Woodland Hills Church

As we continue our summer series on the Holy Spirit, this week Seth explains the role of the Holy Spirit in producing fruit that serves as evidence of a follower’s life in the Kingdom. As a way of understanding the fruits described in Galatians 6, a description and function of the soul is first explored. We use our will not to grit our way into a Jesus looking life, but rather to surrender our lif...

In this sermon Greg goes over the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit. After explaining each gift, he addressed why he believes these gifts are still relevant and important for the church today. He ends with an encouragement to zealously seek after all gifts God has for you.

This next sermon in our series, titled God in Us, focused on the meaning, biblical background and practical application of being filled with the Holy Spirit. This phrase has created much controversy in the church today while often creating more division than unity. The evidence in Scripture emphasizes that there is a difference between having the Holy Spirit as a follower of Jesus and the act of b...

This message is the fifth sermon in the series. It lays the foundation for identifying, understanding, and utilizing spiritual gifts.

In this fourth message of the God in Us series we explore what it means that the light of the world has taken up residence in us. Throughout scripture we see the theme of darkness and light battling back and forth. In Genesis we read of the Spirit hovering over the darkness and bringing order to the chaos, light to the darkness. In the gospel of John, Jesus calls himself the light of the world, an...

God makes amazing promises over the kind of life we can live through the power of the Holy Spirit. This power will flow out of us like a river of living water. But we frequently experience a distance between the kind of full life that God promised and the kind of life we live now, don’t we? So how can the distance of this gap begin to close? Paul tells us, one of the key ways in which we can do th...

This weekend's sermon is a response to the recent police/black lives matter conflicts from Baton Rouge, Dallas and here in Saint Paul. We took a break from our current 'God In Us' series to talk about this together.

This second sermon in our God in Us series focused on the broad question of, “Who is the Spirit?” This message focuses on three characteristics of the Holy Spirit: The Holy Spirit is God, The Holy Spirit is personal and the Holy Spirit is distinct in nature. Greg emphasized that the main role of the Spirit is to show us clearly the person of Jesus and help us to recognize God when we would have no...

We began our new Holy Spirit series by hearing stories from Rob & Fred, friends of Greg's and podrishioners from a house church network in Philadelphia. They shared about what it looks like for them to choose to live in the flow of the Holy Spirit on a day to day basis.

We held a Q&A night to wrap up our Flesh and Blood sermon series. In the final sermon of that series we examined how racial reconciliation is a vital part of the gospel message. To further discuss this we asked Dennis Edwards, the Senior Pastor of Sanctuary Covenant Church, to join Greg for this Q&A on a Jesus-way of addressing racial issues within the church.

In this, the final part of the Flesh & Blood series, we examine how racial reconciliation is a vital part of the gospel message. To be a Jesus-follower is to be one who seeks peace-making and is always striving towards reconciliation. We discover that we are only able to achieve reconciliation to the degree that we are willing to learn about perspectives that differ from our own.

In this, the third message in our Flesh and Blood series, we focus on Jacob's story in Genesis. His story is a great illustration of how we build walls inside ourselves, and it brings to light who we are really protecting ourselves from.

Jesus caused a stir in his community when he read the words from Isaiah 61 in his synagogue and announced their fulfillment through his own life and ministry. It’s no surprise; these words outline a powerful declaration of the Spirit of God at work. This sermon explores what happens for us everyday 21st Century believers as we embrace Isaiah 61. When the Spirit moves we are transformed; we become...

In this second message of the Flesh and Blood series, Seth describes the unceasing realities of conflict not only in the world in which we live, but also in our own lives; our own relationships, and our own hearts. Walls of conflict exist all around us, and those walls are torn down because one man chose to die. Through Christ’s death, the walls of conflict and separation are torn down. As the hea...

In this first message of the Flesh and Blood series, Greg dives in to relational conflict by properly defining kingdom peace and kingdom war. We live in a fallen creation whose inhabitants too often reflect the ideals of the enemy rather than participating in the triune God’s invitation to reflect His perfect love to each other. The principalities and powers play us off one another creating human...

Week four of our Love. Walk. Do. sermon series focused on stories of justice for human trafficking victims. Mark Moore, Church Mobilization Director at International Justice Mission (IJM), shared stories of what IJM has done to actively bring justice and healing to human trafficking victims.

This message examines Christian hope and how we are called to prophetically speak hope into seemingly hopeless situations. While hope is vital, certain understandings of God’s character and role in radical suffering can leave victims of trauma with passionless hope. But when our picture of God is rooted solidly in the revelation of Jesus, it is possible to have a passionate faith, regardless of th...

This third sermon in our Love. Walk. Do. series focuses on the importance of doing justice. There is always a danger in attempting to find solutions to justice issues with the political system where all solutions are ambiguous in nature. We are called to actively DO justice in our church and communities as a sign-post of the beautiful Kingdom of God because all of humanity has unsurpassable worth.

We all want a place at the top. A place of prominence and authority. From the story of Esau and Jacob, to James and John, to me and to you, the desire for a place at the top can frequently be seen. But for Jesus, a position at the “top of the Kingdom” can only be found through humility.

In this first message of the Love. Walk. Do. sermon series, Greg tackles the first portion of the prophet Micah’s depiction of what God requires of us – to love mercy. Loving mercy means loving it when people don’t get the negative consequences they deserve. If justice is about collecting a debt, then loving mercy is about hating debt collecting. In a very counter cultural depiction of the Kingdom...

A popular view of faith is as an absence of doubt. But Greg shows us why this view not only is a barrier to new believers, but is also a dangerous way of doing faith.

Jesus commanded His followers to love, and He commanded us not to judge. Yet the Christians of today are known outside of the Church as arrogant, judgmental, and intolerant. What is wrong with this picture?! In this message, Greg shares three ideas on how we, who say we follow Jesus, can truly become the humble, serving, loving people that the Church is supposed to be.

This Easter we heard from Greg Boyd on how the resurrection confirms that Jesus is the true revelation of God. Jesus is the exact representation of God and the truth is that the mercy of God triumphs over judgment. It is our task to align or re-align our picture of God with the person of Jesus seen in the resurrection.

In this sixth and last installment of the Everyday Influence series, Seth explores the positive ripple effect of us sharing the impact Jesus has had on our life. We don’t share the good news for a variety of reasons, but the promise of scripture is that if we show up and share, God will provide the power to our words that has the potential to change hearts. We don’t have to be perfect; in fact tha...

For the fifth installment of our Everyday Influence series, Sandra shares her own life example of being stuck in a “box” of self-proclaimed righteousness, and how she realized that we are all in the same box: the big box of “screw-ups.” It is within this big box that Jesus dwells, and does his great work.