The Upper Room Fellowship

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...

Why does God allow suffering? Before we can walk through the biblical story, we have to be honest about the hardest question in it. This week we looked at three layers of suffering: human freedom used destructively, spiritual powers working against God's purposes, and a creation groaning under the weight of consequences it did not choose. We started with love. Genuine love requires genuine fre...

We began our nine-week journey through God's unfolding kingdom by addressing the foundation: Can we actually trust the Bible? If Scripture is mythology or ancient speculation, we're wasting our time. But if God is truly revealing himself through these pages, everything changes. The New Testament was written remarkably early. Most scholars agree all 27 books were written before AD 100, with...

We gathered this morning to celebrate what the Holy Spirit has done through our capital campaign. That total represents kitchen table conversations, prayers, and willingness that runs counter to human nature. In 1 Chronicles 29, we see David preparing materials for a temple he would never set foot in. After being told he wouldn't build it himself, David gave massively from his personal treasur...

Easter raises a question most people never think to ask: why does Christianity still exist? Every major movement in history follows a predictable pattern. Unrest, a charismatic leader, a compelling message, a growing following. The leader dies, and the followers carry the ideas forward. Islam, the civil rights movement, countless others. The pattern makes sense. Christianity doesn't fit. Jesus...

Sermon Summary:Palm Sunday is more than a parade. It is a case study in what happens when people see what they want to see instead of who is actually there. The crowd that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem was desperate. Rome was occupying their land, and Passover week was saturating the air with stories of the God who had defeated Pharaoh. When word spread that the Messiah was coming down the Mount o...

The Christian life is fundamentally a story about trust. From the fracture in the Garden of Eden, where the real break was not disobedience but distrust, to the ministry of Jesus, the whole arc of Scripture is God working to restore a trust relationship with people. The Ten Commandments came after the Exodus because relationship always precedes the rules. God's goal has never been compliance....

Greetings from the Upper Room Fellowship, a church in Columbiana, Ohio, where we seek to Know God, Share Life, and Serve Others together. At the Upper Room Fellowship, we believe in a relational God who created us and will go to whatever lengths possible to connect with us so we can experience his perfect love. We believe that His love is open to all and has the power to transform lives and commun...

If you were able to join us for our Transforming Together Growth Campaign meeting this past weekend, you know the room was filled with faith, generosity, and a real sense of God moving among us. If you weren't able to make it, we want to make sure you're caught up on everything that was shared, because this involves all of us. We spent time looking back at our history, and it was a good re...

SERMON SUMMARYWe kicked off this week by going deeper into the foundation underneath our Here for Good series and our Transforming Together growth campaign. Before we talk about buildings, timelines, or giving, we need to talk about the thing that holds all of it up: prayer. We started in Joshua 10, where Joshua finds himself in a battle that God has already promised to deliver into his hands, but...

We opened this series with a building campaign and a question worth sitting with: why are we really doing this? The answer starts in Isaiah 54, where God tells a barren woman with no household and no future to enlarge her tent. Not someday. Now. Before a single person has arrived. God sees who is coming before she does, and he invites her to act on that word before the evidence shows up. That patt...

Sermon Summary:We wrapped up our journey through Pete Scazzero's Emotionally Healthy Spirituality with a question that matters more than any sermon series: what does a sustainable spiritual life look like on a random Tuesday when no one is asking you to think about it? A study of Israeli parole judges showed that the time of day mattered more to their decisions than the facts of a case. Decisi...

Sermon Summary:What does it actually mean to love our neighbor? This week we explored one of the most familiar stories Jesus ever told and discovered it might be more challenging than we have let ourselves believe. The story begins with a lawyer testing Jesus, asking what he must do to inherit eternal life. He gets the answer right, loving God and loving neighbor, but wants to narrow the field. Je...

SERMON SUMMARYWe live in a blizzard. Our schedules overflow, we wear busyness as a badge, and we're expected to work like we don't have families while raising families like we don't have jobs. In the whiteout conditions of modern life, many of us have lost our way spiritually, wandering in circles just feet from home. God offers us a rope to lead us back: two ancient disciplines called...

Sermon Summary:We all hit walls in life: moments when our faith stops working the way we thought it would, when the foundation we've built on starts to crack. These aren't minor inconveniences. They're the trials that test everything we believe about God and ourselves. James 1:2-4 invites us to consider it pure joy when we face trials, because this testing produces the mature, complete...