Renew Communities Teaching Podcast

One of the best things to do at Christmas is watching all “The Office” Christmas episodes. It’s incredible how there can be both joy and pain in every single scene! The office appeals so deeply to us because it shines a comedic light on what people are like and reminds you that you’re not the only one that has to function in stressful or difficult environments with challenging people. While it may seem trivial, the hope of Christmas is that Jesus brings light into the darkness, and as a person whose life is defined by Jesus, we can do the same thing at our work or whatever other exciting situations we find ourselves in.

Interestingly, the impact living next to someone can have on our lives. For some, our favorite people live next door. For others, it’s our worst nightmare as a next-door neighbor. Stranger still is that many of us have lived next door to the same person for years and still don’t know them at all. Yet, the Gospel of John tells us that in Jesus, God “made his dwelling among us,” or as Eugene Peterson said, he “moved into the neighborhood. In week two of our Christmas Party series, we discuss how Jesus saw those he lived life next to and how that could impact how we love and serve our neighbors.

One of the best things about Christmas is spending time with the family, but one of the hardest things about Christmas is extended time with our family! Every family shares its memories, traditions, history, and heartache, and somehow the holidays bring the best out of each of those categories. So as we enter into the Christmas season, we’ll talk about the hope that Jesus can bring to every family and the way Christmas might move us one step closer to the kind of family God wants us to be.

The practice of gratitude will naturally lead us to places where we see we are misusing God’s gifts. Where we have put them in a place in our hearts they do not belong, maybe where things are out of order. It’s really hard to be genuinely grateful for something and then abuse it blindly. What God does here is begin to set us free. And so the practice for us becomes one of letting go. These gifts which we have been gripping on to so tightly, we must let them go.

Most of us allow our income to drive our spending. If you make it, you spend it. If your spending follows your income, you feel an incredible amount of financial pressure because you allow your money to lead the way. In week 2 of our series, we work to understand how knowing God can help us better understand how to handle what has been entrusted to us in every aspect of our financial lives.

More often than not, the idols we give our hearts to are good things meant to be enjoyed and appreciated. The problem is that, because our hearts are little “idol factories,” we tend to make a “good thing” into an ultimate thing. We think that they will satisfy our souls, but in turn, leave us empty. But the good news of the gospel is that God always gives us a way out of our sin. The gospel points our hearts to the reality that choosing Jesus is always better.

In week 4 of our series we explore why we are so easily taken by the god of self, the damage this god has on the world and around us and how we ought to handle our own thoughts and feelings to bring them under the authority of the one true God, His Son Jesus and in step with the Holy Spirit.

In week 3 we talk about what happens when you let politics become a god, how God fights back and how you can live faithfully for Jesus in a world consumed by Power.

In week 2 of our series we explore how progress becomes a god to us. The gospel of progress entices us to live for tomorrow and trust in the advancements we can make on our own. As Christians we believe that God holds the future in his hands and we are to come to Him, hoping not in Him but in Jesus.

In 1 Kings 18 we see the stark reality of the allegiance of God’s people being pulled in several different directions. While their social identity was being known as the People of Yahweh (the one true God) their spiritual allegiances had shift to the false gods Baal and Asherah. The one true God has no room for split allegiances and Elijah calls all of God’s people together to remind them of who they belong to and the damage aligning with another god can do.

We wrap up our Philippians sermons by taking a fresh look at the song found in Philippians 2. We pray through it with Lectio Divina together and discover with God is like and what it means to be human.

What you want makes you who you are and what you want most is what shapes you most. For most of us we don’t think about what desires are driving our life and if we’re not careful we can be enticed to want things that can cause great harm. In Philippians 3 Paul highlights how important it is to want the right thing because only one thing can make us who we were made to be.