The Summit Church

When it comes to prayer, there are a lot of stories from the Bible and truths that just hurt your mind when you try to understand them. One of those is the indication from Scripture that God knows the end from the beginning and will accomplish his fixed and eternal plan. So why pray? Does that mean that prayer is less a way of changing God’s mind and more a way of changing us?

Aren’t you glad there’s a story in the Bible where Jesus explains to his disciples how to pray? He even gives us a model prayer to follow. This week Pastor J.D. walked us through the Lord’s Prayer and shared some practical suggestions for how to either start a daily prayer time or jump-start your prayer time if you’ve gotten into a rut.

The first week of our new series, “Ask,” will not just be an attempt to get you to make a New Year’s resolution about your prayer life. Together we’ll look at Jesus’ example and see that his whole life was saturated with prayer and that the main way we access his power is by praying in four specific ways.

For all that I need, all that I lack, all that I could never be in myself, Jesus is the great I AM.

There is freedom in not having to worry whether you will face adversity or prosperity today when you are in and with the Prince of Peace!

You’ve got to stop viewing your Heavenly Father through the lens of your earthly one. Reverse the order: Understand your earthly father through the lens of your Heavenly one.

What is the best thing God can do for you in the midst of any given problem? Do you trust him as Wonderful Counselor, and are you ready to do whatever he says?

Waiting can be hard, because in waiting, what we want to happen just hasn't happened yet. And waiting can especially be hard at Christmas. In Luke chapter two, there's a Christmas story for those who wait. It's not the Christmas story most of us are familiar with.

Unlike Esther, who was not confident her life would be saved if she obeyed God, we know how the story ends: God wins. The only question is whether or not we’re willing to follow God’s purpose for our lives and be a part of what he is doing in the world.

As we finish strong in our two-year Multiply faith journey, it’s timely to take a look at a passage in Galatians 6 that speaks to the principle of sowing and reaping. We’ll look at how God multiplies in kingdom fruit what we offer to him with open hands and how our money infallibly reveals what we worship.

Paul ends his letter to the Galatians by tying together his two main concerns of gospel integrity and relational unity and giving a litany of practical applications—not a list of things to do but out-workings of what has been done for us through Jesus Christ.

One of the familiar themes from Galatians is the finished work of Jesus and the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit. Paul wants us to understand that sin will lose its grip on our lives when we focus less on limiting the power of sin—the desire to do the opposite of the fruit of the Spirit—and more on the growing presence of God in our lives. Only when we soak ourselves in the love of Jesus and what h...

In this message, Pastor J.D. talks about the ongoing uses for the law in our lives and learn how being justified by faith actually drives us in devotion back to the law and gives us the desire to obey out of love for God our Father.

Have you ever been at a point where you wondered why, even after becoming a Christian, you still feel unhappy or you can’t find peace or satisfaction or you just can’t make a relationship work? In his letter to the Galatians, which we’ll continue studying this weekend, the Apostle Paul explains why we can’t just think of salvation as simply Jesus Christ paying our sin debt. We have to recognize th...

In this message Pastor J.D. unpacks four kinds of freedom that Paul says we should have when we believe in Jesus - all illustrated in a story of a confrontation between Paul and Peter.

God has given you a lens through which to see how God has been preparing you - through your gifts and experiences and even through your sins and failures - to tell others about his grace, and he’s given you his Word in which to ground your statement of belief.

In the first message from the series "Freedom in the In-Between", Pastor J.D. talks about why Martin Luther considered it the most important book of the Bible, how only the gospel of Jesus Christ has the power to save us, and why we have to fight for it.

Many of us suffer from something that we often cannot see in its entirety in ourselves: an undisciplined life. The book of Proverbs gives us a lot of instruction and rebuke to those of us that find ourselves neck deep in indiscipline.

"Eat, drink, and be merry” may not sound like sound biblical instruction, but that often seems like Solomon’s main point in the book of Ecclesiastes. God wants his people to "eat, drink, and be merry", but that is not the end of it. Solomon is speaking from the perspective of one who, like us, lives under the sun. In this message, Pastor J.D. looks at the conclusions drawn in Ecclesiastes and how...

Ecclesiastes makes no apologies for its blunt talk about the senselessness of living. In this message, Pastor J.D. looks at several ways Solomon experienced this absurdity but also what we should do while we are under the sun in light of our eternal perspective and what we know to be true over the sun.

Our default mode is to "be better", "do more", and "try harder" in order preserve and provide for ourselves and our families. But in Psalm 127, we are reminded that we will only experience the true rest that God promises when we embrace our true role and trust in him, because he has already provided for us.

In 1 Kings 11, the downfall of the wisest man who ever lived seems to come out of nowhere. But does it really? Were there any warning signs along the way? In this message, Pastor J.D. takes a look at what brings a good man, even the world’s wisest man, down and what we can learn from his mistakes.

Matthew 25:14-30