Christ Church IL Podcast

This is the final week of Advent. The four weeks set aside to prepare for the celebration of Christ’s birth and to remind ourselves of his promised return. Christianity is not simply a moral philosophy or a set of ethical guidelines. It is a comprehensive worldview based on the bold proclamation: “Jesus loves me.” The claim that Christians celebrate is not simply that God is infinite, perfect, sel...

This is week three of our four-week Advent series. At the moment, we are walking through Advent - which is the time in the church calendar set aside to focus on the arrival of Christ. Advent is a four-week segment of the church calendar. It is to be a dark time because it is a time of waiting. During it we are to be looking ahead to the first coming of the Messiah. Which in turn is to get us think...

Today we continue our series on the weary world rejoices with a focus on peace. How can we rejoice when peace seems elusive in a broken world? When we understand the story of salvation in Isaiah 8-12 we understand what it means that the Prince of Peace was born on Christmas day. That gives us reason to rejoice.

Gifts have become one of the most important things about the advent season. That can be good and bad but non-the-less gifts are very connected to Christmas. But in the midst of all this Gift stuff that goes on during Christmas I want to tell you that God has a gift for you this Advent season. That’s right – God has a gift that He would love to give us this Christmas. This Gift…is the Gift of Hope!

This week we continue our How do you know? Series. Today we will consider how the story of Jesus Christ reinforces that we can indeed know who God is and his love for us. The question you must ask yourself though is how do you know?

How do we know what we know? Welcome back for week three of our six-week series on the Bible’s role in helping us understand reality.  I hope you are leaning in on this topic – and the various resources we have made available: small group discussion guides; daily video devotions, podcasts and a book, the latter which is unfolding a chapter a week.

Today we begin a six-week series – it’s our annual “welcome back, jump in, here we go” Fall series. The question animating all of this is: how do we know what we know? How do we know what really matters?  How do we know who we are?  How do we know what is expected of us?  How do we know what the good life is?  How do we know what happens when we die?  How do we know what we know? There are seven b...

Prayer is one of the most powerful tools we have in our daily lives. But how often do we pray? In fact do we even understand the benefits of prayer in every situation in our life? This sermon talks about when we pray, how we pray, and why we pray.

Prayer is a constant challenge for most people. We need regular reminders of how and why we pray so we will focus on this topic for the next three weeks. Today we have a guest preacher, Dr. Jedidiah Coppenger to help us see God's instruction to pray. Jed is married to Melanie and they have three kids who travelled up from Nashville to be here today. Jed is the founding pastor of Redemption Ci...

We continue our look at the story of Daniel. This week, we see Daniel’s friends faced with a difficult decision: do they disobey God and save their lives or obey God and potentially lose them? And what can we learn from the decisions that they make?

The people of Israel are living in a new world and in exile. Daniel and his friends have just lost their king, their homeland, and their names. The temptation is to conform to the kingdom of Babylon and forget they are citizens of God’s kingdom. Daniel is written to encourage God’s people to Hope in God and live faithfully even when it doesn't seem like God is in control. Faithful living look...

Today is the fifth and final message from The Sermon on the Mount.  We have looked at: the Beatitudes, the directive to be salt and light, the law and – last week – at the command to love our enemies. Today’s text is from Matthew 7, where Jesus says: judge not lest you be judged.

Today we return for a fourth message from the Sermon on the Mount – the greatest sermon ever preached by the greater person who ever lived.  The passage is from Matthew 5:43, it is the directive to love our enemies.

Welcome to week three of our study of the Sermon on the Mount. This series is the third part of our year-long exploration of Renewal. In the fall we turned to Romans 12 to focus on personal renewal; in the Winter we turned to the Book of Acts to think about church renewal. We are now focusing on the Sermon on the Mount to think about Community Renewal.