Hillside Community Church Podcast

Beginning Again: In Love As we’ve gone through the characteristics of love that Paul gives us in I Corinthians 13, we’ve seen that love is not sentimental or sweet but powerful and challenging. It’s not easy to love the way Paul calls us to love. In his final set of the characteristics of love, Paul tells us that love always protects, trusts, hopes and perseveres. Once again we see that love is sa...

Beginning Again: In Love The Bible calls us to rejoice when others rejoice and to mourn when others mourn. But sometimes that’s not easy. Sometimes we take delight in the failures and hurts of other people and sometimes we are sad when others succeed. We’ll look at what Paul says about love: It doesn’t delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. - Pastor Ron Kool To give, please visit: https://pu...

Beginning Again: In Love We all get hurt. In a broken world, there is no way we can avoid it. We all get hurt (and we all hurt others at times). The question is this: How do we respond? What does love teach us about how we respond when we get hurt? - Pastor Ron Kool To give, please visit: https://pushpay.com/g/hillsidechgr Support the show

Beginning Again: In Love One of the greatest ways we show love is to honor people - to notice them, to listen to them, to respect them. Today we'll see how love calls us to not seek to gain honor as it seeks to give honor to others. - Pastor Ron Kool To give, please visit: https://pushpay.com/g/hillsidechgr Support the show

Beginning Again: In Love We start taking a look at all the things the Apostle Paul said Love is NOT in 1 Corinthians 13. Paul wants to warn the church against envying one another, boasting, and being prideful because when we do these things the focus is on "me." True love focuses on "we." We now discover how we can get out of our own way so that we can love God and each other....

Beginning Again: In Love Last week we heard Paul’s call to love. He taught us that no matter how gifted we are, without love, we are nothing. That leads to what we’re going to talk about today and for the next couple of weeks: What is love? A feeling?  A song? A generic sort of feel-good moment? Paul’s going to point out that love—real love—requires some real work. - Pastor Ron Kool To give, pleas...

Beginning Again: In Love We’ve talked about the importance of prayer and of serving. Now we’re going to talk about something that Paul says is the greatest thing: Love. No matter how impressive we may be to others with our prayers and our serving and our speaking and our knowing, Paul tells us that if we don’t do these things in love, we really don’t matter much. Love makes the difference. - Pasto...

One of the most amazing things we can discover is that God can and does work through us. It feels great to realize that we had an impact on someone’s life, whether that was by a word we spoke, an act of kindness, or a gift we gave. We were created by God to do these sorts of things and feel this sort of joy. We’ll take a look at how God not only created us to make a difference but gave us spiritua...

The Bible tells us that Christians are supposed to be ministers of reconciliation. But when we look at the church these days, it seems like most Christians aren't doing well with that - we look more like ministers of division than ministers of reconciliation. We will think about how we can grow stronger at reconciliation. - Pastor Jul Medenblik To give, please visit: https://pushpay.com/g/hil...

For many of us, we are beginning again. Schools are open, ministries at church are ramping up, the Hillside Cook-out is today, the Lions kick off a new season. As we begin again, there are three things that we ought to recommit ourselves to: Prayer, Service and Love.  We’ll take some time to commit and re-commit ourselves to prayer. - Pastor Ron Kool To give, please visit: https://pushpay.com/g/hi...

Most of us have heard that “it’s better to give than to receive.” That’s true. But what we haven’t always recognized is that often it’s easier to give than to receive. We don’t like to receive gifts we can’t pay back. We like to feel like we are pulling our own weight. That’s not terrible, unless it keeps us from receiving the most important gift in the world—God’s grace. - Pastor Ron Kool To give...

Set Free to Live Free | The Ten Commandments As we finish the Ten Commandments this morning we’ll see that the last commandment takes us inside—into our hearts, our inner desires, where all our outward actions start.  We’ll see that if we can get this one right, we can do much better with the first nine. - Pastor Ron Kool To give, please visit: https://pushpay.com/g/hillsidechgr Support the show

Saint Martin of Tours is known as the first Chaplain in the history of the Christian Church. However, Jesus is the first Chaplain and the perfect Chaplain. Jesus is on His way to Jerusalem. By the side of the road, a blind beggar, Bartimaeus, calls out for help. The crowd tells him to be quiet. But, Jesus, even though He is going to be killed in just a few days, puts His life on hold, calls Bartim...

Set Free to Live Free | The Ten Commandments The ninth commandment might be the one that we break with the most frequency.  While we really want to be people who tell the truth, too often we don’t tell the whole truth. We mislead, we speak too strongly, we speak too weakly. We cover the truth and slant it. We’ll take a look at how we can be people who speak the truth in love. - Pastor Ron Kool To...

Set Free to Live Free | The Ten Commandments The Ten Commandments continue to help us learn to live in freedom. We’ll look at what it means to be free in relationship with our stuff, our possessions. God teaches us that real freedom comes when we are satisfied with what we have and when we are able to freely share what we have with others. - Pastor Ron Kool To give, please visit: https://pushpay.c...

Set Free to Live Free | The Ten Commandments As we continue through the Ten Commandments, we come to a very important and very challenging commandment: Don’t commit adultery. God cares deeply about our sexual lives and our sexual thoughts. We need to take that seriously as well. A key question we’ll look at is why? Why does the Bible have so much to say about sex? - Pastor Ron Kool To give, please...

One of the biggest fears many of us have is the fear of the unknown. We don’t like it when we don’t know exactly what is going to happen next. We feel a little out of control. We may be excited about the future but it is still filled with unknowns. This morning we’ll look at what God has to say to Joshua as he is about to lead the people of Israel into the Promised Land. - Pastor Ron Kool To give,...

Ever feel your heart is overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude to God and you can’t stop feeling your cup is overflowing? In my farewell sermon , I invite you to think of our lives as a journey with Jesus. It’s all about Christ. We’ll take a look at how loving, faithful, gracious, and generous He has been to all of us since we got the call to serve Hillside Church in 2008. - Pastor Daniel Bud To gi...

Set Free to Live Free | The Ten Commandments This is one of those commandments that is pretty easy for most of us if we only leave it at the surface level. Most of us aren’t terribly tempted to literally murder someone. But if we push deeper (and Jesus calls us to do that), we discover that this commandment calls us to avoid harming or hurting people and, in fact, calls us to learn to love our nei...

Set Free to Live Free | The Ten Commandments Parents are a big deal. Whether they are good or bad; whether they are wise or foolish; whether they are biological or adoptive; parents are a big deal. And God says it’s a big deal how we treat our parents - we are to honor them. But what does that mean? What does that look like? We take a look at what this commandment has to say to us. - Pastor Ron Ko...

Set Free to Live Free | The Ten Commandments We take a look at one of God’s really good gifts for us - the Sabbath. In a world where we constantly feel under pressure to do more and to do better, God invites us to stop and remember that He is God and we are not. The world is not in our hands, it is in His hands. When we remember this, we can actually rest for awhile - maybe even one day a week! -...

As we celebrate multiple students making profession of faith, we take a moment to reflect on one o the most important commitments in the Christian life; the commitment to serve. Jesus showed us, by example, what a life of service looked like. How will we respond? - Pastor Arek O'Connell To give, please visit: https://pushpay.com/g/hillsidechgr Support the show

Set Free to Live Free | The Ten Commandments Ever catch yourself being tempted to use foul language and curse? Jesus taught us that "what we say flows from what is in our heart!" What? Explore with us the 3rd Commandment, "You shall not misuse the NAME of the Lord." - Pastor Daniel Bud To give, please visit: https://pushpay.com/g/hillsidechgr Support the show

Set Free to Live Free | The Ten Commandments Do you ever feel like someone knew one thing about you and then decided they knew everything about you? They labeled you. They put you in a box. They “knew” all about you so they didn’t really have to listen to you.  If you’ve ever had that happen, then you know that it’s not fun.  God doesn’t like it either. He doesn’t like it when we limit Him or redu...

Set Free to Live Free | The Ten Commandments After God rescues us, He wants us to learn to live in freedom. We start this morning with the first and, in many ways, most important commandment: You shall have no other gods before me.  While most of us aren’t tempted to worship Zeus or Odin or Amun-Ra, there are plenty of gods in our world we are tempted to worship—and we need to identify these gods...