99 CHURCH

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Jesus calls us to be peacemakers, an invitation that is both attractive and troubling. How can human beings be peacemakers when our long history of violence, systemic injustice, institutional failure, and moral cowardice testify to our continued inability to guarantee anything but destruction? Looking at Palm Sunday, we will see...

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. There is a lot to grieve in our world today. But we are notoriously bad at mourning. We are a society addicted to comfort and repelled by grief. But all throughout Scripture, we see a God who isn't afraid of our sadness, who isn't overwhelmed by our pain. This week, we explore what it means to be those who are comforted in our mourning.

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. As people part of modern day western civilization, this might the hardest beatitude for us to understand. What could we possibly know about persecution? Yet we find that this blessing isn’t just for those who are literally following Jesus at the cost of their lives. This blessing applies to the rest...

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Most of us assume righteousness means being a good person and following the rules. But that definition often leaves us feeling exhausted, guilty, or empty. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus offers a radically different vision. This week, we explore what righteousness actually looks like in the kingdom of God—and ho...

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. The beauty of this Beatitude is that the blessing is not in receiving this kind of mercy, but in giving it away. There's a kind of blessing reserved only for those who have learned the divine art of giving others mercy. This week, we explore the symptoms of an unforgiving heart and how mercy shows us a better way.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Out of all the Beatitudes, this might be the hardest for us to grasp. Is there any other verse in the Bible that goes against the ethos of our age more than this one? Our world just doesn't work this way. But Jesus invites us into something more. This week, we talk about meekness and how our world desperately needs followers of Jesus who belie...

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Many of us have mistaken pure in heart to mean perfection, or sinlessness. But to be pure in heart means something quite different. How do we see God? This week, we continue our study of the Beatitudes as we learn about what it means to be pure in heart.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Jesus opens the Sermon on the Mount with a startling claim: the good life belongs to the poor in spirit – the powerless. Far from glorifying misery or offering a future consolation prize, Jesus is naming a present reality – one that dismantles our illusions of control and redefines where true peace, freedom, and flourishing are f...

We live in a time where people within the church have vastly different ideas about what it means to be a Christian. How do we know we are faithfully following Jesus in our context and in our time? We find the answer to that very question in one of the greatest sermons Jesus ever preaching: the Sermon on the Mount. This week, we begin a new collection of teachings centered on the upside down nature...

Spiritual formation doesn't happen by accident. We are shaped by what we intentionally do, again and again over time. This week, we explore how we are formed through the stories we believe, the habits we live into, and the relationships we surround ourselves with.

What does it look like to embody love? Many of us want to love our neighbors… but we’re busy, overwhelmed, or unsure if our effort even matters. This week, Yesuto wrestles with those obstacles and reminds us that faith without action is dead. Following Jesus means centering the vulnerable, choosing humility, and stepping into real service.

What if the disconnect many of us feel in our faith isn’t from a lack of belief—but from a lack of embodiment? We find throughout Scripture that faith was never meant to be lived only in your head. It was meant to be lived in your body. This week, we establish a theology of the body and how God calls us to lived embodied lives of faith.

Waiting is an inevitable part of the human experience. There's no getting around it. Advent reminds us that much of life is lived in the tension of waiting. The question isn't IF we'll wait, the question is HOW we'll wait. This week, we study Psalm 130 as we discern how God wants to meet us in our waiting.

In the journey of faith, we are so prone to forget the goodness of God. And in forgetting, fear stands taller than God's promise in our lives. Gratitude is what helps us overcome our fears and clearly see God's fingerprints in our everyday experience. Today, we explore the subtle temptation of entitlement and the power of praying gratitude.

As we conclude our time in the book of Ezra, we find some troubling things happening in the final two chapters, that highlight a temptation we all face as followers of Jesus. Rather than taking personal responsibility for how far we've drifted from God's heart, we blame some external force or circumstance. This week, we explore what it means to rebuild our altars from the inside out and return to...

What do you do when the Bible—or moments in your own life—trouble you? This week, we look at a challenging passage in Ezra 9–10 and use it as a case study for navigating our own "what on earth is happening?" moments. We talk about how to examine our assumptions about God, Scripture, and human nature, and how that process can keep us from getting spiritually stuck and instead move us toward deeper...

What if the things we built in life weren't just dedicated to ourselves? What if we became a people who dedicated our careers, our relationships, our homes, and our entire lives to God? What if we lived as if they served a holy purpose beyond ourselves? This week, we explore the power of dedication as we follow the story of the Israelites dedicating the temple to God in the book of Ezra.

In Ezra 4, the people of God stop building the temple. What caused them to stop? Discouragement and distraction. In our lives, discouragement and distraction often cause us to stop building our lives with God, to stop our progress of growth and maturity. How do we combat discouragement and distraction? This week, we explore the power of having a sacred posture.

In this week’s sermon, we take a short detour from Ezra to the book of Haggai to hear a convicting word about what happens when we stop rebuilding the “House of the Lord” in our lives. Haggai 1:3 says “Is it a time for you yourselves to be living in your paneled houses, while this house remains a ruin?” Guest speaker Dan Fang encourages us to examine and self-reflect on what our “paneled houses” m...

In a world where many say “all religions are basically the same,” how should Christians respond? As we move into chapter 4 of Ezra, we explore what it means to seek truth and why Christianity’s view of a loving, self-sacrificing God stands apart.

We don't know how to rest. Statistics show that American employees are burning out at a faster rate than ever before. We are literally working ourselves into the ground. But God has an answer to our restlessness: Sabbath. This week, we explore the eight and final ancient festival, the Sabbath, as we learn how to live in the rhythms of rest and worship.

None of the claims of the Christian faith work unless Jesus resurrected. Scripture tells us that Jesus was the firstfruit of resurrection, which means resurrection is for all those who belong to him. This week, we study the Feast of Firstfruits, as we learn that worship looks like giving God your first and your best.

We often find ourselves stuck in our own stories: stories of defeat, stories of pain, stories of discouragement. But when we worship, we're thrust back into God's story. All of a sudden, our stories are re-contextualized and we see our stories in light of God's grander story. This week, we study the Passover festival and learn how we can worship today.

God pours out His life, provision, and Spirit into us. The problem is, we are a people who leak. We are like broken cisterns, that cannot overflow into others. This week, we look at Pentecost and see how it informs the way we are called to worship today.

God loves reconciliation. When we show mercy and grace to one another, the same way God has shown them to us, that's worship. This week, we study the Day of Atonement, an ancient festival that teaches us how to worship God through apology and absolution.