Emmaus Road Church | Fort Collins, Colorado

Sermon Scripture: 1 Samuel 16:1–13, 1 Samuel 17 This morning, as we close out our centennial season, our children and teenagers are leading us in worship, reading scripture, and preaching; a living reminder of the ancient promise that God's spirit would be poured out on sons and daughters, and that the young would speak and see and dream. Through the story of David's anointing, we are remi...

Sermon Scripture: 1 Samuel 7:12 As our congregation reaches a hundred years, in the midst of our celebrations, we also want to remember all that God has done. The prophet Samuel once set up a memorial stone between two towns and named it Ebenezer, the stone of help, so that anyone who passed by would remember who had protected and sustained them through all the celebrations and trials they had exp...

Sermon Scripture: Romans 12:1-2 When congregations begin to grow, there is a natural pull toward activity that is not always sustainable. We start looking for programs to launch, ministries to add, and we begin thinking about what all the other successful churches are doing that we should imitate.  Yet we have  discovered that activity alone can not sustain deep community or lasting spiritual form...

Sermon Scripture: Matthew 28:16-20, Acts 2:42-47, Hebrews 13:8 Our city (our church) would be unrecognizable by those who first founded this congregation, yet our testimony and our story would feel familiar. We are a remnant of the legacy that they planted and tended a hundred years ago. And what were they planting and tending? A simple commission and a strong desire to serve the Kingdom and the c...

Sermon Scripture: Acts 2:38-47 On the day of Pentecost, the Spirit did not come to give one hundred and twenty people a private religious experience. The Spirit came to make a people. A new kind of community. A new kind of family that had never existed in the world before.  The scripture says three thousand were added to them that day, and Luke tells us in one short, dense sentence what that new c...

Sermon Scripture: Luke 24:44-53 Today is the feast of the Ascension of the Lord on the Christian calendar, and it is one of the least observed and most underappreciated feasts the church has.  Most of us grew up in traditions that moved quickly from Easter to Pentecost, treating the forty days between them as a kind of waiting room. The ascension, if it was mentioned at all, felt like a strange fo...

Sermon Scripture: John 14:15-21 Most of us have assumptions about the Holy Spirit that we might not always say out loud, but they shape how we move through our lives of faith.; we believe the Spirit is real, we believe the Spirit moves, and we have seen it in others, in moments of unexpected grace, in people who seem to carry a kind of courage we are not sure we possess.  But we also think this Sp...

Sermon Scripture: John 14:1-14 In the moments of disorientation we inevitably experience in life we can confuse the many emotions and sensations we encounter as a lack of faith. Even worse, the fear, shame, and guilt we feel might be taken out negatively on those we love the most. Today, Jesus meets us in this moment of disorientation and says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, an...

Guest Speaker Paige Parry will be bringing our message this week. Sermon Scripture: John 10:1-10 Walk into a forest and look closely at the ground, and you will find a story that runs parallel to our own. A seedling survives not by its own strength, but by the community it finds itself in: mature trees that shelter it from drying winds, fallen logs that nourish it from below, and gaps in the canop...

Sermon Scripture: Luke 24:13-35 In a gift economy, wealth means having enough to share, currency is measured in relationships, and the unit of success is “we” rather than “I.” This is because all flourishing is mutual. We could be talking about a shrub full of juicy berries, a handmade gift from a loved one, or the gifts of love, compassion, peace, mercy, healing, and life given to us by a God who...

Sermon Scripture: John 20:19-31, Psalm 19 Christ has a habit of showing up in the rooms we have sealed shut, and he always brings the same gift with him. Peace. He does not wait for us to unlock the door or get our courage up, or our theology sorted out; he simply appears, wounds and all, ready to help us sort through our doubts and steering us toward courage and faith.

Sermon Scripture: John 20:1-18 We are very familiar with death, but sometimes we are caught off guard by life, if we notice it at all. And that is exactly where the story of Easter begins. It begins in the shadow of Good Friday, still in the dark hours, in a garden before dawn, with a woman carrying burial spices toward a grave, doing the thing grief usually prompts us to do: stay busy. But she is...

Sermon Scripture: Matthew 21:1-11 The kingdoms of this earth arrive in spectacular fashion, but Jesus arrives in a much more humble way, and that choice was the most important thing that happened in the world in a very long time.

Sermon Scripture: John 11:1-45 Death is an intruder, an enemy, a force that has no place in the world God intended. But the gift of free will, the very capacity that makes love and goodness possible, also means that the collective weight of human choice sometimes comes with a dark shadow side, and so sin and death entered into God’s creation. Bad things happen to beautiful people. Even death. Even...

Sermon Scripture: John 9:1-41 This Lent, we have been learning to set aside our disordered desires: our self-sufficiency in the wilderness, our need to control new birth, our thirst for satisfaction in all the wrong wells. And now Jesus invites us to set down perhaps the heaviest thing we carry: the belief that if we can correctly assign blame to injustice and suffering, we just might be able to e...

Sermon Scripture: John 3:1-17 Every spring when the ground begins to thaw and the first green shoots appear in garden beds that have appeared lifeless for months we are reminded of the cycles of life — and this is how most of us experience the life of faith. Our moments of breakthrough feel sudden, but if we are honest, we know that God has been cultivating something in us long before it ever brok...

Sermon Scripture: Matthew 4:1-11 Today we step into the wilderness and the temptation of Jesus. The place where our appetites are met with the often untended parts of our lives and of the many voices attempting to define us, the only voice that matters is the one we are often too busy to hear.

Sermon Scripture: Matthew 17:1-9 (14-20) We love mountaintop experiences, but you have to come off the mountain at some point and the process of descent is hard, both physically and emotionally. You have to learn how to let that mountaintop experience integrate into your daily life, where it will be truly put to use for the good of others.  The most important moment in the story for us this week i...

Sermon Scripture: Matthew 5:13-20 We live in an over saturated age that somehow provides little actual clarity; screens, notifications, feeds, tags, breaking news. We are surrounded by many artificial lights and yet so many of us feel like we are stumbling in the dark. And we just might be tempted to think that the darkness feels deeper than any flicker we might be able to muster, but Jesus believ...

Sermon Scripture: Matthew 5:1-12, Micah 6:1-8 Often, we have a hard time knowing what to do, how to act, how to pray, or remain faithful when our world seems to be falling apart. We throw up our hands as if to say this is too big, too hard, too scary. Those things may all be true, but these feelings are not unique to us, and Jesus famously spoke directly to those of us who wish we need not endure...

Sermon Scripture: Matthew 4:12-23 Last week we heard the story of the encounter between Andrew, Simon Peter, and John with Jesus (John 1:29-42). Their whole lives, these men have dreamed of following God and serving a Rabbi in the middle of the action of the Kingdom of Heaven, yet now, their prospects seem to have fizzled. But that was not how their story was fated to end, nor is it how any of our...

Sermon Scripture: John 1:29-42 Today, as our journey with Jesus continues, we move from identity into living. We are given an invitation to step fully into one of those turning point moments in our lives. We are invited to answer the question, “What do you want?” If we engage with that question deeply, everything just might change for us because the voice that named us beloved in the waters of bap...

Sermon Scripture: Matthew 3:13-17 Before the teaching and the miracles, before the crowds and the conflict, Jesus receives something from the Father. He receives a name.  He receives an identity.  He receives a word of love spoken over him before he has done anything to earn it. Today we are gifted that very same as we follow in Christ’s steps and as the Holy Spirit anoints in becoming the light o...

Sermon Scripture: Matthew 2:1–12 We don’t know if the Magi who visited Christ debated for weeks before packing their treasures, or if they set out the very next morning after seeing the star, driven by a divine sense of urgency. What we do know is this: they saw a great light and they followed it. They left the comfort of familiar rooftops and the safety of predictable stars, and they journeyed a...

After the joy of Christmas, we tend to notice an elephant in the room… our new year resolution. So, today let's see together how we can do a better job of following God's directions in 2026.