Midtown Presbyterian Church

Shepherded | He Makes Me Lie Down In Green Pastures - Psalm 23:2 - Clint Leavitt by Midtown Presbyterian Church

Shepherded | The Lord is my Shepherd - Psalm 23; John 10:11-18 - Clint Leavitt by Midtown Presbyterian Church

This week is the last message in the Live in Love sermon series, and to complete the series we look to Matthew 18:21-35, where Jesus tells the parable of the unforgiving servant, challenging us to reconsider what we think we know about forgiveness. Clint opens the message with a haunting reminder from Charleston in 2015, where grieving families spoke words of forgiveness that stunned the world. Th...

It is week 6 of our Live In Love sermon series, as Luke Parker asks us how much we love Mercy. This morning, Luke 7:31-50 confronts us with an uncomfortable truth: we are all masters at rigging the game of righteousness in our favor. Through the vivid story of a woman known as a sinner anointing Jesus at a Pharisee's dinner party, we discover that our scorekeeping mentality prevents us from experi...

Our Western culture likes to throw the word "Love" around constantly, but when conflict arises, our definitions quickly crumble. Week five of Live in Love dives into Paul's thoughts about love in Romans 12:9-21, challenging us to move beyond love as a fleeting feeling and embrace it as a consistent, costly action. Drawing from psychiatrist M. Scott Peck's insight that love is the will to extend on...

Live In Love | Love Your Enemy-Pray for Those Who Persecute You - Matthew 5.38-48 by Midtown Presbyterian Church

This week's teaching takes us deep into one of the more misunderstood aspects of Christian living: how we handle anger in a world full of conflict. Drawing from Ephesians 4:25-29, we're confronted with Paul's paradoxical command to 'be angry, but do not sin.' The message challenges our cultural assumptions about anger, revealing that emotions themselves are often God-given responses to injustice a...

In our second week of learning to Live In Love, Tom Parker brings us a message from Colossians 3 challenging us to examine what we're truly wearing in our spiritual lives. Just as we wouldn't want to wear an orange jumpsuit that represents imprisonment, we're called to strip off the old self and clothe ourselves with something far more beautiful. The text confronts us with uncomfortable truths abo...

This week, Gayle Parker opens our next sermon series, Live In Love, with a message that takes us deep into the heart of what it means to truly forgive, drawing from Ephesians 4, the Gospel of John, and the parable of the Prodigal Son. We're challenged to put away bitterness, wrath, and anger, choosing instead to be kind and tenderhearted. The story of the two brothers offers us a mirror: are we th...

In our final week of sermon series through the Gospel of John, Last Words, we consider how Peter's denial and restoration invites us to confront an uncomfortable truth: we are all capable of profound failure, yet that very failure becomes the gateway to experiencing God's deepest grace. The passage from John 21 reveals Jesus meeting Peter on the beach after his threefold denial, not with condemnat...

This week, we pause and take a look at our relationship with doubt in the Christian journey. Rather than viewing doubt as a spiritual failure or something to be buried in shame, we're shown through the story of Thomas in John 20:24-29 that doubt can actually be a pathway to deeper, more authentic faith. The sermon challenges two cultural extremes: the church's tendency to condemn doubt as weakness...

As we continue our exploration of the Last Words of Jesus in the gospel of John, Clint invites us to move beyond Easter Sunday and into the transformative reality of resurrection life. Drawing from John 20:19-23, we encounter Jesus stepping through locked doors to meet his fearful disciples with the profound gift of peace. The imagery is striking: just as we once had to flip cassette tapes to hear...

This Easter, we are challangerd to consider the profound reality that resurrection is not just a historical event but a present power that transforms our lives today. The sermon centers on John 20, where we encounter Mary Magdalene walking in darkness to Jesus' tomb, carrying the weight of grief and trauma. What unfolds is a story of divine pursuit, where Jesus doesn't wait for us to find Him but...

Good Friday 2026 by Midtown Presbyterian Church

This Palm Sunday, Luke Parker invites us to examine how easily we can misunderstand Jesus, even while celebrating Him. The passage from John 12 shows us a crowd waving palm branches and shouting praises, yet within days many of these same voices would cry 'Crucify him.' Why? Because they wanted their version of the kingdom more than they wanted Jesus as King. They were looking for a military conqu...

Good Friday 2026 by Midtown Presbyterian Church

What does it truly mean to be unified in a world that profits from our division? This week we unpack how Jesus' final prayer for his followers in John 17 reveals that unity isn't about institutional mergers or superficial agreement, but about a radical, boundary-breaking love that the world cannot produce on its own. We're challenged to see how Christian unity cuts through every worldly division—e...

In this 4th week of our exploration of Jesus' Final Words, Clint draws us into John 15:18-23 and 16:1-4, confronting us with an uncomfortable truth: authentic Christian discipleship will inevitably produce resistance in our lives. Jesus doesn't sugarcoat the reality—if we truly follow Him, the world will hate us just as it hated Him first. But this isn't persecution for being obnoxious or self-rig...

This third week of our exploration of Jesus' Last Words, Tom Parker invites us into one of the most intimate metaphors Jesus used - the vine and the branches. At its heart, this passage reveals a stunning truth: we are offered friendship with God himself. Not just servanthood, not just obedience, but actual friendship. The imagery is organic and unavoidable - branches cannot produce grapes apart f...

What if the power we need for a transformed life isn't something we have to manufacture, but something we simply need to position ourselves to receive? This exploration of John 14:15-26 invites us into one of Christianity's most profound promises: the gift of the Holy Spirit as our ever-present advocate. Through the story of the Wright brothers discovering that flight required alignment with exist...

We live in a world where trouble surrounds us on every side—betrayal, loss, grief, uncertainty, and the ever-present reality of our own mortality. The question isn't whether we'll face trouble, but what we'll stake our lives to when trouble comes. This message draws us into Jesus' final hours with his disciples in John 14, where he offers three profound realities that the world can never give: a s...

Ash Wednesday 2026 by Midtown Presbyterian Church

This 7th week of our ENcountering Jesus series, we meditate on John 11, where we encounter one of the most powerful narratives in Scripture: the raising of Lazarus. But this isn't just a story about a miracle—it's an invitation to bring our honest grief directly to Jesus. Mary and Martha both cry out the same words: 'Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.' Their lament isn't d...

What do we see when we encounter suffering, brokenness, or Jesus himself? One of our beloved mission partners in Edinburgh, Scotland, Caleb Shocklie, takes us on an exploration of John 9 invites us into the transformative moment when Jesus heals a man born blind—but it's about so much more than physical sight. We're challenged to examine four distinct perspectives: the blind man who must choose fa...

We live in a culture obsessed with condemnation, where one mistake can become a permanent identity and where social media turns us all into stone-throwers. Yet the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8 reveals something revolutionary about the character of Jesus: he is both perfectly just and perfectly merciful. When religious leaders drag a woman before Jesus, hoping to trap him with an...