First Pres Colorado Springs Sermons

Worshipers need community to begin to grow into disciples. New believers have so much to learn. They are like infants drinking milk. We need the milk of Christian community. Learn how to be together, from all walks of life, and be part of a community of faith, the family of God. These are people who need to be encouraged in Christian community. This is the congregation encouraged to build communit...

Participants have stepped into the stream of the Jesus community, now they need to learn how to worship. These are people who need to be invited to exalt the Lord. We gather this crowd in services of worship and lift up Jesus among them so they can see and know the Lord. Paul told the Corinthian church there was just nothing higher, nothing more important, nothing more glorious than “Jesus Christ...

Community Members hear something about Jesus and his community, his followers. These are people who need to be Evangelized. We reach them through outreach. The believers in Corinth were entrusted with a remarkable mission—reaching people who were very different from Judeo/Christian values. Speaker: Tim McConnell

We sing songs of heaven today. Like a foreigner or immigrant who still sings the folk songs of her native land, we sing the songs of our coming Kingdom. We know them already. The Spirit has ingrained them in our hearts. When heaven comes down, these songs will fill the earth as the water covers the seas. Heaven is singing right now. Can you hear it? Can you join in the song? Speaker: Greg Hartnett

Speaker: Jamal Sarikoki

The shepherds were captured in a song of heaven. The chorus of angels appeared in the sky. Suddenly there was an inbreaking of heaven in their ordinary lives. Something interrupted and captured everything in the light of God. The song of heaven broke into the realm of earth. Can you hear the song of heaven? Can you hear the music of God? Can you respond in song? If you are in Christ, if Christ is...

But are you happy? What is your deepest longing? What have you been waiting to see from the core of your being? For Simeon, it was the fulfilment of a promise that one day he would see the “consolation of Israel.” I have seen the Lord! Nunc Dimittis, now dismiss your servant in peace. What would it take to say the same? To say, the Lord has provided for me and I am glad. Speaker: Tim McConnell

Zechariah speaks for the prophets about the prophetic work of John the Baptist. John will accompany the prophets in preparing the way for the Lord. When Kings traveled, roads had to be built before them to allow them to come with all their retinue. John the Baptist, and all the prophets before him, call on us to prepare the way for the Lord. Lower the high places, raise the lowered places. Make hi...

Mary’s song is sometimes called The Magnificat. My soul magnifies the Lord, she sings. Like many “songs” in scripture, it doesn’t necessarily say that she sang it, but the text is so lyrical and balanced it quickly became a song in the church if it wasn’t one originally. Mary’s song is a reminder of God’s faithfulness through history. God has intervened in the past. God will intervene again. God i...

How does a peacemaker make peace? Like a parent short on patience you could be tempted to simply yell, “Stop it!” But that’s not real peace. That’s not lasting peace. Peace, it is said, is not the absence of conflict but the presence of justice and righteousness. Shalom. The world made right as God intended. The world gives a promise of a kind of peace. Take three breaths as your Apple watch vibra...

Swipe left for love. Or is it right? I don’t know. But I do know this: love grows sweeter with time. Can there be love at first sight? Yes. But romantic fascination only turns into life-giving love with commitment over time. Marriage is an opportunity to grow longstanding love. So is friendship. The church is a housing for the development of longstanding love. The long and faithful love of God for...

There are many offers of instant joy, instant happiness, instant satisfaction. They never satisfy. Jesus is invested in your joy. Jesus is sacrificially sponsoring of your joy and happiness. It doesn’t come with the instant solution, but with humble obedience to the Lord’s Word over time and variable experience. Abide with the vine, Jesus, and watch joy emerge from the deepest and darkest roots un...

Abide in me, says Jesus. Hang on to me as I hang on to you. Stay attached. A vine is like a hose in being connected to the source, but it is so much unlike a hose in the slow and unseen way that life moves through it in its connection to the trunk. You don’t grow fruit by dipping the roots of a fruit tree into the soil once or twice a year. You keep the roots in the good soil and you watch, and yo...

Show me a picture of home. Is that too much to ask? God doesn’t think so! In fact, Revelation paints the picture well. Like a brochure of a coming glory land, we have a picture of heaven. Not enough to fill in every detail, but enough to make us hunger and know that we will one day be satisfied. Like the brochure for Alpha Centauri in “Lost in Space.” I can’t know every detail, but it looks good!...

Hope is borrowing the future to pay off the present day. The reality of what is coming changes the reality of what I experience today. Home is out there. It is on the way. My longing is not just endless, existential angst. It is a thirst that will one day be slaked, a hunger that will one day be sated in a glorious exercise of feasting before the Lord with joy. This promise is not an empty encoura...

Yes, you have already been adopted into the family of grace. You have a home waiting and you are beginning to see your place at the table. You are on your way home. Your story (narrative) attaches to God’s great story (metanarrative). The fact that you are part of that larger story makes your own story tolerable. How can I keep connecting to that larger story? Prayer, the Word, sacraments and sanc...

Finally, yes, finally, we come to Jesus. What if I told you that Jesus Christ is the satisfaction of every longing you have? He is the fountain of life that satisfies the thirsty; the bread of life that satisfies the hungry. He is the way home for the lost and wandering. He is the home, and He is the way home. Scattered across the globe are believers in Jesus Christ meeting today at table to recei...

But is there a home? It seems so far away now, I can hardly recall it. Maybe there is no home, just the longing. No. The longing proves we were made for something called home. (“…physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread…but surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist.” C S Lewis, The...

It is the story of the people of God. They wandered. Abraham wandered from his homeland (a wandering Aramean). The Israelites wandered in the desert after liberation from Egypt. The people of God wandered away from faithfulness over and over, called back to salvation by a faithful and loving God. I wonder how you handle the wandering in your own soul? Has it caused you to make a few wrong turns? T...

Now we all long for home. We are wanderers in a foreign land. It’s hard to remember what home was like. Ruth is a good picture of this. Far from home, she seeks solace in a connection with her mother-in-law. It is a good connection. But the real home she needs is somewhere held by a Kinsman Redeemer who will welcome her into the family she was always supposed to join, the land where she was always...

Something in us is always leaving. Yearning pulls us. Longing unroots us. Our wandering hearts are always edging toward the door. How could you lose such a home as Eden? What could compel the human spirit to walk out of God’s carefully-fashioned home for us? Temptation creeps in where our hearts long for more. It is two truths and a lie. A little falsehood mixed in with a body of truth and our dis...

In the beginning, we were home. We were very much at home. Everything the Lord created, the Lord created to make us feel at home. The world we live in still reflects so much of this. The anthropic principle stuns us thinking about the carefully crafted home that sustains our life. Deep within every human being is a knowledge that there is a place called “home” that we must somehow find. Speaker: T...

Never forget God is there. This is a psalm worthy of memorization. Hide it away in your heart. When you are challenged, shaken, pressed upon and sad, this is the message to remember. The Lord is my shepherd. God is there, even when I feel like He is absent. He never stops caring for me. He never stops guiding me. He never stops restoring my soul. Jesus is the Good Shepherd. Never forget the Lord w...

Never forget God is there. This is a psalm worthy of memorization. Hide it away in your heart. When you are challenged, shaken, pressed upon and sad, this is the message to remember. The Lord is my shepherd. God is there, even when I feel like He is absent. He never stops caring for me. He never stops guiding me. He never stops restoring my soul. Jesus is the Good Shepherd. Never forget the Lord w...

Never forget God is there. This is a psalm worthy of memorization. Hide it away in your heart. When you are challenged, shaken, pressed upon and sad, this is the message to remember. The Lord is my shepherd. God is there, even when I feel like He is absent. He never stops caring for me. He never stops guiding me. He never stops restoring my soul. Jesus is the Good Shepherd. Never forget the Lord w...