The Grove Community Church Podcast

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As we embark into a new year, let us be reminded from Peter of some biblical goals that we can incorporate into the resolutions we have for ourselves for 2025.

Welcome to our Christmas Eve service. As you listen along, it is our hope that you will be filled with joy and peace of Christ, and celebrate his birth with us.

The Magi present after the birth of Christ is one aspect of the Christmas story that invokes many questions and mystery. Despite the unknowns, there is still a lesson that we can learn from how the Magi respond to the birth of a King. Listen along to learn what that is!

For some, the holidays can be filled with joy and happiness and celebration. But for others, this time of year can bring about feelings of sadness from the loss they have experienced in their lives. The Blue Christmas service at The Grove strives to recognize this fact and give people not only a place to recognize and process their sadness and/or grief, but to find hope in Jesus Christ as well.

On this third week of Advent, our focus shifts to the angels appearance to the shepherds. God took some of the lowliest members of that ancient culture and used them to be the first messengers of His son's birth. And like the shepherds, we too carry the responsibility of sharing that joyous and wonderful news all these years later.

There can only be one King in your life. This week, the advent week of peace, we will talk about the reasons why Christ should be the one and only King in your life, why he deserves to be our King.

Jesus' genealogy is full of Easter Eggs, and no not the ones you stuff full of candy and hide on Easter. Easter eggs are also like hidden messages. In the genealogy of Jesus that Matthew shares at the beginning of his gospel, he is trying to share a message with us. Tune in to find out what that message is as we begin the advent season!

This is our last sermon in this series and the final church that is addressed in the book of Revelation is Laodicea, which is perhaps most known for being lukewarm. By reading the Bible we know that God does not want us to be lukewarm in our faith or in our actions towards Him. Tune in to discover instead what can be done to be on fire for God and what will happen when we do that.

As we have been studying the seven letters sent to the seven churches in Revelation, we have seen Jesus present in front of these churches rewards for good behavior and promised discipline for bad behavior. The letter to the church of Philadelphia is a perfect example for the type of church that will receive God's blessings, and what those blessings look like.

This week we take a little break from our To the Church series to talk about seeing people for how God sees people. Tune in as Pastor Craig shares what Jesus saw. what he felt, and what he did when he came into contact with people.

This week, the church at Pergamum is addressed. This church had a problem of allowing a false teacher to remain in their midst because of weak leadership. This false teacher is referred to as a Jezebel. Ultimately, the question for this church, which extends to us, is are you going to follow Jesus or Jezebel because you can't follow both.

We have come to the third church out of the seven mentioned in the book of Revelation; the church in Pergamum. Similar to the church in Ephesus, Pergamum is both complimented and given a complaint. In this church, false teachers were allowed to influence people. Tune in to hear not just about how God told this church to fix this problem, but how we can apply it to ourselves and our church now.

This week we turn our focus to the church of Smyrna, the only church to not receive correction. The church of Smyrna was enduring a lot of persecution, and from their example, we too can learn what to do under the pressure of persecution.

This week we unpack the first letter to the first church, the church of Ephesus. While Ephesus is doing several things right, we discover that they have lost their love of Christ. Listen along to hear about what the result of this can be for not only the church of Ephesus, but the Church today.

In the first part of revelation, Jesus is using John to get a message out to his church, trying to get them, like he tries to get us, to listen to His voice. In this first sermon in this series, we will look at the reason for this letter to the church, what John saw of Jesus, and what our response should be.

In part two of this two week mini sermon series, Pastor Craig shares advanced relationship skills 11-22 that can be drawn out from Paul's letter to Philemon. Tune in and let the wisdom of this book speak into your life.

Everyone has experienced a tricky, uncomfortable, or hard situations with people around us. Paul experienced a situation like this when he met Onesmus, a runaway slave of his good friend Philemon. For situations like this, it is good to have some advanced relationship skills. In this first part of this mini series, we will look at 10 of 22 of these skills.

It can sometimes be easy to become unfocused in our faith. There are a lot of stressors and distractions in our lives that can take our focus away from Jesus. However, in Acts 2, we can learn from Peter 3 aspects of Jesus to focus on as we live out our Christian faith.

As we close up this short series on the life of Jonah, we will see a lack of compassion from Jonah, but the unfathomable extent of God's compassion. From this, we can learn to rekindle our own compassion for unbelievers around us.

Jonah has had a change of heart. He has decided to obey God and go to Nineveh and warn the Assyrians of their destruction. This week we will look at the next part in the story of Jonah and discover a principle God has for us all.

Last week we began the story of Jonah and went over Jonah's disobedience and how he felt justified in his disobedience. This week we look at the prayer Jonah prays while in the belly of the great fish after God "catches up" with Jonah.

We have come to the conclusion of our unity series. As we wrap this sermon series up, we are reminded from Psalm 133 just how beautiful unity is, and how unity happens.

Last week. Pastor Craig shared with us how we should be engaging with our enemies, and that we really don't have enemies, we have neighbors. However, we still live in a sin filled world and mistakes are still going to be made that get in the way of unity. When this happens, we need to remember to have grace. This is illustrated so beautifully in a parable about the Kingdom of Heaven. Listen along...

Who is your enemy? Who has hurt you? If we want unity to triumph and be one of our defining characteristics, then we have to engage with our enemies in a biblical way. Listen along to find out exactly how.