Viva Vineyard Church

We introduce our new series: ReMeeting Jesus. We look at why we all have Next Guru Syndrome and 3 wears to avoid missing Jesus as we read the Gospel of Matthew.

Change is slow.  As we’ve been looking at emotional and spiritual growth over the past 8 weeks or so, the question arises of how do we see lasting impact in our lives?  Or do we just move on unchanged from this series? We all make plans about many things in our lives - plans for our careers, plans for retirement, plans of how we will raise and educate our children, plans to travel, plans...

None of us get through life unscathed. The wheels fall off. What happens then? What do we do with our pain, our loss, our questions, our anger at God? When the wheels fall off, Jesus offers us himself. 

The push for productivity in our culture is pervasive. It shapes how we work, how we prioritise, how we do friendships, how we parent etc. But after his work, God rests. And then to a people freed from slavery he gives the gift of one day a week to stop and not work. That gift is available to us too. But how do we receive it?

Last week the National Anglican Family Violence Research Report was published. Two key findings deserve a great deal of attention. We’re doing this series, Tooling Up to Love because we know we need to grow up. Emotionally immaturity is having an extraordinary cost on our households across this country. Core to our growth in emotionally maturity is what we do with conflict. As Christians, we often...

"The first time I encountered the Wall, I didn't know what it was and I was totally unprepared. My hope in talking to you today is we can learn to value and trust what God is doing in us through the Wall."

The story of Joseph in Genesis 37 to 50 is a great guide on how we can do the work of journeying through the things that negatively impact our discipleship and learning to love well, that we inherited from our families. Go to our blog to access a tip sheet to do your genogram.

This week Matt talks about the importance of self knowledge in our growth into emotional and spiritual maturity. (And no this is not a self help course!) Its truth rooted in the rocking story of David and Goliath and the God who saves. 

"My emotional mess, my failing physical health were his merciful lights flashing brighter and brighter on the dashboard of my life… God was calling me to stop, pay attention, return to him. But I didn’t want a bar of it." Emotional health and spiritual health are inseparable. In our new series Tooling Up to Love, we're following Pete Scezzaro's (Emotionally Healthy Spirituality) lead. We're choosi...

Through his death, resurrection and outpouring of the Spirit, Jesus defeated every obstacle to us living in the love and freedom of God. So what? How do we actually live into that? If life comes down to what we actually desire, how does our desire change so we actually want to love God and serve others? Well, perhaps the answer lies in coffee: instant or real?

In life we can get stuck like a container ship. Look around our global village and there's a lot of potential and a lot of stuck. What power is big enough to free our world from the fear of death and the pain that cripples it? The Easter Story, we'd humbly suggest, is the answer.

We have a problem. We act. And when we act we make messes. So how can we possibly live with spirals of reaction and revengeance mounting this way and that? Jesus says forgiveness is the way. But what does that actually look like in real life?

What actually happened at the cross? We slow down and take a long loving listen to the Bible as it tells it. 

It's very easy to reduce the message of the cross to being about me and my sin. But Scripture calls us to a bigger story. Key to understanding the incredible victory and freedom that came through the Cross is understanding Passover and the Exodus story. Because Jesus was about to launch Exodus 2.0.

Imagine an alien seeing the devastation of our planet asks, What went wrong? How we answer that question is vital to understanding what followers of Jesus claim is the ultimate solution: The Cross. 

How would you define success? And what would you do to achieve it? Dave invites us to let Jesus to shed some light on these perennial questions. (Apologies for the scratchy audio)

It's Valentines Day. In the church calendar it's also Transfiguration Sunday. That day when Jesus took his close friends up a mountain so they could see him in a newer brighter light. Jesus still leads his friends to mountain tops to places of solitude to meet with him, so we can walk back down the mountain into the valley filled with people he loves that need him. 

We get practical. We explore the intersection of what we love and God's mission and how God loves creating with dust. 

January is almost over. The new year is here. Really. In this talk we dive right into the presence of God to hear what he has to say to us as a church. The message is clear. We need to swim free into his particular purposes for Viva and get the net off our neck. Paul gives us four ways to do just that. 

For David the beauty of a sunrise and the beauty of God's Word go hand in hand. Did David know something I don't?

God became an embryo. That's the Christmas story. It's wilder than any fiction. What god does that and why? 

The wisemen noticed the star and followed. Paul noticed an altar to an Unknown God and asked questions. God is revealing himself in remarkable ways across millennia and culture. Are we noticing?

Life hurts. Our hearts get old and sore. Is faith and wonder only for the young like Mary? Can faith and wonder be restored to old sore hearts like Zechariah's and mine? If so, how? 

Wonder is a word with two almost contradictory meanings depending on if it is used as a noun or a verb. As a noun wonder is a feeling of amazement and admiration, caused by something beautiful, remarkable or unfamiliar. As a verb it is a desire to know something, to feel curious or to doubt.  The Christmas story is extraordinary. It's also really ordinary. Remarkable and unremarkable. Just li...

We met in a garden (as the bird calls will tell you). It seemed an appropriate setting for a conversation about growth and about this adventure of alerting others to Jesus that God is calling us together to.