Element Christian Church of Santa Maria

Today in Ecclesiastes you will see some things that are philosophical, some that are practical, and some that are theological, but they all deal with foolishness and wisdom. Vapor/vanity are the words that are also translated as “meaningless” and most of the things we freak out about are meaningless. Today we like to classify people in a myriad of ways, Solomon (and the wisdom literature) classifi...

This is week 25 of our walk through the book of Ecclesiastes. In Ecclesiastes 9 Solomon will talk about death and joy, injustice and pain, what we need to remember and what we forget. The idea being that God is good enough to provide joy before death and we should embrace it as long as we can. While we have life, we also have the opportunity to make the most of our days and maximize the lot in lif...

Today in Ecclesiastes we are going to look at what the fear of God means, and how God stands over our meaninglessness. Ecclesiastes is a look at how the wisest man in the world ended his days in reflection of all he accomplished; he comes to the conclusion that following God is the only way to truly live. Solomon keeps reminding us that what we build with our hands under the sun is like a vapor an...

This is the second part of Element’s look at the book of Ecclesiastes. The series title is “The Existential Hangover” because the word ‘existential’ philosophically is concerned with human existence. The book of Ecclesiastes deals with the questions of our lives and what we put our time and energy into and then asks, “now what?” The book is about the headache that comes from getting everything you...

Welcome back to the book of Ecclesiastes. We spent the first part of this year going through this philosophical Old Testament book that centers itself on questions of life, wisdom, and God. The author of Ecclesiastes is King Solomon who is constantly asking questions about where our focus lies: on things “under the sun” (meaning the realm which we create) or the eternal. Solomon will use the words...

God doesn’t want us to wonder about how things will turn out for those who trust Jesus. He is so committed to making sure we know that Jesus’ payment on the cross was enough to pay for our sins that He has also given us His Spirit inside of all of us who trust Him to guarantee our eternity and remind us that we belong to Him. The miracle is that the Creator puts His own Spirit inside of His creatu...

John 6 starts with the real world problem of hungry people who have traveled a long distance needing sustenance. Jesus will feed all of these people and then use this miracle to wake people up with some hard words about salvation. Why? Because we don’t understand our real problem. We focus so much of our lives on our own needs and quick fixes to those needs. We focus on ourselves so much that we m...

God doesn’t zap us into maturity, He leads us in a process. At times that process can be painful, arduous, and long, but it’s a process in which we are not an object to Him; we’re His people. We cooperate, we participate in a personal process of growth. Manna was about relationship with God and others, we can’t live without God and we were not meant to live without each other. We are meant to gath...

Modern Philosophers will say things to the effect that to be free, having no lord or master, to belong to yourself, is impossible. We are a people who are never truly our own, something always owns us in a way. This is why when God calls for His people’s freedom in the Exodus narrative He doesn’t just say, “Let my people go,” in reality He says, “Let my people go, so that they may worship me.” He...

You might have heard of Samson as a kid, seen a cartoon, fantasized about his great strength, but none of it does justice to how much of a knucklehead this guy was. I have a hard time even understanding why he would be talked about in Hebrews 11 as an archetype of faith…unless we can properly understand the word faith a bit better and who God is.

The overarching message of the Bible is the story of God’s redemption of all His creation. The miracles recorded in the Bible were for the primary purpose of accomplishing that redemption AND making it clear who God is (His nature and His glory) to all people of every generation. For us today, when we think of God as a Savior, we point to the cross and to Jesus as our Savior and Lord. When we cele...

We are in the middle of a topical sermon about Miracles, and today we take a look at the miracle of the resurrection! Jon spoke about how there are historical facts surrounding the resurrection that are difficult to avoid. The historical facts are that: 1) Jesus was a historical person. 2) Jesus was crucified and buried. 3) three days after His death, Jesus body went missing. 4) There were reporte...

Today, as the church, we are to be God’s ambassadors to the world, what the world will see of God is how we now live. Healing for the world will come as God’s blessings flow out from us as His people. We are called to pour out our money, power, and opportunity as genuine sacrifice to Jesus in this world. If our giving leads to trouble or genuine sacrifice, that should not surprise us. One commenta...

God uses the metaphor throughout the Old Testament that He is like a groom and His people are His bride. When Jesus comes, He uses the same metaphor for Himself, that He is our great Bridegroom. He will give Himself for His bride in order to restore her. The emotions of love and delight, like a bridegroom feels for his bride, is how Jesus feels about us (in a non-sexual way). The words God uses fo...

In the New Testament, God sometimes used supernatural miracles to help people in need, but also: - To prove that Jesus was the Son of God, the promised Messiah. - To confirm the authority of Jesus, - To prove that His words were true, - To show that He had Divine Power in several realms.

The beauty of God rescuing us from our broken places in life shows His desire to seek and save us even when there is nothing “good” in us. Many religious traditions say, “The good are in, and the bad are out. The disciplined are in, and the undisciplined are out,” but God rescues us because of His grace, not our merit. The glory of the gospel is that because of the grace of Jesus, the humbled are...

The book of Jonah brings all of us under the conviction that we love the things that God has given us (homes, cars, hobbies, health, friends, etc.) more than the great city we live in. There are spiritually blind people whom we pass every day and ignore because our minds are consumed with ourselves. The question that Jonah leaves us to ponder is who would we be if God simply left us to ourselves a...

The words faith and belief in the New Testament was not this idea of something we muster up by trying really hard to hope something is true; faith/belief meant trust. What you see is that everyone in the bible struggles with trusting God for all God says that He is. Today we will see how a father, as well as some of the disciples struggled in trusting Jesus for the healing of a young boy. In our d...

The theme of this week is that there is no man or woman on earth who is wholly and completely righteous. No one has ever been righteous on their own merit except for Jesus. Solomon is reminding us that wisdom is found in being honest enough to acknowledge that we all have failures; these failures should point us and remind us of our continuing need for Jesus. DOWNLOAD PDF SERMON NOTES HERE

This week we will take a look at blessings and sufferings and how our belief about those things dictate how we respond to God, others, and ourselves. Solomon talks about how wisdom comes from God, but he understands that wisdom in and of itself will not spare people from suffering. Wisdom can and will allow people to respond well to situations instead of being made worse by our initial reactions....

We are in week 17 of our sermon series on the book of Ecclesiastes. This week is the last of four weeks that have gone together to provide an overall view of life, money, and satisfaction. The overarching theme of the past few weeks has been the following question, “Have you ever thought about how much you need God?” Many times we do not live in a place where we consistently remember how much we n...

Today, Aaron interviews Christine Soltan, Executive Director of CareNet Pregnancy Center in Santa Maria. Read more about CareNet at their website: https://www.carenetsm.com/

We are in week 16 of our sermon series of Ecclesiastes. Solomon, the writer of Ecclesiastes, has been on a roll about satisfaction in life not coming from man-made things, but from God Himself. The more we try to make the temporary things in our lives INTO eternal things the less and less they will satisfy. The existential hangover is about attaining everything we think we want to make our existen...

Today we are in week 15 of our look through the book of Ecclesiastes. Solomon keeps steering us back to our understanding of what is truly meaningful in life. It is not what we produce (though it can add to it), it is what we receive from the hand of God. Satisfaction doesn’t come from things, it comes from our God who can (and does) bless us with the ability to enjoy things. Today Solomon is goin...

Easter is a day that centers on the resurrection of Jesus. It is a day of celebration and hope because God was and is true to His promises. Instead of looking at the reasons for the Resurrection, today we are looking at the miracle of forgiveness. We are a people who consistently turn from who and what God calls us to be: His image bearers in the world. Even though we have broken relationship with...