Eternity Church PodCast

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. It’s natural when we experience sickness, or see someone we love suffering, to long for healing. We go in search of relief. We ask others if they’ve encountered similar symptoms. We book appointments. We even search for answers from websites and computer collations (ironically referred to as intelligence). The reality is when we suffer, we want solutio...

A Sunday morning service by Pastor Brett Deal. It’s interesting to ask people what they know about Jesus. When you get a chance this week, slip it into conversation and see what they say. Most people who are asked about David will know about Goliath. Those who are asked about Joseph might mention his coat of many colors. Many, when asked about Jesus, think about the sea. Jesus in the boat with his...

A Sunday morning sermon by Peter DuMont. How has God made you uncomfortable this week? We all have preferred ways of doing things, the ways in which we might like to definitively order our lives (and the lives of others) if we had the means to do so. As we continue our Epiphany series in Matthew 8-9, we see Jesus raising some questions and some hackles by what he is doing: “Why does the teacher ea...

A Sunday sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. Tonight, we sit on the water’s edge of a new year. With the sun set and moonlight piercing the darkness, we watch the slow ripple on the waves of yesterday and watch for dawn. It may not seem it, but the hours before sunrise are some of the best for fishing. This silent time lit soft by stars is the perfect time to cast wide our net into the new year. I’m not...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. Time is a funny thing. Think about it. There are times minutes feel like months, and seconds unending seasons of waiting. Then, there are sparkling decades which rush by in a blink of an eye. When our kids were little, the constant refrain we heard was “Don’t blink, before you know it…” You know the rest. Friend, I blinked. When my eyes opened, our new...

A Christmas Eve sermon by Pastor Brett Deal.

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. Can you imagine what it must have been like in Jerusalem when the wise men showed up? Children fetching water. Merchants selling in the market. Scribes dutifully copying the biblical scrolls for synagogues near and far. Priests serving in the Temple. Meanwhile, King Herod, is looking over his shoulder to see what family member he needs to kill next. Li...

A Sunday morning sermon by Peter DuMont. Advent is a season of wonder, an opportunity to consider encounters between Heaven and Earth with renewed amazement: a young girl overshadowed by the Spirit of God, wise men pursuing signs in the stars, shepherds surrounded by angelic rejoicing. This third week of Advent, we look at Simeon and Anna—two figures marked by deep connection to God and a burden f...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. Reading the Bible carefully we often find passages packed with foreshadowing. Luke’s Gospel is a great example of this. Like a great symphony, the theme is set at the start. We hear everything we need to know at the beginning. Luke draws our attention to the fulfillment of the Messianic promise through the Old Testament in the words he chooses and the...

A Sunday sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. The Bible’s rich with all kinds of words. Some are everyday words: the, and, to speak; but others only show up a handful of times, and their rarity causes them to stand out. One great example is episkiazó .  Following Matthew, Luke used e piskiazó (meaning to overshadow ) describing Jesus’ transfiguration.  All three Synoptic Gospels harmonize their use of thi...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells us a parable revealing the nature of the heavenly kingdom we see in Revelation. He says: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son,” (Matthew 22.2). Can you imagine then how shocked Jesus’ disciples were as the parable unfolded? The king’s servants went out with the good news...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. Music is such a unique gift. With a few simple chords a song can energize us. A few words become an anthem when set to music. With the strum of a few strings our souls can be set at ease (1 Samuel 16.23). In the middle of the outpouring of God’s final wrath, the final measure meted out against those who oppose His justice and truth, a song is sung in h...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. Years ago, Bebe Winans in a live recording of  Nothing but the Blood , as the piano keys tinkled in the background, shared how across American Christianity, we sang the same songs, just with different arrangements. He demonstrated what he meant by taking the song, commonly sung as a single voice, arranged the lyrics as a call and response. Winans asks,...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. Years ago, I heard Duke Ellington’s  Heaven  for the first time, and it rocked my world. In middle school I’d stumbled across Ellington (a jazz album misplaced among the blues records), and since then I began to collect his compositions. I thought I knew his sound until  Heaven . His soft recognizable piano playing is accented by a crisp soprano voice...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Steve Hartman. Brett has been leading us in the Songs of Revelation. Brett said as we began, “Jesus deserves our holistic worship, a worship that is rooted in the depths of our heart…” So, we are looking at these “songs” with the aim of more fully joining the worship we see as we read and study these songs the picture to us the worship of the heavenly chorus. In o...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. Arriving at a defining passage for our church, Revelation 7, I am encouraged by the words of G.K. Beale & David Campbell:  “The focus of the revelation John received from God is how the church is to conduct itself in the midst of an ungodly world.” I don’t think it would come as a shock to anyone that we live in times marked more by humanism than h...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal.

A Sunday mornings sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. I was challenged the other day by Melissa Archer’s reflection on the worship found in the book of Revelation. She writes: “The hymns heard in heaven are to be the liturgy of the churches on earth.”    When we read the book of Revelation we find John alone on the isle of Patmos, seeking the presence of Jesus. Our faith is a communal faith, it is a pilg...

A Sunday morning sermon by Jordan Crews. Today is Rosh Hashanah. Since the giving of the Law in the wilderness, around this time of year, we are invited once again to enter into His rest, to remember He is God and we are not. In Leviticus 23.23-25 we read: “Speak to the people of Israel, saying, In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall observe a day of solemn rest, a memorial...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor David Singh. Leviticus is a prelude to the work of the Cross. It is a call to be a holy people who reflect the holiness of God. This is the attractiveness of mission that God’s people who are sinful by nature are being redeemed and renewed.  Mission is an invitation to belong to a holy God and to move from death to life.  I am in India right now and it was here, e...

A Sunday morning sermon by Mike Godzwa. Have you ever watched someone work a loom? For thousands of years, diverse peoples and cultures have created clothing and tapestries using looms. These looms make it possible to weave vertical warp and horizontal weft threads. It’s mesmerizing to watch. And it doesn’t even have to be fast to be impressive. All it takes is one attempt to work a loom—like a no...

A Sunday morning sermon Pastor Brett Deal. Each generation is capable of passing on gifts to the next. At first, the value of those gifts often those gifts go unnoticed. For example, it was really important to my mother that I learn to sew. Perhaps it was because growing up on a farm to parents who’d gone through the Great Depression made basic skills and frugality paramount to my mother. She was...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. Before the start of my Senior year, I had a surprise chance to come to the States, so I set out from the island of Bioko in Central Africa for far off middle America. The whole way across the Atlantic, I had almost exclusively one thing on my mind: new music! I was barely settled in my room at a small hostel for missionary kids in college, and I was lo...

A Sunday morning sermon by Peter DuMont. It is a truism in our culture that non-reciprocal giving can make people uneasy. People don’t always like the thought of others receiving what they have not earned. Extravagant generosity like this can seem a disruption to the moral order.    This was part of the criticism levelled against Paul’s message of righteousness given apart from the keeping of the...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. A striking parallel emerges as we move further into Paul’s epistle. In chapter 2, we heard Paul singing his great Christ hymn (Philippians 2.6-11). Now, following the worthy examples of Timothy and Epaphroditus (2.19-30), “Paul's own story bears the imprint of Christ's way of self-emptying and exaltation” (Daniel Migliore).     Hearing Paul’s personal...