Hope Christian Fellowship

This Sunday Pastor Dan and our teens will explore this tough question and give a roadmap to finding an answer that is life giving and fulfilling, whether you’re a teen asking it for the first time, or an adult who has grown unsatisfied with their answer.

Do you have any struggles in your life that just keep showing up again and again? Maybe you’ve tried to overcome some kind of habit or pattern because you know you’re making a mess, but you just can’t seem to break free. Israel had a national pattern of complaining. Their impatience drove them to once again speak and act like God had not been good (or good enough) to them. This time, God supernatu...

Sometimes life is just plain hard. For God’s people, this can be just a reflection of the brokenness of this world and the fallen nature of humanity. But there are times when God brings struggle to believers for a purpose. That purpose is always good, even when the experience is awful. For Israel, God brings a roadblock and a loss into their story for His work in them. As a newly formed nation und...

The instinct among people to look like they know what they are doing and have it all together is powerful and drives so much of how people interact. When you’re in charge or think a lot of people are looking at you, it can really make you want to seem full of power and confidence. But whether we’re talking about parenting or teaching or being the boss, in any leadership role for a believer, we hav...

Does it feel like you can never figure out what God wants you to do? Many times, it seems like God is playing hide and seek with us as we search for His will. But is that actually the truth? We’ll see in this story from Israel that God desires to make His direction for us clear and memorable. And He is the One responsible for making it so. Our problem is not so much that God doesn’t show us as it...

Some stories in the Old Testament can feel like they are showing us a God of anger and violence. Certainly, the Living God is not someone who cannot be reduced to something less than who He is, and part of His existence is righteous justice. When we read stories like the one we’ll read this morning, we can get stuck on how high the price is for sin. But today, we’re also going to see that most sto...

Have you ever noticed someone’s accent? Isn’t it interesting how our patterns of speech are distinctly affected by where we live? Even if you move away from your hometown, you still hold onto some of that accent. But you also start picking up some of the way your new hometown talks as well! We are more influenced than we realize by the people around us. If you work with negative people all day lon...

Restarting Numbers – Facing Dysfunction The story we’ve seen so far led Israel to a rebellion that stopped the Lord from taking them into the Promised Land immediately. If you thought that this would be enough for Israel to learn to trust God and stop turning away from His instructions, you’d be wrong. As we continue looking at the stories of Numbers, we’ll see that Israel’s years of slavery stay...

Whether you’re an introvert, extrovert, or somewhere in between you may be all “peopled” out after the holidays. Dialing back the social calendar can offer some respite, but it is never a long term solution. In fact, we need each other. Our need for community and God’s plan to bring us all together are themes that run all the way from Genesis to Revelation. This morning we’ll track that theme and...

Most of our morning this day will be filled with music from our choir. We are going to have ‘Bonus Christmas’ because the whole Christmas thing probably ends a day too soon. And then we’ll take a few minutes at the end and look at a part of the story of Jesus’ childhood that’s hard to read. There are refugees running from death in fear. But in all of it, we see the reality that Joseph follows the...

Christmas is THIS WEEK! Part of what makes it so meaningful is the wonder that surrounds it. We are often so jaded that we miss the moments that can gather our attention toward the profound and what moves us deeply. This morning we’ll enjoy our elementary kids program and then we’ll look at a part of the first Christmas story that reflects both the wonder and worship of Jesus’ birth. As we wait fo...

Have you ever imagined what it would be like to meet God face to face? We probably have ideas of how we’d feel depending on what we think He’s like. For those who are Christians, we should be looking forward to that moment with excitement and confident hope! But for anyone unsure of what that encounter will bring, it could be a very fearful thought. Throughout the centuries before Jesus’ birth, Go...

We are all waiting for Christmas. Some parts of that are really enjoyable: we get to see Christmas lights night after night and listen to music that fills us with wonder. But other parts are not so great. We feel the pressure to shop for the perfect gifts, while our schedules seem to overload more than ever. For many, we’re trying to figure out how to manage all of our social and family desires an...

As we kick off Christmas season, it brings into focus the family we do (or don’t) have in our lives. We’d all like to have the type of family that is full of fun and life and brings joy to our hearts – especially at Christmas. But many of us don’t have that. Instead, our family contributes to the mess in our lives. If any part of your family life is difficult, you may find it interesting how Matth...

Each year on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, we step out of our normal routine to kick off the week of gratitude. As believers, we have so many reasons to give thanks. So we’ll sing together, and then we’ll allow people to share a short word of thanks to God for the past year and for His work in their lives. You are invited to join us and to share (if you’re brave enough!). But we guarantee you do...

For the finale of our ALIVE series, we’re going to talk about one more reality that may be holding you back from feeling alive like Jesus wants you to. God’s grace is amazing; He forgives us and gives us so much more than we deserve. We can never lose His love and we don’t have to hold onto Him, because He holds onto us. But our humanity will always try to bend this into selfish and self-centered...

As we begin nearing the end of our series “ALIVE”, we turn to one element of living that we all see. People and relationships are essential to living full of life. The difference for believers is that we value community with our brothers and sisters in Christ as the primary and best way to experience the life we’re designed to get from relationships. We can (and do) have all kinds of relationships...

Free Of Enemies

Who do you want to be like? We all see people and images every day and our natural human idea is to compare ourselves with what we think we see. It could be a favorite celebrity or even someone you know in person. Some of the power of society is to help people’s emotional well-being by creating norms for everyone. Can you imagine what it would be like to drive with no established ‘norms’ of traffi...

Set Free

When you were a kid, and some adult told you that you’d had enough when you wanted more, didn’t it feel like they were just being cruel? We’re born with a part inside us that can’t understand any reason to hold back from what we like or what we want. Of course, as we mature, we begin to understand that letting our desires run our lives can get us into big trouble. But we don’t always remember that...

Times of desperation are not usually anything that we look forward to, hope for, or prioritize. The portrayal of a desperate person is not generally a positive one. In a world that emphasizes maintaining a picture of having things together, we never want to give the implication that we are desperate to be in a better spot. In John 4, Jesus interacts with a man who is desperate and looking for help...

If you wanted to get better at something, do you think you’d be more likely to see improvement if you just tried it once or if you worked at it every single day? Of course, doing something on a daily basis is most likely to help us get better at any skill. We talked last week about how death is life for believers, unleashing the overwhelming power of God in the midst of seemingly unsurmountable lo...

How many arguments between God’s people and the lost can you think of right now? We debate over public policy, moral choices, values, and seemingly almost everything else. But perhaps we miss one big reality: as believers, we really believe things that seem crazy to unbelievers. One of the reasons that the life we are given does not flourish in our lives is that we forget about the power that God...

We’re going to start our series on living at the beginning. Jesus is life. The life our souls ache for cannot be found anywhere else. Probably no one who comes to Hope would disagree with either of those statements. So we should all be fully alive from the depths of our souls, jumping into every day and each calling full of confidence and hope. But we aren’t. So what’s the problem? We’ll take this...