Hill Country Bible Church Dripping Springs Sermons

Every Christian alive got the Gospel secondhand. Nobody reasoned their way to it alone. Somebody said it out loud, and somebody had said it to them, and that chain runs back further than any of us can see. In Romans 10, Paul asks the question foundational to that chain: who sent them? This message works through verses 14 and 15 and lands on three things that are true of everyone listening. Somebod...

Jesus looks at the people of Israel, who look like a wrecked crowd. He calls them a ready harvest, and tells his disciples to beg God to send workers into the field. Then he turns around and sends the very men who were standing right there with him when he said it. The prayer went up, and the answer was already in the room. God's provision is always part of His plan.

Think back over everything you prayed for this week. Now put them on a map and draw a circle around them. How big is that circle? Psalm 67 takes the most familiar blessing in Israel's worship. Verse 1 and verse 2 are not two sentences. They are one. And if you stop at verse 1, you haven't finished praying. You've just stopped talking. At the center of this psalm is a claim most of us have never co...

Jonah obeyed God, preached the sermon, and watched an entire city repent. Then he sat down on a hill outside town and asked God to kill him! He wasn't a man with bad theology. Jonah could have taught the class. His problem was that his doctrine of God was right and he couldn't stand it. In Jonah 4, there's a prophet who is furious that God forgave the wrong people, a question God asks three times...

Athens was not a city that had given up on trying to find God. It was a city that could not stop reaching for one. Statues on the corners, altars in the streets, and one altar with no name on it at all. Paul walked through that city for a week and something rose in him he could not shut off. Then he did the thing we should all do. He went and talked to people.

In this passage, Paul, calls us to be dilligent, and watchful in using the lifeline of prayer to our loving Heavenly Father, overflowing with thanks in view of our complete dependence on him and all that he’s already done and continues to do for us. Even Paul seeks the prayer of believers on his behalf for opportunities and the words to make the gospel clear. He concludes this passage by challengi...

In this message we work through what God actually commanded a displaced, defeated people to do in a place they never chose: build, plant, marry, stay, and pray for the neighbors who forceably put them there. What are you going to do with the place God put you?

They had no building, no budget, and no political power. Their Leader had just been killed. Within one generation they were accused of turning the world upside down. How? This message walks through Acts 2:42-47 and the picture of a church that simply would not stop breathing: devoted to teaching, to each other, to the table, and to prayer. Not in a burst of Pentecost adrenaline, but as an ordinary...

In Revelation 2 and 3, the risen Christ walks through seven real churches in seven real cities. He stops in front of each one. And before He commends anybody, before He corrects anybody, He says the same two words: I know. Then He names Himself. And the name He picks is the exact thing that church was missing.

Scripture makes a startling claim: the rulers and authorities of the unseen world are studying the church. Not a cathedral. Not a movement. An ordinary congregation of forgiven people who showed up on a Sunday. In Ephesians 3:8–13, Paul writes from a prison cell and tells a mismatched church of Jews and Gentiles that God is unrolling His many-colored wisdom before the whole cosmos, and He is doing...

In today's sermon, we dive into The Church as Christ's primary instrument for advancing His kingdom. As believers, we should make it a priority to pray for The Church -- especially for her purity, her unity, and her mission.

What if you trust God completely and still end up embarrassed? Still end up with nothing? That fear keeps more people from fully surrendering than almost anything else. In this message from Psalm 25, we look at the prayer King David wrote when his enemies were circling and his past was catching up with him and we find four moves a praying heart makes to trade anxiety for real, grounded trust.

Shame tells you that you've gone too far. It tells you that God is waiting for you to clean yourself up before you come back, and that the worst thing you've done is the truest thing about you. But that's not what the Bible says. In Psalm 51, King David writes one of the most honest prayers in all of Scripture, not after he had things figured out, but from the bottom of one of the worst seasons of...

The psalmist's image of a deer panting for water is vivid imagery of our need for God. It is a matter of life and death. In our darkest moments, when tears become our daily bread and enemies taunt "Where is your God?" we discover our deepest need isn't relief from suffering but MORE of God Himself. This is the beginning of hope, recognizing that circumstances may overwhelm us, but God's presence s...

Ever lie awake while your mind replays every worst-case scenario? You are not weak, and you are not alone. Long before therapists talked about anxiety, a future king named David was on the run, terrified, and hiding in enemy territory. Out of that low moment he wrote a prayer that still speaks to anxious hearts today. In this sermon we walk through Psalm 34:4-7 and discover that God does not wait...

Most of us have prayed "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil" thousands of times. In this final sentence of the Lord's Prayer, have you ever stopped to ask what Jesus actually meant and why He stopped with this final instruction? In the final sermon of our five-part series on the Lord's Prayer, we find three things. First, we are weaker than we want to admit. Second, there is a re...

Matthew 6:12 holds what may be the most searching line in the entire Lord's Prayer: "Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors." Most of the prayer asks God for things. This line ties what we're asking God to do to something we are supposed to be doing.  In this sermon we work through why Jesus uses the language of debt and not just sin, what daily confession actually is and isn't...

What if the most spiritual thing you could do today was ask God for groceries? Jesus had five petitions to teach his disciples to pray and the first one about human need wasn't forgiveness, or deliverance, or wisdom. It was bread. When we look at the Lord's Prayer from this perspective, we find that it's not a throwaway request. It's a window into the character of God, a diagnosis of one of the de...

You feel it. The sense that something is deeply wrong with the world — and with you. That ache isn't an accident. Jesus had a name for it, and a prayer that speaks directly into it. Matthew 6:10 might be the most radical sentence you've ever casually repeated.

Praying to a God you don't really know will feel like an empty prayer. We are so familar with calling God "Father" that we don't realize how radical it sounded to His disciples. This sermon unpacks why starting the prayer with "Father" changes everything, why "in heaven" keeps us from shrinking God down to our size, and what it means to sincerely pray "hallowed be your name".

What if the thing you are asking God to change isn’t what you need? The young church in Colossae under intense cultural, social, and spiritual pressure. Instead of praying for a change in the culture around them, Paul prays for something more radical. He prays that they would be filled with the knowledge of Jesus....and this knowledge gives them the strength to endure. When we're tired, discourage...

What circumstances might change in your life everything to be okay? Is that what you're drawn to pray for? Writing from prison, Paul does not ask for a change in his circumstances. Instead he prays for people he loves. Under the Holy Spirit's inspiration, he makes the case that the condition of your soul is more urgent than the condition of your circumstances.

Most of our prayers are about changing our circumstances. But what if the deepest thing God wants to do isn't change what's around you but change what's inside you? In Ephesians 3:14–21, the Apostle Paul is sitting in a Roman prison when he writes one of the most extraordinary prayers in all of Scripture. He doesn't pray for his situation to improve. He doesn't pray for comfort or relief. He gets...

What if unanswered prayer isn't a God problem, it's a you problem? That's not a comfortable question. But it's the question Isaiah 59 forces us to sit with. In this sermon we look at why sin doesn't just affect your behavior, it affects your access, and more importantly, what God Himself did to tear that barrier down for good.

Does it feel like every time you try to pray something gets in the way? It might be a to-do list or an urgent interruption. Luke tells a story about Jesus walking into a house where two sisters respond to His presence in completely opposite ways. One serves. One sits. And what Jesus says next is the response to anyone who feels exhausted from doing all the right things yet something is missing. On...