Mission Hills Church Messages

Some things that worked in one season of life quietly stop working in the next. In this message from Ecclesiastes 3:1-11, Reza Zadeh starts with a story about running beside his five-year-old daughter on her first bike, and what it taught him about when to hold on and when to let go. He looks at the 14 pairs in the passage, makes the case that grief and trust can sit side by side, and explains why...

Is there a spiritual gift you're supposed to find, and will an online quiz tell you what it is? Craig Smith and Colin McFarland keep talking about Sunday's message on discovering your spiritual gifts, and they get into the questions that didn't fit on the weekend stage. Craig explains why he's wary of spiritual gifts quizzes, and why the Bible's several lists of gifts aren't meant to be one comple...

How do you find your spiritual gifts? Craig Smith walks through 1 Corinthians 12 and explains why the Holy Spirit is the person, power, and presence of God. He shares how a college campus ministry showed him a gift he never asked for and why serving is the only reliable way to discover yours.

What do you do with what God hands you: wrap it up safe, or risk it for more? Craig Smith and Colin McFarland talk through the parable of the minas from Luke 19, and Craig admits something he hadn't fully named until Colin asked him live on air: for a few years after COVID, Mission Hills Church shifted from taking new ground to protecting what it already had. The conversation gets personal fast. C...

Craig Smith teaches from Luke 19:11-27 , the parable of the ten minas, and asks a question that hits close to home: Is the line between a faithful follower of Jesus and a hypocrite thinner than we think? This message breaks down why the king in the story is the most generous character in the Bible, and why your faithfulness with money, not your results, is what unleashes that generosity in your ow...

Craig Smith admits the 80/20 rule- twenty percent of people doing eighty percent of the work- made him bitter for years before it made him grateful. He and Kelly talk about why comparison is mostly an environmental problem, why he hasn't opened TikTok since summer, and a three-word filter (content, pattern, relationship) for confronting someone without making a mountain out of a molehill. Plus the...

What if the difficult person in your life is more than the problem you can see? In Luke 10, Martha's frustration with her sister quickly spills over into resentment toward Jesus. But instead of treating Martha like a problem to fix, Jesus looks beyond her behavior and responds to her with both compassion and truth. He shows us that the problems we see in people can sometimes be the product of pain...

Most of us have a complicated relationship with work — we pray for it, then complain about it. Pastor Craig Smith opens Genesis 1 to make a case that work isn't a curse; it's the first thing God ever called us to. When you see your job as joining God in creating, caring, organizing, and ruling, everything looks different.

In 2 Samuel 9, King David goes searching for someone — anyone — left from the house of his fallen friend Jonathan, just so he can show them kindness. What he finds is Mephibosheth: lame, hiding in a place called Lo-debar (which literally means 'nothing'), convinced the king is coming to destroy him. What David does next is one of the most stunning pictures of grace in the entire Bible. This messag...

You had the best intentions. You picked your words carefully. So why did it still go sideways? In this episode of Continuing the Conversation, Craig Smith and Colin McFarland dig into one of the most practically useful ideas from Sunday's message in the Proverbs series — the difference between knowing a truth and knowing when and how to speak it. They unpack a framework of three Ms: motive, manner...

You meant well. So why did that conversation make everything worse? Pastor Craig Smith unpacks Proverbs 27:14 — a proverb about a guy who loudly blesses his neighbor at sunrise and gets cursed for it — to reveal three things that determine whether a hard conversation heals a relationship or damages it: motive, manner, and moment. If you have a conversation you've been dreading, or one you regret,...

Bitterness doesn't usually announce itself. It grows quietly, often dressed up in the language of boundaries, self-protection, or just being realistic about people. But what happens when it's already taken root — and what if some of the things we think are helping are actually keeping us stuck? In this episode of Continuing the Conversation, host Kelly McSpearin and Lead Pastor Craig Smith dig int...

You've probably said it before: 'I don't know what came over me.' But what if that's not actually true? In this episode, Pastor Craig Smith unpacks Proverbs 4:23 — 'Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it' — and makes the case that the words you say, the choices you make, and the conflict in your relationships all trace back to one place: your heart. The filter you pu...

Who's in your corner — and are they the right people for where you're headed? In this episode of Continuing the Conversation, Lead Pastor Craig Smith and Marketing Director Colin McFarland dig into week two of the It's Complicated series: Find Your People. And it gets personal fast. Craig opens up about the moment he realized he needed more than instructors — he needed actual mentors. That moment...

The people around you are shaping you—whether you realize it or not. In Proverbs 13:20, we're told to "walk with the wise and become wise." But what does wisdom actually look like, and how do you find people who can help you navigate a complicated life? In this message from our It's Complicated series, Craig Smith explores why the relationships we invest in have such a powerful influence on who we...

What if the key to real rest isn't less fear — it's the right one? In this episode of Continuing the Conversation, Lead Pastor Craig Smith and Life Center Director Micah Harrison dig into Sunday's message on the fear of the Lord and what Proverbs means when it says that fear leads to life — and rest. Spoiler: it's not the kind of fear that tightens your chest. It's the kind that lets you finally e...

Relationships stir up real fear. Rejection, betrayal, getting hurt again. But the fear itself isn't the enemy, it's what we do with it. This week we'll open Proverbs 19:23 to discover a fear that doesn't shrink your life, it leads to it.

Jacob's life is marked by God's grace. This is true of all believers. Like Jacob, we are more than just recipients of God's grace, we are invited to be ambassadors of God's grace. In this message we will learn three practices to live as ambassadors of God's amazing grace.

Genesis 34 is one of the darkest chapters in the Bible — a story with no hero, where one man's small compromise sets off a devastating chain of events. In this message we trace how compromise rarely looks like rebellion and usually looks like settling, why the cost is never paid by us alone, and how a chapter with no one to save the day points us to the One who can.

God is a Redeemer. He takes what is broken, fallen and seems unfixable and can make it new. See the hand of God in this long dispute between to brother and learn the steps that both the offender and offended take on the road to reconciliation.

Can God use your brokenness to become your greatest blessing? In this message from our Bad Blood series, Pastor Craig Smith walks through Genesis 32 and Jacob's unforgettable wrestling match with God. It's a story about fear, faith, surrender, and discovering that God doesn't always remove our struggles—sometimes He uses them to transform us. Jacob spent his life fighting for blessings from other...

Have you ever felt stuck, in a job, a relationship, or a pattern you just can't shake? This weekend, we're opening Genesis 31 to learn what it means to leave what limits you and step into what God has next.

Sometimes the greatest blessing doesn't come from escaping a difficult situation—it comes from changing how you respond to it. In this episode of Continuing the Conversation , Craig Smith and Colin McFarland dive deeper into one of the most unusual stories in Genesis and unpack the sermon, "The Fastest Road to Blessing." Craig shares what it was like preparing one of the hardest passages he's ever...

What if the fastest road to blessing isn't about grabbing more, it's about giving more? This week, we dig into Genesis 30 and discover why the people God blesses most are the ones most focused on being a blessing to others.

Real love doesn't sit on the sidelines and hope things work out — it steps in, speaks up, and leads. This Father's Day message from Genesis 29-30 is a challenge to every husband and father who's been coasting.