South Fellowship Church

What do you do after you've been miraculously fed by ravens; they've brought you little cakes in the desert?  In a middle of a drought, you had a brook that gave you enough to drink.  You saw oil and flour not run out; miraculously multiplied over and over and over again; God's provision that's unmistakable.  You saw somebody raised from the dead, because you prayed and laid down o...

I can remember this day because there was a lot of buildup.  The day was January 28, 1997.  It was the summer before my senior year of high school.  A bunch of my friends and I had gone in together to buy a Pay-per-view boxing match.  It was Evander Holyfield vs. 'Iron' Mike Tyson.  Most boxing matches you don't remember; my guess is, you at least have a recollection of this one.  In t...

If you have a picture in your mind about what a prophet is like, might I suggest to you that the biblical image might ruin your idyllic view. Prophets, in the Scriptures, weren't people who had their own TV show, weren't people who made a lot of money, they weren't people who flew around and had large followings. They were sort of fringe folks. They were the people that were on the out...

I was in second or third grade and I was in a particular math section.  The teacher was trying to teach us some math concepts, and for some reason, my brain could not get it.  She gave exercise after exercise and she circled the plane ten different ways.  Now when my kids come home and they ask for help with math, there's like 117 different ways to it and they have to know them all, I'm li...

We're at week four of a four-week series that we've entitled "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" It was inspired by Jesus who inspired Mr. Rogers who then inspired us. We've been talking about being neighborly. Not about defining who are neighbor is but about becoming neighborly. We said, a few weeks ago, that that's not always easy. As long as there's been hospitality, there's been complaining about offe...

Welcome.  You're here on week three of a four-week series called "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" How many of you have seen the Mr. Roger's documentary that they did?  Amazing documentary and tribute to an amazing man who really lived out the way of love, and did so in a compelling, breathtaking way.  Kelly and I saw the movie and I thought I really need to do a series on this because my heart's plea t...

This series is like one long message! You may have walked away last week thinking, "Yeah, I know, hospitality's really good, Ryan. That's a great idea. BUT...." We have a whole list of "buts," don't we? We have a whole list of reasons why it's really, really hard. To that, I want to say, "You're right! It is." I want to spend the next 35 minutes or so affirming you're right! BUT.... I was a sophom...

A few months ago, our elders started to ask this question: What would it look like to create a culture of hospitality? Where, as a church family, we didn't just attend, but we gathered together and linked arms and hearts. Not just show up on a Sunday morning, but open our homes and our lives to the people who we worship with. It was our conviction, not that we weren't that place, but there were so...

My family has been here two years and we just love this body and being at South Fellowship and plugging in with the Young Adults.  A few weeks ago, we were going to have a worship night and I had this vision months before.  We were going to have lots of young adults come to the great outdoors of Colorado and enjoy seeing the creation God has created.  We'd have the mountains in the background and...

My name's AJ.  I'm from Grand Rapids, Michigan.  It's really good to be here.  Here's a question I want to begin with:  Can we go deep this morning?  Is that okay?  Richard Foster had this amazing sentence in his work,  Celebration of Discipline,  when he says, "The world's greatest need today isn't for intelligent people or cool people or innovative people.  All that&...

I grew up in an era where we didn't wear helmets for everything that was even a little bit dangerous, therefore, we had the chance to play games on the playground that mattered.  One of those games was entitled "Red Rover."  Red Rover is a game where you link arms with other people and there's other people across from you with linked arms as well, and you say, "Red rover, red rover, send Ryan righ...

We're going to wrestle with some very easy words from Jesus today --- DO. NOT. JUDGE.  Or you too will be judged.  It's Jesus's teaching on the Sermon on the Mount and I joked last week about wanting an easy sermon. . . .one easy message from the Sermon on the Mount. . .and I think this is it.  Here's why.  Because when we talk about being judgmental, all of us have somebody in our mind who should...

That was good worship, wasn't it?  But it stirred this question in me.  We're singing "This is My Father's World," right?  We see the sunrise, that he spoke into existence, that shouts for joy as it dances it's way across the sky.  This is my Father's world, and yet, I don't know about you, but there's time when I open my news app and think, "God, this is a weird world for you to own."  Sometimes...

I want to say thank you to your pastor; we've been friends for eight months.  You have an excellent, top shelf, amazing, Bronco-rooting pastor in Pastor Ryan and his family.  I want to say thanks to Ryan and the whole staff for their hospitality and ministering to me as I come to minister the Word today.  I have been friends with Larry Boatright for 20 years.  We actually traveled for a year in a...

How many of us, in this room, would admit that we've done something embarrassing that we wish no one would ever see?  Wow!  When we do something embarrassing and then later on we think about it, we still kind of feel it, right?  It's crazy because the world that we live in now everybody has a cell phone and they can take video of this stuff, so when you do something stupid, it gets recorded for po...

We are exploring the Sermon on the Mount this summer as a community.  We are sort of in the middle of Jesus's teaching, it's in the gospel of Matthew.  Matthew, one of Jesus's disciples, records a collection of Jesus's teachings in one place.  It's probably the most famous sermon given EVER!  If you have your Bible, you can open to Matthew 5.  Over the last few weeks, we've explored some really li...

We’re continuing our series in the Sermon on the Mount.  I’ve spent a lot of time in fear, trepidation, and prayer over these last two messages.  Last week we talked about lust and adultery, and that was really easy, so we decided to build on that and now we’re going to talk about divorce, remarriage, and oaths.  Did you come to hear from the Lord today?  I hope you did, because as much as I’ve wr...

If you have your Bible, turn to Matthew 5.  We're continuing our series of the Sermon on the Mount.  We are about six messages in.  Let me give two disclaimers as we begin this morning.  Number One -- You got a service guide when you came in and it has an outline to follow along with the message.  You can make a big 'X' on said outline and flip it over.  There are three days between when I made th...

It's my privilege to talk about a passage of Scripture today that isn't very pleasant, but, hopefully, we'll be able to join together and realize we're not alone as we go to this passage.  This is part of the Sermon on the Mount series that Ryan started a few weeks ago.  When Ryan talked to me about it, I was excited to take a sermon; then I took a look at the passage I'm going to be dealing with:...

Take a deep breath and identify that unbelievable smell wafting into the worship center today.  BACON!  If you're a student of the Scriptures, you may be thinking to yourself, "Should we be eating bacon?"  Doesn't the Bible talk about bacon?!  Leviticus 11:1-3, 7  ---   The Lord said to Moses and Aaron, "Say to the Israelites: 'Of all the animals that live on land, these are the ones you may eat:...

We're in week 2 of a series we're doing on the Sermon on the Mount.  If you have your Bible, open to Matthew 5.  This is a picture of a man by the name of Michael Carroll.  Michael Carroll, at the age of 19, won $14.4 million in the lottery.  He was a garbage man at the time, just happened to play, and happened to win.  Over the next decade of his life, from 2002 to 2012, he bought mansions, he bo...

We are starting a new series that we'll be in all summer, where we're going to be exploring one of the most impactful, significant, beautiful messages ever given.  It's called the Sermon on the Mount, and you can open your Bibles to Matthew 5, where you'll find it.   Over the last few weeks, throughout our nation, we've been in a season that we affectionately refer to as graduation season.  In gra...

If you haven't been with us, let me catch you up on where we've been the last six weeks. We started by talking about our mission as a church, which is to help people live in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus.  We started exploring these values that we want to shape us over the coming months and years that we have together.  The value of presence of God---that we'd be people who pursue the p...

If you're new with us, we're in a seven-week series called "Ethos."  We're looking at the values, dreams, and hopes we have together as a community of faith, as we seek to live in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus.  This week we're talking about renewal, next week we're going to be talking about roots, the last in our series. A few weeks back, my wife took our two boys to a mother-son event...

I want to invite you to close your eyes and to pretend the year is 200.  You live around the Mediterranean; you've decided to follow the way of Jesus.  Against the advice of most of the people in your life, you've joined this sort of rogue, rag-tag band of the Jesus way followers.  It's Sunday morning and before you go to work, you head to church.  You get your family ready, you walk through the d...