Matthew 18 is Jesus’ sermon for the congregation. These are his house rules.  He is building his house and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. And in this section, he is telling us how he expects his family to live in the world and live together. This is a manual for loving others,…

We are moving to Phase 3 of Jesus’ building project: His House Rules. We all have “house rules.” Some are obvious and stated: Take your shoes off at the door…  No balls or frogs in the house…  No sugar before bed… And some are implicit and unsaid:  Don’t bother Dad while the game is on… …

We all have rituals. We all have routines or traditions that we keep year after year. There is not always a clear explanation for some of them. But we have been intentional about others. Mark 14:12-31 tells about a ritual. A celebration. The Festival of Unleavened Bread, also known as the Passover, had been a…

When Cynthia taught first grade one of the weekly highlights for me was hearing the report from “Show and Tell.” I loved hearing about nervous Dad’s bringing in the lego Death Star, or frogs being snuck in lunch boxes, or some family heirloom being brought into class without the parents knowledge.  Show and Tell is…

We are greatly looking forward to celebrating the resurrection together this Easter Sunday. Our hope is that all who come to worship anywhere in the world will feel a rich sense of God’s presence and the gospel’s power. Pray with us for the Lord to move mightily. Our theme this Easter is “New Hope from…

It has been said that “a man can only fail so many times…before something in him breaks.”  How do you deal with failure? Yours? Others?  In our text today we are going to see a picture painted of three types of failures…and we will hear three words of Jesus to confront and then overcome them. …

Some jobs seem to get the short-end of the publicity stick. For example, go to Barnes and Noble sometime and ask a sales clerk if they have: The Joy of Accounting, and see what you can find. You probably will be able to track down the Joy of Cooking, The Joy of Photography, The Joy of Juicing…but not…

We live in an age of “crisis.” Sit down and watch the news and you will be bombarded with one crisis after another: a humanitarian crisis; the Ukrainian crisis; the border crisis; a health crisis; an economic crisis. All of those crises are real and big — they are macro forces that sweep whole peoples away.…

Building projects tend to take on a life of their own. A good rule of thumb is that whatever the time and cost estimate is…you should double it.  In fact, it is a law: Hofstadter’s law. Douglas Hofstadter is a cognitive scientist who has shown, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that no matter how much time you plan for…