WestGate Church Teaching

Easter is a strange holiday for our post-Christian, mostly secular world. If you go just a little bit deeper than Peeps and chocolate bunnies, it’s actually pretty confrontational. The story says, “Jesus was dead, and now He isn’t and that means something BIG.” Jay and David talk about the “confronting” edges of Easter, and why Easter has harder edges than Christmas. We talk about if the historici...

In the ancient near eastern world, humans were universally conceived as being made by the gods to be slaves. Made from-the-mud servants, with little to no value. But in the story of creation in the first book of the Bible (Genesis) we see a dramatically different story. God creates humans not as slaves, but as co-laborers, stamped indelibly with God’s image, and given purpose and dignity. And they...

Easter is a strange holiday for our post-Christian, mostly secular world. If you go just a little bit deeper than Peeps and chocolate bunnies, it’s actually pretty confrontational. The story says, “Jesus was dead, and now He isn’t and that means something BIG.” Jay and David talk about the “confronting” edges of Easter, and why Easter has harder edges than Christmas. We talk about if the historici...

Sermon Description: The final book of the final Gospel contains a story of an ordinary man (Simon Peter) who comes face-to-face with an extraordinary story: Jesus has beaten death and is Resurrected. As we walk through Peter’s story, we show him moving from utter depression, to glimmers of hope, to majestic awe to being invited to respond to Jesus’ invitation and join Him in His work around the wo...

Matthew 8 records an interaction of Jesus with two demon-possessed men, a story which seems fantastical (even made up) to modern ears. But the Biblical worldview, here and throughout, has no problem with the existence of an unseen realm, a world in which there are “powers of a dark world and spiritual forces of evil,” in the words of Paul in Ephesians 6. So if that’s the case, what are these “powe...

Title: THE AFTERWORD | Matthew (Season 5) - Week 6 - Demon-Possession, Healing and Authority Description: Two demon-possessed men tormenting a whole town? Jesus sending a horde of demons into a herd of pigs that then immediately drowns itself? The story of the two demon-possessed men in Matthew 8 is undoubtedly one of the strangest stories in the entire New Testament. Jay and Dave discuss the othe...

Sometimes, in the Gospel narratives, Jesus can come across as….cranky. In the story of Jesus calming the storm in Matthew 8, Jesus seems to be irritated (and even seems to rebuke) His disciples because they were afraid when a GIANT storm seemed ready to sink their boat. Sorry that we couldn’t fall asleep during a Hurricane like you, Jesus. But is the lesson here “don’t wake Jesus up during a nap b...

In Matthew 8, Jesus and His disciples are crossing the Sea of Galilee when a giant storm erupts on the lake. His followers, many of whom were fisherman in that region, are more than worried: they’re terrified of the strength of the storm. What makes matters worse is that Jesus is literally asleep in the boat while all this is happening. This only adds to the angst and fear of the disciples. Does J...

Sometimes, in the Bible, we encounter passages that - on their face - seem to make Jesus look like a giant jerk. One example is in Matthew 8, where a man says he wants to follow Jesus, but requests to first bury his father. Jesus says no, and tells the man to let “the dead bury the dead.” What the heck, Jesus? Compassion much? As always, there’s more going on in the story - and this is a textbook...

After the years-long pandemic, it seems that there’s been a shift in the way that people see their time and their space. In a world in which so many of us are overworked, under-rested, always chasing, never-arriving, it makes logical sense that we would so fiercely try to protect our space and our time. But in Matthew 8, we see back-to-back examples where two people approach Jesus to say they want...

In Matthew 8, we see the third of three healings that the author Matthew lists. He is being deliberate, but this third “miracle” is different than the others. Unlike the previous two, where people quite literally fell at Jesus’ feet begging Him to help, this time a sickly woman doesn’t say anything. But Jesus sees her, knows her need and heals her out of compassion. The author Matthew is clear: th...

Often, our image and concept of God (if we have any) is that He is distant and far away. Aloof, at best. And humans who are interested have to undergo nearly Herculean feats to find Him. The equivalent of hiking up a tall mountain to gain wisdom from a spiritual guru. But the Biblical narrative presents a radically different picture of God, especially when you consider the person of Jesus. Here, w...

We Americans have an uneasy relationship with authority - and have since the very beginning of our nation (right, King George?) But this distrust of authority has only been exacerbated in recent decades to the point that we are quickly becoming a people totally unaccustomed to and even repulsed by the concept of authority. What does this mean for Christians, who have said for millennia to be a peo...

We modern people have - for a variety of reasons - a trust problem. And specifically, we have a trust-in-authority problem. From broad institutional failures, to distrust of media, to the deepening of individual autonomy, we are becoming a people who are distrustful of all authority. For followers of Jesus, this poses a tremendous challenge mainly because one can't read the Gospels without being s...

Immediately after the famous set of teachings found in Matthew 5-7 called the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus goes “down the mountain” and is immediately confronted in a shocking manner by a leper. According to Mosaic Law, this man would have not only been banished from the city, but was required to yell “Unclean, Unclean” to warn everyone of his condition. But it was more than simply taboo - this was...

In almost all zombie movies, the infected are treated like walking death - because in most of those stories, they are dangerous and contagious. In Matthew 8, we encounter a man with leprosy - pretty much the closest thing to an infected zombie in the ancient world. Contact with a leper was forbidden by God’s law, and for good reason: it could mean certain death. But Matthew records this shocking i...

In her best-selling novel The Poisonwood Bible, author Barbara Kingsolver presents missionary Nathan Price as a deep force of evil on the people of the Congo where he goes to serve. He’s a stand-in for colonialism, for arrogance and makes the case that “Christianity” makes our world worse. This mindset is common – so common that when many modern people think about Christian mission work to evangel...

Once a year, on the final week of Compassion Immersion, we take some time as a church to highlight the work of a Christian missionary whose impact can be felt down through the pages of history. This year, we look at the very first Protestant missionary sent from North America: Adoniram Judson - specifically the role his spouses played. Judson was married three times, losing his wives to disease on...

One of the core values of WestGate Church is a direct command by Jesus to “love your neighbor as yourself.” This week, Keivan Tehrani, our Global Compassion pastor, stops by to explain why this extends to the entire globe. And even though it’s easy to get quickly overwhelmed at the magnitude of the brokenenss of the world and the desperate need of so many, Keivan shows that it’s faithfulness in li...

It’s easy to get quickly overwhelmed at the magnitude of the brokenenss of the world and the desperate need of millions of people. And as people living in the Bay Area, it’s also easy to quickly turn myopic, focusing only on what’s going on in *my* life. Keivan Tehrani and Ryan Brailler from our Global Compassion Team stop by to share some incredible stories of ways they’ve seen God at work across...

For the next three weeks, we’ll be in a sermon series called Compassion Immersion. But why compassion? Finny Abraham and Lily Weirich, both of whom work in the area of Local Compassion for WestGate Church, stop by to talk about this. They explain why works of compassion aren’t really optional for following Jesus, and how compassion demonstrates what Jesus is really like to a world that’s hurting....

In John 4, we see Jesus approach a woman who many in the orthodox Jewish community would have avoided. There were all sorts of barriers that would have prevented an Orthodox Jewish people from conversing with her: barriers around gender, race, religion and morality. Jesus’ interaction with this woman shows not only an incredible posture of grace and kindness, but also an invitation to capital T-Tr...

For Christians, the Bible isn’t nice to have, it’s vital. Central. Christians believe that the Bible is not just a book, but the divinely inspired Word of God, spoken for us, to lead us in the way of truth and love, down the path toward God’s glory and our good. But it isn’t about intellectual ascent; it’s about transformation. And we find, in the Bible, that the Word of God is referred to as a nu...

For generations and millennia, Christians have believed that the Bible was the very Word of God. But what does it look like, practically, for us to take the Bible seriously as God’s people? How can we do that? And how do we handle the elephant in the room for many people: that Jesus is great, but the Bible is antiquated, out-dated (and has been used as a prop for anti-science, racist and sexist mo...

This past weekend, we made the case that we need silence in our lives to overcome the loud, noisy distracting world in order to hear God. But that raises a point: if the world is noisy, and God wants our attention, why doesn’t He just shout? Break into our lives like the Kool-Aid man crashing through your house. That would do it, wouldn’t it? Why is silence necessary for us to connect with God? Wh...