Eternity Church PodCast

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. I wonder if we really understand how God sees us. Some of us go through life under a cloud of condemnation, and, failing in our warped views of perfection, we ascribing those failures to God. Others seem to be so carefree they flout any form of righteousness that doesn’t easily fit into their lives. Both extremes fall short of seeing ourselves through...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. A few weeks ago, I was translating my way devotionally through James’ first chapter, and the twelfth verse floored me. In past translations, I spent more time focused on the nouns and adjectives, the keywords James draws our attention to through repetition:  blessed  (connecting us back to his brother Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount),  trials  and the  crow...

A Sunday morning sermon, scripture reading, testimony, and song by Mike Zello and ther Beauty For Ashes Ministry Team. In the New Testament, we find another letter to the church in Corinth. These people, filled with the Spirit and passionate about God’s call on their lives, were nevertheless struggling to live out their faith in ways pleasing to the Lord. They were rankled by Paul’s apostleship an...

A Sunday morning sermon by a visiting missionary. In the New Testament, we find another letter to the church in Corinth. These people, filled with the Spirit and passionate about God’s call on their lives, were nevertheless struggling to live out their faith in ways pleasing to the Lord. They were rankled by Paul’s apostleship and his frequent sufferings. They had “a better way” in mind, one in wh...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. Have you ever felt the ground shift beneath your feet?  I’ve shared before about a time when I was home on the island, sitting with my Dad in the living room, when I felt the earth shake beneath my feet. Not only my feet. I felt it in my core. So did the recliner. So did the house! It was as if the entire island was shaken! And it was. Mount Cameroon,...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. When was the last time your life turned upside down? On the rollercoaster of life, it’s only a matter of time before we’re flipped again. Sometimes we can see it coming, but other times… not so much. Sometimes these experiences leave us feeling sick to our stomach, but other times they reorient us in ways we didn’t know we needed. It’s the old adage: t...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. I find it strange when people think Christians are narrow-minded,  but even stranger when too many of us prove them right!  Reading the grand story of the Bible, we find God’s people as fish out of water, constantly finding new ways to communicate the truth of God’s character through the languages and cultures around them. Joseph went from being a slav...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. We live in a world of emojis. Somewhere along the way, we took the simple, yellow smiley face of the 1970s and turned a few well-drawn lines into an entire hieroglyphic language!  What can’t that little face do?!  One of my favorites is being mind blown. It expresses so much. It depicts shock and surprise. It symbolizes the sheer intensity of a moment....

A Sunday morning presentation by Kings King International Ministry. Intergenerational ministry is a gift, and it is something that comes naturally to us at Eternity Church. Everywhere you look, you see young and old serving side by side, encouraging one another in faith (1 Thessalonians 5.11). But as natural as this is for us, it still takes intentional effort. At times, especially when we are in...

A Sunday sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. It’s been said that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This is painfully true. More than we might care to admit, we approach complicated tasks ill-equipped and—not sure what to do—we start swinging our proverbial hammers. When God blesses us, we nail down His goodness in our lives with the hammer of praise. But when we experience suff...

A Sunday sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. We’ve been to the moon, amazing 238,855 miles from earth! A few months ago, astronauts circled the moon again, and it was hailed as a great achievement. And it is! But every time we step out into space or live for protracted periods of time on the International Space Station, I can’t help but remember that we’ve yet to reach the bottom of the ocean’s depth in...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. We need to learn from lament. From Leah to Lamentations, from Israel’s ancient patriarchs to the Church’s Apostles, we are embraced by the grace of lament. When we strive to live endlessly happy (unrealistic) lives, we miss the grace of lament which seasons our prayer life. Put it this way: biblically, we have a whole spice rack available, but we only...

A Sunday sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. We surprise ourselves with pain when we ignore the grace of lament. We close our ears to the voice of grief and suffering in a naïve hope that what’s out of sight will remain out of mind. We read the Bible like a bouncing ball, alighting on the passages we find encouraging and rush past the others we find discouraging. We love to find ourselves with the Lord o...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. I never tire of seeing God at work in our lives. Too often (like most), I only want to see the ends, but the means are where the details shine. Leah’s life is a testimony to this. She grew up in a dysfunctional family, the daughter of father who never saw her worth, treating her as a commodity for his financial future. She spent the early years of her...

A Sunday morning sermon by Peter DuMont. What does it look like to be rewarded by God? So far in our “Leah Beloved” series, Brett has shown the ways in which Leah’s story demonstrated to the Exodus Generation that God sees, hears, and responds to his people according to “ways and means” different from our own! This week we will look at the birth of a fifth son to Leah. She celebrates him as God’s...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. An amazing thing happened between the birth of Levi and the birth of Judah. It’s as if something finally clicked into place for Leah. For at least the first three to six years of her marriage to Jacob, Leah exhausted herself. She was the tradwife par excellence with nothing to show for it. We can hear the desperation in her prayers. Everything in her w...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. I think the deeper we step into the story of Leah, the more we find a mirror image of ourselves. We all long to be seen, especially by those closest to us, and we all want to be heard. It can be deeply frustrating when we feel our words are falling flat all around us, unheard. We all want to be held, not just physically, but emotionally. We understanda...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. The Bible is full of so many amazing stories! Obvious right?! Okay, but humor me for a moment. The mind reels as we read of the cosmos created. The pulse races as the rain beats against the side of the ark and then lifts it up into the waves. The heart swells when Noah and his family stand again on solid ground gazing at the rainbow, the soaring symbol...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. As I’ve been praying and preparing the summer series for our youth, following the repeating imagery of God’s presence in fire, I'm struck afresh by the faithfulness of God to us across the ages. In the Old Testament, at one of Abraham’s lowest moments, God anchored His promise to the patriarch by making a covenant with Abraham; one for which the Lo...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. In the early church there was a man named Ignatius (30-107 AD). He devoted his life to the way of Jesus, was discipled by John, and served as the bishop of Antioch. In his final years, as a living witness to the rule and reign of Jesus, Ignatius was condemned by the Roman Emperor Trajan. In chains, he was brought to Rome to be executed, torn apart by w...

A Sunday morning sermon by Jordan Crews.

A Sunday morning sermon by Peter DuMont. In our movement toward celebrating Pentecost we are examining the Old Testament texts quoted by Peter the Apostle in his powerful Acts 2 message to those gathered in Jerusalem as the gift of the Holy Spirit fell upon Jesus’ followers. This Sunday we will be examining Psalm 110, which Peter quotes from to demonstrate Jesus’ fulfillment of a long-held hope of...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. Have you ever felt like the wheels of your life were coming off? A few years ago, Elise and I were hosting family in Dakar and took them to one of our favorite places: Lac Rose. It is a naturally pink lake surrounded by deep flowing sand dunes just off the Atlantic coast. The best way to enjoy it is to get out of the car and get on a four-wheeler. So,...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. Lent always takes us lower than we could ever fathom. On the journey to the cross we are confronted with our own spiritual deformation—how we’ve exchanged the image of God in our lives for “the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life” (1 John 2.16). The Lenten season is like a pumice stone against the cold and calloused death...

An Easter Sunday sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. These are the final days of our Lenten journey. We’ve spent these weeks marveling at Jesus’ signs. He turned water to wine. What a wonder! He miraculous restored a man’s legs lame for 38 years! What awesome power! He took a handful of fish and flatbread and fed 5000! Only God has done anything like this before (Exodus 16). Jesus made mud and anointed t...