Greenwood Christian

Ever felt like an outsider longing to belong? Pastor Matt unpacks the story of the Samaritan woman, showing how Jesus met her shame with grace and offered living water that satisfies the soul. This message reminds us that God isn’t deterred by our past—He redeems it—and invites us to share that same hope and acceptance with others.

How could God call someone “a man after His own heart” despite deep flaws? Pastor Matt explores David’s story—from victory over Goliath to his failures with Bathsheba—to reveal that grace, not perfection, defines us. Through David’s repentance in Psalm 51, we see that God restores surrendered hearts and uses the repentant, not the perfect, to carry out His purpose.

What if your greatest regrets became the foundation for your greatest purpose? Pastor Matt explores Moses’ story—a flawed yet chosen leader—to show how God turns weakness into calling. Even through doubt and fear, God’s promise remains: “I will be with you.” This message invites you to lay down excuses, trust His presence, and let your past become the launching point for purpose and hope.

The key to holy living is reliance on the Holy Spirit. Our lives are a battleground in which our flesh (the urges of our bodies) and the Holy Spirit duke it out for supremacy. And our actions and attitudes demonstrate who is winning the fight.

Jesus Christ came because we’re unable to keep God’s Law perfectly. So if we insist on trying to earn our salvation with good behavior, we actually reject His gift.

Religious rule-keeping is not spiritual growth. But when legalism is all we’ve known, it’s easy—even after encountering the grace of Jesus—to revert back to the futility of trying to earn our salvation.

The entire Old Testament anticipated Jesus because Law alone is unable to give life or produce righteousness. Regardless of ethnicity, gender, or economic status, all who are in Christ—are God’s children.

Emphasis on God’s grace is not a “watering down” of the gospel. We receive the Holy Spirit by faith, not by law-keeping, and we can’t finish His work by our own willpower.

The Gospel is for all people, and its promise is that we become righteous before God through faith in Christ. We cannot save ourselves through legalistic rule-keeping.

No matter who preaches it, there is no other gospel but the message of Jesus, who died to deliver us from sin. To add to that gospel is to abandon Christ.

The pain in our world isn’t just our own. The longer we live, and the more relationally connected we are, the more likely we are to encounter others who are hurting in significant ways. And when we do, we have a choice to make: Will we back away from the hurt for our own comfort, or try to help?

Life sometimes feels unfair, especially when we hurt while others seem to just glide through life, problem-free. But the presence of pain doesn’t mean the absence of God, and God never wastes a hurt. When we trust Him through our trials, God redeems our pain and uses us for His glory and for others’ good.

Pain often perpetuates pain. Hurt people hurt people. Much of the pain in our world is inflicted by people who’ve been hurt themselves, and who lash out at others in bitterness and anger. But rather than cathartic release, those explosions tend to produce only more hostility, which leads to more pain. So God provides a better way.

Our world is a place of pain. But pain happens for many different reasons, so we need to be wary of simplistic, one-size-fits-all explanations. We won’t always understand the suffering we see and experience, but God paved the way for a future without pain, tears, and death by personally enduring all of the above.

In its own words, the Bible’s validity hinges on the resurrection of Jesus. If Jesus rose from the dead, that historical reality underscores the authority of all He taught, claimed, and promised, and demands that we listen to Him. If Jesus is still dead, then He’s just another teacher and philosopher who lived, died, and was overshadowed by others. The Roman Empire’s hostility toward Christianity...

Matt reflects on the significance of Good Friday, emphasizing how this day, often seen as bleak and unjust, represents the profound love of God demonstrated through Jesus' sacrifice for humanity's sins. He recalls the events leading up to the crucifixion, highlighting the pain and suffering endured by Jesus, and reinforces that this day is essential to the Christian faith, as it leads to the hope...

To our Western appetite for feel-good, self-help religion, Christianity’s most recognizable symbol is uncomfortable and offensive. But the cross stands as a monument both to God’s holiness and His love.

The Bible’s reliability is often questioned, but not always for honest reasons. Many aspects of the Bible—its date, content, form, extensive manuscript evidence, etc.—call for a closer look. Much of the Bible’s teaching is counter-cultural, but if it passes the literary and historical litmus tests, we can’t honestly dismiss it as irrelevant.

The Bible wasn’t written as a science textbook, but it does speak to where our world came from. If your worldview disallows the possibility of anything beyond what’s physical and tangible, you’ll likely be dismissive of faith. But there’s a difference between saying that science isn’t equipped to detect spiritual things and insisting that the spiritual doesn’t exist at all. If there is a Creator G...

People are universally flawed. So when lots of us come together—whether in our world, or in the Church—it should be no surprise that messiness and hypocrisy ensue. Jesus didn’t come to establish a club for a hand-picked group of good, upstanding people; He came to call broken, messed-up, spiritually dead people to new life.

Many people see pain and suffering as evidence against a good God. But there are many legitimate reasons, particularly our choices, as to why pain exists in our world. Christianity is the story of a God who, rather than always preventing pain, entered personally into our pain to provide us a way out of it.