kinds of ways for their beliefs. They were marked by their conviction and courage. This passage begs the hard question: would we be willing to die for Jesus if the circumstance arose?

The call to Jesus is to give up everything to follow Him.

The difference between a head knowledge and a conviction is the action that puts feet to it, which often is most clear in the face of trials and hardships.

In this hour we need to assess our convictions and our courage.

God wants us to be people who truly live for His glory, and in order to do that our lives must be so aligned to His purposes.

The ultimate hero (v39-40).

There is an author of this story called life and He is the Creator of all things.

All of these heroes of faith did not get to see the culmination of what was then to come; Jesus – His life, death, and resurrection. But we do. We get to live in an age where we can not just know about Him, but we can also know Him intimately and live for Him passionately.

This week, Pastor Jermaine continued on with our Hebrews 11 faith series with the story of Rahab, starting in verse 30.

Rahab is referenced three times in the New Testament, and is one of only two women in this Hebrews 11 passage. Like all the rest, she is mentioned because of her great faith.

Through the story and example of Rahab we see that God has a way of meeting, using and encountering people where they are at. He will use people even as they are in process for His purposes. God can still accomplish His perfect plan through imperfect people.

Rahab risked everything for her faith – she was undaunted by her circumstances. Her faith was in the majesty and mercy of God.

Rahab had unorthodox faith, an undaunted faith, and an undeniable faith. Her faith was sincere and authentic, and we can tell because of her actions. The book of James tells us that faith without works is dead, and we show our faith by our works. We are not just saved to be good, we are saved to do good. We do good because we believe in the Lord and what He is doing in the world. We do good for His glory.

Rahab was a woman who went from immorality to immortality, and our story can be thus so.

This week Tom and LeAnn Fraley shared a family moment with us.

They apologized as spiritual parents on behalf of the church at large for three primary things.

First, that the church hasn’t paid enough attention to the struggles of minorities. From the beginning the church was multi-ethnic, and that is the heart of the Lord. We need to do better at recognizing and reconciling that.

Secondly, that the church has become fixated on political (instead of spiritual) power as the way to bring change. Only Jesus can bring the change we desire, and far too often we have allowed politics to rule and shape us.

Thirdly, we have treated each other so poorly and with contempt. This contempt has led to divisions among us that do not honor Jesus.

We need to do better and allow Jesus to make us more and more like Him as His church.

This week, Pastor Matthew continued with our Hebrews 11 faith series with verses 23 – 27.

The way forward for Moses, his family, and the whole Israelite nation was faith in God. Faith that He would fulfill His promises, and ultimately faith in who He is. Similarly, we move forward in our culture by faith and not fear. Our obedience in faith today affects people tomorrow.

If you belong to Jesus, you must be part of the church. We are created to lay our lives down for one another. We also must believe that Jesus is greater than the treasures of America. We must throw off all that entangles us.

God wants to teach us how to wait on Him – He must become more as we become less. We are to live in faith and be faithful, trading our areas of fear for faith in Him.

This week, Pastor Luke continued on with our Hebrews 11 series with verses 17-19 and the story of Abraham.

Abraham is a huge character throughout the narrative of Scripture, and Pastor Luke used his story to make three primary points about testing and growing in faith:

God tests His people

God works more like a crock-pot than a microwave. The testing of God is good and necessary for us to become more like Jesus. The goal of spiritual maturity is to look, act, and respond like Jesus in each and every situation.

We need to make a distinction between tests, temptations, and trials. God tests us to grow our faith, Satan tempts us to destroy our faith, and trials exist because of the poor decisions of ourselves or other people.

Maturity comes when we turn our focus away from consuming and complaining and move it towards serving, loving and helping others.

There is a proving in what we profess, and that is shown and developed through testing.

The necessary parts of testing.

There were many times within Scripture that Abraham failed – he lied twice about Sarah being his wife, and he became impatient with waiting on God for a son (which resulted in him sleeping with Hagar, and having Ishmael).

In each of these situations Abraham essentially became a functional atheist. He tried to control the situation, and forgot his reliance on God.

There are two necessary parts to God’s test: He’s going to confront your need to control, and it’s going to be hard. It’s simple, but it’s hard, and we grow through our hardships.

Anxiety is temporary atheism – a suspension of our faith in God.

The key to passing the test

Abraham obeyed even when he did not know what would happen. The key for us also is to surrender to God’s goodness and obey the last thing that he told us to do.

Trusting God and following Jesus is not easy, but it’s worth it. We want to be people who are both faithful and full of faith. We need to surrender control, trust in the goodness of God, and obey what He has spoken.

This week, Pastor Luke continued on with our faith series with the person and story of Enoch, found in Hebrews 11: 5-6.

We first read about Enoch in Genesis 5: 22-24 which says that Enoch walked with God, and that God took him.

The goal for all followers of Jesus should be to walk with God all the days of our lives, as Enoch did. Enoch’s faith was practical, tangible, hopeful, and honest. He was a renowned, publicly known man, famous for being seventh from Adam. He lived in a world that was not for God, and he lived his life standing up for Him.

In order to walk with someone, you need to have a reconciled, unified relationship with them. You cannot walk with somebody you are ashamed of, and you need to be walking alongside them in the same direction, and at the same pace. Our relationship with the Lord should reflect all of these qualities.

The life with God is a life that pleases God. Enoch’s faith was rooted in what God is like, not because of what he was like. We need to see and obey God for who He truly is, and not what we ourselves think, feel, or need in any moment. We can not view God in our own image, and the basis of our theology can not be transactional. Enoch did not see God as an avenue to blessing in his life, but rather God was the blessing.

We experienced a power outage during our time of worship, therefore the audio is lower quality than usual.

This week Tyler Schenzel continued on with our Hebrews 11 faith series.

Faith is the organ that allows us to see the supernatural things of God. Successful faith is not about us and how much of it we have, but rather who we put our faith in. It is not the amount or stability of our faith, but the object of our faith.

Tyler opened up the chapter with the story of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, and this righteousness did not come by his works. It is as Pastor Murdoch once said, righteousness is not our responsibility, but it is our response to God’s ability.

We need to hear the word, study the word, and apply the word. In order for the promises of God to take root in our lives, we need to apply the word of God to our lives. We need to live in obedience to the Word of God, and give our lives away.

Noah’s actions were proof of His faith in God, because the one who loves the Lord keeps His commands. God is good, and His faithfulness is never ending.

This week, Pastor Jermaine introduced our series on Hebrews 11, a series on faith.

We believe that the author of Hebrews is writing to Jewish converts who are enduring hardship. Many of the Christian believers were walking away, while others were being imprisoned for their faith.

The author wrote the letter to encourage the church, asking them to consider the cost of radical devotion. He urged the readers to choose the dangerous direction of devout discipleship.

Hebrews 11 tell us that faith is the confidence in what we hope for. It gives substance to our hopes and is a deep and sincere belief in the unseen, and what is to come.

What we see from the story of Cain and Abel in this passage is that righteous living precedes and is more valuable than righteous giving. Abel’s sacrifice was acceptable to God because it flowed from a generous and obedient heart. It is not the quantity or the quality of the offering, but the condition of the heart from which it comes.

Pastor Jermaine challenged us to ask and answer the question: does what is In your hand match what is in your heart?

Pastor Alex David wraps up our series on the Holy Spirit, sharing about the power that we receive to be witnesses for Jesus in all the earth.

We move through four steps in this process: 1) Denial 2) Devotion 3) Display 4) Declaration

Ultimately, we want to live and walk in surrender to the Father's will, living in humility and holiness - and we continue to be filled over and over again by the Holy Spirit.

This week, pastor Matthew continued on with week four of our Holy Spirit series with a sermon titled living life full of the Holy Spirit.

If we are followers of Jesus, we have an obligation to live by the Spirit.

The Spirit makes us new and gives us new desires. The Spirit prompts us to love God with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength. We need to yield to the Spirit and obey Him.

We have too often forgotten that love does not equal knowledge, but obedience, and the Spirit within us desires to obey the Father. We must live as Jesus did, keeping the commands of the Father.

The key is learning to yield to the Holy Spirit - our will yielding to the will of the Father.

It is not about perfection, but about being on the road with Jesus: learning, adjusting, growing, repenting, and becoming more and more like Jesus. The Spirit empowers and transform us to become more like Him.

Pastor Matthew encouraged us to ask and answer the question, are we walking full of the Holy Spirit today?

Pastor Matthew continued with week 3 of our Holy Spirit series, this week on hearing the voice of God.

God has been speaking since the creation of the world and has never stopped. We need to hear His voice to know His heart.

In our culture we often place doing before being, and it should not be this way. We need to focus on who we are becoming, because if we have an intimate relationship with Jesus we will also have His guidance and grow deeper and deeper with Him.

The Bible provides plenty of guidance on how to hear God through His Holy Spirit. If we seek Him with all our hearts He will speak to us.

The best way to know the heart of God is to know and to be with Jesus. The Holy Spirit reveals Jesus to us, just as Jesus revealed the Father. This is a lifestyle and a process that we learn, it is a journey. The Jesus revealed to us is the same one we read about and see in scripture, which is why we need to get to know the Biblical Jesus.

Pastor Matthew made three primary points:

The Spirit carries on Jesus' work.

The Spirit does not reveal Jesus in a vacuum, He does so through His people by their proclamation and their lifestyle.

The Spirit helps us to become intimate friends with Jesus.

True friends can have intimate secrets with one another, and we can have that kind of relationship with God through the Holy Spirit. We should be able to hear Jesus’s words as clearly today as His disciples did 2000 years ago. Believing this is half the battle.

We need to implement safeguard for listening to the voice of God.

Does it look like Jesus? The Spirit will only teach us what is consistent with the Biblical Jesus because God is always true to His character.

Is it motivating you to demonstrate unselfish love, which is Gods heart? The Spirit wants to lead us in giving our lives away.

Are you hearing in a vacuum or do you have a community of friends? We need one another to walk out the Christian life.

This week, Pastor Kristen shared a Mother’s Day message about living a lifestyle of worship. Worship doesn’t fit into any particular box, time or place and instead should be expressed as a lifestyle. Worship should and can be done out of reverence and relationship with the Father, anytime and anywhere as Biblically worship is simply obedience to Christ.

The more we get to know God, the more we desire to obey Him. We cannot live for the Lord and tell Him no, and thus a lifestyle of worship is a lifestyle of obedience to Him. What delights the Lord is lives fully laid down and surrendered to Him. This is often very uncomfortable for us.

When it comes to worshiping the Lord, there is no such thing as a small yes, as our small, mundane and non-glamorous yeses have huge and eternal impact.

We are called to simply do the next thing that the Lord has placed right in front of us, and therefore we must resolve to stay put and be faithful. We need to become a people who first and foremost and concerned with “your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”, living our lives with a posture of full surrender.

This week, Pastor Matthew continued on with our series on the Holy Spirit.

As followers of Jesus, we should be listening to and hearing from God regularly. Jesus longs to speak to us, and the way in which we hear the voice of God is through the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is divine, He is a person and a part of the trinity. What is true about each person of the Godhead is true about them all.

We read the Bible to get to know the trinity between the lines. God wants us to know what He is like. We get to know His character.

Pastor Matthew gave us two points on how to recognize the voice of God in the Spirit:

We must realize He is available to us.

Worthiness is not a prerequisite to being in the presence of God. We need to be careful not to make feelings an idol, but instead to truly understand and embrace the fact that through the Holy Spirit God is always available and accessible, no matter how we feel about it. Through Jesus we have access to the Father by the Holy Spirit.

When we stumble, we do not need to stay down or give up. We repent, ask for forgiveness, get up and keep going. Sometimes we get so focused on ourselves that we do not focus on the God who will set us free.

We need to be transformed by the renewing of our minds.

We have the Holy Spirit to walk with us and to live with us. Therefore we need to practice cultivating His presence so that when He does speak we will hear Him. The Holy Spirit moves and empowers us to obey Him, follow Him, and walk with Him.

We are Gods Holy temple, which is a big deal. It is where God comes to dwell with His people. It is His sign that He is with us. The Lord Himself goes before us, and is with us.

Worship is important if you are going to recognize the Spirit.

Worship helps us to focus on God’s glory, and invites us to pay attention to the very one whose heart we wish to know. It allows us to translate what we know about God into a dynamic conversation with God. Our worship matters to God.

This week was Justice Sunday and Kerri Taylor, the executive director of Unbound Houston, shared with us about human trafficking; its definition, what Unbound does, what we can do about it, and how to pray.

Following Jesus should not be boring, and there are many ways that we can join with Unbound in action and with prayer. The prayer points shared included:

Prayer for legislation and legislators. Prayer for police officers and human trafficking task forces. Unbound Omaha. Human trafficking in our city, and for open doors (prayer for an increase of community partnerships). The justice of the Lord to be made in the area of human trafficking, and for dark places to be brought to light.

This week, Pastor Matthew introduced our new series on the Holy Spirit.

Following Jesus faithfully means that we must prioritize the thing that matter most; sitting at His feet, hearing His voice and learning His heart.

We need to recognize how He speaks and he best place to start is by asking Him to open our ears.

They key is not just to hear the Lord, but to obey Him.

Pastor Matthew made two primary points:

We should begin to recognize the Spirit by getting to know God’s character by means of what He has already said in the Bible. God shows us His heart in Jesus’s sufferings.

This week Tyler Schenzel finished up our 1 Corinthians series with Chapter 16.

Paul talks about four distinct topics within this short chapter; money, his travel plans, standing firm in the faith and his final greetings.

Tyler spoke about the various things that get in the way of living on mission such as our jobs, relationships, phones, hobbies and desire for comfort amongst others. We need to become people who live on mission; taking control of our schedules before they take control of us. Tyler encouraged us to hear from the Lord and walk through the wide door of effective work that is open for us.

Just as Paul urges the Corinthians, we must stand firm in the faith, putting on the full armor of God and displaying the fruits of the Spirit in every area of our lives.

This Easter Sunday Pastor Matthew preached a message of resurrection out of 1 Corinthians 15.

The resurrection is what changed everything, it is the anchor of our faith and the thing upon which everything hinges. It launched the church, Christianity and the Kingdom of God.

When Jesus died everybody assumed that He would do what every dead person does – stay dead. Nobody expected no body, which is why the resurrection changed and changes everything.

Pastor Matthew led us in three points:

How can I be sure?

All scholars believe that Paul was a real person who lived in the 1st Century, and there are seven letters that all agrees He wrote between 50AD and 60AD. Likewise, all credible scholars believe that Jesus was a historical figure and that He was executed by Romans.

Paul wrote about the resurrection just years after it happened. He met with eyewitnesses and used a creed to teach the people:

Christ died for our sins and was buried; He rose from the dead and was seen.

Paul’s letters prove two things; first - that the resurrection was not a product of decades of oral transmission, and secondly - belief in the resurrection was around when eyewitnesses were still alive.

No scholars believe that Paul was lying, because His life validated it.

What does it matter for me personally?

The resurrection proves everything Jesus said about Himself.

That He is the Son of God. The exact image of the invisible God. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The light of the world. The forgiver of sins. The Word made flesh. He was there before the creation of the world. He was and is and is to come. He is the great I Am. The Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.

Apart from Him we are all destined for an eternity without Him in hell. The wages of sin is death and apart from Him that is our destiny. Jesus paid the price for our sins, and conquered death.

If Christ truly was resurrected, we are no longer bound to sin. Jesus’s power is REAL and we can be set free. We do not have to live in our sin any longer.

What does it matter for our world?

Jesus is King, and the Kingdom of God brings life to dead places. Jesus is making all things new and partnering with His children to bring it to pass.

We are people of the resurrection and we can see graves turned into gardens.

This morning, Pastor Jermaine continued on with our 1 Corinthians series with Chapter 15:35 to end of Chapter 15.

This section of 1 Corinthians is all about the resurrection.

The Corinthians had let false teachings come into their churches and they were doubting the resurrection of Jesus and of the body. Paul passionately addresses these concerns, using the resurrection as the link between the present and the future.

Just like Jesus we will be resurrected into a new body, into a present and heavenly existence.

Pastor Jermaine made three major points:

There is a resurrection

Paul calls out the Corinthians for not using common sense, and uses the image of a seed to demonstrate the continuity between our present body and our future body.

There is a resurrected body

The body is both natural and spiritual. It is natural in its current age, but spiritual in the age to come.

The resurrected body/ state involves the body, and is a supernatural event performed by God.

Adam was life receiving whereas Jesus is life giving.

This week Pastor Matthew continued on with our 1 Corinthians series with Chapter 14.

Within Chapter 14 Paul expands on the problem of church disorder within the Corinthian church by outlining it in the context of two specific gifts; tongues and prophecy. At its core, his message is about using the gifts within the context of love for the building up of the body. He helps to ask and answer the question, are you exercising the gifts God has given you in the spirit of love?

In our lives we need both private spirituality and public service and worship. This public worship setting needs to build up the body as our gifts are for laying our lives down and serving other people.

Pastor Matthew shared three main points:

Clarity is important.

The church needs a fresh, intelligible vision of God. In order to properly prepare people for the work of the Kingdom our services need to be clear and understandable.

As well as we love our neighbor is as well as we love God and our aim in coming to church should be to come to church to serve others and build them up.

Balance is important.

We are full humans; mind, body, soul and spirit. We all become what we worship, and in doing so we need to bring mind, spirit and body together.

Maturity is important.

Maturity is what matters, and this comes with knowing what behavior is appropriate in which context. We need to be mature so we can fully use the gifts.

This morning, Pastor Luke continued on with our 1 Corinthians series with chapters 12 and 13.

Within these chapters Paul lists and clarifies the spiritual gifts. He tells the church in Corinth that the gifts are for each person for the purpose of building up the body and ultimately impacting the world.

There are four primary views about spiritual gifts within the world today:

Cessationist: the gifts ceased after the early church as there was no longer any need for them. Augustine held and taught this position. Charismatic: the gifts are alive and should be practiced today according to the limits of Scripture. This is the position Waypoint takes. Charismaniac: the gifts are alive, but their importance is overemphasized. In doing so the Bible’s authority is lowered and the place for contemporary revelation is elevated. Pentecostal: the gifts are for today, but the Holy Spirit is not within all Christians. The evidence for fullness of the Holy Spirit is in the speaking of tongues.

Every single person who has put their faith and trust in Jesus has at least one spiritual gift. They are tools and not toys for the service of others and the building up of the church.

In order to illustrate the gifts of the Spirit, Paul gives a picture of a body with many parts. Pastor Luke gave four applications on how we can operate in these giftings:

You’re uniquely gifted and the church needs that.

God determines who gets what gift, but all are for operation within the wider body.

Contentment in your gifting brings unity in the body.

The point of our giftings is not our giftings, it’s the giver. We need to accept our own gifts and appreciate the gifts of others. It’s not about ‘me’ it’s about ‘we’ as we go after Jesus together.

Killing comparison will bring joy in serving.

Comparison is the thief of joy, and we need to stop comparing ourselves to our heroes.

If the body isn’t coordinated, then it’s not effective.

The most important thing within all of this is love. Our gifts without love are pointless noise, and this is the heart of Paul’s entire message.

It’s easy to get unloving when we move away from the heart of Jesus which is why we need to stay close to Him in order to be most effective within our gifts.

This week, Bec Isaacson continued on with our 1 Corinthians series with Chapter 11.

In this Chapter Paul tackles two very distinct issues, head coverings and the Lord's Supper.

The thread that ties both of these two very different topics together is order in the church. Paul was ultimately for order and unity, and against distraction and disrespect.

Commentators routinely recognize that the first 16 verses of this passage are some of the most difficult in the New Testament for modern readers to understand as there are many layers of cultural context at play, as well as different interpretations of the word ‘head’. ‘Head’ could either mean authority, or source which drastically changes the meaning of the text.

Regardless, within these verses Paul lays out his belief that women and men should be adorned in opposite ways. For women this meant having their heads covered, and for men this meant having their heads uncovered. At the end of the day, Paul was asking both genders to worship in a way that brought glory, honor and respect to their “head;” literally and metaphorically.

Paul was asking the Corinthians to come to church dressed in a respectful manner and he urged both genders to show respect for God and one another by adorning themselves in ways that were culturally and gender appropriate. They were to lay down their individual rights and desires to bring others glory and not shame. They were to think and live beyond themselves.

Paul definitely wanted the genders to be differentiated but he then also called for their unity and interdependence as well, as individualism is not Biblical and we need one another.

The second topic that Paul covers in this passage is the Lords Supper, or communion. The Corinthian church were doing a terrible job at practicing the Lord Supper, as they were using it as an opportunity to get drunk, binge eat, humiliate the poor and segregate themselves from those who were different from them.

Paul reminds them that the purpose of communion is to remember Jesus. The red of the wine is to remind us of His blood, the bread is to remind us of His body, and the fact that we all tear from the one loaf is to remind us of our unity as the body of Christ.

In explaining communion, Paul was trying to lead the Corinthians in a practical lesson about how they can achieve the unity Christ was calling them to; a two-step process that involves us all understanding that we have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and that we have a point of rally in Jesus. This unity we have in Him is to surpass the normal social and cultural barriers that exist within our cultures, and we are instead to love one another sacrificially as the body of Christ.

This week, Pastor Jermaine continued on with our 1 Corinthians series with Chapter 10.

In this Chapter Paul uses the story of Israel as a warning to the church in Corinth. He encourages them to be self-disciplined, to flee sexual immorality and to and to do everything in their power to obtain the prize by loving God and one another.

Our freedom in Christ is a great privilege, but one that comes alongside great responsibility. Paul encourages them to learn from the mistakes and example of those who went before them.

As believers, we are all under three covenants:

We are all in covenant with Christ. We are in covenant with our church leadership. We are in covenant with one another.

How do we know if what we want to do is both lawful and beneficial? We pass it through the criteria of verse 24, in seeking the good of others. We have to make sure that the use of our freedoms do not infringe upon our neighbors freedoms.

Everything that is lawful to be done is not always lawfully done, and therefore some of the ways we exercise our freedoms can cause our brothers and sisters to stumble, and in doing so our rights can become idols.

We as a church need to be people who love consistently.

We have to think about the good of the whole, as in our context we ourselves can become the very idols in our way.

This week, Pastor Matthew continued on with our 1 Corinthians series with Chapters 8 and 9.

In this section of the book, Paul talks about food sacrificed to idols.

In the city of Corinth, people worshiped pagan gods by sacrificing animals within their temples, and eating the meat afterwards as a meal. There were often leftovers, and these were sold to the general public within their markets. This is the reason that some Jews refused to eat meat at all, as they didn’t want to risk even getting close to pagan sacrifices. This is the primary issue that Paul is dealing with within these chapters.

Within them, he sketches out the principles of Christian living in a pagan world before coming back to the specific topic itself.

Pastor Matthew made three primary points:

The principles of Christian living spring from love, not knowledge.

Paul says “knowledge puffs up;” bringing with it pride and arrogance. Instead of knowledge therefore we need love; practiced and put into action. We must figure out what it means to love the one true God with everything we are, and everything we have. God is both the world’s creator and redeemer, and if there’s any knowledge that we need to know, it’s of this God.

Paul therefore warns the Corinthians to be careful, doing everything they can not to cause other people to stumble and sin.

In the context of Corinth this came back to food sacrificed to idols, as before they became Christians, many of the people in the church would have been involved in shrine worship and would have therefore found it difficult to separate any part of their prior practice from the whole thing. The very smell of meat may have taken them back to the temple, and therefore Paul is asking the other believes to take this into consideration and practically love their brothers and sisters in Christ; prioritizing their love for them over their personal rights, knowledge and freedoms.

Similarly, we must all hold up our rights up to the light of love.

Love relinquishes rights and freedoms.

As Christians there shouldn’t be one single part of our lives that is not given to loving God. Everything about our lives should be devoted to Him. This has implications on how we live and how we treat others. Essentially: it’s not about us.

Our entire lives should revolve around Jesus, and this has practical implications for us.

First and foremost, we must be aware of our brothers and sisters and their consciences. We must sacrifice and relinquish our rights for them, laying our lives down.

Our freedom is for something. It is a freedom from all the things that keep us from who God wants us to be, and a freedom for His service and the Gospel. This is why He set us free, and what true freedom looks like.

God has given everything for the sake of the Gospel, including His own son, and He wants a return on that investment in the form of lives won through the Gospel all over this world.

Paul asks and answers the question, who am I becoming for the sake of the Gospel? Paul’s rights and freedoms were nothing to Him. What mattered most was that people were being rescued from darkness and transformed by the Lord’s glorious light. This message has not changed.

Love requires hard work and discipline of our own lives.

As Christians there are things we have to do not for our salvation, but for our growth. Our relationship with Jesus takes work, and requires laying down our lives everyday.

Our entire lives need to be oriented around the Gospel, and laying down our rights and preferences for the love and service of other people. A big part of the Christian life is discipline and self-denial.

Paul had his sight on nothing less than the renewal of all creation and the abolition of death itself. We are called to join this purpose, and be a sign of what’s to come.

This week Pastor Luke continued on with our 1 Corinthians series with Chapter 7: talking about marriage, sex, and singleness.

The big point is that both sex and sinlessness is a gift.

Point One: Sex is a gift.

Paul is giving a renewed vision for sex inside of marriage to the Corinthian church. Historically, sex has been viewed as two opposite extremes, either animalistic and sinful, or angelic and off limits. Neither of these views is correct, and every generation seems to miss it in some way when it comes to sexuality.

Instead, we need to see sex through a Biblical lens, understanding that it is a good gift to be expressed and experienced within the safe context of a marriage covenant.

If you are not willing to be completely vulnerable with somebody legally, consistently, emotionally, mentally and covenantally, you should not be naked and vulnerable with them sexually. Sex doesn’t create intimacy, it comes from intimacy.

From that point, Pastor Luke gave five application points for married couples:

Don’t withhold sex from one another, as mutual submission within marriage is key. Your spouse is your standard of beauty. If you start looking in any other direction you will run into porneia (sexual immorality). Sex takes work, but practice often and fight for it. It’s important to have healthy expectations and understand that God is in the business of restoration. Sex should never be used as a punishment or reward. The only time not to have regular sex with your spouse is to set aside time to pray. Not having regular sex opens couples up to temptation, and it’s important to fight for a healthy sex life. Don’t settle in this area. God created sex too good for it to be stolen.

Point two: Singleness is a gift.

In church culture, we haven’t always a done a great job with celebrating singleness, and we need to have a renewed vision for the gift and calling that it is.

Paul had a celibate lifestyle, and calls others to do the same because single people can devote themselves to God in a way that married people can not.

In your singleness, it’s important to guard yourself against porneia as a great sex life starts when you are single.

Sex and singleness are both gifts, but it’s always, always about the giver – and dedicating ourselves most fully to Jesus.

This morning, Pastor Luke continued on with our 1 Corinthians series with chapters 5 and 6 and the topic of sexuality within the church.

It’s important for us to remember that Corinth was an extremely sexual city. Prostitution and the worship of Aphrodite (the goddess of love, fertility and sexuality) were rampant and set the tone for the culture itself.

The church in Corinth was celebrating their sexual immortality, and Aphrodite’s influence was not just over the city but within the church. This same sexual immorality is rampant within our world and culture today as well. For example, pornography in America is a $16.9 billion industry (a number which is larger than the GDP of 80 countries in the world) and 12% of all webpages and 25% of all google searches are porn related.

The good news is that there is hope in Jesus.

Pastor Luke tackled two primary questions, starting with: What is and what is not okay?

In this passage Paul used the term “sexual immortality” five times, and this word in Greek is porneia. This word is the root of pornography, but is also much broader than that as well; encompassing everything and anything outside of Gods specific design for sex and sexuality.

The Corinthian church were basing their sexual ethic off of their culture, and specifically within the framework of dualism. They believed that their true self was held in the spirit and soul, and therefore the flesh and the body were somewhat irrelevant and inconsequential. Within these Chapters of 1 Corinthians, Paul reorients their sexual ethic away from their culture and instead around the Bible, starting in the creation story of Genesis.

In Genesis we learn that we as human beings are image bearers of God and that our purpose is to worship Him and complement one another as male and female both relationally and sexually. Gods purpose was man and woman in a monogamous covenantal relationship together, and He said that it was good. The Bible therefore starts with a positive view of sex and sexuality, as we were sexual before we were sinful. As long as it in in the right context, sex is something to be enjoyed.

However, we are born bent; and our desires, appetites, views and sexuality are not as they should be. God therefore draws a line for His people not because He is prude or a fun-hater but because He knows what is best for us. The sin in our life is always going to hinder our relationship with God and other people.

Paul tells the Corinthians to flee sexual immorality because our bodies are a temple, they are not our own. When we become believers in Jesus our spirits are intimately connected with Christ, and we must therefore not defile them with sexually immoral acts.

The second question Pastor Luke answered was: what about homosexuality?

Typically, the church has handled this issue in two ways; labelling it either as the chief of all sins, or the other side embracing and celebrating it as fully acceptable.

We need to come to a middle ground, understanding that homosexuality is not just an issue; it’s people. It’s bigger than an act. And although scripture clearly condemns the act of homosexuality, it does become more complicated when we tackle the identity and attraction elements of the topic.

The bottom line is that following Jesus is one of cross bearing for everyone, and we all have burdens to carry and bear. Therefore, although our sexuality is super important, it is not the most important thing about us. God defines who we are, and we need to make sure our sexual ethic matches scripture and not culture.

We as a church want to be a people who are shaped by Jesus in every single area of our lives. This includes our sexuality, which needs to be framed around the Bible, and simply not our culture or our times.

This week was Vision Sunday, and Pastor Matthew shared about the past, present, and future of Waypoint Church.

2020 was an interesting year for everybody. It was a year shaped by covid, racial tensions, divisions and political uproar. The church at large suffered through great pain; with people divided, leaving the church, being un-kind to one another, and acting out in crazy ways.

However, it is important to remember that although a wrench was thrown into our plans, it was not thrown into the Lord’s plans. We were given space to slow down and press into our relationships with the Lord. This is where we still stand today. As a church we urge you to put Jesus and His Kingdom priority over everything else, and from that place pursue unity with one another.

We must put our hope in the Lord alone and call others to do the same. We must give ourselves to Jesus every day; making Him our sole plan and purpose.

2020 held some great lessons for us a church. It taught us that there is a committed core, and that people are beginning to understand the importance of slowing down. Our Life Groups are getting better, and we have five long term teams in the nations who are doing well. Our staff is strong and committed, and the body has continued to give generously. We have endured many painful issues together but remain united.

Looking for the future we will continue to press into four areas:

The pursuit of slowed down spirituality, for the purpose of being with Jesus and with one another. A focus on beneath the surface discipleship. The goal of reaching cities and nations for Jesus locally and abroad. Living on mission and reaching others with the Good News.

We are to take off the old clothes and put on the new. To keep our eyes on Jesus, His purpose and His mission.

This week, Pastor Matthew continued on with our 1 Corinthians series with Chapters 3 and 4.

He spoke about power, and the counter-cultural nature of the Gospel.

The Corinthian church was full of human wisdom. Their jealousy, divisions and quarreling were proof of their worldliness and immaturity. In his letter to them, Paul calls them to the alternative way of living by the spirit. A way that was not compatible with their behavior.

People who have been transformed by the gospel of Jesus Christ cannot act in the same manner as those who have not. We must live crucified lives with Christ. Lives which are laid down for others and are founded upon humility. Our allegiance must be to the Kingdom of God and not to our countries or cultures. Our lives and our values must be shaped by the crucifixion, as God’s power is lived out by way of the cross.

Paul boasts about the very things that the Corinthians distained, and he calls out their hypocrisy. The values that they held (their power, honor and riches) were the opposite of all that Paul and therefore Christ was calling them to.

The power of God is expressed in a life that blesses those who curse, endures persecution, answers kindly to those who slander, practices forgiveness and lays their life down for Jesus and other people. We cannot receive the benefits of the cross without laying our lives down daily. We can not lay our lives down daily while being filled with human pride.

Paul reminded the Corinthian church that the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing; a message that is repeated all the way through the Bible. We live in a culture that doesn’t teach this.

We as the church need to stop getting into fights and quarrels that have nothing to do with the Kingdom of God. We need to begin to look like Jesus. We need to lay our lives down and not get caught up in worldly things.

This week, Pastor Jermaine continued on with our 1 Corinthians series, this week focusing on Chapters 1 and 2.

The church in Corinth was experiencing huge amounts of division amongst themselves and against Paul.

They were fighting over different teachers and ranking them against one another. They were forming clicks and dividing over them, quarreling amongst one another in the name of wisdom.

Unfortunately, we see evidence of this trend continue in the church today as Christians bicker and divide over their consumer preferences.

In his letter, Paul is lovingly exposing their sin. He asks them: where is your humility and your reverence?

He points them back to the example of Jesus Christ and asks them to consider His life and death. He points them back to Jesus’s life of humility and of “going low;” concepts that were completely counter-cultural to both the culture of the time, and our current day.

The foolishness and simplicity of the Gospel remains the most powerful thing on the planet. If we are going to boast, let us boast in Christ and in the Gospel.

This week, Pastor Luke introduced our 12 week 1 Corinthians series.

He encouraged us to dive into the series alongside our devotional that can be picked up from the church or found online at: www.waypointomaha.com/1corinthians

1 Corinthians is a letter written by the apostle Paul. It was written to real people in a real place, which is why it’s important to understand it within its historical context.

Paul arrived in Corinth as part of his second missionary journey and stayed there for 18 months. We can read about his time in Corinth in Acts 18. Corinth was the biggest city that Paul had visited.

Four things that are important to know about Corinth:

Corinth was extremely wealthy. They were a huge trade and port city. Corinth was very multicultural. Corinth was very religious. There were at least 26 sacred places of worship within the city. It was also the home of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Corinth was very sexual.

A few years after his departure from them, Paul wrote multiple letters to the Corinthian church. He was addressing various issues within the church including divisions, sexual misconduct, false practices and theological misunderstandings.

He encourages the Corinthian church to be set apart from the culture and the city around them.

Pastor Luke concluded his message with two thoughts about the church in Omaha.

The call for this moment in time is unity in our church and holiness in our behavior. We are to be a laundromat. We are to be a place where we point people to get clean through the Holy Spirit and because of what Jesus does in and through us.

STOP THE SHOW

This week, Pastor Jermaine kicked off the year with a sermon out of Matthew 23:13-28.

He spoke about hypocrisy.

In this passage Jesus tells the Pharisees that it is possible to have the appearance of being alive, but really be in a state of death and decay inside. People who look alive, but are dying.

We need to care more about being alive, than having the appearance of being alive. Excellence is great, but it should never trump intimacy.

We must all understand that we are lacking without Jesus. Many of us are trying to be like Christ without Christ. It’s religious acting and we need to stop the show.

The truth us if we are not abiding and remaining, we are dying.

We need to abide in Christ, to have a lasting and persistent faith. We need to stand.

It’s not our job to make ourselves look alive, it’s our job to seek and abide. If you get proximity to Jesus right, everything else with be right.

This week, Tyler Schenzel led us in a word on revival.

He spoke out of Hosea 10:12:

“ Sow righteousness for yourselves, reap the fruit of unfailing love, and break up your unplowed ground; for it is time to seek the Lord, until he comes and showers his righteousness on you”.

The great revivalist Charles Finney said that revival needs to begin with three things; conviction of sin on the part of the church, a deep searching of the heart, and a persons faith being renewed.

In order to be a part of this, we need to take the plow into our hearts and break up the unplowed ground within us. Five symptoms we have unplowed ground within our hearts:

We have little to no revelation of Scripture We have not recently confessed sin to the Lord or a loved one. We lack tears. We are bored and/or indifferent. We have no vision or passion.

If we find ourselves in a place where any of these things are true, there is good news, and that is the plough is in our hands. Through perseverance and prayer we can create good soil within us; a place where God can give us dreams, revelation and passion. We simply need to plough.

This process begins by humbling ourselves, confessing our sin, and repenting and turning back to the Lord.

The invitation is to plough the areas of our hearts so we can be led into wholeness and intimacy with Jesus.

Merry Christmas!

Pastor Matthew concludes our "Hark!" series with a special Christmas Eve message about Mary, the mother of Jesus. What must it have been like for Mary? With all the uncertainty she experienced... yet she chose to trust God.

Today we find ourselves in the midst of uncertain times; will we choose to trust God?

This week, Pastor Luke continued on with Week 3 of our Christmas sermon series ‘Hark’.

He spoke about the joyous gift of obedience and the freedom that comes from enjoying God’s gifts in their proper time and space.

He spoke about the shema out of Deuteronomy 6:4-9, and gave three reasons we are to obey the Lord:

We obey God is because we’re in an exclusive relationship that has history.
We obey God because His reputation is tied to our obedience.
We obey God for the sake of the legacy of you, your family and the Church.

This week, Pastor Matthew preached week two of our Hark Christmas sermon series.

He launched his message from Hebrews 1:1-2: “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe”. Our world is breaking, and it needs the church to break with compassion as well. The world needs Jesus as He is their Savior. Because of this, the world also needs the church to be able to cut through the emotions and hear from Jesus in these times.

As we learn to hear the voice of God, we must hear it through the life of Jesus as He has so much to say about the times we are living in, if only we will listen.

Jesus’s life was filled with prophetic signs. He turned water into wine, He healed people, He fed the multitudes, He gave sight to the blind, He walked on water and He raised the dead to life. All of these were signs that Jesus was doing a new thing and bringing life to people.

In the times that we are living in, instead of asking who is to blame we should ask: what is Jesus doing?

Jesus is the light of the world, and as His people we are called to be the same. Jesus was the center and must be the center of it all. In Him we need to simultaneously relax and be ready.

We need to make the Lord’s prayer a lifestyle; slowing down to be with God, drawing near to Him, living out the Kingdom of God and loving the people around us well.

We need to be living lifestyles of repentance and forgiveness, starting with lament over our broken world.

This week, Pastor Jermaine kicked off our Christmas series ‘Hark’ with the topic of ‘How do we hear God in this crazy season?’

He preached out of Luke Chapter 2: 8-14 and Isaiah 9 and 42.

Our Christmas sermon series is called ‘Hark’ which means to listen, pay attention and look back.

Isaiah 9:6 says this:

“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace”.

The context of this passage is important as this was 700 years prior to the birth of Jesus. The people of God at the time were in rebellion and facing extremely hard times, and yet in the midst of this turmoil came this prophetic declaration. They were not deserving of the hark, just as we are not deserving. God’s goodness is not based on how good we are, but on how good He is.

What ties us and them together is the question: how will the Godly respond? In many ways, we have the same problem as the church of old; we have not heeded to what God has already spoken.

The first step to hearing God is repentance. A returning to what God has said, and a response of listening and obedience. We need to not only hear but to act on our hearing, as what we do with what God speaks or has spoken will greatly determine what we hear.

There are three groups of people today:

Those who hear and obey God’s message Those who hear and disobey God’s message Those who are yet to hear God’s message

Sometimes the only way to go forward is to go backward and acknowledge our sin and then move forward in the embrace of Gods promises.

Are you having problems hearing the voice of God today? Could it be that you have failed to hear what has already been said? Have you excused your lack of obedience?

Before we receive the new, we must acknowledge what we have done with the old. We must repent of what we have done or haven’t done with what God has already spoken.

Repentance is a gift, because as we draw near to God our unrighteousness is revealed and we are stripped of the things that hinder us from intimacy with God. Repentance is not just about judgement, it is about refinement, intimacy and acknowledging the Lordship of God.

We must prepare ourselves to hear. If we expect nothing, we will succeed every time. But, if we come in expectance that God will speak and prepare our hearts for Him to do so; He will.

This week Pastor Matthew preached a special message called "A Prophetic Warning for Today", based on the minor prophet Malachi. Malachi was written 100 years after the Jews returned to Jerusalem from the Babylonian captivity and after the temple was rebuilt. While God's people had many hope-filled prophecies of a coming Savior, the exile had not turned their hearts back to God as He had intended. God's Objections with His People:

1.The Love of God was Doubted (Malachi 1:2-5) - They did not fully trust God anymore. Instead of obeying Him, they spent their time asking God WHY?

2.The Presence of the Lord Had Become a Burden to the People (Malachi 1:6-14) - The Israelites had made a covenant with God on Mt. Sinai, where they committed to be God's people and obey His commands. We have the laws in Leviticus and specific instructions for the temple because that sacrificial system was how a just and holy God could dwell in the midst of a sinful and unholy people. Malachi had strong words for the Israelites to remind them that they were called to be a people set apart for God, and they were called to live like it.

Unfaithfulness is Now the Norm (Malachi 2:10-16) - The Israelites had married women who did not believe in God and had divorced their believing wives. This activity was a direct reflection of the unfaithfulness in their relationships with God as well. Malachi reminds the people that there was a great cost to following God.
Sin Becomes Good and God is to Blame for Injustice (Malachi 2:17, 3:1-5) - The Israelites had begun to normalize sin. They had begun to call good evil and evil good. We live in a society that refuses to talk about sin - a society that has begun to blame God for the injustice caused by the sin of the world!
Return to God and He Will Return to You (Malachi 3:6-12) - Malachi calls the Israelites to turn from their wickedness, to return to God's commands, and to cultivate His presence. God promises to return to us as we return to Him. We need to be all-in for Him, the world needs us to be all-in for Him. God tells us that if we go all-in, He will reveal Himself to us.
Living as Though It Is Pointless to Live as God Asks (Malachi 3:13-14) - The Israelites thought there was no benefit to living righteously, but Malachi reminds them that obeying His commands is always worth it! Many Christians believe that the "great and awesome day of the Lord" and His return is imminent, and whether or not that is true, the church needs not to be afraid of His return. The return of Jesus is a day where darkness is pushed back and Jesus returns in victory! (Malachi 4:1-3)

Have you given thanks yet? The pathway to thanksgiving.

This week Pastor Luke preached on the power of thanksgiving. Giving thanks takes our eyes off of our circumstances and emotions and puts it onto Jesus. It changes our countenance and our perspective, acknowledging that God is working out all things for our good and His glory.

The Apostle Paul was a great demonstration of thanksgiving in all circumstances. He was shipwrecked, whipped, beaten with rods and pelted with stones among many other severe afflictions and yet he was thankful in all things. This attitude should be the goal and reality for followers of Jesus.

Four steps to help us get there:

Acknowledge God in your life.

We need to give credit where credit is due by letting go of our possessiveness.

Matthew 5:3: ““Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

In other words: blessed are the ones who have broken the chain of the oppressor of self. It is a blessedness of possessing nothing.

Getting to this point does not require a fight but a surrender. We need to open our hands to God and acknowledge that everything we have is the Lords. This acknowledgement will keep us humble.

Learn to trust God

Our journey with God is filled with endless opportunities to grow and learn to trust Him. The Scriptures are filled with people who GREW in their faith. They LEARNED to trust God in every situation.

A lot of people are afraid to go all in with Jesus because they fear losing what they perceive to be good. We need to bring our situations, dreams, hopes and feeling under the jurisdiction of God’s character and purposes. We need to learn to trust Him in each and every circumstance.

Deal with your doubt

Doubting is not a sin, but remaining a doubter is. Perpetual doubt is a close cousin to cynicism and comes when we haven’t wrestled with God through our situations. This creates spiritual baggage which takes away the joy available to us and suffocates the life of Christ within us.

Doubt causes ingratitude and maximizes the situation and minimizes God.

We have to remember and live out Psalm 100:4 “Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name”.

Start Thanking

The goal is in everything to give thanks. We need to thank God for anything and for all things.

If you don’t know where to start with thanksgiving; think about and thank God for you your salvation.

This week Pastor Luke preached out of Psalm 139 with a sermon titled: “An ancient answer to a timeless problem”.

The timeless problem is our loss of perspective and the ancient answer is to think on God. It’s really easy in this cultural moment to lose perspective and forget about the power of God.

He broke his sermon down into three parts:

Think on God’s Bigness.

God is omniscient and omnipresent. We can never escape Him, and there is nowhere we can go where He is not. God is sovereign, He is in control and we need to cement our lives in that fact.

Think on God’s thoughts about you.

Through Jesus we get to enjoy God’s presence in the most intimate way. We get to enjoy the rights and privileges that are only reserved for sons and daughters. We get to walk in freedom and out of our sins. We have the gift of God’s presence.

Prize God’s thoughts while dealing with yours.

We need to process our emotions with God and ask Him to reveal to us any areas where we are not in line with Him. This process takes both time and humility. We need to seek and treasure the thoughts of our God.

Our response needs to be one of repentance, relaxation and refocusing.

This week Pastor Matthew concluded our series with the topic of “Relax in Jesus”.

His foundation was James 4:8, that when we draw near to God, He will draw near to us.

We live in a time where we are seeing cascading crises. As a nation, we are more polarized than ever before; divided and buckling under the weight of covid-19, political opinions, mental health issues, loneliness, addictions and stress. We have lost our ability to disagree with others while still loving them, which is relationships 101.

Anxiety is running through our world like electricity, and we as Christians must be the circuit breakers. The only way that we can do that is through truly learning to relax in Jesus. In John 6, the followers of Jesus ask Him, “what must we do to do the works God requires?” and Jesus answered them, “the work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.” To believe means to put our full weight on, to fully rely on, and to relax in. Jesus models this relaxation and contentment for us in two ways:

He understood the Father’s sovereignty. He was content in the Father, and the Fathers timetable.

We have to rest in the truth that God is in control. Seven signs we are doing this effectively:

We enjoy daily communion with Jesus. We listen to our bodies. We are not easily triggered. We are aware of the beauty around us. We have a deep sense of knowing that we have nothing to gain and nothing to lose. We enjoy a deep sense of “I am okay”. We know our limits.

Our number one work is getting to a place where we can relax in Jesus.

This week, Pastor Jermaine continued on with our series “how to follow Jesus into today’s world” with the topic of “the cost of Racial Justice”.

Using Paul and 1 Corinthians 9: 19-23 as a platform he broke his message down into three parts:

The cost The example The moral

Jesus speaks about counting the cost of following Him, and Paul labels that cost as: “I have become.”

This Greek word for become is ginomai – which means to come into being. We need to become something totally different, a new creation in Jesus. When it comes to racial reconciliation, this means we need to become before we do anything, as doing flows from being and not the other way around.

Becoming is more difficult than doing, because doing costs you something but becoming costs you someone. It costs you, you. It costs us our lives. Saying yes is much harder then living yes when it comes to racial reconciliation.

We can not become what we want to be, by remaining who we are. A lot of people want change without changing. The world wants butterfly results with caterpillar comfort.

We need to ask and answer the question: what does God need to do in us, so that we can be more like Christ in our generation?

Becoming is a journey and not a destination. God needs to change us, to make us more like Christ.

Seven keys to becoming:

Befriend someone of another ethnicity. Intentionally pursue to listen, learn and love them. Spend time with them. Not to change them, but to listen to understand. Find someone of another ethnicity to mentor you or hold you accountable in a certain area, and truly submit them. Most relationships had by a majority culture to minorities are help-based relationships. Read books from authors you wouldn’t normally, or those you don’t agree with. Introduce your children/family to novels, movies, histories, and heroes of other ethnicities and learn about them together. Learn about Black History. Those who don’t know their history, repeat it. Humbly, lovingly and courageously (as the Spirit leads) confront racial prejudice and stereotypes. Believe that as you’re being intentional, that it will matter and make a difference. Prayer and fasting.

The work of becoming is a spiritual work. We need to fight for commonality even when it goes against our preferences. When we do this, we are signing up to take shots, to be misunderstood, and to be confronted with things you didn’t know existed.

If we commit to become, we will eventually overcome. The world can not unconditionally love itself, or solve its own problems. The call to come and follow Jesus was a call to become someone. We are the answer, we need one another and we serve the only one who can make us new.

We need to not simply complain about what’s wrong, but ask God to do a work within us so that we embody what is right.

This week, Bec Isaacson continued on with our series “how to follow Jesus into today’s world” with the topic of justice and righteousness. Justice and righteousness do not have united definitions within our culture, which is why we have to go back to the Word of God. In Hebrew, the word for justice is mishpat. It means to give people what they are due, and to treat people equitably. In the Old Testament it had a lot to do with caring for vulnerable people; specifically orphans, widows, immigrants and the poor. This view of justice is also the basic foundation for human rights; the understanding that all people are made in the image of God and therefore possess inherited dignity and worth. The Hebrew word for righteousness is tzadeqah. It references a persons behavior not only internally, but externally and specifically in the context of relationship with others. Living righteously means conducting all relationships (in family, in society, at work, everyday) with fairness and generosity. Living out daily life unto the Lord. We see these characteristics not just in the Old Testament, but also in the person of Jesus.

Justice and righteousness are paired together over and over again in the Scriptures, and God set up Israelite society in such a way that if they obeyed His laws and did what He said, then the underclass and the poor would virtually have ceased to exist. As believers, our lives are to be marked not simply by the absence of sin, but by the presence of justice and righteousness; acts of doing that actively care for the poor, the vulnerable, the sick and the immigrant. It is a lifestyle that involves understanding mutual brokenness, living in relationship and giving not only finances but time, friendship, shelter, advocacy, support and care.

This week, Pastor Matthew continued on with our series “how to follow Jesus into today’s world” with the topic of seeking God’s face.

Seeking God and hearing His voice should be normal for the believer of Jesus. It is a practice that takes time and effort. As temples of the Holy Spirit we harbor His presence, and as people of His presence we should be hearing His voice. We need to seek His face, and then respond to what He tells us.

We need to ask God what He wants us to do and not simply assume we know what He wants. We need to be a people who will seek His face and hear His voice first and foremost.

We begin to hear His voice by knowing the Word of God and orienting ourselves towards Him. When we do this, He changes us from one degree of His image to the next. We get to be like Jesus, and that is what this world needs. We do not seek Him to be saved, He saved us and so we seek Him.

Omnipresence is the idea that there is nowhere that God is not. The problem is, there are so many people that don’t feel or experience His presence in day to day life due to their lack of awareness. We want to experience practically what we believe theologically, and in order to do that we need to be better attuned to the presence of God.

We serve a holy God, and we need to remember that; reestablishing the fear of God within our lives. As a church, we can not bow to convenience, or the worlds ways. We must bow to Jesus; seeking His face, hearing His voice and obeying His word.

This week, Pastor Matthew continued on with our series “how to follow Jesus into today’s world” with the topic of Identity and Purpose. We should do out of who we are. But, our doing will either affirm who we are, or corrode who we are. In order to ground our purpose and identity, we need to put aside other sources and turn to the source; the Bible. 1. Who are You? The Bible is the inherent word of God. It is both true and reliable, and we can answer the question of who we are through the Genesis account. If Genesis were all we had it would be enough to tell us what God is like, who we are, and what our purpose is. - We are God’s creation. We have a maker. He formed us. If we have a maker, then we must look to Him for our purpose. The most important thing in the creation account is the function that God assigns. He and He alone can define our function. We are created in His image and likeness. We are not God, but we are like God. We are male and female, that is how He made us and we have to align with His design. We are blessed. We are the ones who carry His breathe within us. We were made for His presence. We were made to house the very presence of God. We are good.

2.What is your purpose? We were made in His image, so that we would have dominion over the earth and so that we could rule. We are blessed in order to do this; to rule and multiple across the earth. We need to do everything unto the Lord, wherever we are. Matthew 28: 18-20 are the last words that Jesus spoke. They are the same command that God gave to Adam and Eve; to spread across the earth as His sons and daughters. That is our purpose. Jesus is coming back one day. What will He find us doing?

This week, Pastor Jermaine preached on “faith; the vision of the blind: now you see me, now you don’t”. He took us through Mark 10: 46 – 52, and the story of Jesus healing blind Bartimaeus.

This narrative has two major groups of people; the religious leaders (the Pharisees and Sadducees) and Bartimaeus (the blind man). The religious leaders were jealous of Jesus, and spent the majority of their time trying to discredit His ministry. They physically saw Him, but were blind to who He was. On the flip side, in Mark 10:52, Jesus told Bartimaeus that his “faith has made you well.” Although not able to physically see Jesus, Bartimaeus recognized Him as the Son of God. Where the religious leaders had sight, Bartimaeus had vision; and faith and vision are one in the same.

Similarly, we need faith to actually see the world and its spiritual reality. We are not simply called to see, but to have vision. To view people, circumstances and ourselves not just as they are within the physical realm, but within the perspective of faith, eternity and the power of God. We need to see with the heart and the mind, and not just the eyes. Sight sees what is there, but vision sees beyond what is there, and into what could be.

We need to move toward what we are believing God for, as faith steps out.

This week, Pastor Luke continued on with week two of our series “how to follow Jesus into today’s world” with the topic of Worldview. He broke his message down into three parts:

What is worldview?

Worldview is the funnel or filter through which we see the world. It is a combination of our ideas, attitudes, beliefs and basic assumptions about life. It determines how we think and act in the world.

Whether we know it or not, we all have a worldview, and for most people, it’s subconscious; a belief system that we only notice when it gets bumped (such as when we travel, or relate to people from a different country or culture).

The thing that should bump our worldview the most should be putting our faith in Jesus, and consequently reading and applying the Word of God. The Bible tells us that when we put our faith in Him, we are taken out of the Kingdom of darkness and placed into the Kingdom of light. This should entirely change our worldview.

The four pillars of a Christian worldview are:

The Bible. It is the final authority. God is real. He is personal and powerful. He determins what is right and wrong. Satan is real, as is the spiritual realm. Jesus is the only way.

Our World Today

The world we live in today globally connected, ethnically diverse and postmodern in thinking.

This postmodern thinking:

a) Provides a new way to understand words. There is no final meaning to words anymore, and an author’s intent no longer matters. The reader is sovereign and determines the meaning of a text. All interpretations are equally valid or meaningless.

We can contrast this with Gods Word in 2 Peter 1: 20-21. There is an author’s intent to the Bible, and it is not about our interpretations. His intent is all that matters.

b) Relativism is the way forward. We live in a world with no absolutes. What is morally right or wrong depends upon an individual’s beliefs. “The real world exists in shades of grey”.

We can contrast this to basically the whole narrative of the Bible, but one example would be Titus 1:10-13. Here at Waypoint we teach sound and unchanging doctrine. We teach absolute truths. We teach rights and wrongs. There is a true and a false; and they are all determined by the Lord.

c) The world has pluralistic views on “truth”. Universalism reigns, and we can pick and choose what spiritual things we want to experience. We build-a-god based on our own specific thoughts, needs and desires.

Contrast this to John 14:6 where Jesus says He is the way, the truth and the life. It is exclusive in nature.

We are fish swimming in the waters of our age and if we don’t stop to intentionally see the water around us, we will mix the worldview of our culture with that of Scripture.

How do we follow Jesus into today’s world?

We need to start following Jesus into today’s world rather than following the world with Jesus. When we follow Jesus, that truth needs to be a root level thing within our lives. It needs to determine everything else we do, think and say. We need to self-evaluate and ask: are we actually fully surrendered to Jesus? God wants and requires full surrender.

In order to do this, we need to think and act.

“Discernment is not knowing the difference between right and wrong. It is knowing the difference between right and almost right.” — Charles Spurgeon

We need to wrestle with the questions of life, and we need to think through our faith. We need to know what we believe and why we believe it. We need to have intellectual ground to stand on, as our world is desperate for culture shaping leaders.

We also need to be bridges. As Christians we are a colony of heaven, an outpost on earth. Our job is not to shut out the rest of the world, but to be a bridge between the Kingdom of heaven and the Kingdom of this world.

We were put here to be salt and light, a city on a hill. We need to take up that mandate, and go into the world.

This week, Pastor Matthew started us in a new series called ‘how to follow Jesus into today’s world;’ beginning with the sub-topic of discipleship.

We are living in and on the cusp of dark times. But when times get darker, the light gets lighter and the Lord needs His church to stand. The reason that we are here on this earth is for people to come to know Jesus. We are called to lay our lives down, and to know Him, love Him and obey Him. And the way we first and foremost do this, is by being His disciple.

The word disciple appears 266 times in the New Testament and generally means abandoning the things of this world and following Jesus.

Matthew shared ten points of discipleship:

A disciple counts the cost before following Jesus (Luke 14:28)

There is a cost to following Jesus and it’s everything; our body, possessions, time and futures. We need to be people who count the cost.

A disciple is totally committed to Jesus (Luke 14:26)

He is our first priority, and we need to be willing to go anywhere and do anything He asks.

A disciple is willing to carry his/ her cross and sacrifice for Jesus and His cause (Luke 17:10)

We are called to and will be called upon to lay our lives down for Jesus. It is a choice to yield to His will, and we must choose obedience at all costs. Obedience must be our only preference, but there is life in it.

A disciple is willing to give up all earthly possessions (Matthew 6:24, Matthew 6:21).

We must be willing to surrender all of our possessions if Jesus asks us to.

A disciple is immersed in God’s Word and experiences freedom in Christ (John 8: 31-32, Romans 12:2).

We need to soak in the Word so that we know and hear His voice. The Word of God can set us free from the lies of the enemy and empower us to overcome.

We cannot be a disciple without a hungry commitment to consume and obey the Scriptures.

A disciple really loves other believers (John 13:35, John 15:17)

If you don’t love other believers, you don’t know the love of God. We should love one another in such a way that it shows the world the character and reality of Jesus. We must be committed to love God, one another and those who don’t know Him.

A disciple abides in Christ, bears fruit and glorifies God.
A disciple is full of the Holy Spirit (Acts 13:52)

We need to bear the fruits of the Holy Spirit. We also need to serve and use our gifts.

A disciple is obediently following the desires of Jesus (Matthew 26:19).

Immediate, complete and cheerful obedience is the hallmark of a disciple.

We are members of His Kingdom, He is our King and it is a joy to serve and obey Him.

He will return one day and we will be held accountable. We can not assume the rewards of Jesus if we have not obeyed the wishes of Jesus.

A disciple is intimately involved in the mission of Jesus to make disciples (Matthew 26:16)

It is a command to go and make disciples, and He promises to be with us in the process. We need to be more than just believers in Jesus, we need to be His disciples.

This week, Pastor Alex finished up our 1 Peter series with Chapter 5: 1-11. Peter is addressing multiple groups of people in this passage; the elders and the young. Pastor Alex broke his message down into three categories:

The Flock Peter tells the elders to exercise oversight by being examples to the young. The young and the old need each other in the church; as the young need an example of what a Godly life looks like. Without the conjunction of generations, we are doomed to repeat the past. Humility is the way forward. It is “the only soil in which the graces root; the lack of humility is the sufficient explanation of every defect and failure. Humility is not so much a grace or virtue along with others; it is the root of all, because it alone takes the right attitude before God, and allows Him as God to do all.” (Andrew Murray).

The Adversary As believers, we have to remember that we are at war. We need to actively build our spiritual muscles so that we can stand firm in our faith and endure suffering. We need to keep our conduct honorable, glorifying God and doing good. We need to make time for Jesus, and not just fit Him in when it’s convenient. Being firm in your faith means you make time for your faith. Devotion to Jesus is our primary defense we have to withstand the adversary. Anything less than a surrendered life leaves us vulnerable.

The Promise In chapter 5 verse 10 the Lord promises He will “restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast”. We are responsible for our response to the Lord, and we need to build and stretch our faith muscles.

This week, Pastor Matthew took us through 1 Peter 4:12-19. Within this Scripture, Peter brings warning, correction and hope in an attempt to shift the perspective of the Gentile believers and their experience of hard times. How we go through hard times matters, and we need to see them as an opportunity for God to do an amazing work in us and through us. Matthew's three main points were: Hard times are going to happen, guaranteed.

We should not be surprised when hard times come, as we are living in warfare. We are going to get hit and we need to prepare for that. When we suffer, we need to identity with the sufferings of Christ and see it as an opportunity to draw into Him. If we learn to do this, we win and have victory.

If hard times are guaranteed, then make sure they are for the right reasons.

The Spirit of God and of His glory rests on us. We need to wrap our minds around that fact and rid ourselves of hated, bitterness and unforgiveness. They will ruin us, and they will make us suffer for things that are not worthy of our time. We are called to look like Jesus, and we need not suffer for anything outside of being like Him.

Trust in God and do good. We have to fully lean on God and give our lives completely to Him. No more luke-warm, on-the-fence Christianity. We need to live differently and righteously for His sake, as His ambassadors. We need to work hard at giving our lives away on behalf of the Gospel.

This week, Pastor Luke continued on with our 1 Peter series with Chapter 4: 1-11. He titled his message “Peters practical guide for not losing yourself in 2020.”

His five practical points were:

Arm yourself with the Gospel

In order to effectively live life in the center of Gods will and escape the temptations of this world we need to arm ourselves with the mindset of Jesus and the Gospel.

We can not just have head knowledge of the Gospel, but instead, we need to apply it to our lives. We need to arm ourselves daily and carry a Christ-awareness with us everywhere we go. We need to always be aware of God’s will and His presence.

Draw the line

The person we were before Christ is not the same as the person we are after Him. We need to draw a line around the things we used to do and be, and stop teeter-tottering between the will of God and who we were before Christ.

We need to draw the lines in our lives, and refuse to cross them, knowing that God’s grace is sufficient to cover all of these things.

Pray as if it’s your last day

Peter says that in order to pray effectively in this time, we need to be sober minded and self-controlled. We need to pray as if it’s our last day in order to keep our focus on the right, main thing.

We need to ask the Lord: what is your heart today? And we need to live from that place.

When tempted to sin, serve.

Peter tells us that above all, we are to love earnestly. We need to serve, in our hearts and with our lives, our brothers and sisters in the Lord. Nobody can truly love others if we take delight in finding and exposing the faults and sins of others, and so we need to stop doing that. We need to learn healthy confrontation for the sake of love and unity.

If we get annoyed with people, we need to deal with it, staying together for the sake of Jesus in order to show the world what the church actually is.

People are to know the disciples of Jesus by our love for one another, and we need to put that into very practical, everyday action.

Remember who your life is for.

Two things happen when we give our lives to Jesus; He gives us spiritual gifts, and He redeems our natural talents. These gifts are discovered in service, as we need to give our lives away.

Our life is not our own, it is meant for people – as Jesus’s heart is for people. Jesus died for souls. For humans. We need to take our spiritual gifts and our natural gifts and use them for the Glory of God.

This week, Pastor Matthew and Amanda took us through 1 Peter 3: 1-7.

From our cultural vantage point, this is a very difficult section of Scripture to understand and apply, and we must do the hard work of reading and understanding it through the lends of first century Christianity. Not doing so is very dangerous, as it opens the door for misinterpretation.

Under the Jewish law during this time, women were objects, owned first by their fathers, and then by their husbands. Wives could not leave their husbands under any circumstances, but husbands could dismiss their wives for any reason. Women had no rights, and could not make decisions for themselves: including that of religion.

The family religion was that of the husband, and it is almost unfathomable for us to think about what it would have meant for a wife to become a Christian in this time, without her husband doing do first. And yet, this is the exact circumstance that Peter is addressing.

Therefore, although this passage can read as very oppressive towards women through our twenty-first century American viewpoint; it is actually in many ways the exact opposite. The fact that Peter addresses the women as their own independent moral agents in this passage is in itself radical and revolutionary, as normally within this time, women would not have been addressed at all.

Additionally, Peter is not encouraging believing women to walk away from Jesus in their submission to their husbands, but instead, to be model wives; as their seeking to please their husbands is far more likely to win them over than arguing, disobeying or nagging. Their submissions in not out of fear, but obedience to Christ who treats them as full persons and allows them to rise above the threats and fears of the age.

Peter then goes on to address the husbands, commanding them to live considerately with their wives, which was also radical for the time. He tells husband to love and honor their wives as the physically weaker gender, something that dictates the effectiveness of their prayer life (and is therefore extremely important!).

Before God, husbands and wives are equal and joint heirs to God’s gift. Marriage is a mutual laying your life down, all the time, and there is no vacation from that. But this mutual submission actually brings life, as we were made to lay our lives down for others, for the Lord and for other people. Great marriages are established when two people lay their lives down for one another, constantly.

This week, Bec Isaacson continued on with our 1 Peter series with 3:13-22.

Following Jesus means being people who do good. People who are peaceful, united, sympathetic, loving, compassionate and humble. People who give gentle and respectful answers to those who ask about the hope that they have.

The Kingdom of God is upside-down, and following Jesus requires living out of a reverence for Christ. This reverence leads to a relinquishing of our rights, as we put Jesus in His proper place as Lord. Our rights to freedom, culture, reputation, family and sleep among others should never stop us from being obedient to the Lord and what He asks of us.

This morning, Pastor Jermaine continued on with our 1 Peter series with chapter 3: 8-12, titled “Wax or Mud”.

This section of Scripture is centered on suffering; and Peter teaches on how Christians and friends should treat one another. He implores the Christians to be united in both heart and mind. To be sympathetic and compassionate, loving one another.

We need to walk in other people’s shoes, to show practical love and compassion and to put the interests of others ahead of our own. We need to lay down our preferences.

Our response is our responsibility. We must seek peace and pursue it by building great relationships and having healthy conflict in the context of commitment.

We need the Lord to change and soften our hearts; to transform us into His likeness.

This week Pastor Matthew spoke to our current times; a world that is shaking. He took us through the history of the Bible and the place of God's people within it.

We need to be people who hear from the Lord, and not the world. We need to spend more time with Him than we do soaking in the news and social media. We need to lay down our rights so that people may know Jesus. We need to learn (or re-learn) to hear and obey the Word; unmingling our belief system from that of the world.We We need to come back to the Word of God. To hear it, read it, and obey it.

This week, Pastor Luke led us through 1 Peter 2: 18-25.

This passage introduces a section of the book that talks about household codes and answers the question: how do we honor God and suffer well where we are at, specifically in the context of slavery, marriage and government.

It speaks about turning the other cheek and responding to mistreatment and false accusations with humility, forgiveness, love and service.

This is not a natural human response, as we love to retaliate, get revenge, justify our actions, defend ourselves and fight back. We hate to look weak, and letting false accusations come against us is very difficult.

However, the response that the Lord calls us to is not one of weakness, but great strength as it is actually much more difficult to respond to suffering with restraint, forgiveness and unconditional love and respect for others.

How can we do this? By looking to Jesus, and just as He did – trusting the one who judges justly (v.23).

Three points to help us hope as we suffer unjustly:

God sees you and will help you.

Do not look at your situation, look to God and trust Him.

You will be rewarded

The Word makes it clear that we will be rewarded for our faithfulness, and our worst misery could very well be our best ministry.

You are imitating Jesus.

We can do this BECAUSE of Jesus. He is both our example and our empowerment.

This week Pastor Jermaine continued with our 1 Peter sermon series with Chapter 2: 11-17 under the title of: Tension #thestruggleisreal.

In this section of Scripture, Peter is prescribing the Christians a response on what to do when they are criticized for their faith.

As Christians, the world needs to see us living honorably; treating every human being, (regardless of their position, political affiliation, status, ethnicity and gender) with honor and dignity. We have to live from the understanding that above anything else, our allegiance is to the Kingdom of God and to Jesus as Lord.

Submitting to and honoring our bodies of authority does not mean that we can not disagree with them, it simply means that HOW we disagree with them matters. Unlike the world around us, we can not simply write people off with labels.

We need to be people who pray for our leadership and fight for unity in the context of relationship building. We must do better in honoring our governing authorities even when we are criticized and dishonored. We can do this because our identity is not in politics, but in Christ.

Our freedom is rooted in our servanthood. It is not a freedom to do what we want, but a freedom to do as we ought.

This week, Pastor Matthew led us through 1 Peter 2: 1-10.

We need to be people who taste that the Lord is good, and having tasted it, we need to want and crave it more and more.

The people that Peter was writing to had been born again. They had heard the Word, and responded. He was encouraging them to continue to study the Word, to read the Word, to devour the Word and to crave the Word. To continually deepen and strengthen their relationship with the Lord.

He tells them to do this via two things:

Taking off the old clothes.

They, and we, need to die to the old and come alive in the new. We need to get rid of all that is dirty, ruined and soiled as the “clothes” that we wore before Christ are not salvageable. Sometimes our old clothes are familiar and comfortable, but we must be rid of them as they kill and destroy us and our community.

Peter lists the five divisions (“old clothes”) of the church at the time: malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy and slander.

The church is so powerful because we can be unified in Jesus as we lay down our lives, preferences and opinions for the sake of one another. Our inability to do this today is killing us, as we do not have a message to preach to the world if we as a church are not unified. We need to lay aside the things that disunify us, and we need to pursue relationships with one another.

If we are not hungry for God, we need to check our hearts for these things and get rid of them, living lifestyles of forgiveness to stop bitterness from creeping in. We need to have the mind of Christ and eliminate envy from our lives and hearts.

2.We need to come to Him, and keep coming to Him

We are to continue to come to Jesus. This is what it takes to grow up. The secret to this growing is to keep coming to Him through seeking, repenting and returning. We need to be firmly anchored in who He is, and then who we are out of that.

This week, Pastor Jermaine led us in the third week of our 1 Peter series with “Light in Dark Times;” a look at chapter 1:13-25.

In this passage, Peter looks at three characteristics of a Christ-less life. They are:

A life of ignorance A life dominated by desire, and A life characterized by futility

Peter is writing in a Roman world where life was futile and there was no eternal life. He is calling the Christians living within this society to something different, to be holy as God is holy (v.15).

We are called to be unique, different and other as children of God. To be sober minded in our thinking and our actions.

Being a child of God is both a great privilege and a great responsibility. It means that God should have access to every area of our hearts and our lives, and that they must both be infused with the Word of God.

We are to live in fear and reverence before God because the price of our salvation was costly, and we will be held accountable for our actions.

In this dark time, we aren’t to stumble and fumble around – we are to live as children of light, conducting ourselves in reverent fear.

This week Pastor Jermaine continued our series on 1 Peter with part two: Lights in Dark Times. This book was written by Peter while he was in Rome. Peter (previously named Simon) was one of Jesus’s 12 disciples and wrote this letter to multiple communities of Gentile Christians within Asia Minor.

Pastor Jermaine calls us to live our lives courageously - to honor God and have our lives reflect the Gospel. He gave us four major points to consider:

1- Prepare your mind - "gird up the loins of your mind". Peter encourages us to put all the parts of our mind to following Jesus and doing our duty. We need to disengage our minds from all that would hinder us and prepare ourselves for the challenges we will face in the future. 2- Be sober - Peter exhorts us to maintain a balanced mind, being prudent, careful, tactful, and avoiding distractions. We need to think clearly and decisively and allow our minds to be transformed by God's Word (Romans 12:1-2) 3 - Think Hopefully - Peter calls us to be filled with hope in Jesus Christ and endure with confidence, because the faith-filled life is a marathon, not a sprint. We should meditate on things that are good, true, and beautiful (Philippians 4:8) 4 - Shape your conduct - Peter encourages us to be holy, obedient, and attentive to God's Word. We need to be mindful of our actions and be not conformed t the lusts of the world. We need to break the bridle of the world and its influence! Instead of being concerned with where "the line" is, we are called to "be holy in all of our conduct", for God is holy.

Pastor Jermaine shared that Peter emphasized these points because in times of trial or persecution, we need to "be strong and very courageous" (Joshua 1:8) and fully commit to being holy. Instead of hiding our light with our conduct, we need to let our light shine and reflect God's glory in the earth.

This week Pastor Matthew introduced our 1 Peter series with part one: An Explosion of Praise. This book was written by Peter while he was in Rome. Peter (previously named Simon) was one of Jesus’s 12 disciples and wrote this letter to multiple communities of Gentile Christians within Asia Minor.

Pastor Matthew read and took us through the first 12 verses of Chapter 1, in which Peter introduces a type of floor plan for the book. The width speaks to our identity in Christ, the height to God’s mercy, and the depth to suffering, and how it purifies us to respond with praise, glory and honor.

We are dual citizens between this world and the Kingdom of God. We are to be signposts within this reality, pointing toward the next. The whole world should be able to look at us and know there is a God, as the same power that raised Jesus to life is the same power that works within us. With Jesus we are not to simply make it through this life, but to do so with joy and with praise.

This week, Pastor Matthew led us in a sermon called ‘A New World;’ studying the book of Philemon.

Philemon shows us that the Gospel is not just about how people get saved, but a message about the Lordship of Jesus and therefore our everyday lives and decisions. Before we are anything else, we are Kingdom people which puts us in partnership with others. This partnership often extends to those who do not look, think, or act like us which is why we need to live out the life-changing work of reconciliation in our lives. If we are to reach the full measure of Christ, we all need to come together, and grow together in love by listening to the Holy Spirit. As this partnership does good work, it produces in us good things such as new ways of thinking, new ways of living and new ways of being.

Just as Philemon and Paul were bound together by love, partnership and respect we too must be living examples of the Christian practice of reconciliation, as it is the music which will heal our world. The Church is the only body who is equipped to carry this out as we are the ones who have first-hand experience of it in Jesus.

Reconciliation has a cost, but it is powerfully explosive if we give ourselves to it.

This week, Pastor Jermaine and Pastor Matthew sat down to have a conversation about race in response to the unrest and protests happening around the United States. They spoke about the Biblical process of lament, and how racism is a demonic stronghold in this world. Diversity and change do not happen organically and it takes intentionality to grow and develop in these areas. Therefore we need to lean in with the heart of Jesus and use the gift of reconciliation that He has given us. We need to respond with compassion, prayer and fasting; drawing near to our brothers and sisters in this time.

This week, Pastor Luke finished up our Wait on God series with 'Wait on God; In Power'.

He spoke about courage, and it being not the absence of fear, but action in spite of fear. Courage is rooted in our ability to overcome and press through, and the whole life and ministry of Jesus and His disciples was an example of this kind of faith-filled courage.

They possessed this kind of bold courage through three things:

They understood Gods presence They lived out God’s power by faith They knew how to pray and persevere

The promise of Scripture for the people of God is the presence of God, as He promises He will be with us at the end, and with us to the end. We need this presence because what God calls us to do is impossible in and of ourselves. He calls us to make disciples of all nations, which is impossible without Him and always requires us to take a step of faith.

Our Christian walk is always demonstrated by works done in faith. We need to foster and practice this faith regularly and intentionally by doing difficult things and embracing the discomfort that it brings. We need to meet and share with our neighbors, pray for the sick and regularly share the Gospel as true courage is planted when we give our lives away through our time, money and love for others.

We need to do these things from a place of prayer, as our lives are only as powerful as our prayers. It is in prayer, through prayer and by prayer that we get the perspective and perseverance to keep pushing forward. In order to see our society change, we need to burn for the things that Gods heart burns for, and we need to step out in faith and courageous action toward those things. When the Gospel takes root in our heart, we can’t help but be changed and change the world in faith and courageous action.

This week Pastor Matthew continued on with our ‘Wait on God’ series with ‘Be Filled’.

The message centered on Luke 3:16 and the baptism we receive of the Holy Spirit and fire. Like the burning bush, our lives should be consumed with the fire of God: fully alive, but not burnt up. Living in these strange times we need this fire like never before.

When we are filled with the Holy Spirit we have:

The presence of God. The purity of God. The passion of God, and The power and provision of God.

The Holy Spirit searches us, consumes us and refines us. His presence in our lives should radically and constantly be changing everything about us. His very presence should be setting us aflame from within as an all-consuming fire. If you are filled with His spirit, His presence should be the number one defining thing about you.

This refining process means that the purity of God should be our reality. We need to be open to and listen to the conviction of the Holy Spirit. We need to be careful not to limit what the Spirit of God wants to do in us, and we need to flee from loving the world or the things of the world.

Our God is a zealous God, and when He fills us, His zeal comes with it. Romans 11: 12 says “Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord”. Our zeal should be for the things that God is zealous for; for the world to know Him and for His church to walk in His fullness.

As we give ourselves to the service of this hurting world, the provision of the Holy Spirit will be there too. This is what happened in Acts, and what God is calling us into presently.

We need to ask for the Holy Spirit, constantly. We need to fan into flame the gift of God, feeding and nurturing our hunger for Him.

To recognize Mother's Day this week, Amanda Anderson led us in a study on Ruth. Ruth was set in the time of Judges, a time when "everyone did as they saw fit" (Judges 21:25). This is not unlike our current postmodern culture, where personal autonomy rules and the intended authorship of the Bible has often lost its meaning. Amanda led us through the story of Naomi; the loss of her husband and sons, her move, and Ruth's dedication to her. In Ruth 1:16 she said "where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God." Ruth's and Naomi's story is one of lament (where God is okay with us being not okay all the time) as well as redemption in the form of Boaz the kinsman redeemer. Christ is our kinsman redeemer, the one who comes to the aid of His people and helps those who need it. In turn, we should go to God in our suffering, pour out our lives for others, and live according to the Word of God (and not whatever is right in our own eyes).

This week, Pastor Jermaine continued on with our 'Wait on God' series with part three; Waiting In Prayer: the Secrets Out. His four main points were:

God waits for those who are willing to wait on Him.
God is at work in you in the waiting.
God reveals Himself to those who are willing to wait on Him.
God rewards those who are willing to wait on Him.

God can still use you in your messes and mistakes. He is looking for people who will prioritize His presence in the middle of this season, as He doesn't waste our waiting. The secret place in the presence of God is the fiery furnace where faith is forged and fortified. We need seek Him in the secret place, as there is a big difference between being still and doing nothing.

In this hour God is calling us back to a place of worship and adoration. God is looking for promise keepers, as He is a promise seeker. Many of us are not praying from promise, but from poverty. From defeat, and not from power power. Pastor Jermaine encouraged us to to pray instead with faith and expectation as God is looking for those who will remain, abide, stay, intercede and believe.

This week Pastor Luke continued on with week two of our new sermon series with ‘Wait on God; Together.’

He asked and answered the question: How do we as the people of God press into the Spirit of God and allow Him to do a work in us to make us more like Jesus?

Because, if we all do this as individuals then we will be ready for what God is doing collectively in our church and in the world. This is a historic time, and we don’t want to miss out on what the Lord is doing.

His three main points were:

The Holy Spirit

Christians are built differently because we have the Holy Spirit. He is a giver, our comfort, our peace and our power. He is like a wind who comes and fills, lifts and brings life to the believer. He is the one who convicts us and conforms us to the likeness of Jesus.

Unbelief and disobedience hinder this life and power, and it is possible for us to grieve the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 4: 29-32). If you’re relationship with God feels dead, you need to repent and receive the wind of the Spirit back in your heart and lives.

God wants to use this season of your life.

Hardships have great power to refine us and we all have the choice to use this time well through a process of repentance, refining and renewal. The goal of our lives is to bear fruit.

You’re not alone in this season.

We have our comforter and helper (the Holy Spirit) and we have each other. We need to lean into God both individually and collectively. We need to be not just hearers of the Word, but doers. We need to repent of sin and self-pity, spend time with Jesus and encourage one another daily.

This week, Pastor Matthew led us in celebrating Easter Sunday with the good news that Jesus is RISEN! He is alive, and because of that we have been extended the greatest invitation of all time; to be freed from our guilt, sin and shame and to know God as Jesus knows God, as intimate children with the Father. The death and resurrection of Jesus broke the power of sin and defeated every evil power and principality. There is no brokenness that is beyond His power and love to heal and to set us free. This invitation requires our response; to turn from our sin, to repent from running our own lives, and to invite Jesus in.

Pastor Jermaine take us on a reflective journey through Scripture as we stop and give thanks for the Cross on this Good Friday.

This week Pastor Luke led us in our Palm Sunday service; asking and answering the question of Jesus in Matthew 21:10 "Who is this?"

We serve a God who is in control, who is never hurried and whose timing is perfect. We have great hope in this season (and every season!) because our God is a faithful and trustworthy King. We have access to great peace when we are in close proximity to Jesus. This is great news!

This week Pastor Matthew finished up our Revival series with a sermon on anchoring in.

God is not bound by a building and wherever we are He is. He has the ability to refresh our souls in the midst of this crazy season.

In times like this what our souls are anchored to will become known. If our lives are anchored to idols such as our sexuality, our nationality, our body image or our personal "rights" then our souls and lives will shake alongside our world. We will be tossed to and fro and we will be forced to learn the hard lesson that our idols have nothing to offer us. They have no power, they can’t sustain us, they can't carry us and they can't help us.

However, if we quiet our souls and anchor ourselves into the immoveable God – then He will bring us refreshment. We have to be anchored to Yahweh, to Jesus. His peace. His joy. His goodness. His faithfulness. The truth that He is the same God yesterday, today and forever. He is the only one who can save us.

We anchor into this truth by knowing who He is, and who we are in Him as His sons and daughters. As His children we can know the love of the Father. A Father who wants to be with us, who loves us, who delights in us, who will never leave us or forsake us.

Likewise we will be good children who seek to please the Father, who receive His correction and teaching, who are secure in His love, who know His voice and who love to spend time with Him. God is the firm foundation on which our lives can be built. If we are anchored to Him who is immoveable, we too will be immovable.

This week Pastor Jermaine shared on the topic of race. He encouraged us as the church to come back to our first love (the Lord) by coming back to what He first loved (the world).

He emboldened us to see in color when it comes to compassion and understanding, and beyond color when it comes to love and acceptance. We must see in color because our experiences are so different to one another, and it allows us to walk in somebody else’s shoes with empathy and understanding. When we have a lack of understanding it creates condemnation and fear which in turn produces division and hatred.

Our supernatural love for others is from the Lord, it is not human nature and it is not our own. This is why the church is the answer to issues of race. We need to be the thermostat for our culture and not the thermometer. We must champion Gods kingdom call for the nations of the earth. We must go to ALL the world.

In the Lord’s prayer Jesus prayed “your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Jesus would not pray a prayer that wasn’t possible. We must go to ALL the world, not just where we deem worth going to.

This week, Pastor Luke led us into the start of a new series called Revival: Reform to Transform. The heart of this series is the prayer of Saint Augustine “Revive thy church, Oh Lord, beginning in me.”

The title of his sermon was ‘Preparing the Way of the Lord’ and took us through the life of John the Baptizer. Pastor Luke’s three main points were:

You need to exchange your vision for God’s calling Start with your heart Receive the grace and power of Jesus

As followers of Jesus we need to exchange our cultural values with kingdom values, submit our vision for life under God’s call for our lives (to prepare the way of the Lord and make disciples) and live out our faith as the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Our lives are not about going to heaven one day but bringing heaven down today. It’s not about getting into heaven, but about getting heaven into you. We need to live lives of repentance (recognizing, confessing and turning from our sin) lived out in community and discipleship. We need people in our lives who can call out our sin and baggage.

Pastor Luke concluded by offering two cautions: we have to bear fruit in keeping with repentance without becoming religious, or irreligious. We must rely fully on God and not allow our freedom in Christ to become freedom from Christ.

This week, Pastor Jermaine told his story in the context of Judges 6 and finding himself in the narrative of Scripture, God’s calling and the church. He encouraged us that if we have to, we need to do it afraid and learn to obey in the context of fear.

This week Pastor Matthew finished up our Psalm 23: Life Without Lack series by sharing on the topic of dying to self. His four main points were:

Death to self does not mean death of self
The flesh is not all bad
We all have desires and a Spirit
Desires must not dominate us

Dying to self is super important if we are going to live a life without lack. We live in a world where everything is telling us to constantly fulfill self, whereas Jesus calls us to the opposite. When grounded in a correct view of God, death to self is a rising up into the very life of God. Death to self isn't killing us, it's actually bringing us life.

Desire is the impulse to possess or experience something when and how we want it to. Desires are terrible masters, and yet so many of us have let our desires master us. We need to place God's dreams and desires in the most important position within our lives, because only in them will we find true life and what we were made for.

This week Pastor Jermaine led us in a sermon titled 'What's in your hand?'

We looked at the story of Moses in Exodus 4, the story of David and Goliath in 1 Samuel 17 and the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 in John 6. His emphasis was:

Everyone has something in their hand. You can’t use what’s in someone else’s hand. God can use whatever we have in our hands in ways beyon

The same God who led the children of Israel into and through the wilderness - also led Jesus into the wilderness. Dr. Smith shows us the very contrasting responses to very similar tests...

This week, Pastor Matthew continued on with our Psalm 23: Life Without Lack series to talk about faith.

He talked about the importance of speaking out our faith, and the synonymous relationship between faith and trust. The good news is that our faith can be transformed into one that allows us to experience God's full sufficiency. This is possible through a movement between three stages of faith:

Faith of propriety Faith of desperation Faith of sufficiency Like Job, our faith must carry us from a place of "I've heard about you" to "I've known you" as we learn to trust God not before or after, but within our moments of need.

Pastor Luke talks about spiritual warfare and the importance of knowing what is within us as we follow our Good Shepherd.

If we know who our Shepherd is... there is absolutely nothing to fear.

Pastor Matthew launches our new series in Psalm 23.

How will we respond to Jesus when He calls us? Pastor Alex takes us through his own story - as well as a few of those in the Bible who responded differently to Jesus.

Thank you for listening... we apologize for the poor audio quality! Pastor Matthew shares about the greatest Gift... and the great joy He brings for all people.

When we stop to gaze at the wonder and majesty of the night skies, we should be led to the feet of the One who created it all... and just as the Magi did so many years ago, worship Him.

Pastor Matthew takes us through the story of one who thought he would be remembered as a hero, yet we know him as the villain of the Christmas story. The hard truth is that there seems to be a little bit of Herod in all of us...

This week Pastor Luke led us into a study on Mary; specifically her song of worship outlined in Luke 1:46-55. In the face of very difficult circumstances (being unwed and pregnant, carrying the savior of the world, being open to public ridicule and ostracism, the dangers of first century pregnancy and childbirth etc) Mary chose to worship and magnify God - focusing on His greatness and His grand plan. She replaced her fear with faith, and her worry with worship and we have the opportunity to do the same; bowing our knees in humility and knowing the joy of Mary as we magnify her son.

Currently we are in our four part Christmas series titled 'From Wander to Wonder, experiencing the human and the holy'. Over four weeks we will be looking at the Prophets, Mary, King Herod, the Wisemen and the Christmas story as a whole.

The goal of this series is to take us out of wandering around in life, and instead bring us to the feet of Jesus in wonder and awe of who He is; and the purpose of our lives in Him.

This week, Pastor Luke introduced the series with the Prophets; examining how the birth and life of Jesus were predicted and came to pass throughout all of time. It was no accident where, when and how Jesus came to earth; a redemptive plan that God had put into action since the beginning of time. Luke honed in on two Christmas prophecies in particular, one found in Isaiah 7:14 and Matthew 1:18-22, and the other in Micah 5:2 and Matthew 2:6.

This week, Pastor Matthew led us in the last of our three part money series: Wealth and Wisdom. Looking at Matthew 16:19-24, he spoke about the juxtaposition of, and our choice between the two treasuries, the two perspectives and the two masters.

If we grasp hold of what Jesus taught us about money and possessions, it has the capacity to change our lives eternally and transform us internally. In Jesus, we have the incredible opportunity to trade temporary goods and currency for eternal rewards. At the core of it all, the question is this: who are we serving?

This week, Pastor Matthew talked about tithing: specifically the importance of aligning our hearts with the Lord's generosity, and not giving out of religious obligation.

Our current sermon series is called 'Wealth and Wisdom, What God Says about Money'. Over three weeks we will be exploring what the Bible says about money, heavenly rewards, eternity, possessions, giving, and the heart of Jesus.

This week Pastor Matthew shared about why we go to the nations; and why as a church we believe so strongly in seeing people who have never heard, hear the name of Jesus.

He spoke about the life of saying yes in the context of our unshakeable faith in the goodness and trustworthiness of God. Jesus calls us to the nations because He loves the world, as seen in the narrative of the Bible. God is still in the process of spreading His Kingdom across the world through His church, and we are invited to be a part of it.

This week, Pastor Matthew finished up our Church Beneath the Surface series with the sermon 'A model for loving others well.'

Going beneath the surface of our lives, and doing the deep transforming work of God within us allows us to supernaturally love God and others well. With Jesus as our example, Pastor Matthew gave us a three step model to live this out:

Entering Another's World Holding on to Yourself Hanging Between Two Worlds

This week Pastor Matthew walked us through the movements of processing sorrow, grieving and loss; equating the degree to which we grieve our losses to the depth and quality of our relationship with God, and the compassion we can offer to others.

Avoiding grief is the anthem of our culture, an issue which causes us to self-medicate, does damage to our souls, and stops us moving forward. The three step Biblical rhythm to grieving is:

1) Paying attention 2) Waiting in the confusing in-between 3) Allowing the old to birth the new

Listen to find out more!

This week, Pastor Matthew led us in a sermon titled 'Know Your Limits, They Are A Gift'. He spoke about the public health crisis of burnout in our society and how this is the not the way God intended life to be for us. He defined maturity in life as somebody living joyfully within their God-given limitations.

This New Life Sunday Pastor Luke Isaacson took us back to the heart of baptism; why we do it and why it maters.

This week, Pastor Matthew helped us to establish a theology of brokenness and weakness by leading us into the paradox between being Holy-Spirit empowered new creations and broken, weak human beings. If we are to be a healthy church full of healthy people we need to be reconciled to our brokenness through vulnerability.

This week, Pastor Matthew continued in our series with "Breaking the Power of Your Past"; talking about what it means to identify how our families have shaped us and how we would like to shape the future generations after us.

Pastor Matthew launches our new series about going beneath the surface of our lives and allowing God to bring light to - and heal the deep things that we tend to keep hidden.

Pastor Matthew concludes our series with this powerful message about living on mission.

Pastor Luke breaks down the importance of discipleship and community as we continue in our series.

Pastor Luke continues in our series with a message about what it looks like to be a disciple of Jesus.

Pastor Matthew breaks down the value of encountering God together.

Pastor Matthew launches our new series with these key "markers" of what a church full of maturing Believers looks like.

Pastor Matthew wraps up our 1st John series, driving home John's message about the incredible love of God - and how His love should inform everything we do.

Pastor Matthew covered most of chapter 4 of 1st John and digs even deeper into what God's love looks like - and what it looks like for us to love.

Pastor Luke continues in our series, sharing what it looks like to test teaching, fear not and love one another.

Pastor Matthew talks about the "crazy" message of Jesus... as we continue in our 1st John series.

Jeff W. from Central Asia talks about what it looks like to live within the Kingdom of God.

Pastor Matthew continues in our 1 John series.

Pastor Matthew continues in our series in 1 John with a message about our identity in Christ.

Pastor Luke talks about sin and how we can overcome it.

Pastor Luke launches our new message series in the Book of 1st John with a powerful message about God's Light in the midst of darkness.

Pastor Luke continues in our two-part series on finances with a message about generosity.

Pastor Matthew walks us through the significance of finances and how we can overcome worry.

Kristen shares about worship, expectation and the importance of unity within the Church.

Pastor Matthew talks about the purpose of the Church.

Pastor Matthew takes us on a journey to visit the empty grave... and invites us to let Jesus empty our own graves as well.

Pastor Luke talks about the journey to Jerusalem as we take a closer look at Palm Sunday and what it means to let go of our expectations of Jesus.

Pastor Ben talks about the importance of boundaries and how healthy boundaries actually help us stay in our own yoke with Jesus.

Pastor Matthew talks about the change that happens when Jesus comes into our lives.

Pastor Luke breaks down the differences between working under the curse and working under Christ.

Pastor Alicia talks about the unhurried nature of God, and how our hurried culture is actually not Christ-like at all, as Jesus always slowed down to stop for the person in front of him.

Pastor Matthew relates to so many about harmful self-talk, while encouraging all of us to begin to agree with God and what He thinks about us.

Pastor Matthew talks about the importance of knowing God as "Abba".

Pastor Matthew teaches us how we can have true peace in the midst of life's storms.

Pastor Jeff talks about the importance of living our lives in healthy rhythms with God.

Pastor Matthew talks about how relaxed Jesus was - even carrying the weight of his mission and ministry... and how we can live relaxed as well.

Dr. Smith walks us through the book of Luke with a closer look at Jesus through the lens of those around him - specifically those who responded in faith.

Pastor Matthew breaks down 5 things that can hinder the flow of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

Pastor Matthew teaches about the power of the Gospel through the ages.

Pastor Luke takes us back to the story of David and Goliath, and talks about the importance of faith and obedience as we move into the new year.

Pastor Matthew continues in our Christmas series with a very timely message about the gift of limitations.

Pastor Ben launches our Christmas series with a message about the gift of uncertainty.

Week ten: Pastor Luke talks about what it looks like to abide in Christ.

Week Nine: Pastor Luke talks about the practice of thanksgiving - and how it should be a more than just a holiday.

Week Eight: Dr. Eric Smith teaches from Ecclesiastes in this raw and profound message about the practice of rest.

Week Seven: Pastor Ben talks about the practice of prayer as we continue in our series.

Week Six: Pastor Alicia talks continues in our series as we talk about the discipline of reading the Bible.

Week Five: Pastor Luke continues in our series with a message about the discipline of fasting as we follow Jesus.

Week Four: Pastor Ben walks us through the importance of practicing silence and solitude in our walk with Jesus.

Week Three: Pastor Alicia continues in our series with a raw and beautiful message about the mercy of God to illuminate the shadows within our hearts.

Week Two: Pastor Luke continues in our series with a message about the rich young man's encounter with Jesus.

Pastor Drew Steadman from Antioch Waco shares about the importance of having the right perspective in this life.

Pastor Ben launches our new series, "The Way" with a message about Peter's encounter with Jesus.

Pastor Ben continues in our Heroes series with a message about enduring faith.

Pastor Luke takes us through the story of Rahab and breaks down the reasons that she is included in Hebrews 11 as a hero of faith.

Pastor Alicia continues in our series with a look into the life of Moses.

Bec Isaacson launches our new series with a deeper look into the life of Abraham.

Pastor Ben wraps up our series in Colossians.

What the emphasis of our lives? Are we emphasizing rules of authority, or love? Pastor Ben continues in our Colossians series.

Pastor Ben continues in our series, teaching from Colossians, chapter three.

Pastor Luke talks about the importance of keeping our lives firmly grounded in Christ alone.

Pastor Luke continues in our series and talks about Spiritual Maturity.

Pastor Ben continues in our series in Colossians.

Dr. Eric Smith talks about the key to bearing good fruit.

Katherine Fischer talks about our amazing Good Shepherd.

Pastor Ben teaches about forgiveness as we continue in our series.

Pastor Ben continues in our series in the Lord's Prayer and challenges us to live generously.

Pastor Ben encourages us that new life is for everyone and that it is not too good to be true.

Pastor Luke continues our Like This series and challenges us to be people who bring the Kingdom of God into the places we go.

Pastor Ben kicks off our Like This series and encourages us to rethink the way we think about God as we pray.

Pastor Matthew walks us through the historical significance of Jesus' resurrection found in the apostle Paul's writings.

Pastor Matthew brings our series in the book of Acts to a close with this powerful message.

Are you a "radiator" or a "drain"? Pastor Matthew asks important questions about who we are and what we believe.

Pastor Matthew talks about suffering and endurance.

Pastor Luke gets to the heart of idolatry as we continue in our series in the book of Acts.

Unity in the Church is vital to our effectiveness as change agents in the world... Pastor Matthew continues in our series with this powerful and challenging message.

Katherine Fischer talks about the obstacles we face and how we overcome them.

In this "tale of two visions", Bec invites us to encounter God and respond.

Pastor Matthew recaps our World Mandate conference and calls us to respond.

Pastor Matthew calls us to lay down our lives for the sake of the Kingdom.

Pastor Alicia takes us through some of the history of the temple and the Church, as we continue in our series.

Pastor Matthew launches our new series in the book of Acts.

Dr. Smith gives us practical tools to overcome fear when facing new opportunities.

Pastor Matthew wraps up our Christmas series with this powerful message.

Pastor Matthew continues in our series with a closer look at the Christmas story.

Pastor Matthew gives us a closer look at the life of a man in the Christmas story we can all relate to.

Pastor Matthew launches our Christmas Series.

Pastor Matthew brings our series in the book of Luke to an end.

Katherine Fischer talks about Zacchaeus.

Bec continues in our series in the book of Luke.

Pastor Matthew continues in our series.

Pastor Alicia continues in our series.

Pastor Luke shares about Jesus and why He is the Good News.

Pastor Matthew gives us a closer look at the life of John the Baptist - and what he might say about the Church today.

Pastor Matthew launches our new series in the Book of Luke.