Waterbrooke Christian Church

Waterbrooke Family, In Psalm 72, we have a song written by Solomon. It is the last psalm in a collection (Books 1 and 2 of the Psalms) that is considered to be largely psalms written by David. Psalm 72:20 reads, “The prayers of David, the son of Jesse, are ended.” What’s beautiful about this psalm is that we get the heartbeat of the son of David for the kingdom. Solomon prays for God’s blessing on his kingdom but he does so because of a deep heart of compassion for the people and the nations. We are clearly meant to see not simply Solomon’s heart but the heart of the great Son of David, Jesus, in this song. This would be the Old Testament version of “The Lord’s Prayer.”  Come as we see the heartbeat of the King as he prays for us. Come learn how much we are loved and how determined the King is to see His kingdom come and His will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Our sermon is called, The Praying King… and praise God, He is praying for us! See you Sunday! In Christ, Kevin Dibbley, Senior Pastor

Waterbrooke Family, This Sunday, we studied Psalm 45, which is a “love song”. This is one of the greatest and most joyful psalms in the Bible. It was written to celebrate the marriage between the King and his Bride. The words contain effusive praise for the King and what He is like as it invites the bride to embrace the abounding joy of her impending marriage. Often, in fairy tales, the handsome prince finds a fair maiden languishing in poverty and abuse in some far-away corner of his kingdom. He discovers her and seeing her true hidden beauty (that others have either neglected or envied), He rides in and rescues her and makes her his own royal queen.  In the Scriptures, this is no fairy tale. It’s the story of King Jesus and God’s plan of redemption. Christ comes and redeems His bride, the church. The trajectory line of every Christian shifts radically when we discover how safe and how loved we are in the eyes of our King. Jesus never found our hidden beauty and fell in love with us. Jesus knew us when we

This Sunday, we studied another great Psalm – Psalm 19. C.S. Lewis wrote: “I take this to be the greatest poem in the Psalter and one of the greatest lyrics in the world” (Reflections, 73). What makes this Psalm so beautiful is that it opens up to us God’s glory not just in creation but in His Word.  Here’s the challenge that we all face: We live in a world of both glory and catastrophe. We behold the majesty of billions of stars in a northern night sky. We feel the warmth of the summer sun as it caresses our faces as it makes its way across the Minnesota sky. It is glorious! Yet, inside and all around, simultaneously, we feel deep brokenness. Injustice and corruption plague the world where we work, create, and play. Sin continually tempts us and draws us away from enjoying God’s glory. Beholding glory creates a deep ache for God’s glory to fill all the earth and all our lives for all eternity. Herman Bavinck writes, “The gravity and the vanity of life seize on us in turn. Now we are prompted to optimism, the

Waterbrooke Family, This Sunday’s message is from Psalm 18 and is called “The Exultant King.” Psalm 18 is written by King David when God has finally established his kingdom and defeated all his enemies. It is recorded near the end of David’s life in 2 Samuel 22.  There is no doubt that David is blown away by the abundant goodness and unfailing love of God towards him throughout his life. There were numerous dark and difficult times. Times of brokenness and betrayal. Yet, it feels so good to rest and to look back at the amazing love of God in his life through it all. The king is so blown away that He wants to sing God’s praises to the ends of the earth!  Exultant love for God drives the Christian to make much of God. Come as we marvel with David at how good God has been to us and have our spiritual hearts set aflame again to sing of His love forever! See you Sunday and bring a friend! In Christ, Kevin Dibbley, Senior Pastor

Have you ever felt God is taking a long time to answer your prayer?  Does it feel like sometimes your prayers have gone no higher than the ceiling? Join us this Sunday as we walk through Psalm 13 and see how Jesus, Our Compassionate King is truly with us during these times. In Christ, Bruce Washington

Well, this has been the summer of rain! I actually love how green everything is but it has been recently providing challenges for farmers and folks in our area. There are little lakes in fields where there normally isn’t water and there shouldn’t be. I get updates from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and some of the portages between lakes have been closed due to erosion caused by rain. Water can quickly wear away at the foundations of buildings and land. It reminds us of how living in a world of sin and a world of pleasures and temptations can wear away at the foundations of our faith in the Lord. They can erode our experience of joy and peace. Thank God that we have a Rock in Jesus that cannot be moved! This week our message in the Psalms is taken from Psalm 16 where David writes “Preserve me, O God, for in you, I take refuge.” Our sermon is called “The Desperately Happy King.” We are going to see how David sees the Lord as both his greatest good and his only means of experiencing stability and joy in a lif

This Sunday was Father’s Day. For our message this week, we spent a little time together meditating upon Psalm 23. The twenty-third psalm is without a doubt the most well-known and, I would suggest, well-loved of all 150 psalms. And I think rightly so. This psalm brings the assurance that from beginning to end the Lord, Yahweh, shepherds his people through all the storms of life and brings us safely into our eternal home with Himself forever. It is a psalm of enormous comfort. It is a psalm of rock-solid hope and peace. What we often don’t recognize is that it is also a very personal psalm from the Son about his Father.  One commentator reminds us that the Psalms are the most quoted part of the Old Testament in the New Testament. He writes: “This was not because the Psalms seemed to them to cover the full range of human emotions – a psalm for every mood. Not at all. It was not sentimentalism or anthropocentrism. Rather, it was because the Psalms were about the Messiah, the Christ of God.” Come this Sunday as

New Series this Summer - “Sing to the King.” It is a study of the psalms with a focus on God’s provision of a righteous, redeeming King for His people. That King is Jesus. Thank God that He is the King that we all need but could never find. In a world where leaders are perpetually flawed and fallen, there is One who can be trusted.   This Sunday, in our series called “Sing to the King”, we considered Psalm 2. Psalm 2 is one of the two “gateway” psalms (along with Psalm 1) that are designed to be the lenses through which we read all of the other 150 psalms. Psalm 2 declares that as aggressively evil and unjust as the world around us might be, nothing can withstand God’s zeal to establish the kingdom of His Son. Do we realize how passionate our God is for the entire cosmos to be under the reign of His good King? The world might be passionate to throw off God’s rule over their lives, but it cannot compare to God’s passion to bring all the nations out from under sinful human tyranny and under the just, good, and

This Sunday, our sermon was entitled “Pursuing Godliness.” Often, in the western world, we think of our spiritual lives as a private or personal matter between us and God. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the New Testament, our personal godliness is a crucial part of the church’s mission to proclaim and to protect the truth of the gospel in a world in desperate need of Christ. This Sunday’s message will be taken from 1 Timothy 6:6-19 and it is a postscript to our study on the letter of Ephesians. 1 Timothy was written by the apostle Paul to encourage the pastor of the church at Ephesus to remember how crucial the church is to the mission of God in the world. Paul writes, “I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these things so that, if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and buttress of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:14-15). How we live as the church upholds or undermines the truth of God.  As we enter the summer seaso

God’s people continually need encouragement. You do. I do. Our missionaries do. In the mission of God, it is easy for Christians to forget that God has designed the church to build one another up and to encourage each other in the faith. This side of heaven, the Christian life is fraught with perils. We are in a spiritual battle. It is often discouraging and tiring. Yet, we are not alone in this. We have been studying this letter to the Ephesians because it contains the call of our Waterbrooke Church mission to be “compelled to love one another.” Encouragement is a clear way to love each other.  Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus from a Roman prison with the goal of encouraging and strengthening the brethren and to encourage them to do the same. Even though he himself was in the precarious position of being in chains for the gospel, he knew enough about how tough it is to live for the kingdom of God even when you don’t have chains. God’s people need to cultivate a consistent environment of mutual encouragem

This week, our sermon, from Ephesians 6:18-20,  was called Fostering a Passion for Prayer. As the apostle Paul comes to the end of this letter to the church, he calls for an all-out commitment to prayer. Paul knows that human effort and ingenuity cannot advance the kingdom of Christ. Unlike Muslims who respond to an external call to prayer 5 times a day, Paul wants believers to respond to an internal call to prayer continuously.  Prayer is Paul’s passionate conviction. It is Paul’s confidence in his life and ministry. Paul prayed earlier in Ephesians 3:20 declaring that God “is able to do abundantly more than we ask or think according to the power at work in us.” Every day when Paul looked in the mirror (or whenever, Paul could see his reflection), he saw the biggest miracle of his day. A hater, a blasphemer, a persecutor of the church is now one of Christianity’s greatest ambassadors.  If God could save Paul, he could save anyone! Oh, that God would give us all a passion for prayer! Would you pray this wee

As we continue working our way through Paul's letter to the Colossians, we are encouraged to prayerfully live our lives and walk before the world in a manner which shows how beautiful Christ is.  Our personal contexts are a means through which God intends to communicate grace; both to us and through us. Though they may not be glamorous by the world's standards, we're in the service of the King! In Christ,  Andy Keppel

As Paul wraps up his letter to the church at Ephesus, he gives what some theologians call a “peroratio”. A peroration is a passionate conclusion to a speech or a letter which is meant to inspire passion and enthusiasm.  Paul has been teaching us that King Jesus is on the throne and that his kingdom advances in the lives of everyday people like you and I who learn to live out the grace and forgiveness of the gospel in our marriages, in our families, in our workplaces, and as His church. Paul calls us to be passionate for the kingdom characteristics that were first demonstrated in Christ Himself. Earlier in Ephesians 4:32-5:2, Paul writes “Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. Therefore, be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”  As Paul wraps up this epistle, he calls us as believers to be aware of Satan’s attempts to put in our hearts the old atti

This Sunday, our message, from Ephesians 6:5-9,  was called “Working for King Jesus.” Ever since the garden of Eden, work has been difficult. Adam’s sin led to a broken world and a broken creation. The penalty for his sin fell upon our work. Genesis 3:19 reads “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground…” As the Ray LaMontagne song, Trouble, goes: “Trouble, Trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble. Trouble been doggin' my soul since the day I was born. Worry, Worry, worry, worry, worry. Worry just will not seem to leave my mind alone.”  In the gospel, Jesus has come to introduce his new kingdom. Ephesians announces that the grand plan of God is to reconcile everything in heaven and on earth to himself in Christ (Ephesians 1:10). The Church is the new redeemed people where that reality  of Christ’s eternal reign begins to break through into our lives where we live every day. It is in our lives as disciples of Jesus that the curse begins to be reversed. Work becomes a place of worshi

This Sunday we'll be talking about the joy that comes from experiencing God’s Harvest in our lives and the excitement we can have from partaking in what He is doing in us and in others around the world. As others have sown His word in our hearts, we also have the amazing opportunity to sow His saving and sanctifying truth in others and those coming after us, rejoicing together in what He has done for His people. The joy of missions is that over 2000 years ago the Son of Man finished the work necessary to bring salvation to His people across timelines and generations. And as His plan for salvation unfolds in our time on earth, we can freely and joyfully go into the world, knowing that God’s people have been paid for and that He will not lose a single one of His sheep! May the certainty of Christ’s loving work in His Church across time and space be a source of constant joy and celebration. In Christ,  Diego De La Vega, Guest Pastor

As we go into Missions Week, I want to start out by challenging us to pray that we might see the call to missions as the greatest and most beautiful reality and hope that this world could ever imagine. The news constantly bombards us with story after story of heartache, evil, violence, and war. The hopelessness of the world around us can only be countered by the truest and greatest news in the world – The King has returned to reclaim his world. Yet, here is an interesting thought that we ought to consider on Missions Week: Maybe, it isn’t just the world that needs missions. Maybe, it’s the church that needs missions. Maybe, there are things in our hearts and lives that cannot change until we find ourselves in the position of being Christ’s ambassadors and experience not simply how desperate the world is for Christ but how desperate we are for Him as well. Missions aren't simply the place where God changes the world. Missions are the place where God changes me.  The sermon this week is called “A Heart for Mi

This Sunday, on Easter Sunday, we celebrated and talked about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In particular, we looked at Jesus’ encounter with Thomas, at least a week and a half after the crucifixion. Thomas is struggling. When the disciples tell Thomas that they have seen Jesus, Thomas’ response is very strong. He says, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe!” Thomas’ reaction is not purely intellectual. It is highly emotional. Thomas is often called “Doubting Thomas.” Thomas might more accurately be called, “Devastated Thomas.” There is more going on here than a need for rational evidence. Thomas is a Jew. He believes in God. He is a disciple. He had high hopes for Jesus. But suddenly, his hopes and his expectations were dashed at the cross. Thomas is wounded, weary, and done. That describes a lot of people that I have known and even know today. Maybe some of you are wounded, weary, and just

God created us in his image to resemble him and center our lives around him. But when we rebelled against God, we decentered our lives from him and marred God’s image with our disobedience. As a result, we all are children of wrath and without hope in and of ourselves (Eph 2:1–3). But Jesus came to reverse our spiritual predicament. As the image of the invisible God and the firstborn of all creation (Col 1:15), Jesus is the new and better Adam we desperately need. He came to recreate us after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness (Eph 4:23). In Christ, we have a new identity as children of God. But with this new identity, the gospel calls us to live differently, not how we once lived––alienated from God and in the darkness (Eph 4:18). Paul describes our new identity in Christ as a Father-son relationship. As beloved children, the gospel calls us to walk in love and light as imitators of God our Father (Eph 5:1–2, 8). But how can we walk in love and light as obedient children? And how do we im

This Sunday’s sermon is called “Walk In Love.” In the city of Ephesus, the idea of love had been severely distorted by the worship that was happening at the Temple of Artemis. The temple was considered to be one of the seven great wonders of the world. It was twice the size of the Parthenon in Athens. Emperors and travelers came to behold this incredible architectural masterpiece. As Acts 19 revealed, the worship of Artemis was the major economic engine for the city of Ephesus. Artemis was the goddess of fertility so sexual idolatry and promiscuity was promoted and celebrated. It is no wonder that Paul’s instructions on walking in love in Ephesians 5 is set in direct contrast to the sexual immorality that plagued their culture and continues to plague ours.  We know that sexual promiscuity has become the sign of one’s freedom today and the clearest marker of one’s identity in our culture. Loving yourself and being yourself is often tied to being open about your personal sexuality. In Ephesians 5, we are calle

This Sunday’s message was called “Learning Jesus.” It is taken from Ephesians 4:17-24 where the apostle Paul is encouraging the Christians at Ephesus to “no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds.” The Ephesian Christians were once Gentiles walking in “the futility of their minds.”  Futility really describes that downward spiral that the unbelieving world is in towards spiritual and moral catastrophe. The individual believes that he or she is completely fine and in control. They think that they know the way to life, to joy, to peace. In aviation, there is an error called a “graveyard spiral”. It happens when the pilot thinks he is flying with his wings level, but he or she is actually flying in a wide downward circle. Their altimeter and vertical speed indicator tell them that they are getting lower so they simply pull back on their control yoke. They grab the controls. What that does is actually tighten the circle of their descent towards a crash. It’s like water going down the drain