Hillside Foursquare Church - Reno

Our text for this morning is 1Samuel 3 & Mark 4.

Our text for today is John 10:27.

Our texts for today come from John 14, 15, 16, & also Acts 1 & 2.  At the beginning of the podcast, our friend Jochen Geiselhart shares a short welcome from Foursquare Deutschland & the churches he oversees in the southwest of Germany.

Our texts for today are Acts 4:13, John 8:28-32, Ecclesiastes 4:9-12, John 13 & John 17

Our text for today is Luke 9:18-26, & the title of the message is, "THIS IS THE LIFE!"

Our text for today is John 15:1-13

Acts 4:13 – Now when they (the religious leaders) saw the boldness of Peter & John, & perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. & they recognized that they had been with Jesus. It’s human nature to disqualify ourselves &/or come up with reasons why we can’t respond to Christ’s invitation to follow Him as His disciple. The excuses run the gamut: We’re ashamed of ourselv...

This last Sunday at Hillside we wrapped up our “Jesus REVOLUTION” series – it’s was also our last Sunday gathering of 2014. The normally hectic pace of life has significantly increased in this Christmas season, & in some ways, I feel like I’ve had to be more & more intentional about stopping, reflecting, & evaluating life, its happenings, my priorities, & what I give my time to. Specifically, over...

John the Baptist was a prophet. Actually, he was THE prophet, the one promised in  Malachi 3:1 . The one that would announce the coming of the Anointed One. The Messiah. The Christ.   The first time John saw Jesus, he boldly declared, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” & he proclaimed, ““The Messiah will baptize you with the Holy Spirit & fire. His winnowing fork is in H...

One thing that Jesus did to help His disciples & other seekers to understand God, His nature, His kingdom, & the appropriate response to it was to use allegorical stories known as parables.  Each one began something like this: “The Kingdom of God is like…”   In the parable of the Hearer, Jesus told of a farmer who sowed seed – some fell on a hard footpath. This seed never took root, & was eaten up...

At Hillside, we believe that one of our main purposes as a church is to help people find, understand, & follow God’s plan for their lives. This means moving people towards self-discovery, helping them uncover & develop their God-given gifts, & talents, exploring their hopes & dreams, & hearing God’s direction & moving towards it. This Sunday, we welcome our friends Anthony & Ally Siwajian back to...

One of the things that has stood out to me through my studies for our current series, “The Gratitude Experiment,” is that our attitude of thanksgiving & living with a grateful approach to life actually flows as a response to God for His mercies, grace, care, salvation, & provision in our lives.   The Psalms (the church’s songbook for a couple thousand years) has dozens of examples of this – with t...

A few days before Halloween, I walked into Costco to pick up some supplies for dinner. I made it 30 feet into the store & was confronted by a huge snowman, who just happened to be fronting a mega-sized Christmas display. Christmas display. Christmas carols emanated from somewhere in the pile of holiday cheer. Anchoring the display were several large ticket items, each promising to be the core of m...

NOTE: To watch the video we used in our Sunday service, "The Science of Happiness" click  HERE .The preamble to the Declaration of Independence states a belief that the Creator has given us certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness. Even if we haven’t been in a civics or government class in a while, weknow, as Americans, these things are our birthright.   It’s...

After having spent the last several months reading, studying, & now teaching through the Sermon on the Mount, I have drawn a couple of conclusions for myself that I don’t think I had before (or at least hadn’t identified.) In this passage of Scripture, Christ defines exactly what it means to be His disciples: in how we relate to & obey God & His commandments. In establishing our priorities & value...

“Judge not, that you not be judged. ” When Jesus made the statement quoted above, what did He mean?  The following verses give us much clearer understanding – they say, in essence: “In the same way & with the same measure you judge others, you will be judged. Before you try to take the speck of sawdust out of someone else’s eye, take the 2x4 out of your own. Jesus challenges His disciples not to t...

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus challenged those that wanted to follow Him to recognize that God’s peoples’ priorities, values, thought processes, & actions run completely counter to those of the prevailing culture. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the passage we’ll be exploring this week, Matthew 6:19-34.   Here’s what I mean. The desire to acquire MORE – money, possessions, & stuff...

Have you ever heard this (or a version of it)? “Hypocrites. I don’t go to church because of the hypocrites. You know, the people who say they’re Christians, but who don’t live it out.”  I don’t buy that definition - to me any follower of Christ could then be called a hypocrite, because even though we don’t want to sin, to do wrong, &/or miss the mark, we DO. That doesn’t make us hypocrites, it mak...

One of the many challenging declarations Jesus made in the Sermon on the Mount comes from Matthew 5:43-48. It’s the passage where He tells His disciples & the crowds, “You’ve heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbor & hate your enemy. But I say to you, ‘Love your enemies, & pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in Heaven.” Love your enemies? Pray for p...

When I was younger, I equated much of Christianity & my relationship with God to “the Rules:” things I was supposed to do, & things I was NOT supposed to do. If I followed “the Rules,” I was doing good with God, & if I didn’t, well, I was doing bad.  Over time, I got pretty good at keeping “the Rules” & if I would admit it, I was pretty proud of myself. Why? I’m glad you asked.   Because I was goo...

Several times in the Gospels, Jesus declared Himself to be the light of the world… He usually made this declaration as He was interacting with the Pharisees/other religious leaders, or to the curious crowds that followed Him around, wondering what He was going to do next.   But to His disciples, those pledged to follow Him, learn, & become like Him, He said the following:  YOU are the light of the...

You know those spiritual gift ‘tests’ that you can take to find out what gifts you ‘have’ & what gifts of the Holy Spirit you are exempt from displaying? (Here’s an example of one:  http://bit.ly/1xDYRBo  ). Well, I used to love taking those tests & discovering at the end that I had ‘scored’ high in certain areas like discernment, teaching, & pastor … & that I had scored ‘low’ (read: not on the ch...

God’s people awaited their Messiah (the Anointed One) for thousands of years. Prophecies declared that He would be of the Israelite tribe of Judah, a direct descendent of King David the giant-killer. Among His titles would be King of kings & Lord of lords, the Sun of Righteousness, Wonderful, Counselor, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. The Old/First Testament prophets declared that the...

We’ve heard it said, “God is good all the time. All the time, God is good.”   Is He?   What about when our life experiences collide with our faith in a way that is seemingly contradictory to that declaration?   Disappointment. Disaster. Loss. Pain. Rejection. Suffering. Death.   What happens then? How do we process through those things, when it seems our faith in God & belief in Him is confronted...

It’s easy for us to get caught up in the 24/7 “busyness routine” that is the ‘normal’ for the world we live in, where our schedules are jam-packed, & where our identities are defined by DOING (our work, education, activities, recreation, etc.) … And even when we’re not actively busy, our version of ‘rest’ is done at a hectic pace. As I’ve been studying for our “Entering God’s Rest” series, I keep...