Hope Church Nashville Podcast

This week Joel walked us through Acts 17, where Paul and Silas move from Thessalonica to Berea and the same Gospel meets two very different responses. He showed us that the claim "Jesus is King" always lands as a threat to our personal sovereignty, and the only real difference between the two cities was whether they met that claim with a clenched fist or an open hand. The question we are...

This week Joel walked us through Acts 16, where Paul and Silas sing in a Philippian jail cell, and showed us that real freedom is not a circumstance to arrange but a person to receive. Tracing 2 Corinthians 3:17 through the story, he reminded us that freedom is the Spirit's presence, found not where the chains are absent but wherever the Lord is, even in the dark. The slave girl set free, the...

This week Joel walked through Acts 16:1-15, where the Holy Spirit repeatedly closes the doors Paul had carefully planned to go through, shutting down Asia and then Bithynia before redirecting him by a nighttime vision across the sea to Macedonia. He made the case that a closed door is often neither failure nor punishment but God's guidance, and that the faithful posture is open hands and movi...

This week, Wendy closed the "Emmanuel: Practicing Presence" series with a message on how God is with us in our enemies, and argued that Jesus's command to love our enemies corrects a misreading of the Old Testament that treated hatred as permissible toward outsiders. She walks through four steps for escaping what she calls "enemy mode" (listed below) and frames love as the...

This Sunday, Joey continued the "Immanuel: Practicing Presence" series, focusing on God with us in our neighbors. He argued that practicing God's presence means becoming present to the actual neighbor in front of us, seeing them as a person rather than reducing them to a category we can safely ignore. This distinguishes costly compassion (which moves toward, suffers with, and bears...