Shelbyville Community Church

We explore Ephesians 6:5-9, where Paul explains to slaves and masters how they can walk in wisdom and participate in Jesus’ victory over death. We wrestle with what Paul has to say as a chance to be grown in your faith and equipped to have difficult conversations with others seeking after truth.

All throughout the book of Genesis, we're told the story of messed up families. Murder, drunkenness, lies, polygamy, slavery, etc... Feel better about your own family now? So why all the drama? Those families are meant to remind us of our need for a Savior. This weekend we unpack what Ephesians 6 has to say about parenting.

In Ephesians 5, Paul paints a picture of marriage that reflects the beauty of Christ’s relationship with the church. It is a picture that Christians need to recover and reclaim. This weekend we discover that Christian marriage is meant to be a submission competition, a race to the back of the line.

Followers of Jesus can live every day “filled with the Spirit.” But what does that mean? What might it look like to live that way? What if our relationship with the Holy Spirit is the key to walking in wisdom? This weekend we talk very practically about how to be “filled with the Spirit” on a moment-by-moment basis.

In Ephesians 5:1, Paul tells us to be “imitators of God”, and then offers three ways to walk that out. We are to walk in love, light, and walk in wisdom. A failure to walk worthy in one of these three areas can cause the foundation of your entire life to crumble and give way. In the same way that a stool must have at least three legs to support any weight, it is vital that we walk worthy in all th...

Baptism is a picture of a new life! This weekend we had the amazing opportunity to celebrate what God is doing here at SCC through the ancient practice of baptism. Baptism is a celebration and picture of Christ’s loving work of salvation on the cross. It points us to His grace and power in our lives.

The resurrection reminds us that the early writers of Scripture weren’t telling what they believed, but instead were telling us what they saw! They speak as eyewitnesses, not out of wishful thinking. The resurrection also reminds us that Christianity was founded on a historical event, not a creed or a belief system.

The Holy Spirit is a person. But when we call Him a person, we don't mean that He has a body. We mean that He has a personality, feelings, a will, and desires. This is why we are told in Ephesians 4 not to "grieve" the Holy Spirit. To grieve someone is to cause them sorrow, pain, or distress. This means it is possible for you and me to cause the Holy Spirit within us to suffer. But...

Ephesians 4 tells you that when you became a follower of Jesus, He gave you a new identity and a new life. This transformation means that the choices of your old life no longer own you. It means that your old failures no longer define you. It means your old mindsets no longer need to control you. Jesus has given you a new identity and a new life, but you must put that lifestyle on.

We have so much potential to grow and develop in our walk with Jesus, but we need to understand just who it is that we’re becoming. Fortunately for us, after spending Ephesians chapters 1-3 showing his readers what God has done for them in Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul turns his attention to helping them understand who they are and how they can participate in Jesus’ victory.

This passage is going to finish the first half of the book of Ephesians and lead is into the second half, how we live out what Paul has already taught us. He’s finishing this part by reminding us how much God loves us and wants to work through us and in us. As we grow in intimacy with Jesus, we come to understand His unfathomable love and power in our lives. It is a beautiful thing when someone co...

In the early church, there was a huge “us” and “them” problem. There were Jews, and then there were gentiles. There was great hostility between these two groups of people. But this weekend we’ll discover that not only does the gospel tear down the dividing wall of hostility between people and God, but it also tears down the walls that divide people from one another.

If you’ve ever purchased or played a game of checkers, you may have noticed that each checker has the insignia of a crown. That is because each checker was created to eventually become a King. When you became a follower of Jesus, He gave you a crown. In Ephesians 2, Paul says it this way: “God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms.” This crown allows each of us to...

Baptism is a picture of a new life! This weekend we have the amazing opportunity to celebrate what God is doing here at SCC through the ancient practice of baptism. We’re used to thinking that baptism day is about us or the other people who made their declaration of faith alongside of us, but nothing could be further from the truth. Baptism is a celebration and picture of Christ’s loving work of s...

It’s one thing to know information about Jesus with your head, but it’s another thing entirely to know Jesus with your heart. It’s the difference between information about Jesus and intimacy with Jesus.

Ephesians 1 tells us that when God looks at people, regardless of their ethnicity, the color of their skin, he whispers in their ears, “I wish you were my little girl. I wish you were my little boy.” It doesn’t matter whether they are black, white, yellow, or brown. God is offering a salvation that is way bigger and more important than ethnicity.

The Bible was written for us, but it wasn't written to us. Ephesians was a letter written to a particular church at a particular point in history for a particular reason. Before we jump into chapter 1 we must learn the context that this letter was written in. What we'll see is that the gospel has the power to completely alter a city.

God calls us to love Him with ALL we are. We’ll see that in Deuteronomy 6:1-9. But He doesn’t just leave us hanging. He shows us HOW to live that out. And in HOW we live that out is through the family. The beauty is we each have a family, but even bigger we have each other as the family of God. No matter what you call family, you are a part of THE family and can help each other live out HOW to lov...

We live in a broken world. The book of Malachi was written in such a world. And the people of Malachi’s day, well, they noticed. As a result, they aired some very serious complaints against God, which He answered in no uncertain terms.

When someone robs you, you never forget it, and in Malachi 3, God actually says that his people are guilty of robbing him. The word “rob” in Malachi is a rare and violent word. It literally means to “plunder of pillage.” How can human beings “pillage” God?

To break faith with someone is to fail to support them. In fact, when Jesus came to bring a new covenant, he brought a new command. He said, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” Jesus didn’t ask us to love others as we would want to be loved, but as He loved us.

The beginning of Malachi will set the pace for the rest of the book. At the beginning, the first topic is God’s love for His people. If that comes into question, that affects the rest of who we are and how we respond to Him. We’ll see that He does love us, and we can see that throughout the Bible. We’ll also see how others were responding and how that affected them and their relationship to God.

When God created in Genesis we're introduced to Adam and Eve in the garden. God gives them a command to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Through their disobedience, sin enters the world. When Jesus is crucified He is nailed to a tree for the forgiveness for our disobedience. Today we live between the trees.

Without Jesus, who is the light of the world, our world would simply be a dark and dangerous place. But because His light shines in the darkness, the world is a far brighter and more colorful place. Make no mistake friends, the darker the darkness, the brighter the light.

Most of us have things or memories in our past that are so humiliating, so painful, things of which we are so ashamed, that not only do we never laugh about it, we never speak of it. We don’t even like to think about it. Because when we do, we are just overwhelmed with feelings of intense shame and regret. The good news is the power of the gospel can cancel out shame and regret. It’s good news ind...