Mill Creek Church

Your favorite candidate will win or lose based on how our country votes this November. However, the church will win or lose based on our behavior between now and then. While we will not agree on every political talking point, we must not let politics divide us.

Loving others is not a super controversial subject, most can agree how important it is for us to be kind and loving to others. But let's be real, we don't always do real great at the implementation. Why do we struggle to love others? The answer could be as simple as what we see.

Jesus draws a very distinct connection between loving God and loving others. It's not enough to just say we love God, we show our devotion by going all in with our heart, soul, mind and strength. Equally as important is showing that love in our interaction with others. For Jesus, this was of upmost importance. Love God. Love others. This is true faith.

The greatest commandment given by Jesus tells us to love God with all of our strength—with every opportunity, capacity, and ability. Strength goes beyond just our physical abilities or mental fortitude. It's an idea that challenges us to enhance and amplify God’s desire in every capacity and opportunity that is presented to us every day.

Our minds have incredible power. The power to move our lives in a positive direction or hold us back in the lies of our world. When questioned about the greatest commandment, Jesus includes the idea of loving God with all our minds. Discover how it's possible to love God with all of our mind when we allow our thoughts to be transformed by God.

The greatest commandment, given by Jesus, tells us to love God with all of our soul—but what exactly does that mean? For many, our understanding of soul does not align well with how the ancient Jews and Jesus would view it. For them, the soul was not a non-physical immortal essence trapped in our bodies, only to be released at death. It was the entirety of our life and being.

The greatest commandment, given by Jesus, tells us to love God with all of our heart—our desires, emotions, affections, and will. Our challenge is will we be a people who love God with our emotions, our desires, our affections, and our will? Will we be all in?

The word discipline can have a negative connotation in our lives. We don't have great memories of how we were disciplined and vowed to do it differently. But what if we've misunderstood what discipline is? Discipline means “to teach,” not “to punish.” So what's the message we are conveying to our kids if we are meant to teach and not punish?

As parents, we sometimes worry that we focus too much on the physical to the detriment of the spiritual. However, we prepare our children’s whole person for success by making sure we are meeting physical and environmental needs, along with the spiritual needs.

As parents, we often guilt ourselves about whether we are spending enough time with our children and giving them the right life balance. But as believers, we can be freed to focus on presence over perfection. Like God, parents can meet many of their kids’ needs through true presence and connection, because kids have the same innate needs parents do. Both Scripture and neuroscience teach that conne...

The Bible encourages believers to understand parenting as a picture of the gospel. Humans were created for connection. Genesis shows us that God parented us rightly from the beginning, but every relationship—including parenting—got harder when sin and shame entered the picture.

Real faith includes both belief and action. Often times our actions are carried out in moments of great courage and boldness. What we see might not match up with what we know God is calling us to do. There is a choice in that moment, trust God or give into fear.

It can become pretty easy to distinguish the knock off brands in life. It might look like the "real" thing, but we know it's a phony. How about our faith? Hard times will quickly reveal whether our faith was real or fake. But why wait for the difficulties to discover what we have isn't real?

Even in the best of times, it can be hard to speak words of kindness, love and integrity. In the middle of some of the most difficult times we've faced? Maybe it's best to stay off social media. A follower of Jesus has a lot of labels, one of the most important is light. What kind of light are you illuminating?

All of us will go through the valley at some point. Experiencing loss and grief is a part of the human experience. The real question is how we handle grief. Most of us have not had great examples of how to process loss but God wants to be close to the broken and help us learn how to grieve with hope!

The grace of God can be experienced beyond just the powerful story of the cross and forgiveness. It is found everyday, all around and in front of us. Grace is seen in what we have and who we are. It can be easy to miss God’s grace. We have to remember to remember.

Grace is uncommon in our world. We don't see it modeled often but when we can show and give grace, we can show Jesus. It doesn't have to be difficult, it might be as simple as seeing the person right in front of us.

Grace is a gift we continually need, through our entire lives of faith. It goes beyond just the moment of realization how far we might be from God and his grace filled forgiveness of our rebellion. We need his grace daily and find his gift never runs out.

As Mill Creek begins to gather together again in worship and life, we do so in a challenging time. People are hurting, confused, frustrated and angry. They need hope. But most importantly, they need grace. It's grace that changes everything.

After eleven weeks apart Mill Creek finally is able to gather together again. In the midst of some very trying and difficult times in our world, we have a great opportunity to bring hope and love to hurting people. We probably don't have to go far or do much, just remember the greatest rule.

While we might not be able to parse the reasons for our pain and suffering, we know that Christ is with us and working to redeem our broken creation, broken hearts, and broken world. Maybe just knowing the end of the story can give us the hope we need to make it through the hard times.

There can be great inspiration in life watching the underdog persevering and showing steadfast determination to achieve their goals. When life is difficult and too hard to handle on our own, how do we keep our focus on the right things? How do we stay in the fight?

Jesus went through pain and suffering and we see him wrestling with this in the garden of Gethsemane. In our suffering, we can take heart that Christ loves us and that suffering is part of what it looks like to commune with him. Like Jesus did, take people with you into your pain. Turn your pain and hardship into honest prayers.

We’ve all heard the saying “God will only give you what you can handle.” This isn’t always true, however. Sometimes we experience moments that we can’t handle. Life isn't fair and bad things happen to good people. The problem of pain comes from humankind’s fall into sin. But, from the beginning, God’s heart has always been to redeem and rescue.