The Upper Room Fellowship

Acts 10 and 11 show us a turning point in the story of the church. God sends an angel to Cornelius, a Roman centurion who prays often and gives generously. At the same time, God gives Peter a vision that stretches everything he thought he knew about who belongs in God’s family. Two men, one Jew and one Gentile, each paused to pray, and each ended up part of something new. The good news was always...

After Stephen’s death, persecution scattered the church, and it would have been easy to see that as a loss. Acts 8 and 9 show us God at work in the middle of it. We watch Philip carry the good news to Samaria, where people the Jews despised received the Holy Spirit. We meet Simon the sorcerer, who is rebuked and repents. We see an Ethiopian official baptized right away beside a desert road. We see...

Some seasons of life look like a loss. A diagnosis, a broken relationship, a prayer that hasn’t been answered in years. In Acts 7, we meet Stephen, a man chosen to help feed widows who now stands on trial for blasphemy against the temple and the law. Instead of defending himself point by point, he tells the council their own story. God spoke to Abraham in Mesopotamia, far from any temple, and prom...

Sermon Summary:We pick up in Acts 5 with a church that looks nearly perfect. Barnabas lays the money from his field at the apostles’ feet and earns a nickname. Ananias and Sapphira watch, and they want a little of that honor. They sell their land, keep part of the money, and let everyone believe they gave it all. Peter reminds them that the land and the money were theirs the whole time. Nobody req...

Sermon Summary:Peter and John walk up to the temple at the hour of prayer, and a man who has never taken a step sits at the gate called Beautiful. Peter looks him in the eye, has no silver or gold, and gives what he has in the name of Jesus. The man walks, then jumps, and goes into the place he spent his whole life sitting outside of. Peter and John soon stand before the same council that condemne...

Sermon Summary: Most of us know the feeling of being handed something big before we feel ready. The first followers of Jesus knew it too. They waited in Jerusalem as he told them, and on the day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit came on all 120 of them. Ordinary people began declaring the wonderful works of God in languages they had never learned, and a crowd from every corner of the known world heard...

Sermon Summary:We're starting a new series in the book of Acts, the story of what happened after Jesus left the earth. Acts doesn't read like a theology book or a biography. It reads like history, and it's the only book in the New Testament that doesn't really end. Luke sets the pen down mid-story because the story is still going, and we're part of it. In Acts chapter 1, Jesus...

Today we paused our regular series to celebrate Move Up Sunday and to talk about the kids and teenagers in our church family. Looking at Mark 10:13 to 16, we saw how Jesus stopped the disciples from turning children away and told the adults in the room that they were the ones who needed to change, not the kids. We walked through four things that make up what the Bible calls childlikeness. Trust, b...

We spent this week on the fourth core value of our church, knowing our greatness. We started in Ephesians, a letter written to a small group of believers living in the shadow of a massive pagan economy. Paul spends three chapters reminding them who they are before he ever tells them what to do. Then he pulls out an image every Roman would recognize, the victory parade thrown for a conquering gener...

We started this morning in a strange place for a Sunday, an orphanage in Romania in the early 1990s. When Ceausescu's regime fell, workers found thousands of children who had stopped crying because they had learned no one was coming. Psychologists called the pattern they saw in these kids indiscriminate friendliness, kids so starved for touch they would wrap themselves around a stranger's...

We thrive through relationships with others as we show up authentically, with kindness and honor. That is one of our core values, and this week we dug into why something we were built for can feel so hard. We started with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who ran an underground seminary in Nazi Germany and later wrote about what he called the wish dream, the fantasy version of community we carry in our heads....

We opened a new six-week series called Pursuit, and right away we drew a distinction between a value and a pursuit. A value can sit framed in a lobby and never touch your life. A pursuit means you are running after something, even when you are stumbling. The pursuit we started with is this one: we treasure God's presence. And treasure is a big word. We looked at Jesus' parable in Matthew 1...

We picked up right where we left off last week, with Jesus coming up out of the water at his baptism and heading straight into forty days in the wilderness. No food, no comfort, just the devil waiting for him at the end of it. Where Adam failed in the garden, Jesus stood firm in the desert, and he did it using the same practices we talked about last week: prayer, scripture, fasting. From there we...

We spend a lot of time talking about what Jesus did. This week, we slowed down to think about who he was. We started in a familiar place, the acknowledgment that nearly all serious historians agree Jesus existed. But the goal wasn't to argue for that. The goal was to actually meet him. To spend some time with the man who changed the calendar, rearranged the world, and somehow managed to get ac...

This week we are stepping into 24/7 prayer, and we are doing it because we believe God moves when His people make space for Him. We looked at 1 Timothy, where Paul is writing to a young pastor named Timothy, who is nervous, young, and leading a church in one of the most spiritually chaotic cities in the ancient world. Paul's first instruction to him is not a leadership strategy. It is a call t...

Most of us picked up our picture of the end of the world from somewhere other than the Bible. A novel, a movie, a footnote in a study Bible. This week we went looking for where that picture actually came from, and traced it back to one man in the 1830s, a study Bible in 1909, and a series of paperbacks and movies that turned his idea into common sense. Then we opened the actual passages. In 1 Thes...

We closed out this series by asking what we actually believe happens at the end of the story. Most of us grew up with a picture of heaven that never really came from the Bible. Souls floating up to clouds, harps, pearly gates. That picture owes more to Greek philosophy than it does to Scripture. Plato taught that the body is a prison and the goal of life is escaping it. The real hope in the Bible...

On the day of Pentecost, fire showed up again. Centuries earlier, fire and smoke covered Mount Sinai when God gave the law to Moses, and anyone who touched that mountain paid for it with their life. Fifty days after Passover, on the same festival that marked that moment, the fire of God's presence returned. This time it skipped the building and landed on people. A room full of fishermen, a for...

We are in week nine of our series, The Whole Story, and this week we landed in the middle of the most pivotal moment in history. After four hundred years of silence, after Babylon and Persia and Greece and Rome had all taken their turns crushing God's people, something finally happened. And it happened in the way nobody anticipated. We looked at the four main groups who were waiting for God to...

We all know the move. Something feels off, stuck, or broken inside, and our first instinct is to look outward. Change the job, the address, the relationship, the scenery. We are convinced our primary problems are out there somewhere, waiting to be solved by the right external circumstances. This week we walked through five hundred years of Israel's history, from the chaos of Judges to the coll...

There is a moment in Exodus where Moses asks God for a name, and God refuses to give him one. "I AM WHO I AM." It is less an answer than a declaration that God cannot be categorized, cannot be placed on a shelf next to the other options. That refusal sets the whole story in motion. We follow Moses back into Egypt, where Pharaoh asks a question that sounds ancient but lands close to home:...

Our journey through the sweeping narrative of Scripture brings us to a moment where everything seems to have gone completely sideways. Humanity is scattered, language is divided, and the divine image in us appears deeply bent. God responds to this global chaos not by choosing an obvious, powerful empire, but by calling a seventy-five-year-old pagan moon-worshiper named Abraham from the middle of n...

This week we walked through one of the hardest and most necessary sections of Scripture: the fall. Genesis 3 opens with a serpent making a familiar move, taking the generous goodness of God and reframing it as restriction. The offer to Adam and Eve was a claim to authority: stop receiving wisdom from your Creator and become the definer yourself. They took it. And everything changed. The consequenc...

Most of us are living from a story about ourselves that was written by someone other than God. This week we looked at the gap between the false self, the identity we absorbed from our wounds, our failures, and the people around us, and the true self, the one God had in mind when he formed us. Psalm 139 gives us the foundation. God knitted us together with the same deliberate care a weaver gives to...

This week we opened Genesis 1 and 2 not as a science debate or a piece of poetry, but as something more specific: a temple-building text. Using the work of scholar John Walton, we traced how the six days of creation follow a forming-and-filling pattern, and how day seven is the moment God moves into what he has made. The cosmos is his temple. His rest is not exhaustion. It is delight. He settled i...