Grace Church Elk Grove

Living by faith is easy to say, but difficult to do. There are so many obstacles, such as our own desires, the opinions of others, the pain of loss, the pain period, the boredom of no change, the fear of certain change, etc. All these obstacles, and many more, threaten to detour us from the path of faith. Is there any hope that we can live lives of faith in God consistently? I believe there is! Li...

This week we continue looking at the book of Ezra. In this chapter we see some profound lessons about God's sovereignty that apply directly to our time and place. We live in a diverse place led by a bureaucracy largely set on acquiring and keeping power for itself, paid for on the backs of its people. So did the people of God in Ezra. Yet God worked in wonderful ways, using their very similar...

This week we return to Ezra, though we've not left Christmas. As I said a couple sermons ago, our Nativity scenes should have Roman soldiers in them, because Christianity has faced opposition from the very beginning. God's people in Ezra 5 face their own opposition, a more effective form, and we will see their even more effective response. It is a timeless scene that carries numerous appli...

This week we celebrate Christmas! In doing so, we will consider the heart of Christmas, the heart of the greatest Giver, God Himself, reflected in the heart of the real Santa Claus, the historic Nicholas. Nicholas did nothing halfway, generously building orphanages with this wealth and slugging the heretic Arius at the Council of Nicaea. The guy lived a blessed life, one worthy of emulation.

This week our sermon will take on the shape of C.S. Lewis’ book, “The Screwtape Letters.” He wrote that book from the perspective of a demon named Screwtape giving instruction to his nephew about how to deceive and derail his “subject.” It is a fascinating read about the nature of the opposition we face, as is the passage before us this week - Ezra 4. When we consider the principles in play, we wi...

This week we look at Ezra 3, where Israel “makes a beginning” in rebuilding the temple. This passage is filled with ancient details of Israel’s worship, and these same details are mapped across the eons to our present situation. God’s Word is evergreen in its application because its Author is timeless. There is vital wisdom here for the beginning we are making today. Listen to this episode from Pa...

The chapter before us this week is full of the names of real people, with real stories, who took great risk to  continue  the work of God in the world. At a minimum, we honor them, but we will also learn from them. Listen to this episode from Pastor Jed’s sermon on November 30th, 2025 to learn more.

This week we begin our next series, on the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. We think God is leading us into a time of our own rebuilding, which is what Ezra is all about. So I invite you to simply read the book of Ezra. Familiarize yourself with it. And listen to this episode from Pastor Jed’s sermon on November 23rd, to learn more.

Failure is something we all can understand. I can fail to play the right chord during a worship song on Sunday morning, and I can forget to stop my car at a red light. Both are failures, but the scope of the failure is vastly different. The failure I am referring to is a spiritual one. The failure I am referring to is a spiritual one. And it is that kind of failure that produces individuals who, a...

This Sunday, we looking at church membership because in it we organize ourselves to do the work God has called and commanded us to. Listen to this episode from Pastor Jed’s sermon on November 9th, 2025 to learn more.

This Sunday is the final talk at our Revival & Reformation Summit. Our theme this year is The Word of God. God's "job" for the Word is not just to make us better little boys and girls. It is that, and it is more than that. Listen to this episode from Pastor Jed’s sermon on November 2nd to learn more.

This week we have our final installment in our series on missions. And it turns out that understanding missions requires understanding the church. Because God's ambition has always been His mission to have the nations, and His primary tool in that great empire-building project is the church. Listen to this episode from Pastor Jed’s sermon on October 26th to learn more.

This week we consider two different but related passages on the relational work of missions. What should it look like, between people? Jesus says we are “salt and light,” and Paul says we should be “all things to all people.” Both are necessary for our witness to be effective, over there and right here. And as with so many things in life, we learn to do both by, well, doing both.

This week we consider the "ambition" of Paul. Ambition is a concept that has fallen on hard times in the church. That's because we are wary of it going wrong. But the Bible is very clear: ambition is a good thing. It only goes bad when it is aimed at the wrong things. Verbs are defined not by themselves but by their objects. If our greatest ambition is for self-glory, self-satisfacti...

This week we begin a new four-week series on missions. Missions has been often misunderstood and sometimes corrupted in the past, and yet our forefathers went far and sacrificed much for the spread of the gospel. We want to walk faithfully in their footsteps yet never repeating their errors. We want to follow our ascended Lord wherever he leads.

This week will be our final look at Christ in the Old Testament. We will finish on the most important passage, the famous Isaiah 53. I hope it is known to you. If not, I encourage you to familiarize yourself with it before Sunday. There are too many riches for us to consider all of them in one sitting. This is why many people consider this section of Isaiah the "New Testament in the Old Testa...

The texts we are considering this week are a thread through Scripture that teach us several things at once: how Christ is portrayed in the Old Testament; how Christ has a massive bearing on the events of the Old Testament; and how God is nourishing us to salvation. The big lesson is that we neglect these gifts to our peril. God gives His gifts so that His children would enjoy them fully, not leave...

This week our nation learned about two monumental deaths: the horrific, unprovoked murder of Iryna Zarutska and then just yesterday, the assassination of Christian apologist Charlie Kirk. As the president said, these are dark times. What we do in such times is dependent on *what story we think we are living in.* For instance, if we think we are living in a nihilistic J.G. Ballard story with no goo...

We will consider another way that Christ is in the Old Testament. It begins mysteriously, with the story of Melchizedek, and yet it ends with something very clear and solid: having "full assurance" in our faith. Full assurance! Whatever capacity we have to be assured that, when we meet our Maker, we will be with Him forever, that cup of assurance can be filled to the brim. This is really...

Today we consider another passage that reveals Christ in the Old Testament. In the wreckage of The Fall, with all of its shame and regret, God promises hope. That one day Eve's seed would come and crush the head of the dragon. Praise God that our dragon crusher has come, and he is still on the move! Listen to this episode from Pastor Jed’s sermon on August 31st, 2025 to learn more.

This is the start of a new Christ in the Old Testament series. The Bible is a whole, one story, all of it pointing to one person: Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world. So, it is no wonder that we see the Old Testament and the New point forward or backward to him. This series will look at specifically how the Bible looks forward to Jesus. We will begin this week with Jesus' own words, as he te...

We are looking at Psalm 30 today. The heading says that it’s for the dedication of the temple. But there is much more to the story. The background begins in 1 Chronicles 20.  Listen to this episode from Pastor Jed’s sermon on August 10th, 2025 to learn more.

Sometimes the Scriptures are to be studied, the way you study for a class. But there are other times when we are not to so much study but INHABIT a text. We are to let it swirl around us, capture our imaginations, and let it take us to the heavens or a foreign land that we’ve never known.  Such is Psalm 29 - it’s not here for us to completely get our arms around it, but to let it take us to a plac...

Many times, our greatest enemy as believers is ourselves. Fredrick Nietzsche made these words famous. He was a pagan, but all truth is God's truth, so even pagans can speak truth. Faith is faith when it is hard to trust. But when it is hard to trust, we often work against ourselves in letting our minds move to complete submission and trust in God.

We all face fear, because we all have enemies. These enemies come in three flavors: the world, our flesh and the devil enemies from this world, in the form of temptations, and disasters and people who hate us; our own flesh, in the form of wrong desires and illness and weakness; and spiritual powers directly, in the form of the devil and his servants. This enmity did not start with communism or Da...