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Your hope is not held up by how well you can argue for it; it is held up by the risen Christ, which frees you to witness without fear and stand unshaken when it costs you.

When the two sides demand you pick one, Jesus refuses both and runs a different test on the coin in your hand, render Caesar the metal that bears his image and refuse him your neighbor, your enemy, and yourself, who bear God's.

The desire to be rich is not a money problem but a soul problem, because money cannot deliver the security and contentment we secretly ask it to guarantee, and only a life lived before the face of God can carry wealth without being pierced by it.

This sermon on Ecclesiastes 2 argues that pleasure itself isn't broken—our method of pursuing it is. Solomon's experiment of total self-indulgence proved that earthly pleasures, though genuinely enjoyable, are ultimately "vanity"—they never last and never fully satisfy. The root problem is that God has placed eternity in our hearts, so finite pleasures will always leave us empty. The solution isn'...

The exposed nerve in Romans 12:1-2 is not indecision about a job; it is the quiet terror that God has hidden your real life somewhere "out there" and is mildly disappointed in how slowly you are finding it. Paul refuses to feed that terror with a technique. He has just spent eleven chapters standing inside a mystery he cannot explain and glorying in it rather than panicking, and now his "therefore...

Ruth and Boaz show that when we live for God, we bear the following fruits. We are fully alive in both work and play, we are emotionally expressive and physically self controlled in love, and we value both generosity and privacy.

From 1 Timothy 5:1-8 and Paul's instruction concerning widows, we learn that the latter half of life, both empty nesting and old age, is not merely a domestic or physical adjustment but a profound new chapter of discipleship marked by emptying. While the world treats this season as loss to be resisted, Scripture frames it as kenosis, the very pattern Jesus modeled in Philippians 2 of receiving...

Rachel only begins to experience rivalry in chapter 30 because she gets starved of the attention and affection she has long taken for granted. Rachel competes by playing dirty because she's so desperate to regain her status. But as she goes from assuming she's better to becoming bitter and even monstrous, until she finally learns to pray as one who knows she needs grace. Because her unders...

Drawing on the story of Leah, Pastor Sam described two life strategies that lead to poisoning the people we love. Self Erasing actions come from a heart that idolizes acceptance. Self-Sacrificing actions come from a heart that idolizes appeasement. When we see these actions fail us, we can recognize what God wants from us. God wants us to be so satisfied in His love that we live with Self-Forgetti...

1 Peter 3 sits inside a letter written to believers scattered across the Roman empire, people pushed to the margins for following Jesus. To them, the apostle announces that they belong to a revolution, a new humanity built on the living stone of the risen Christ, where the rejected have become a chosen race and a royal priesthood. Marriage is part of that revolution. To wives, the text assigns a n...

John 13:33-35 teaches us 3 things about embrace: (1)The personal embrace of Christ, (2)The sacrificial embrace of Christ, and (3)The missional embrace of Christ. As we see how Jesus loved his own, we are given a model and a pattern for how we are to love our own. The call to love one another is the distinguishing mark of the new community of Christ and it is designed to testify to the world who Ch...

We are called to reach the lost for Christ, especially in the cities with our reach. This calling requires us to Go where the people are, Integrate within our communities, and seek their good in light of eternity.

In the final chapter of Genesis, Joseph stands before the brothers who sold him into slavery and speaks the sentence the entire book has been building toward: "You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive." The Hebrew word for "meant" is chashav - to weave, to design, to architect with intentionality. Joseph uses it twice in the same...

In Genesis 45, after twenty-two years of slavery, false accusation, imprisonment, and silence, Joseph stands before the very brothers who stripped him, sold him, and let their father believe he was dead - and instead of exacting the revenge he had every right to demand, he clears the room, breaks open in tears, and pulls them close with the words "come near to me, please." He names what...

Favoritism is the preferential treatment of people based on what they can do for us, and it has the power to fracture not just families but the mission of God — as we see in Genesis 37 where Jacob's open favoritism of Joseph nearly unraveled the entire family of promise. Favoritism jeopardizes God's work because it devalues people by stripping them of their God-given worth, and dethrones G...

*Special Episode* Pastor Dave gives guidance on understanding the Book of Revelation. In this podcast he gives four keys to help understand a difficult book.

Jacob is called to return to Bethel to commemorate what God has done for him and now to commit himself to live a radical life only for the Lord. As amazing as this is, Jacob knows that in order to do this he has to expel idols from his life and his home. Genesis 35 reminds us of the critical need to expel idols from our lives. Idols are nothing but at the same time, idols are conduits to commune w...

Jacob’s story shows that when a deceiver finally tells the truth about his name and wrestles with God instead of running, confession becomes the path to freedom and a completely new future.

In Genesis 27, we see what happens when God’s promise feels uncertain and His timing feels slow. Rebekah and Jacob believed what God had said, but they did not trust that He would fulfill it without their control, so they resorted to manipulation. Yet despite their scheming, God still carried His covenant forward, proving that His promises rest on His faithfulness, not human effort. Because Christ...

Waiting for God's promises is hard. How do we wait well?

We will be going over these topics in our podcast today. Creation Ex Nihilio and pre-existence history The Imago Dei (Vice Regents) Romans 5 Theology of Federal Headship

After the flood and Babel, Genesis slows down to focus on Abraham because God is re-launching His plan to bless the nations through one promised line. Yet Abraham’s story is not a straight line of heroic faith - it is a tense mix of obedience and compromise, worship and doubt, hope and exhaustion as years pass with no child. Under the pain of delay, he begins editing God’s promise to fit within hu...