99 CHURCH

Waiting is an inevitable part of the human experience. There's no getting around it. Advent reminds us that much of life is lived in the tension of waiting. The question isn't IF we'll wait, the question is HOW we'll wait. This week, we study Psalm 130 as we discern how God wants to meet us in our waiting.

In the journey of faith, we are so prone to forget the goodness of God. And in forgetting, fear stands taller than God's promise in our lives. Gratitude is what helps us overcome our fears and clearly see God's fingerprints in our everyday experience. Today, we explore the subtle temptation of entitlement and the power of praying gratitude.

As we conclude our time in the book of Ezra, we find some troubling things happening in the final two chapters, that highlight a temptation we all face as followers of Jesus. Rather than taking personal responsibility for how far we've drifted from God's heart, we blame some external force or circumstance. This week, we explore what it means to rebuild our altars from the inside out and return to...

What do you do when the Bible—or moments in your own life—trouble you? This week, we look at a challenging passage in Ezra 9–10 and use it as a case study for navigating our own "what on earth is happening?" moments. We talk about how to examine our assumptions about God, Scripture, and human nature, and how that process can keep us from getting spiritually stuck and instead move us toward deeper...

What if the things we built in life weren't just dedicated to ourselves? What if we became a people who dedicated our careers, our relationships, our homes, and our entire lives to God? What if we lived as if they served a holy purpose beyond ourselves? This week, we explore the power of dedication as we follow the story of the Israelites dedicating the temple to God in the book of Ezra.

In Ezra 4, the people of God stop building the temple. What caused them to stop? Discouragement and distraction. In our lives, discouragement and distraction often cause us to stop building our lives with God, to stop our progress of growth and maturity. How do we combat discouragement and distraction? This week, we explore the power of having a sacred posture.

In this week’s sermon, we take a short detour from Ezra to the book of Haggai to hear a convicting word about what happens when we stop rebuilding the “House of the Lord” in our lives. Haggai 1:3 says “Is it a time for you yourselves to be living in your paneled houses, while this house remains a ruin?” Guest speaker Dan Fang encourages us to examine and self-reflect on what our “paneled houses” m...

In a world where many say “all religions are basically the same,” how should Christians respond? As we move into chapter 4 of Ezra, we explore what it means to seek truth and why Christianity’s view of a loving, self-sacrificing God stands apart.

We don't know how to rest. Statistics show that American employees are burning out at a faster rate than ever before. We are literally working ourselves into the ground. But God has an answer to our restlessness: Sabbath. This week, we explore the eight and final ancient festival, the Sabbath, as we learn how to live in the rhythms of rest and worship.

None of the claims of the Christian faith work unless Jesus resurrected. Scripture tells us that Jesus was the firstfruit of resurrection, which means resurrection is for all those who belong to him. This week, we study the Feast of Firstfruits, as we learn that worship looks like giving God your first and your best.

We often find ourselves stuck in our own stories: stories of defeat, stories of pain, stories of discouragement. But when we worship, we're thrust back into God's story. All of a sudden, our stories are re-contextualized and we see our stories in light of God's grander story. This week, we study the Passover festival and learn how we can worship today.

God pours out His life, provision, and Spirit into us. The problem is, we are a people who leak. We are like broken cisterns, that cannot overflow into others. This week, we look at Pentecost and see how it informs the way we are called to worship today.

God loves reconciliation. When we show mercy and grace to one another, the same way God has shown them to us, that's worship. This week, we study the Day of Atonement, an ancient festival that teaches us how to worship God through apology and absolution.

How often do we stop working, and make time to look back and thank God for all He's done? The Feast of Trumpets was an opportunity for the people of God to express their worship through recognition and reliance: recognizing God's faithfulness in the previous year, and relying on God's faithfulness in the upcoming year. This week, we explore how we can express this worship of gratitude annually, mo...

If you ever want to know what the love of God looks like, it looks like hospitality. We're reminded that God doesn't just save us, he sustains us. God doesn't just deliver us, he dwells with us. This week, we study the Festival of Tabernacles and learn how we can worship God today through hospitality.

We imagine spiritual maturity as the need to confess less. But it's actually the opposite. Spiritual maturity means more confession, not less. This week, we study the Festival of Unleavened Bread, as we continue learning about the different expressions of worship we can bring before God at the altar.

For many of us, the Sunday worship gathering feels irrelevant or disconnected from the rest of the week. This leads to a passive engagement that places a bulk of the responsibility on spiritual leaders to feed us and stir us up to worship. But we find that God actually expects all of his people to show up, prepared with something to offer him. This week, we explore what kind of sacrifices God is l...

For the people of God, rebuilding the altar of worship started with a radical reshaping of how they spent their time. But it wasn't just their daily schedules that revolved around worship. Their entire year was reoriented towards worship. Last week, we talked about what it means to reclaim the clock. This week, we talk about reclaiming our calendars for worship.

The most important element of Christian worship is time. Living a life of worship requires us to radically redefine how we approach time and how we use it. This week, we explore how time is not meant for productivity, but for faithfulness.

After returning from exile, God gave the Israelites instructions for how to use their gold and silver—not to build idols, but to build vessels for worship. Today, He calls us to do the same. In this message, we explore how generosity leads us away from financial stress and into deeper worship, community, and purpose. And we look at how generosity reorients us toward God, empowers the church to ser...

Why do we gather as a church? What is the purpose and design for our Sunday gatherings each week? In the book of Ezra, the temple lay in ruins because the people had forgotten what the temple was designed to do. Rebuilding the house of the Lord meant rediscovering its purpose and design. This week, we get to the heart of why we gather as a church, and what should happen every time we get together.

In a world full of complex issues and divided opinions — even among faithful Christians — what does it mean to follow Jesus with honesty and humility? This week, we explore how to find comfort with uncertainty. Drawing from Paul’s letter to the Romans and the teachings of Jesus, we see how God invites us into a deeper kind of faith — one built not on having all the answers, but on trusting Him thr...

Whenever God wants to do something in our world, He always looks for a people whose hearts are open and available to being moved by Him. We find in the book of Ezra, that the first people to return back home out of exile, were those whose hearts were moved by God. They were the first responders. This week, we explore how we can be the first responders to what God's doing in our unique context.

What makes 99 a church, and not just some random community or club? It's that at the center of our togetherness is the worship of God. This week, we begin a new collection of teachings on the book of Ezra, as we respond to God's calling for us to rebuild the altar of worship in our community.

The problem is not the seed. The problem is the soil. God is always speaking. God is always moving toward us in love. God is always working on our behalf. The problem is that the soil of our hearts often prevents the seed of the God's blessings from bearing fruit in our lives. This week, we read through the "Parable of the Sower," as we identify four different types of soils, or heart postures, th...