Hillside Church Sermons

Giving as an act of worship needs to be revisited and reconsidered as we give to the local church and through the local church to advance the gospel in obedience to God’s word.

For many these topics are more than a little confusing. We find clarity in a careful examination of the New Testament.

Many times, things get so crazy in our lives that we drift away from God’s purposes. We feel unsettled, anxious, and nothing is going right. It’s time to stop and think. What’s the matter? Where am I with God?

There is a void in our souls that only God can fill. When we try and satisfy this void with anything other than God we don’t “feel right.” Often God moves in our lives to cause us to consider our ways by reevaluating our priorities. Haggai chapter 1 bears witness to this: we cannot have divided loyalties, attempting to serve two masters.

Paul says that in Christ’s body, “each member belongs to all the others”. We are profoundly interdependent. The implications of this principle are spelled out practically in dozens of “one another” passages in the New Testament epistles. We will take a quick look at three of these “one another’s” that are key to start building community.

We need to be there for those who suffer loss. We need to be present; available; and useful---and sometimes just listen.

Every person every born has a choice to make when it comes to successful kingdom living, to embrace Christ and live for Him or to ignore Him and live for self. What’s it going to be?

We know a tree by the fruit it bears, and we can discern a Christian by His character profile. Unpopular as it sounds, it is possible to profile a real Christian as Christ provides us a profile in the Sermon on the Mount, generally, and in our passage, particularly.

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and swims like a duck, it could well be a duck (the same is true of Christians).

On the trip the team used a simple way to study the Bible as they went through a portion of the book of Acts, tracking the development of the early church.

While God affords us liberty in prayer, there are certain principles and patterns we do well to observe as we distill and derive principles of prayer from Jesus Christ’s model prayer in Matthew 6:5-13.

Prayer is a simple yet profound concept and act of worship. Sometimes we make it more complicated than we should. Understanding the basics of prayer may help you develop a more God honoring and satisfying prayer life. Let’s learn from Jesus the basics of prayer so that we can build on His solid foundation.

Worship is all encompassing. It’s everything we say think and do. In Matthew 6 Jesus shows us the necessity of worship in our helicopter fly-over of Matthew 6 in ways we might not always have considered applicable to our time and culture.

If Christ changes everything (and He does), and if we detach and discard the junk that has to go, then we need to replace old desires and attitudes with new ones. In today’s passage, we find three places to start.

Faith needs to be expressed in obedience that leads to concrete actions that please God, even if we are going through trials and difficult situations.

This message is a look into Jesus being asked if He is the Christ, and His response is so much bigger than they imagined.

The Good Shepherd is imagery that Jesus employs to illustrate the difference between Himself and others. This sermon tackles the sheep/shepherd theme in Scripture, and depicts God being a close and intimate God with his creation.

Christ changes everything, and that includes you, me, and our conduct. But too often, we fall prey to conventional wisdom (pragmatism), and ways of thinking, speaking and acting which must be detached and discarded from our lives if we are to have an impact for the Kingdom of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus, clarifying the Law and the Prophets seems to suggest our desires, attitudes, and...

Life changing, eternity changing contact with Christ changes everything from the way we think, to live, and speak. It changes how we relate to people. As we continue our discussion of successful kingdom living, we consider how successful kingdom living changes everything from us to the world around us!

Live every day of your life as who is saved, not by any goodness in yourself, but by the grace of God. In doing so be a light to the world, that others will see the love of Jesus in you.

Successful kingdom living starts from within us, at salvation. And the new heart we receive through Christ takes our upside down, worldly thinking and rights it like a capsized boat. We may look the same, like the houses built upon sand and the solid rock look the same, but like those houses, we are founded and grounded on Christ and that makes a difference in the way we think and live (a noticeab...

Successful kingdom living starts from within us, at salvation. And the new heart we receive through Christ takes our upside down, worldly thinking and rights it like a capsized boat. We may look the same, like the houses built upon sand and the solid rock look the same, but like those houses, we are founded and grounded on Christ and that makes a difference in the way we think and live (a noticeab...

How do we live ‘the successful Christian life’ beyond platitudes like ‘your best life now?’ How do we live effectively as citizens of the kingdom of God in Christ? The Sermon on the Mounts is our declaration of independence from worldly thinking. It is a Christian manifesto that describes a life lived out in obedience to Christ. Our first sermon counter-intuitively comes from the end of the Sermon...

The world is full of broken relationships. Peter damaged his relationship with Christ by denying Jesus three times. But Jesus restored Peter in John 21 and recommissioned Peter to ministry. In this narrative we can distill principles for restoring relationships in our own lives whether we sin against God or others.

People know viscerally or intuitively that Christ offers something that other religions don’t. And they can’t put their finger on it. Christ provides for us what we cannot provide for ourselves, forgiveness as His expense.