Everyday Church Sunday Messages

If we're honest with ourselves, many of us take on different personas throughout our week depending on whom we're trying to impress or curry favor with, often without even realizing it. We can be doing all sorts of good things, but often with selfish motives. Living this way is exhausting, but Jesus invites us to live a much simpler life — a life where we do the right things for the right...

We never mature beyond any of the four stages of prayer we are exploring in this Practice, but the further we progress in prayer, the more we desire to speak to God, to listen to God, and to just be with God. As a general rule, you can gauge the intimacy in a relationship by how comfortable you are being alone together in the silence. When applied to God, this type of wordless prayer has come to b...

There comes a point in our relationship with God where we desire not just to speak to him, but to listen — to hear his voice. As Jesus said in John 10:27, “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.” But how do we hear God’s voice? PrayerPrayer, at its most basic, is the medium through which we communicate and commune with God. Over four weeks we'll learn how, in our busy an...

In week two of our Prayer Practice we begin to learn how to talk with God. Praying pre-made prayers is a beautiful way to pray. It’s where we start our prayer journey, and it’s a place we revisit all through our lives. But at some point in our life of prayer, we desire to pray our own words to God — to share what’s on our mind, our heart. Our pain, our joy, our hopes and fears. We can’t help but d...

We begin our Prayer Practice by exploring the first stage of prayer: talking to God. When the disciples asked Jesus, “Teach us to pray,” in Luke 11, Jesus replied, “This, then, is how you should pray: “‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name...’” He gave them a pre-made prayer to pray to God. Pre-made prayers can look like praying the Lord’s Prayer, singing through the Psalms or using a praye...

In one sense we are the most connected society that has ever walked the face of the planet. But that same technology which, at it's best, enables us to talk face-to-face with someone on the other side of the world, at it's worst, enables us to pretend that someone in the same room as us doesn't even exist. The connection that the online world claims to offer us is an illusion and it&#3...

We've been taught that faith is about a decision (choosing to trust in Jesus) and a destination (going to heaven when we die), but the Gospel of the Kingdom that Jesus preached seems to put a lot more weight on the part in between the decision and the destination than we sometimes do. The journey of faith — the way we walk out our apprenticeship to Jesus — is at the heart of being a Christian,...

This Mother's Day we brought together six women in our church family who are various stages of motherhood to get their perspectives on life and hear what God has taught them through the joys and struggles of being a mom.

The modern Western world is a very confusing place. Recent generations have become more and more adept at deconstructing age-old ways of thinking and living, but what is often missing is the ability to reconstruct the dismantled pieces into a workable framework for living in the 21st Century. This leaves many standing amid the rubble of a world that belonged to previous generations with no clue as...

Most people in the Western world live life at a break-neck speed. The technology that was once predicted to expand our leisure has instead expanded our labor. This state of constant exhaustion and crippling anxiety is the enemy of life with God, but by practicing the ancient Way of Jesus, it is possible for us to find rest for our souls. This radically different way of life that stands in defiance...

What does it mean to follow Jesus in 2026 on the Central Coast of California? So many people feel stuck in their spiritual journey much of the time, but following Jesus is an ancient way of life that so many have walked before us, including Jesus' first disciples. What can we learn from their experience as we reimagine our discipleship and community life for the 21st century? Ancient//Future J...

What is life really all about? The average Christian might answer, "To have a relationship with God, so that when I die, I can go to heaven and be with him for all eternity." That's not a bad answer, but according to the pages of scripture, it's an incomplete answer. When Jesus discusses eternal life with his disciples in Matthew 19, he points out two key truths that the modern w...

All throughout scripture God reveals himself as a God of new beginnings, but no more so than in the Easter resurrection story. The first Easter Sunday turned history on it's head as the new age of the kingdom of heaven was inaugurated and a new story began to be written for for all of creation.

Most followers of Jesus would agree that part of our call is to be witness to the good news that Jesus himself preached. But how do we do that in a post-christian culture that is increasingly hostile to christianity? Jesus, operating in a culture that ultimately killed him, had a very simple but effective way of reaching out to people who were far from God — he invite them to the table. He ate, he...

Stories are hardwired into our brains — they are how we make sense of the world around us and our experiences within it. From ancient cave paintings and oral histories, to classic novels and plays, to blockbuster movies and TV shows, our culture is both understood and shaped by stories. It should come as no surprise then that Jesus came as a master storyteller. God created us as narrative beings a...

Jesus comes to the last of his case studies on how his apprentices can live out a greater righteousness, and it's the most challenging of all. It centers on how we relate to those who oppose us and oppress us—our enemies—and how we are not just called to tolerate them, but to love them. After all, Jesus says, if we only love people we like and are like, how are we any different from the world?

As followers of Jesus it can be difficult to know how to approach the evil and injustice that we see in the world. On one hand we may feel a righteous anger when confronted with issues of injustice, but on the other, Jesus, in Matthew 5, seems to say that we should not resist evil people. What do we do with that? Understanding the cultural context of Jesus' examples of injustice will help us r...

Today contracts and legal agreements are everywhere—so much so that we regularly sign our lives away without even reading what it is that we are agreeing to! But in Jesus' day an agreement was not bound by a pair of signatures on a piece of paper (or a Docusign link), but by the word of the parties involved. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus addresses the way that people had come to use oaths and...

As John Mark Comer writes in the opening to his book, "Loveology", “In the beginning God created Adam. Then he made Eve and ever since we’ve been picking up the pieces.” There is so much beauty in the relationships between men and women, but there is also so much brokenness. One of the most obvious ways that this brokenness is seen is through the betrayal of an affair, but, as Jesus will show us,...

An inmate on death row. An abusive husband. A middle school bully. All examples of people who have struggled to get a grip on the human emotion we call anger. But of course we know there is a vast difference between murder and name calling... or is there? According to Jesus, those who are angry with someone else will be subject to the same judgment as those who take the life of another, but how ca...

Have you ever wanted something so badly that you went to great lengths to get it? Jesus wants us to feel that way about righteousness — that we would hunger and thirst for it. Righteousness is a confusing word, but in the context of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount it simply means living in right relationship; doing right by God and by others. This was the way of life that Israel was supposed model to t...

Early on in the history of the church, fasting was tied to what Jesus and the early Christians called “almsgiving” — a practice that combined generosity, serving, and justice. On fasting days, Christians would take the food or money they would have spent on food and give it to the poor. Often, they would also give the time they would have spent cooking, eating, and cleaning up to serving the poor....

Fasting and prayer go together. Like two wings of a bird, together they take flight. You can pray without fasting, and you can fast without praying, but when you combine the two, there’s a noticeable amplification of our prayer before God. This comes as no surprise, since fasting is a kind of praying with our bodies. When the requests of our hearts are coupled with the yearnings of our bodies, som...

Our culture conditions us to long for, and even expect a comfortable life. But in the words of one elderly monk, "God sits at the summit of hunger, thirst, and suffering; the devil sits at the summit of the comfortable life." Jesus himself said, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Deep down we know that self-denial is the way we g...

In the modern world, you are more likely to hear about fasting from a Muslim, Buddhist, nutrition expert, or fitness guru than from a serious disciple of Jesus. Most followers of Jesus in the West no longer fast; if they do, it’s rarely on a weekly basis, despite the fact that it was the common practice of the church for well over a millennium and a half to do so. Yet in his teaching on fasting in...