Teaching & News From Eastgate PCB

Matthew #31: The Canaannite Woman Who Outwitted Jesus (Matt 15:21-28) Don Guidas (12/14/25) Download This Sunday we’ll be reading Matthew 15:21-28 . This is a distressing section of Scripture. We are confronted with a Jesus who seems strange to us; uncharacteristically distant and even apparently rude. He and his disciples have left Israel and are 50 miles north in the coastal region of Tyre and S...

Matthew #29: Traditional Trouble (Matthew 15:1-20) Rob Woodrum (12/7/25) Download Do you have any traditions for Christmas that your family has passed down through the years? I think the most delightful for Robbie and I is the annual watching of Die Hard as we put up the Christmas tree. “Ho, Ho, Ho…now I have a machine gun.” C’mon? What’s more Christmasy than that? Traditions are great. They can k...

Matthew #29: Faithful In The Fury (Matthew 15:1-20) Rob Woodrum (11/23/25) Download “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” ~ Captain Edward A. Murphy Jr . (Murphy’s law ) This Sunday we will continue our study of Matthew –  14:22-36 and we’ll be reading about things going very wrong for Jesus’ disciples, and the awe-inspiring revelation they get in the process. I believe this is an acco...

Matthew #28: The Parallels of Power (Matthew 14:1-21) Janelle Greene (11/16/25) Download Have you ever found yourself wondering where God is in the middle of a chaotic or painful moment? Many of us have been there. Plans fall apart, people are hurt in ways that seem needless, and violence can spread with unsettling speed. In moments like these it is natural to ask, Where is God in all of this and...

Matthew #27: The Valuable Kingdom (Matthew 13:44-58) Rob Woodrum (11/8/25) Download It seemed to me that my mom was on a perpetual hunt for some valuable antique that would somehow turn the tide of her fortunes. She wasn’t materialistic, per se, but just had this indefatigable hope that some day she would discover treasure. By and large, the stuff she had (either passed to her from her family, or...

Matthew #26: The Hidden Work of the Kingdom (Matthew 13:24-43) Janelle Greene (11/2/25) Download My brother Daniel used to work as a manager in the Publix deli. It seemed like a hard job with long hours, demanding customers, and endless sandwiches. Yet when I asked him what it was like, he said he loved it because every day he got to “feed the hungry.” That perspective changed how I think about or...

Matthew #25: Learning To Listen (Matthew 13:1-23) Rob Woodrum (10/26/25) Download Have you ever been talking with someone and then, with a chill, realized you’d tuned out and had no idea what the person was talking about? Not listening can be frustrating in a conversation; it can be devastating spiritually, when God is trying to communicate and people don’t seem to listen. That is going to be the...

Matthew #24: Identity Issues (Matthew 12:28-50) Rob Woodrum (10/19/25) Download One thing about human society throughout history is, we love to label stuff…especially people . It’s usually born from a quest of trying to get a grasp of who our fellow human is by generalizing them. It’s easier to interact with someone if we can fit them neatly into our categories. But this is, of course, a broken wa...

Matthew #23: Choosing Sides (Matthew 12:22-27) Kevin Barron (10/12/25) Download We live in an extremely polarized society. Everyone seems to want to divide up into teams. Usually these divisions are along socio-philosophical lines. But some choices we are confronted with have big consequences. We’ll be considering that in our study of the Gospel of Matthew this week. In our text we’ll be reading t...

Matthew #22: Rest From Religion (Matthew 11:1-21) Janelle Greene (10/5/25) Download I remember back in high school hearing about the Exxon oil spill in Alaska and feeling so bad for all of the wildlife that was hurt as a result. In fact, I was so affected by what had happened that I decided I would never get gas from an Exxon gas station again. One day, I came home bragging to my dad about how muc...

Matthew #21: Rejecting or Receiving God's Wisdom (Matt 11:20-30) Rob Woodrum (9/28/25) Download We live in an unprecedented time where incredible amounts of information are readily at our fingertips, and at the same time we are starving for wisdom. We know that information is not the same as wisdom, but the keen observer will also recognize that human wisdom will only take us so far. In fact, the...

Matthew #20: The Anomalous Kingdom (Matthew 11:1-19) Rob Woodrum (9/21/25) Download Anomalous: deviating from what is standard, normal, or expected. We face a lot of disappointments in life, all of which extend from our own expectations. Have you ever been disappointed in how God’s plans seem to be working in your life? If we’re honest about it, there are probably a lot of times when God doesn’t s...

Matthew #19: Preparing For The High Calling (Matthew 10:26-42) Janelle Greene (9/14/25) Download One time I came across a church’s advertisement for their Sunday morning service. The video showed someone walking into church carrying “100 problems.” As they experienced the service, the number of problems kept dropping until, by the time they left, they had “0 problems.” I believe the ad was trying...

Matthew #18: Mission Briefing (Matthew 10:1-25) Rob Woodrum (9/7/25) Download Learning to drive is a rite of passage in our culture and I still remember it well. It’s one thing to be along for the ride as a care-free kid, it’s another when the keys are in your hands and steering that metal box that’s flying down the road is up to you. It can be daunting at first, and it certainly isn’t something d...

Matthew #17: Compassion For The Desperate (Matthew 9:18-38) Rob Woodrum (8/31/25) Download One thing we as humans all have in common is that at one time or another, we have all felt desperate. Certainly, times of desperation come in varying degrees – but none of us escape moments where things seem so hopeless they seem impossible to deal with. In our times desperation, we will usually go all over...

Matthew #16: The Merciful Kingdom (Matthew 9:9-17) Janelle Greene (8/24/25) Download The Israelites in the time of Jesus lived under the heavy hand of Roman rule. That context shapes so much of what we read in the gospels, influencing the meaning of scripture and the dynamics we see in the stories. This Sunday we’ll read Matthew 9:9-17 , about Jesus calling Matthew to be His disciple. At first gla...

Matthew #15: Trusting In Christ's Authority (Matthew 8:29-9:8) Rob Woodrum (8/17/25) Download How difficult or easy is it for you to trust someone? For many people, trust is a hard commodity to come by. A lot of factors go into that – past experiences and a host of other reasons can make us reticent with our trust…and those are people we can SEE and examine and evaluate on a regular basis.  W...

Matthew #14: The Road Is Narrow (Matthew 8:18-22) Rob Woodrum (8/10/25) Download Robert Frost ended his famous poem “The Road Not Taken” with the words: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. It just reminds me of the “two paths” motif we find in the biblical narrative, and the “Narrow Gate and difficult road” Jesus contrasted wi...

Matthew #13: God's Power In The Margins (Matthew 7:13-29) Rob Woodrum (8/3/25) Download Every society on earth has always had groups of people in the social margins; people who are relegated to the edges of the larger community. It’s a tragic symptom of living in this broken world, the ease with which we dehumanize others by categorizing them as unwanted or undesirable, or unuseful. Which is why J...

Matthew #12: The Two Ways (Matthew 7:13-29) Janelle Greene & Rob Woodrum (7/27/25) Download This Sunday we’ll be concluding Jesus’ most famous teaching, the Sermon on the Mount, in our ongoing series studying the Gospel of Matthew. We’ll be reading ch 7:13-29 . Jesus wraps up his instructions with a series of contrasts between two choices. Only two. Two gates, two roads, two types of spiritual lea...

Matthew 11: Do Unto Others (Matthew 7:1-12) Blake Rosemann (7/20/25) Download We continue our study in the book of Matthew, this week covering verses about judging others, and seeking Christ. Click here for a pdf of the teaching slideshow.

Matthew #10: Greed and Generosity (Matthew 6:19-34) Janelle Greene (7/13/25) Download When I was a kid, staying home from school meant watching The Price is Right . I loved guessing the value of prizes and was often surprised by how different items were valued. Interestingly, 47 other countries have their own versions of the show. If I struggle with prices in the U.S., I can only imagine how lost...

Matthew #9: A Deeper Devotion (Matthew 6:1-18) Rob Woodrum (7/6/25) Download One of the things that has accompanied the rise of the internet and our online connections via social media is an ever-increasing angst over social comparisons – something that has been ringing alarm bells for mental health professionals. The other side of that tends to be the phenomena of “virtue signaling”; expressing o...

Matthew #8: A Deeper Righteousness (Matthew 5:17-48) Rob Woodrum (6/29/25) Download We’re going to be continuing our study in Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount this Sunday – we’ll be reading chapter 5:17-48 . So far, Jesus has been turning popular concepts on their heads, pointing to the stuff we normally try to avoid in life and saying that is where the good life is found. In the...

Matthew #7: Who Is Living The Good Life? (Matthew 5:1-16) Janelle Greene (6/22/25) Download Have you ever looked at someone’s life—on social media or even in real life—and thought, “I wish I had what they have”? Maybe it’s their home, their family, their vacations, or just the way their life seems so perfectly put together. It’s easy to compare, especially when all we’re seeing are the highlight r...