St. Paul's Church - Willington, CT

This week we continued to introduce our new vision slogan (Truth. Grace. Life.) by focusing on the second word: grace. John 1:14 says Jesus came "full of grace and truth." What does it look like when our church is "filled with grace," like Jesus?

We've decided to start 2019 with a new vision slogan: Truth. Grace. Life. This week we talked about the reason for the change, and the first word in the new slogan. What does it mean to be filled with truth? We identified six characteristics of what it looks like when we are filled with truth, like Jesus

The angels' announcement of Jesus' birth was actually a subversive political statement. This Christmas Eve, we considered its significance.

Christmas is a time when we want everything to be in place; a time where we want it to feel like all is right with the world. But often our experience of Christmas falls far short of our hope. This morning we talked about how Mary and Joseph's first Christmas must have fallen far short of their hope as well, and what we can learn from their messy first Christmas.

This week we started our three-part Christmas Reflections series by reflecting on Mary, the mother of Jesus. Some branches of the Church give a lot of attention to Mary, others hardly any. What should we think?

This week we finished our Seven Deadly Sins series with what some consider to be the root of all sin: Pride. We identified the difference between the good kind of pride and the bad kind of pride, why the bad kind of pride is so destructive, and why the Christmas story should humble us.

The deadly sin of greed is an excessive desire to possess wealth and material things. It is a destructive, spiritually blinding impulse. We considered three insights Jesus taught about greed, and the different ways greed can manifest itself in our lives. We also identified the root fears behind our greed, and why those fears are based in lies.

This week we looked at the deadly sin of lust. We considered what lust actually is, why it's dangerous, and how to deal with one particularly common manifestation of it in today's world.

This week we looked at the deadly sin that is probably the least talked about in the Church: gluttony, the sin of immoderation. In today's world of abundant food and entertainment options, gluttony is harder to avoid than ever before. How do we avoid falling into this trap?

Sloth - probably the most misunderstood of the seven deadly sins - is the failure to care about things that matter. Sloth is the apathy that robs us from the abundant life God has for us. This week we identified four signs that we have a problem with sloth, and four ways that we can find freedom from this deadly impulse.

This week our Seven Deadly Sins series continued with wrath (or anger). We identified four signs that we have a problem with wrath, whether all "wrath" is bad, and how Jesus can help free us from this dangerous impulse.

This week we started our new series: Seven Deadly Sins: Finding Freedom from our Worst Impulses. We started with the sin of envy, our impulse to resent those who have things we want. We talked about how this sin "entangles us," and some steps we can take to "throw it off."

Our mini-series on anxiety ended this week by focusing on the question: What do we do when our faith itself becomes a source of anxiety? We looked at two possible sources of faith-related anxiety: (1) Anxiety that we aren't really saved, and (2) Fear that we aren't doing enough for God.

This week was Part 2 in our mini-series on anxiety: we considered the role "renewing our mind" has in moving us from anxiety to peace, and three practical ways to help us do it. Listen here:

We live in an anxious age: research indicates that 1 in 4 adults will experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their lifetime. And yet, the Bible encourages us to be anxious for nothing. How can we move from anxiety to peace?

Our Conversations with Jesus series concluded this week with a look at a conversation Jesus had with his disciples about his identity. Many people in our culture today have ideas about who Jesus was, but they are often very different from the Jesus-approved answer Peter gave in this conversation. We considered what Peter's answer reveals about how Jesus wants us to view him.

Jesus invited a man to follow him. When the man requested that he be able to say goodbye to his family first, Jesus sounded disappointed. Why? While on the surface it may seem that Jesus is advocating a cult-like abandonment of previous familial ties, when we reflect more deeply on the passage we realize that something else is going on.

This week we looked at Jesus's conversation with the Devil, a series of three temptations. For many of us reading this story today, it can be hard to understand what would have been wrong with Jesus succumbing to these temptations. We identified what the Devil was trying to get Jesus to do, and why it would have been wrong for Jesus to give in. In understanding Jesus's temptations, we are better p...

Jesus had a conversation with Peter that has a lot to teach us about the subject of our calling. If we're wondering what God wants us to do with our lives, this conversation helps us to recognize at least three foundational truths about our callings.

In today's politically contentious times, it's worth asking: what did Jesus have to say about how we relate to politics? Jesus said "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's." What did he mean?

In this week's "Conversation with Jesus," a rich, young ruler asks Jesus what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. On first glance Jesus' answer may appear to be a denial of his own divinity, a declaration of salvation by works, and a requirement of absolute poverty for his followers. When we look closer, though, we see that Jesus is doing none of these things. Rather, he is challenging this ma...

When some Pharisee men asked about divorce, Jesus said it was only lawful to divorce a wife if she had been unfaithful. When we understand the intent and context of Jesus' words, we find that God has both an incredibly high ideal for marriage, and grace for when we fall short of that ideal.

This week we looked at the longest one-on-one conversation Jesus has in the Bible: a conversation with a woman that - according to cultural norms - never should have happened. We considered how Jesus models interacting with the opposite sex, addressing the "elephant in the room," and freeing people from shame.

This week we started our new sermon series (Conversations With Jesus) with a look at one of Jesus's most famous dialogues: his nighttime conversation with Nicodemus. Jesus told Nicodemus that no one could see the Kingdom of God without being "born again." Today 1 in 3 Americans consider themselves "born again," but do we mean the same thing as Jesus when we use those words?

As we concluded our Scenes in Acts series, we went back to the beginning of the book when the apostles were first empowered to do the incredible acts we've been reading about over these last 14 weeks. We looked at that first empowerment and asked ourselves: What does this power do? Is it available to me? And, if so, what do I have to do to experience it?