Countryside Church | Sermon Podcast

If you're exhausted. If you feel trapped, invisible, or like you're one bad day from falling apart — this message is for you. Elder Shannon Ferrell isn't speaking from a distance. At 13 years old, he was making a plan to end his life, caught in a mental spiral he didn't have words for yet — undiagnosed anxiety, ADHD, and OCD all working against him at once. One passage, Psalm 103, became the thing...

What if God's plan to change a city — and maybe the world — was always going to happen through ordinary, unknown people like you? In Acts 11, we meet a group of unnamed, unremarkable people who showed up to one of the most influential cities in the ancient world and quietly started something that would ripple through history for centuries. No famous leaders. No platform. Just ordinary people who d...

What if the person God wants to use to change the world is someone nobody else would pick? Not the most polished. Not the most put-together. Not the one with the most to offer. What if God's plan has always been to use the people everyone else overlooks — including you? In Acts 9, Pastor Sam Weitman unpacks one of the most dramatic reversals in the Bible — and the two ordinary, unassuming people a...

What if the most powerful thing you can do for your neighborhood… is just open your door? You don't need a perfectly clean house. You don't need an Instagram-worthy meal. You don't need to have all the right words. What if God has already been working in the lives of the people around you — long before you ever showed up? In Acts 10, Pastor Sam Weitman unpacks one of the most pivotal moments in th...

Note: We had some audio issues at the start of this recording — it picks back up at 5:58. Thanks for your patience! --------- Have you ever gone through the motions of something — and felt completely empty doing it? This message hits on something most of us have experienced but might avoid talking about: the difference between performing devotion and actually being devoted. In this week's message,...

What if one conversation could change everything? Not a sermon. Not a sales pitch. Just a real talk about how ordinary people — people like you and like us — can be part of something much bigger than ourselves. In this message, guest speaker Rusty Gunn opens up Acts 8:26–40 and walks us through one of the most surprising stories in the Bible: a chance encounter on a desert road that sparked a chai...

Nobody wants to talk about suffering. But it's something we all go through — hard seasons, loss, relationships that fall apart, or just a low-level ache that won't go away. In Acts 6–8, Care Pastor Bryan Intemann walks through the story of Stephen to answer one of life's hardest questions: why do we suffer, and what do we do when we do? Here's some of what Bryan covers: 🙏Why suffering is unavoida...

Most of us know we should pray more. But most of us don't. Not because we don't care — but because if we're honest, we've prayed before and it felt like nothing happened. So we quietly stopped. In this week's message, Pastor Sam Weitman walks us through Acts 4:23-31 and gets refreshingly real about that exact feeling — including his own dry season in prayer. What comes out of it isn't a guilt trip...

What does it actually look like when a group of people go all in for God? Not in a churchy, performative way. In a real, costly, life-looks-different-after-this kind of way. In Acts 2:41–47, Pastor Sam Weitman looks at the very first church — 3,000 people who had just encountered Jesus and decided to do life completely differently together. What they built wasn't a program or a system. It was some...

Two thousand years ago, a small, overlooked group of ordinary people received the Holy Spirit — and it changed the entire world. According to Acts 2, that same Spirit is available to everyone who puts their trust in Jesus. In this message, Pastor Sam Weitman walks us through one of the most pivotal chapters in all of Scripture — Acts 2:1-41 — and what it means for your everyday life today. Here's...

The most important message in history was not meant to stay inside church walls — it was meant to travel through you, into the lives of the people around you. In this message, Pastor Sam Weitman unpacks Acts 1:4-14 and issues a personal challenges: 💔 The people closest to you — your friends, your family, your coworkers — may be waiting for something only you will bring them 💔 What do you do with...

Most of us walk around with this quiet feeling that we're just... not enough. Not qualified enough. Not put-together enough. Too much baggage. Too many mistakes. And somewhere along the way, we decided that means God probably can't do much with us. But what if that's 100% wrong? This week, Pastor Sam Weitman preaches from Acts 1:6-8, and what he unpacks might stop you in your tracks. Because it tu...

Most of us have a running list of reasons why God wouldn't use us. Not smart enough. Not bold enough. Don't have the right words. Haven't got it all figured out yet. Maybe you're not even sure you believe any of this. And yet… here's what keeps jumping off the page in this week's sermon: God has never once waited for the right person to show up. He just uses whoever's already there. Pastor Sam Wei...

He Is Risen — but what does that actually mean for YOU? Whether you are walking in faith or full of doubt — this message is for you. This Easter, Pastor Sam Weitman preaches from John 20 and brings Easter to life in an honest, powerful way. No fluff, no empty religious phrases — just the raw, real story of an empty tomb and why it still matters nearly 1,993 years later. In this message, you'll dis...

What if Good Friday isn't meant to be rushed? 🕊️ We live in a world that skips straight to Sunday. But what if slowing down and staying in the grief of Friday and Saturday is exactly what your soul needs this Easter season? In this reflective and moving Good Friday service, Care Pastor Bryan Intemann invites us to resist the urge to fast-forward to the resurrection and instead do something counter...

Have you ever felt like things aren't going the way they were supposed to? 🌱 Life has a way of not matching our expectations — relationships that don't work out, dreams that never happen, a world that feels more broken than hopeful. And maybe you've wondered... if God is real, why does everything feel so uncertain? You're not alone in asking that. But this message isn't just for people who are fa...

Jesus didn't wait for people to clean themselves up. And neither should we. What if the most important thing you could do with your life was simply to show up for the people around you, especially the messy ones? In this message, College Pastor Scott Manning walks through Luke 19:11-27 — the Parable of the Ten Minas — where Jesus tells a story about a king who entrusts his servants with something...

What if the most broken person you know walked through your church doors this Sunday? In this message, Pastor Sam Weitman takes us deep into Luke 15 — home of some of Jesus' most beloved stories: the Lost Sheep (Luke 15:3-7), the Lost Coin (Luke 15:8-10), and the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-24). But here's the twist: these aren't just feel-good tales. They're a mirror held up to our hearts, revealing...

What if the thing you're holding onto is the very thing keeping you from the life God has planned for you? 🤔 William Borden had it all — heir to a dairy empire, wealth, connections, and a future that most people only dream about. But he walked away from everything to chase something greater. At every crossroads, he wrote three simple phrases in the back of his Bible: No reserves. No retreats. No...

Be honest — anxiety is exhausting. Whether it's your job, your relationships, your future, or just the general feeling that something could go wrong at any moment... most of us are carrying more than we let on. In this message from Luke 12:22-34, Pastor Sam Weitman tackles one of the most quoted — and most misunderstood — passages in the entire Bible. You know the one. "Consider the lilies." It's...

What if more people are ready to say "yes" to Jesus than anyone thinks? Senior Pastor Sam Weitman spent 19 years in the Bible Belt — churches on every corner — and not one person ever sat down to explain the gospel to him, invited him to church, or offered to pray for him. Six months after someone finally did? His life was completely transformed. That's the heartbeat of this message. Opening up Lu...

Pastor Sam Weitman unpacks one of Jesus' most famous parables. We love the idea of seeking God's kingdom. We get excited about transformation, breakthrough, and seeing God move. But what if the real question isn't "what should we do for the kingdom?" but "what kind of heart do we actually have?" This message covers: 💡 The parable of the four soils (and why we all want to skip to soil #4) 💡 Why l...

Pastor Sam Weitman shares one of the hardest truths about following Jesus. We love dreaming about what God can do. Marriages restored. Lives transformed. Breakthroughs we've prayed for. But what happens when you give everything for the kingdom and end up in prison instead? What do you do when following Jesus leads to a place you never saw coming? This message covers: ✨ The final days of John the...

Join Pastor Sam Weitman for a gut-check message from Luke 6:20-26 that confronts our self-righteousness and calls us back to the heart of the gospel. In this convicting message, you'll discover: 🎯Why we have more in common with the "worst sinners" than we do with God—and what that means for how we treat others 🎯The difference between spiritual bankruptcy (which opens heaven's gates) and moral su...

What if God wants to do MORE than we've been asking for? In this powerful message, Pastor Sam Weitman challenges us with an uncomfortable question: Have we become so familiar with Jesus that we've stopped believing He can do the impossible? Drawing from Luke 4:14-30, Pastor Sam reveals that the Kingdom of God isn't for those who have it all together—it's for the spiritually poor, the captive, the...