Ridgedale Students

In our final series of the semester, coming off of a retreat weekend, we'll begin exploring what sustaining the life we encountered on retreat requires of us. We can believe that it's just more church attendance or different inputs into our lives in the form of music or entertainment, but as we saw at Fall Retreat, God is all around us constantly speaking! With that in mind, we must begin...

In our Sunday morning session of Fall Retreat we look at John 6:60-69 and the two opportunities all of us have when returning to our routines. Will we seek out our satisfaction from Jesus, the lover of our souls, or will we slowly regress back into life as usual?

In our final full session of Fall Retreat we look at the story of Mary at the Tomb from John 20 to see the difference it makes when our satisfaction is wrapped up in our intimacy with the one who calls us by name.

We had some technical difficulties with our first message of the weekend, but go check out John 7:37-38 for Jesus' invitation and the promise that comes with it! If Jesus' promise is satisfaction, why are we so unmotivated to come and receive it from Him? In our second teaching of the weekend at Fall Retreat, we explore Isaiah 55:1-3 to see what often holds us back from seeking the satisfa...

Will my hunger ever be satisfied? In the search for God we will go through periods where it can feel like the God we hunger for, may never be ours to feast on. We feel dry, like we're starving, and the doubt begins to creep into our minds, "Maybe all my hungering is for nothing." But then comes God's promise. Matthew 5:6 reminds us that not only will our hunger one day be satisfied, but that our h...

Last week we looked at staying near to Jesus in order to sustain a hungry faith that looks more like desperation than complacency…but what have we been given to live this out? In his book, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, Eugene Peterson touches on our world’s love for sensation. We long to be wowed by something, but we value less what Peterson calls a, “long obedience in the same direction...

What’s the key to sustaining a hungry faith? So often we’re conditioned to want things quickly, easily, and without resistance. But rarely is this the experience of disciples of Jesus. To draw nearer to Him is to move further from the world, and the world does not take that kindly. Walking with Jesus is a war of attrition, of perseverance, and the only way to sustain it for the duration is to rema...

After three weeks of in depth examination on worship the question still remains; How do I live this in the normal routines of my days? The answer, “Through the practice of Living Worship. As worship is integrated into the regular rhythms and routines of our life we come to actualize the fact that we are not participants in worship services, rather, we are worshippers. Through the simple practices...

When worship is first mentioned in the Bible, it isn’t in the context of a rocking concert setting, or an intimate gathering of people singing songs to God. It’s in the context of sacrifice (Gen. 4, Gen. 22). God presents Himself to people and the natural outpouring of what they see in Him drives them to offer up something of cost. In week 3 of our series Heart, we look at this often forgotten sid...

“How tragic that we in this dark day have had our seeking done for us by our teachers. Everything is made to center upon the initial act of "accepting" Christ, and we are not expected thereafter to crave any further revelation of God to our souls. We have been snared in the coils of a spurious logic which insists that if we have found Him we need no more seek Him.” -A.W. Tozer

In our series Heart we want to dig deeply into worship. Week 1 takes us to Psalm 115 and 27 where we look at hearts consumed with beholding God and allowing what they beheld to fill their minds and guide their worship. A.W. Tozer summed it up best with this word, “I want the presence of God Himself, or I don't want anything at all to do with religion...I want all that God has or I don't want any.”

How much of us does God want? What does it look like for me to live with God with all my being? This year in RSM we want to answer these and other questions as we seek to love the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. This year, we’re seeking to live as whole people.

Our audio wasn’t working for the first two teachings from HouseCamp, but we were able to get the third! In our final teaching from the week, we wrap up Psalm 27 after hearing night 1 about our need to seek out God as light, and night 2 on how we see God properly. In this final teaching we look to the hope of Jesus available to us all here and now and David’s confidence in claiming that hope for hi...

How do we respond to God’s answer in prayer? Through the posture of yielding we learn to listen and respond in a way that honors God and leads to our flourishing.

Asking is uncomfortable, isn’t it? We fear asking for a variety of reasons. We believe it reveals weakness in us in a society that prizes strength. We believe it shows us to be needy in a culture of self-sufficiency. What we find in the Scriptures is a very different vision of going to God with our need in prayer. Charles Spurgeon informs us that asking is the currency of the Kingdom of God. That...

Walter Wangerin once said, “Praise and thanksgiving require more than our brains. They want our laughter, our capering bodies, our trembling delight, smiles and the sweet flush of delight-and song. Praise must be sung.” This is the truth we come to in prayer; that God asks for all of us in an expression of joy. Prayer isn’t robotic. It isn’t simply us asking, or confessing, or adoring God. It’s a...

What do we do with our sin? David was familiar with not meeting the expectations of God and so he writes to us about it in the Psalms. Tonight we look to Psalm 32, 139 and 52 to see how sin works, what God thinks of us in our sin and what we experience in our moment of confession to hopefully move us from a place of fearing confession to freedom in confession.

In our final series of the year we look at prayer as a regular rhythm patterned for us in the Psalms. Tonight we look at the practice of pausing and adoration in prayer from Psalm 8 and many other passages throughout the Scriptures.

In the final week of our series we look at our relationship to the most essential element in supporting life there is; food. How are our meals, not only spiritual in nature, but also meant to form our communities and our joy in a God-ward direction?

We spend a large majority of our lives completely incapacitated by this thing called sleep. Not just this, but we spend a great portion of our waking hours longing for the rest that sleep brings. With so much of our lives wrapped up in rest the obvious question is what is God trying to teach us through the necessity of rest? Join us for week 3 of our series w(HOL)l(Y) Ordinary as we examine the sp...

Join us for week 2 of our series examining the holiness of every day moments as we discuss the spirituality of work.

Join us for a new series examining the holes in the idea of the sacred/secular divide and exploring the ways we can find God at work in the things of everyday life.

Join us for a concluding Q&R with Chris as we conclude our SEEDS series on relational evangelism.

Is life found in God’s Law or does it actually choke out our life in following it? Tonight we look at our relationship to the Law and life as we seek to dig out the weeds to a thriving faith.

(Note, our recording stopped earlier than the end of the message by about 7 minutes. So sorry for the missing audio!) Why am I still continuing to sin even though I’ve committed to Jesus? Hear from Josh Powell on this difficult subject for apprentices of Jesus as we walk the way of Jesus together.