Restore Houston Church Sermons: Recent Episodes
Restore Houston Church
At the heart of every sermon we preach is this simple truth – “grace restores all things”. Our world is broken. We all feel it. Things are not as they should be. And yet, there is a veiled beauty at work in our world – softening our hearts, teaching us to love each other, even our enemies, restoring our lives, giving us rest, filling our hearts with wonder and forgiving our wrongs – that beauty is grace! In all our teachings, in every sermon, in all our worship, and in all of our community we too participate in this veiled beauty as we learn to love and follow Jesus.
With every pursuit of our life we are asking this question - "Am I enough?" We want to spiritual haggle with God to ensure that we are. But being enough means offering all that we are. There is freedom here.
We might not actually think about ourselves as the greatest, but most of our life is spent being preoccupied with our standing. Jesus offers us hope!
When it comes to the topic of hell, most of us feel like we understand everything there is to understand. But there is about hell we might have never thought of before.
Change comes when we know God loves us. God loves us, so we can love Him. The formula for a full life is incredibly simple, which is why we find it so incredibly hard.
Grace is the only way to read Scripture. Reading Scripture through the lens of grace means we'll never go wrong.
Sometimes we pray for things we want and don't get them. It's disappointing, but we move on. And sometimes we pray that the deepest longings of our hearts could become realized, healed, restored and made whole and it doesn't happen. When God seemingly ignores our breaking hearts, then what?
Actually coming to terms with God's unconditional love for you is harder than you think. In fact, refusing to accept his radical love might just be the greatest temptation you face.
Follow along Paul's journey toward Lydia and see what unexpected and surprising works of God are in store along the way.
Through the story of Stephen, we will see how our great God likes to do powerful work through even the most everyday, messy, and human of circumstances.
All your toil, no matter how pointless and meaningless it may feel to you, are because part of God's highest good for you and your world. Resurrection gives us this grand promise.
The resurrection means that the power to set your life right rests entirely in God's power. And that's a good thing.
The resurrection of Jesus means that the hope of Jesus is light in our darkness. But understanding just how pervasive the darkness is can help us find the light.
Why is deep, actual change so hard for us? We spend much of our life being an enemy to ourselves. And after all the therapy, all the pills, all the self-help, all the striving, and talking, and discipline, we often find ourselves not very far from where we first started. Resurrection offers us a hope that changes all of that.
Join us as we walk through the events of Palm Sunday as told to us by the Gospel of John and see what those events have to teach us about belief, faith, and our own expectations of Jesus. Come eager and expectant as we ready our hearts, minds, and souls for the celebration of our Savior's life and victory over death!
We all struggle to feel like our life will actually mean something. Sometimes we call this struggle a midlife crisis or existential depression, or maybe losing our way. But a life of grace means that even when we can't see the end of our story from the scary middle, redemption is bringing about a beauty that will not leave us empty.
What if a big part of God's redemptive plan for the world required you to ask for grace from others? And when we say "grace", we don't just mean asking for more patience or understanding from others. We mean truly allowing others to rearrange their hearts, lives, and priorities to love us as God has called them to! Most of us will resist the idea. After all, isn't being a Christain all about loving others? But what if learning to open ourselves up to love was equally part of living a faithful life to God? Through the courage of Ruth, we will see how living as God has called us to live involves receiving love.
We might have sung the words of the old Sunday school song, "Jesus loves me! This I know!" But most of us had sung these words before life happened. They sounded true to us as kids, but then we grew up. And now, it seems like the more that life happens, the harder it is to see. Before we knew it, our love for God had grown as cold and distant as we perceived His love for us to be. Yet, a Moabite woman living thousands of years ago shows us that God's love for us is unwavering, relentless, and fiercely loyal. Will our souls ever reawaken to this love?
This Sunday we are going to tell a story! It is full of uncertainty and pain, fear and loss, disillusionment and bitterness. But like all good stories, we will find hope and loyalty, and a love that never quits. For our second Sunday of lent, we will dive into the life of someone married to a man whose name means, "My God is King", but whose life seems to work out as anything but that. It will leave us asking the question, "If my God is my King and He is in control, then why has my life worked out the way that it has?" She will ask this question, but before her heart is locked away in total bitterness, a relentless love from an unlikely hero will come to rescue her.
Join us this Sunday as we begin a new series, entering into the season of Lent, seeking to better understand its themes and significance by looking through the lens of a single and widowed woman from the margins: Ruth.
Unity is found when we are on the same page about what God is up to. Join us as we conclude our series on unity and the Nicene Creed by discussing the works of the Spirit, past, present and future.
We spend most of our life trying to understand God's will for us so that we can make the right decisions. Sometimes trying to discern His will for our lives can be like trying to listen to a concert with earbuds in. We can see it happening all around us but we are unable to internalize it. We want to do what He wants, so why is it so hard to discern His will? What if God's will isn't so much something we try to follow as it is something we become? What if it is more about being whole than making choices? Join us as we explore 1 Corinthians 2:9-16 this Sunday!
Actually, you've already lived through one! Usually, the question, inspired by fear, gets poised something like this, "Are you ready? Because if you're not, you'll be in trouble because it's coming!" But the apocalypse, as Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28, is about God rescuing a hopeless humanity. Instead of bringing death, God will do away with death. The apocalypse is about God's love for your triumphing over all your darkness. Jesus' rescue of your heart was an apocalypse that has already happened. This is why you can say you have lived through God's apocalypse. Or rather, you have been made alive because of it.
We have always heard that God became human like us. But did we stop having something in common with Jesus after His resurrection? Did He go back to being just God, finally shedding off all that we had in common with Him, while we just stayed as the humans we always were? Or did his resurrection mean that we will forever and always have something in common with Him? The answer to this question is the reason Paul says that "against all hope" we will never truly be lost even when we are convinced that we will never be found.
Why does it matter that God is both Father and Son? What do we miss out on when we lose sight of this fact? What does "begotten" mean anyway? Join us as we explore these questions, hoping to fall more in love with the essence of God along the way.
The secret to trusting God is knowing that you cannot comprehend Him. It's counterintuitive. We know! But because we know that God is good, the creator of all things both visible and invisible, our inability to understand what God is up to becomes evidence for us that He's got us.
Most of us admit that we do not have consistent faith lives. But we aren't quite sure what the remedy is. The quality of our faith seems so dependent on how we are doing as individuals at any particular point in our lives. However, this is not the way the New Testament understood faith. When we understand faith only in a private, personal way, our faith will end up being dependent only on us. The problem is, we are an incredibly unreliable anchor for our own souls.
We are crushed by the weight of having to justify our existence to everyone else. All day long we strive to prove our worth. We live with the fear that we will fail - as a parent, as a child, as a provider, as a spouse, as a friend - and that we will be seen for what we are when we do. How could we ever actually be accepted if we don't produce? But God's justification of us offers radical freedom from all of this. Join us as we explore God's righteousness and justification in Romans 5:18-21.
Many of us will try to have a magical Christmas this year. So why won't we? The holidays exaggerate the false belief that we can curate our lives. We want to know our lives are headed in the right direction, and the holidays become a time for us to confirm that they are. But what if they aren't? The Advent of Christ relieves us of the burden of trying to manufacture our lives to produce results that will make us feel ok about ourselves. Instead, if we can use the Advent season to face our life (and our powerlessness over it) as it really is, we will find the Incarnate Christ waiting for us in love and mercy.
Join us as we spend this final week of our series on justice discussing where exactly we as people of faith fit into that story. What does it look like for us as believers to live out Christ's Kingdom and God's universal mission for justice, today?
Christ has come and He brought with Him a kingdom of eternal blessing and justice. The better we seek to understand that kingdom, the better we may begin to understand the nature of justice itself.
Justice can feel like a loaded term. As we begin our three-week series on the topic, it's important we know what we mean when we say it. It's important we know what God means when He asks us to pursue it. Let's start from the very beginning and learn what God's heart and mission for justice have been all about throughout the past, present, and future.
One year ago we started out to be a part of God's plan to restore all people to His love.
When trying to understand hell, we have a simple challenge. If God is love (which He is!), and if God is everywhere (which He is!), then we are left with only one option when we are trying to understand hell: we can only understand it in light of His love and His presence.
Church is not something you go to. You are church! You are in Christ, and Christ is in you. And did you know that others in your church are called to imitate the Christ they see and learn about in you? You may not even know that you have this kind of leadership in your church, but you do!
For Paul, the end times meant one thing - hope. And this hope meant that Paul could love with reckless abandon because he knew that in the end, no matter how messy loving others in Christ might be, God would ensure His goodness would prevail.
What if life in Jesus was less about trying to find out what's right and wrong with you, and more about discovering the joy of God's Spirit within you?
Trust and hope are deeply connected. Losing hope first involves losing trust. Learning to trust again means having hope again. Paul encouraged his church in Thessalonians by ensuring their trust in one another stayed alive.
Church is family! This Sunday is going to be an extra beautiful Sunday because we get to share it with our precious little ones! Pastor Nicole will walk us through what it is like to see one another as our joy and glory, just as Paul so affectionately saw his churches in 1 Thessalonians 2. Our children will be leading us in worship, and we will be dedicating several of our children to the Lord and to His great love for them!
The church is relational. It is a space of deep affection and love. Did you know this is how God exists? The Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father, and the Spirit flows forth in grace and peace from them to us! It's so easy to forget this, but the early church in Thessalonians 1 was defined by strange friendships. And to make it even weirder, these relationships of deep connection and love looked a lot like God Himself. This Sunday we kick off our Thessalonians series by exploring how beautifully relational God is and how we are made to exist just like Him.
Psychiatrist Thomas Hora believed that most modern relationships would be characterized primarily by disappointment. A western consumerist mindset has shaped how we relate to one another, even our loved ones, creating relationships that constantly feel discontent. Like interlocking fingers of two hands placed together, the fingers can intertwine only to a point before no more movement is possible except by going backward, causing friction and pain among the too tightly woven fingers. But Psalms 146 shows us a different path to joy for every part of our lives, including our relationships. It starts by letting go of our need to justify ourselves or to justify others' presence in our lives and ends in unrestrained happiness which flows from a genuine trust in God.
We all want to control our lives, but we often end up controlled by our need to control. Not being in control is a gentle invitation to trust God. Trusting Him means He will teach us to dance freely even in the spaces that have always most defeated us.
God’s love for us is so beautiful and so profound that it is often unrecognizable to us at first. And so for us to learn to see it, God must lead us through unrecognizable places. These unknown places are often the most uncomfortable. But when we begin to see all the days of our lives as places of God’s mercy, we cannot stay resentful or discouraged about even the most disappointing moments of our lives because they all become moments that God uses to shape us for his purposes.
You might have been a part of a church or religious setting where your righteousness was the price of your acceptance. But such a price is a crushing weight to carry. So why do we think God's acceptance of us is similar? With grace, our greatest failures become the space where we meet God.
What if the secret to facing anything in your life wasn't found in how strong you are, but in how weak? The path to victory starts with need. There is no other way.
In the midst of an anxious and weary week, we have some special things happening at Restore this morning. Join us for our “Ask Me Anything Sunday!” as we answer your questions about the Bible.
We are often preoccupied with ourselves in a way that keeps us restless, resentful, and anxious. So how do we fix it? Why is it so hard to find true, lasting, soul-settling contentment in our lives?
Most of us want Jesus to help us get through the life that we already have created for ourselves. We would like Him to show up here or there, maybe throw a few blessings our way or help work some things out in our favor. But Jesus did not come to help you get through life, He came to give you an entirely new one! And new in every way! One of the reasons we might feel frustrated or disappointed with God in our life might be because we keep trying to fit Him into an old life with old priorities. Don’t settle for just letting Him get you through, let Him make you new.
You’ve heard the “Good News” right? But has it changed you? Why does the “Good News” of Jesus feel more like average news? We might be underestimating Jesus. It’s happened before. Fortunately, His love warms our cold hearts and awakens our sleepy souls.
The Christmas story shows you that before any response or acknowledgment from you had ever been offered, God set about your restoration. His Goodness towards you was not (and is not) brought about by yours. His faithfulness was not (and is not) dependent on yours. The Truth of God revealed in Jesus invites us to reconsider how God moves, acts, and orchestrates our lives. Like waves crashing upon the shore of the ocean, John helps us to see the restoration of God for us as love upon love crashing on the shores of our hearts.
When the Word, Jesus, became flesh, He took upon Himself all of the weakness, frailty, sinfulness, and corruption of the human condition. Our condition. And because Jesus united with us, we are now united with Him. All our corruption, all our darkness, all our brokenness, is being driven out by His goodness. It’s beautiful. It’s life-giving. It’s what Christmas is all about.
The glory of Christmas is seen in a love from God that overcomes a world that actively resists His love. Even in your own soul, when there is no life, when the darkness is incomprehensible, when the truth is muddled and unrecognizable, His Love is making a way. Every part of your life, even the parts that do not know God or honor Him, are becoming places shaped by His love for you.
What kind of life does Christmas call us into? For starters, it calls us to never make peace with the brokeness around us or in us. We might have grown so accustomed to accepting pain, depression, fear, injustice or disconnection as simply part of our existence that we forget that God came to vanquish them and to give us life. In our discouragement, we may make peace with their presence, but the presence of Jesus has come to drive them out of our hearts. This week we look at John’s poetic and beautiful introduction to the purpose of Christmas in the first chapter of his gospel. There is more hope in his words than we can possibly imagine.
Imagine that in your most life-defining moment the God of the universe, the Architect of the stars and Designer of your life, came to you and directly asked you this very simple and open question, “What do you want me to do for you?” How would you answer? Would you even begin to know how to respond? For many of us, we may not have had even a still moment in our life recently to stop and think about it. But if we did, what would we say? Would we even know to ask for the right thing? What if what we asked for was too small? Or too big? What if it is not the thing He wanted to give us?
Jesus has a bizarre conversation with a woman. It is probably one of the strangest conversations He ever has with someone. Yet by the end of it, Jesus declares that she has defined true faith for everyone. Her secret? She grasped grace like nobody else could.