TNL Church Talks

Mark 9 shows us that Jesus doesn’t wait for clean, confident prayers, he meets people in the middle of fear, disappointment, and the honest cry, “I believe, help my unbelief.” TNL Church: Growing into the people we're created to be as we join God to incite love, reduce suffering, and increase joy. Find out more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tnl.org⁠

Lexie Mahaffey joins us to talk about one of Jesus’ most timeless stories: The Prodigal Son. TNL Church: Growing into the people we're created to be as we join God to incite love, reduce suffering, and increase joy. Find out more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tnl.org⁠

This strange little story of Acts 5:12-16 shows a community so shaped by Jesus that desperate people bring their pain into the open, trusting mercy might be near. The invitation is to become the kind of people whose lives make more room for grace, healing, and hope for others. TNL Church: Growing into the people we're created to be as we join God to incite love, reduce suffering, and increase...

Fear often tells the truth, but not the whole truth, and this strange story reminds us that God can open our eyes to the help we couldn’t see and free us to respond with mercy instead of revenge. TNL Church: Growing into the people we're created to be as we join God to incite love, reduce suffering, and increase joy. Find out more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tnl.org⁠

God’s grace meets us in our exhaustion, our limits, and our very human bodies, and the church is at its best when it stops protecting the plan long enough to care for the person on the ground. TNL Church: Growing into the people we're created to be as we join God to incite love, reduce suffering, and increase joy. Find out more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tnl.org⁠

When something small makes your stomach drop, God doesn’t dismiss it as too ordinary or too minor. The floating axe head reminds us that God’s care reaches into the daily places where we feel responsible, anxious, embarrassed, and afraid we can’t fix what went wrong. TNL Church: Growing into the people we're created to be as we join God to incite love, reduce suffering, and increase joy. Find...

Sometimes God uses the voices we’re most tempted to dismiss to interrupt our blindness before we do damage. Balaam’s donkey reminds us that humility means slowing down, listening before we label, and staying open to correction even when it comes through an unexpected source. TNL Church: Growing into the people we're created to be as we join God to incite love, reduce suffering, and increase jo...

Jesus meets Peter around the fire where his failure still lingers, tells the truth without humiliating him, and restores him through love, responsibility, and a renewed call to follow. Resurrection means our worst moment doesn’t get to become our whole identity. In Jesus’ hands, even the conversation we’d rather avoid can become the place where we begin again. TNL Church: Growing into the people w...

When life gets disorienting, most of us go back to what’s familiar. In John 21, that’s exactly where Jesus meets the disciples, in the boat, in the empty nets, in the exhaustion, and in the ordinary reflex to return to what they know. This talk explores drift, survival mode, small acts of trust, and the grace of a savior who has breakfast waiting on the shore. If you’ve ever felt stuck between wha...

Thomas’ response to the risen Jesus in John 20 isn’t a failure of faith, it’s one of the clearest, boldest confessions in the Gospel: “My Lord and my God!” This talk looks at doubt, wounds, belonging, and the kind of Jesus who meets honest questions without shame, and turns them into deeper trust. TNL Church: Growing into the people we're created to be as we join God to incite love, reduce suf...

Resurrection peace doesn’t erase fear by force. It meets us in the middle of it, tells the truth about our wounds, and starts opening what fear has closed. TNL Church: Growing into the people we're created to be as we join God to incite love, reduce suffering, and increase joy. Find out more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tnl.org⁠

In John 20:1–18, Easter doesn’t begin with clarity. It begins with grief, confusion, and the unsettling possibility that what looked like the end might not actually be the end. This Easter talk explores how resurrection often arrives before we have words for it, and how Jesus meets us in the aftermath with a hope that’s real enough to carry into ordinary life. TNL Church: Growing into the people w...

Palm Sunday is full of excitement, praise, and big expectations. But beneath the celebration is a deeper question: what are we actually building our lives on? In this talk, we look at Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem alongside his words about building on rock instead of sand, and we confront how easy it is to admire Jesus without actually letting him reshape our foundations. TNL Church: Growing into th...

In Matthew 5:38–48, Jesus takes us beyond “eye for an eye” and into the difficult, freeing work of loving our enemies. This talk explores retaliation, boundaries, St. Patrick’s story, and the strange way Jesus refuses to let harm have the final word in who we become. TNL Church: Growing into the people we're created to be as we join God to incite love, reduce suffering, and increase joy. Find...

In Week 3 of our Lent series, we sit with Jesus’ intense words in Matthew 5:27–30 and talk about how desire and attention form us over time. We explore the “private means harmless” script, how triggers and habit loops get wired into our lives, and what it looks like to bring things into the light and enact wise boundaries that help us learn to see people, and ourselves, as whole again. TNL Church:...

Matthew 5:21–24 pushes past surface-level obedience and goes straight for what happens inside a person long before any obvious violence. Jesus starts with “don’t murder,” then goes upstream to anger that curdles into contempt, the kind that turns a human being into “empty-head,” “idiot,” “you’re nothing,” and calls it justified. Jesus ties this to worship on purpose. You can’t practice contempt al...

All of us have a running commentary in our heads: old family rules, church messages, cultural noise, our own shame and fear. Most of the time we don’t even notice it. As we step into Lent, we’re asking a simple but disruptive question: “Whose voice is that?” In this Ash Wednesday–style gathering (on a Tuesday night, of course), we explore how Lent isn’t a spiritual performance contest, but a seaso...

What if God’s light doesn’t just comfort you, but actually complicates your life first? In Week 4 of our “Strange Light” Epiphany series, we sit with the story from John 9 where Jesus heals a man who’s been blind since birth. Instead of a community celebration, everything blows up: neighbors argue, religious leaders clamp down, parents panic, and the man who can now see gets kicked out of his own...

When Jesus goes back to his hometown synagogue in Nazareth, the people who know him best are the ones who struggle most to see who he really is. Familiarity, “I already know this,” becomes a kind of spiritual anesthesia that keeps them from recognizing God’s strange light right in front of them. This week of our “Strange Light” series sits with Luke 4:16–30 and Isaiah 61, exploring how pain can sl...

Jesus’ first miracle in John 2 doesn’t happen at a temple or on a mountain, it happens at a wedding reception, quietly, backstage, and most people never even notice. When the wine runs out and shame is about to crash the party, jesus steps in with a strange kind of light, practical generosity that protects people from humiliation and turns ordinary water into celebration. Epiphany is about learnin...

The story of the Magi in Matthew 2 is familiar on the surface, but when you slow down, it exposes three very different responses to the same light: Herod’s anxious need for control, the religious experts’ informed but unmoved comfort, and the Magi’s risky decision to move on partial light. What happens when God’s activity threatens our little kingdoms, when our knowledge outpaces our obedience, or...

A Christmas Eve reflection on John 1, where the cosmic “Word” who spoke light into existence is revealed as a person who moves into the neighborhood of ordinary, messy lives. We explore what it means to live in a world that often feels ruled by darkness, anxiety, and invisibility, and to hear the claim that a stubborn, unflinching Light has already stepped into that darkness and refuses to leave....

Waiting is frustrating. It feels unproductive, inefficient, and sometimes like silence from God. But Advent refuses to rush past the wait. This week, we sit with Simeon and Anna, two often-overlooked figures who spent decades waiting for hope to arrive. Their lives remind us that waiting doesn’t automatically make us wise. It can make us bitter, numb, or closed off. But it can also train our atten...

The first people to hear about Jesus weren’t priests, politicians, or anyone with influence. They were shepherds, men pushed to the edges of society who smelled like their work and rarely got invited anywhere. Yet God chooses them as the first witnesses of the incarnation. In Week 2 of our Advent series, we explore why God keeps showing up in the places no one looks. We sit with the fear and confu...

Advent starts in the last place anyone expected: a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, with a teenage girl no one was looking at. In Week 1 of our Advent series, we look at Mary’s story in Luke 1 and what it tells us about a God who loves showing up in small, overlooked places. Mary’s “yes” isn’t loud or polished. It’s trembling, honest, and full of questions...which is exactly the kind of cour...