Eternity Church PodCast

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. In the eye of the hurricane, swept up in the majesty of God, Job says, “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you,” (Job 42.5). That must be one of the most striking verses in the Bible. It confesses a heartfelt belief, something held, something heard; and confirms it to be true. Naveen Rao interprets Job’s confessional words through the c...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. In the eye of the hurricane, swept up in the majesty of God, Job says, “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you,” (Job 42.5). That must be one of the most striking verses in the Bible. It confesses a heartfelt belief, something held, something heard; and confirms it to be true. Naveen Rao interprets Job’s confessional words through the c...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal.

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. What must it have been like for Job when God showed up! One second the young Elihu is encouraging Job to “Keep listening to the thunder of His voice and the rumbling that comes from His mouth [because] God thunders wondrously with His voice; He does great things that we cannot comprehend,” and “then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind” (Job 37.2...

A Sunday sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. I once found myself in conversation with a futurist. He’d published several books and was well-known for his study of the future and his predictions on where things were headed. At times it was as if he was looking past the curve of the earth and seeing what tomorrow was bringing. When I asked him how he went about making his predictions for the future, his re...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. I think Mark Twain was right when he said, “Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.” The little book of Ruth is driven by kindness. Amid famine, decimation, and loss, the whisper of kindness soothes deafened ears. In the clashing cymbals of time, when the cacophony of anxiety and worry flood our vision, kindness reveals...

A Sunday morning sermon by Peter DuMont. Gregory Wagenfuhr, member of the ECO Standing Theology Committee, has spoken of time as a difficult thing to live within. In his telling, we are continually ground between two stones: between processing and making sense of the past, and anticipating and planning for the future. Our task as humans is to live between the weight of past experience and the loom...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. Every year during the festival of Weeks, the time more commonly known as Pentecost, the people of God would read the little book of Ruth. Annually they would take this short story from their past and listen to it again as it spoke into the current realities they were facing as well as the unknown, unseen possibilities of the future. Starting Sunday, we...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. Elise and I just got back from our own Emmaus road. We set out walking from our Jerusalem, like Cleopas and his companion into the unknown. And walk we did! Over the last two weeks we averaged six miles a day. Our peripatetic journey took us across the British isles. We worshiped in Westminster and Glasgow, the castle heights of Edinburgh and the cliff...

A Sunday sermon by Peter DuMont. Why do we worship Jesus?     Six weeks ago we gathered on Easter Sunday with a palpable sense of joy to celebrate Jesus’ resurrection. Since then we have been walking through his disciples experience of grief, disorientation, and sorrow between his death and resurrection. This week we arrive at the incredible finale to Jesus’ earthly ministry where he is revealed i...

A Sunday morning sermon by Kathleen Hudson. It is not an altogether uncommon experience in our home for someone to shout out to another person asking where something is. The irony of this is that, often, the person seeking what they cannot find is positioned directly in front of the “missing” item. The one called walks in and quickly grabs the item and hands it to them. Now, say it with me if you...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. After moving back to Kenya for my senior year, I was flying home for a break. Without a direct flight between the island and Nairobi, I stopped in Cameroon on my way. Landing in Douala, the port city close to Malabo, I heard from a friend that a well-known author was in Yaoundé leading a spiritual emphasis week for the group of Bible translators I’d li...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. After a few weeks home, it was time to fly back to Cameroon. With a new visa in my passport and a new semester ahead, I was ready to get back to work. I also had a new lease on the days ahead of me. I didn’t want to miss “why” I was in Yaoundé. We all have reasons. I realized I need to reshuffle mine. Some reasons we know. They’re written in billboard...

A Sunday sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. I boarded the little Cessna on the hot tarmac of the Yaoundé international airport. I had just received the grace of the customs and border patrol I surely didn’t deserve. I’d been an illegal alien in Cameroon for several months, assuming—as most naïve teenagers are wont to do—the school would keep my papers in order. After a few hours, however, the man behind...

A Sunday sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. Back in 1999, I found myself in hot water. As a high school junior, I was living in Cameroon, going to school in Yaoundé. For most of my schooling years I’d benefited from the meticulous care and attention of a much larger academy in Kenya. That year, however, I attended a much smaller school, closer to home. Everything seemed fine until I went to fly home for...

An Easter Sunday sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. Have you ever noticed how each Gospel speaks from a unique vantage point? Matthew and Mark, Luke and John all speak from a distinct place in the story. Eyewitnesses have shared their personal experiences of being with Jesus. They take several others’ testimonies of Thursday’s washing and communion, of Friday’s execution, of Saturday’s traumatic silence...

A Palm Sunday morning sermon by some of the youth at Eternity Church. One of the best questions anyone ever asked Jesus was, “Do you hear what these children are saying?”  As Jesus entered Jerusalem, with great fanfare and acclaim, as the long-awaited Messiah of Israel, people crowded along the roadside. They raised up palm branches and laid their cloaks beneath the foal’s footfalls. In the gather...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. There’s no excuse for my sense of humor. That’s an important place to start. It pops up in the strangest of places. For example, in high school my best friend and I named our dorm room. No, that wasn’t a normal practice. Dorms had names. Rooms didn’t. But I’d been spending dedicated time in the Psalms of Ascent, and I was taken by the thought of pilgri...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. Have you ever heard a great song or watched an incredible movie then afterwards learned the inspiration for it, and it made it all the more powerful? Years ago, Elise and I were in a little art shop in a mall. Among all the large and impressive art for sale, there was a fairly small oil replica of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers. So simple. Flowers in a...

A Sunday sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. Have you ever lost the thread? I imagine the phrase “lose the thread” began in a time when tapestries were still primarily made by hand and the careful design required mindful attention to the weaving. Despite the fact most of us do not mind the literal progress of thread, we still use this phrase to indicate we have lost focus, that the task or talk at hand g...

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. All of us know what it feels like to fail. The sear of shame, the burning against the skin of our neck born of embarrassment or humiliation. Some of us may hide it better than others, but we’ve all fallen short of our intentions. We all know what it feels like to regret. Whether it was the weight of our actions or the expense of our words, we’ve all pl...