Renew Communities Teaching Podcast

The holiday season can be so hectic that many of us are ready to move on from Christmas. Christmastide, the twelve days following the 25th of December, invites us to slow down and sit with the meaning of Christmas. Listen as we learn about how the light of Christ invites us out of the lives of scarcity to live lives of abundance.

One of my favorite parts of the Christmas story is how quickly the Shepherds respond to the good news of Jesus’ birth. Luke tells us they hurried off to see this newborn baby as soon as the angels left them. Why? When something you’ve been waiting for finally arrives you don’t wait any longer - you hurry off to participate in it as quick as you can. This Christmas we talk about why the birth of Jesus makes what you’ve always hoped for a reality in the here and now.

There’s always tension in waiting. There’s a very specific tension that comes in our awaiting the arrival of Jesus - but it’s often not what you think. Part of what creates such a deep longing for the coming of Jesus is what a mess the world has become. The tension comes when we recognize that we’ve helped make the mess. It’s like Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt says “Anyone whose attention is fixed on the coming reign of God… will become more and more aware that there exists a universal wrongness that is pulled over us like a choking, suffocating blanket.” This is why part of “preparing the way of the Lord” is repentance. In week 3 we looked at the part we’ve played in creating the mess and the hope we could have in this savior’s arrival.

We move closer to the birth of Jesus by taking a look at the prophecy given by John the Baptist’s father, Zechariah. He declares that Jesus will bring a new order of redemption, salvation, and mercy through humility and laying down his life as opposed to King Herod’s order of self-reliance and trying to make one’s name great. Jesus’s new order is coming, it’s here, and we’re a part of it. We live in this new order by receiving Jesus as our king and loving him with our lives. In our second week of Advent, we explore how our love for God leads us to allow God to shape us through the stories we tell, the relationships we keep, and the habits we form.

There’s so much division in our world today - but it’s not just a problem we see at work in our world at large we see division in families, workplaces, relationships, and neighborhoods. That division serves as a reminder of what we’re waiting for - a day when everything will be reunited by the power of Jesus. This was the same hope that the people of Israel had as they waited for the birth of the Messiah. In week 1 we’ll embrace the pain of separation as a way to take hold of the hope of reconciliation and peace available in this Jesus.

As we’ve spent time in the book of Acts we’ve seen how the Holy Spirit has worked to prepare, call and equip God’s people for the mission He’s called them to but in the last legs of Paul’s missionary journey we see the Holy Spirit warning and informing the believers about the dangers ahead. What is most interesting is that Paul and his friends interpret the warnings they are receiving from the Holy Spirit in completely different ways. In our final week in Acts, we take a look at how Paul can look so confidently toward the future while knowing that suffering awaits him and how we can press on in hope when we face similar circumstances.

The first Christians faced opposition to the work and movement of God and so do we. In this week's sermon, we take a look at what the true opposition to the work of God is and how the primary weapon to fighting back against the opposition is a personal connection with Jesus himself.

Have you ever been so sure that God was up to something that never happened? Maybe you thought you were going to move somewhere new, get a new job, marry someone or even lead someone to faith in Jesus and then just when you were almost certain it was about to happen the door slammed shut. In this week's teaching, we watch this very thing happen to Paul as he works to share the Gospel in new places to new people and discuss how we stay the course even in the most frustrating moments of our life.

Most of us want to be used by God to make a difference in this world and often we're sure what that would look like - but what if God has something in mind we could never even conceive of? What if God's idea actually runs against what you even think you should be doing with your life? In this week's sermon, we see how God moves Peter to new people and new places that he should never have engaged with to invite them into God's family and we talk about how important sitting and listening to God speak to us can be in making us into who God's called us to be.

After Stephen’s death a great persecution breaks out and the church is literally running for their lives. Of course, this scattering is used by God to spread the Gospel to new people and places. In an amazing turn of events, Saul traveling to a new city to destroy Christians encounters Jesus in a vision and it changes everything. Paul is not just transformed he becomes a transformer as well. On Sunday we talked about how what we desire will always bring us to Jesus because he is what we truly desire. We talked about the power of transformation and asked if we truly believe the Holy Spirit can transform the “worst threat” we face.

Jesus said to His followers that they’d do even greater things than He had done after the Holy Spirit came and we see some of that on display in the book of Acts. The primary reason that healing takes place in and through the first Christians is so that those who don’t know God can see His love on display and encounter the saving grace of Jesus. In this week’s teaching, we talk about why healing takes place when it does and we discuss what that might mean for the church and world today.

One of the most interesting things we see in Acts is the very specific direction some of the first Christians get from the Holy Spirit. At times the rationale is clearly stated and other times it’s left to discover through their obedience. In this week's sermon, we talked about what it means to be open to the leading of the Spirit, what perspective we need to not miss the purpose of these leadings and we’ll learn some ways to listen to both individually and together.

As the book of Acts continues the first Christians are making quite an impact. People are being healed, darkness is being pushed back and many people are coming to Jesus. Along with all the good came strong moments of suffering. One of the beautiful things about the Bible is it helps us understand how to work through these moments of suffering and respond the same way these first Christians did - by rejoicing!

The most incredible aspect of the early church is who was allowed to lead. You’d, of course, think the disciples of Jesus would have key roles because they had been with Jesus - but they were seen as unschooled fishermen by the masses. How does the leadership multiply as the church expands? It includes people we’ve never heard of and we’d least expect. Persecutors, gentiles, women, youth, and slaves! With such organizational leadership, you’d expect a disaster - and yet the church moves forward! How is any of this possible? The key is the Holy Spirit - He calls and qualifies who He wants when He wants for His purposes.

In the book of Acts the church is doing incredibly well in...until a crisis hits. The first crisis to ever hit the church was that of pretending to be something on the outside that was not on the inside. While we tend to minimize the weight of pretending in our lives, Peter maximizes it and shows us what really happens when we pretend. This talk encourages us to stop pretending together so that we can build a community of trust transformed by the Holy Spirit. Only then can we be the people of God on mission together.

Jesus said that his followers were to be the light of the world. In Acts, we see exactly what that looks like as the people of God’s lives look completely different than everyone else in the world’s lives - both collectively and individually. This ideal is often exalted as the idea that all churches today are striving for but most find impossible to truly live out. The reality is this kind of living is only possible through the indwelling and unifying presence of the Holy Spirit. In week 3 of our series, we’ll look through the activities that defined the people of God, how the Holy Spirit empowers us to live this way and what it might look like for the Holy Spirit to direct our community in the same way.

In Acts 2 the Holy Spirit arrives in a powerful way and right away they have exactly what they need to do what they were called to do. These unschooled fishermen are able to connect with the people from all over the world and Peter has a newfound boldness and clarity that could only be explained as God working. As the Church, God is giving us the same help and power if we're open to it. Listen as we talk about how this might play out where you live, work, learn and play.

At the beginning of the book of Acts Jesus gives directions to his followers to be his witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the “ends of the earth.” The assignment extends beyond just the people present with Jesus on that day all the way to us now. Often we miss the “initiating agent” at that moment and either get to work or avoid the call because we don’t know what it would even look like to do this work. Jesus says it happens through the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives and what’s incredible is that Jesus models what this kind of life looks like.

In 1 John 3 John tells us that Jesus came to destroy the work of the Devil. In week 3 of Jesus is the Point we understand that the Devil's primary strategy is to convince you and I that we are just fine without God. Jesus came to destroy that lie and its impact on our lives and He does it through the cross - but with Jesus, it's always personal - which means it takes a personal response. Listen as we talk about how to respond and what trusting Jesus may do in your life.

In every little moment, Jesus has truth to share with you. The question is what does Jesus have to teach you in this moment. Don’t wait for the moment. Let him teach you in this moment. In the second week of our series, Sarah Knepper teaches us that we are not simply cogs in a machine. We are the children of God and Jesus has invited us to learn from Him.