Knox Presbyterian Church Podcast

Some weeks leave us gasping. We carry too much—news that never lets up, responsibilities that don’t pause, worries that follow us into bed and greet us when we wake. We grip our schedules, our work, our obligations so tightly that we don’t notice what it’s costing us… until breathing itself feels hard. And still, we tell ourselves we can’t stop. Not now. Not yet. Somewhere deep down, we fear that...

The truth is hurry IS a sickness. Hurry hurts our health – our physical health, our emotional health, our relational health, and yes, our spiritual health.  As the modern psychologist Carl Jung once wrote, “Hurry is not of the devil, hurry is the devil.”  So what do we do about this devil in our midst? How do we heal ourselves of the hurry sickness that pervades our hearts and our minds and, indee...

The incarnation takes everything we think we know about God and stands it on its head. But it’s not just that. Beyond the miracle and the mystery of the incarnation itself, there’s another incredibly important thing we need to see here. It’s about that little word ‘with’: Emmanuel is God WITH us. The incarnation isn’t just about the mystery of God becoming human. It’s about God becoming human so t...

We all have our ways we like to think of God, don’t we? We all have our own preferred pictures of what we think God is like. We form those pictures from a lot of different places. From books and movies. From Sunday School Flannel Grams- do you remember those? From our parents, our friends, and our teachers.  We all have our ways we like to think of God, to picture God. Even people who say they don...

The word Advent means ‘arrival’ or ‘coming.’ One of the things we celebrate during Advent is Christ’s arrival in Bethlehem—that’s obviously central to the season. But even as we look backward to Christ’s birth, part of Advent is about looking forward—looking ahead to the transformation of all things. The Christian story ends with Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom. It ends with God victoriou...

Advent gently beckons your gaze toward Bethlehem. Advent reminds us that the great event we long for at Christmas is not Santa’s drop down the chimney, but God’s coming down to us in the birth of Jesus Christ. In a season where everything around us is telling us to run, work, get-going and get-done, Advent offers us a time to wait. To hope. To make ready. To breathe. Isaiah 9:2, 6-7 

The greatest gift God gives us is the opportunity to be part of his kingdom. The greatest gift God gives us is opportunity to be part of his kingdom. Here at Knox, the kingdom of God is important to us. Our mission statement at Knox echoes the words of Jesus we just heard: seek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness. Our mission at Knox is to love sacrificially, serve generously, and seek...

In his teachings on ethics, the Greek philosopher Aristotle coined the phrase “the good life” – it’s a term that stands for the life one would like the live and the happiness one would derive from that life. So, what IS the good life, would you say? What is the kind of life that will make you HAPPY? That will lead us to feel CONTENT?  Seems to me, there are two very different ways of answering tha...

We’re wrapping up a sermon series today called ‘Worth Sharing.’ It’s a series about evangelism, and one of the main ideas we’ve been emphasizing these last few weeks is that evangelism is good news. Evangelism is GOOD NEWS. Evangelism is ‘sharing the God you love with the people you love.’  Evangelism is about sharing, not forcing. We all share things that we love in life all the time: movies and...

Evangelism is GOOD NEWS. To engage in evangelism is simply to share the faith we love, the Jesus we love, this church that we love with the people that we love and to invite them to love our faith, our Jesus, and our church too.  And as we’ve been talking about evangelism this month, we encouraged everyone to pick their “one” – one person in your life who is far from faith, who doesn’t know Jesus,...

God has a story. The church has a story. And you have a story too. We were all born someplace, had a family, grew up, maybe got married or maybe didn’t, and so and so on. Even if we never sit down to write our autobiography, we all have a narrative we keep in our head about who we are and where we came from: a story about significant events, crucial decisions, values and commitments that shaped us...

We are, by nature, evangelistic people. When we love something, we can’t help but want to share it. We’ve just kind of forgotten that Jesus is worth sharing too. So we want see if we can change our thinking around evangelism. Evangelism is not telling people that they’re going to hell, that they’re bad people or really anything bad at all. Evangelism, when it’s done right is simply… Sharing the fa...

Special Guest: Reverend Peter Park Luke 18:9-14

A teacher of the law wants to test Jesus. He asks him, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus turns the question back on him: well, you know the Torah. What does it say? The lawyer cites the Bible from memory: I need to love God and love your neighbor. That’s it, says Jesus!  Then the lawyer takes a second pass. ‘But who is my neighbor?’ Luke tells us that the lawyer ‘wanted to vindicate [o...

We’re continuing our series on the Gospel of Luke, focusing on the Upside-Down nature of the Kingdom Jesus came to bring.  In Jesus’ upside-down kingdom, the poor are blessed; those who are low are lifted up; the blind see; the oppressed are set free. And as we will see in our story today, the untouchable are touched, are healed, by the gracious touch of Jesus’ hand. Luke 8:40-56

Throughout the gospel of Luke, when Jesus proclaims and demonstrates the kingdom, he often does so an eye on women. He shows compassion to this sinful woman who would be rejected by the Pharisees. He heals a woman whose issue of blood had rendered her ritually unclean for years, restoring her body as well as her place in the community (Luke 8). He heals a women physically bent into a position of i...

Jesus’ blessings and woes are an illustration of life in his kingdom, where things are upside down, where they run quite counter to what we think is ordinary and usual. In Jesus’ day, people saw wealth as a sign of divine favor. In our day, people aren’t all that different: sure, they might not put it exactly that way, but we do tend to regard wealth as an unambiguously good thing. And we see pove...

Upside Down Kingdom: The Good News according to Luke  Jesus is for everybody. Jesus is for the rich and the poor. Jesus is for men and for women. Jesus is for sinners and for saints. Jesus is for insiders and outsiders. Jesus is for everybody. And the way that Luke lets us clearly know just how “for everybody” Jesus really is, is his emphasis on how Jesus treats those who would otherwise think Jes...

Psalm 133

Psalm 145

Psalm 121

Guest: Doug Bradshaw

Psalm 139