Andy Talks

In this final reflection on Ecclesiastes 12, the Teacher brings the entire book to its ultimate conclusion after wrestling with wisdom, pleasure, mortality, anxiety, and the fleeting nature of life. After exploring nearly every avenue for meaning, Ecclesiastes ends with a simple but profound truth: “Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of everyone.” The devotion explains...

In this reflection on Ecclesiastes 11, the Teacher continues offering wisdom sayings while wrestling with anxiety, uncertainty, and the temporary nature of life. Though Ecclesiastes often feels filled with angst and existential frustration, the chapter also points toward an important truth: life is fleeting, and recognizing that reality can bring wisdom and clarity. The devotion explores how human...

In this reflection on Ecclesiastes 9:17–10:20, the Teacher continues exploring the value and limitations of wisdom. While wisdom is portrayed as better than foolishness, stronger than weapons, and worthy of pursuit, it still cannot remove life’s uncertainty or guarantee control over the future. The devotion contrasts the Teacher’s growing cynicism with the Christian conviction that wisdom itself i...

In Ecclesiastes 9, the Teacher points out that life is uncertain, death comes for everyone, and the things we often chase—success, power, recognition, possessions—cannot give lasting meaning. The Teacher’s repeated call to “eat, drink, and be merry” is understood not as a call to shallow living, but as an invitation to find meaning in community, shared meals, conversation, and time with the people...

In our Traditional message from Pentecost Sunday, Andy shares with us from Acts 2: 1-21. We see how God restores what sin has taken. In Babel, sin leads to division, but Pentecost restores that, and through the Spirit, we have unity.

Ecclesiastes 8:9–17 wrestles honestly with the unfairness and brokenness of life in a fallen world. While the Teacher becomes cynical as he sees evil rewarded and justice delayed, the message for Christians is different: we are called neither to deny injustice nor to surrender to it. Instead, we are called to resist evil, remain faithful, and hold on to hope because we belong to the God of resurre...

In this reflection on Ecclesiastes 8:1–9, the Teacher wrestles with the complicated relationship between wisdom, authority, and faithful living. While Scripture calls believers to respect and pray for governing authorities, the Bible also shows prophets confronting unjust leaders, reminding us that our ultimate allegiance belongs to Christ rather than any earthly power. Drawing from examples like...

In this Thursday reflection on Ecclesiastes 7:15–29, the Teacher's closing observation — God made human beings straightforward, but they have devised many schemes — frames the whole passage as a meditation on wisdom and its limits. The Teacher says it's good to take hold of wisdom without letting go of the acknowledgment that you might be wrong, and the reflection develops that into a pa...

In this Wednesday reflection on Ecclesiastes 7:1–14, the Teacher's seemingly morbid observations — that the house of mourning is better than the house of feasting, sorrow better than laughter — are rescued from mere pessimism and read as genuine wisdom about suffering and formation. The reflection is careful not to romanticize suffering or suggest we should seek it out; Christianity calls for...

In this reflection on Ecclesiastes 6, the Teacher continues wrestling with the emptiness of life when meaning is sought in wealth, pleasure, work, or achievement. Though these things are not inherently bad, they cannot bear the full weight of the human soul or provide lasting peace and purpose. The passage serves as a warning against building our identity on temporary earthly things—whether money,...

In this Monday reflection on Ecclesiastes 5, the chapter's three movements — reverence, humility, and contentment — are unpacked with practical pastoral honesty. The call to guard your words before God and take your vows seriously is a word about integrity: promises to God and to each other matter, and we shouldn't make them lightly. The observation that oppression and injustice are ever...

In our message from May 17, 2026, Andy shares with us from Acts 1: 6-11.  Jesus sends us out to the people we know and love, as well as to the people we are tempted to hold with contempt, to be His witnesses, to show all the world His goodness and grace.

In this Friday reflection on Ecclesiastes 4:9–16, we see the Teacher's familiar refrain of vanity gives way to a genuinely hopeful word: two are better than one, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. The reflection unpacks Wesley's concept of social holiness — often misunderstood as primarily about social action, when Wesley actually meant something more intimate: the communal acco...

In Ecclesiastes 3:16–4:8, the Teacher reaches perhaps his lowest point — wickedness in the place of justice, the tears of the oppressed with no one to comfort them, and the devastating conclusion that the never-born are better off than the living. The reflection uses this as an entry point into how to read Ecclesiastes responsibly: it is wisdom literature and poetry, not history, and building a th...

In this Wednesday reflection on Ecclesiastes 3:9–15, one phrase anchors everything: God has put a sense of past and future into their minds. We are wired to look backward and forward simultaneously — to remember, to plan, to worry, to dream — and that tension so often pulls us out of the only moment we actually inhabit: now. The Teacher keeps returning to the same simple refrain throughout his sea...

In this Tuesday reflection on Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 — the passage made famous by the Byrds' Turn! Turn! Turn! — the full sweep of human experience is named honestly and without pretense: birth and death, planting and uprooting, weeping and laughing, war and peace, love and hate. The wisdom literature, like the Psalms, is a gift precisely because it names what we actually feel and go through, and...

In this Monday reflection on Ecclesiastes 2:12–26, Solomon's existential spiral — the wise and the fools both die and are forgotten, and whoever comes after me might waste everything I built — is met with a gentle diagnosis: delusions of grandeur, and the worrier's tendency to catastrophize. But buried in the despair is a landing worth holding onto: there is nothing better for mortals th...

In our Traditional sermon from May 10, 2026, Andy shares with us from John 14: 15-21.  Jesus promises not to leave us orphaned.  With changes in life, church, and the world, we can feel unsettled, like wet cement.  But then we remember that Jesus writes His name up the wet cement of our hearts.

In this Friday reflection on Ecclesiastes 2:1–11 — offered on Mother's Day weekend, with a pastoral acknowledgment that the day lands differently for everyone — the Teacher's second experiment in the search for meaning is examined: pleasure. Having tried wisdom and found it vexing, Solomon goes the other direction entirely, becoming history's most extravagant hedonist — houses, vine...

In this Thursday reflection on Ecclesiastes 1:12–18 — appropriately falling on the National Day of Prayer — the Teacher's surprising conclusion that wisdom itself is vanity is unpacked honestly and personally. On the surface it seems to contradict Proverbs and the Psalms, which celebrate wisdom as a gift worth seeking. But Solomon's point isn't that wisdom is bad — it's that wi...

In this Wednesday reflection that opens a new series in Ecclesiastes, the shift from the New Testament epistles to Old Testament wisdom literature is grounded in a simple observation: we are always searching for meaning, and most of the things we search in come up empty. The Teacher — almost certainly Solomon — opens with one of Scripture's most sobering refrains: vanity of vanities, all is v...

In this Tuesday reflection that closes out Jude, the letter's final movement is from warning to mercy. Jude tells his readers to remember what the apostles predicted — scoffers will come, driven by their own desires, causing division — but then pivots immediately to the posture of the faithful: build yourselves up in faith, pray in the Spirit, keep yourselves in God's love, and look forw...

In this Monday reflection on Jude 5–16, the letter's central concern becomes clear: these false teachers are not being led by the Spirit but by their own unchecked desires — almost certainly the Gnostics encountered in Second and Third John, who believed the body was irrelevant and therefore lived however they pleased. Jude's devastating poetic description of them — waterless clouds, twi...

In this Friday reflection on Jude 1–4, Jude's urgent appeal to contend for the faith is set against a backdrop we've seen all week: the problem of wandering teachers. Where Third John commended a church for receiving the right teachers, Jude warns a church that has received the wrong ones — intruders who have twisted grace into a license for anything-goes living and in doing so have deni...

In this Thursday reflection on Third John, the letter's central cast — faithful Gaius, self-promoting Diotrephes, and well-regarded Demetrius — illuminates a practical question about the early church: how do you know whether to trust a wandering preacher? The answer is apostolic authority and community accountability, which is part of how ordination developed — a traceable chain of trust, so...