Christ Community Sunday - Shawnee Campus

It is so easy for us to embrace a misguided religious faith founded in a religious consumer mentality. Christian faith is desirable to us as long as it is comfortable and helpful to us. When it helps us form friendships or our involvement in religious services provides a sense of connection or provides us with great business contacts, or helps our kids or teenagers make better choices and find better friends. Hear me carefully, making good friends and experiencing community are good things, often good things that are outworkings of authentic faith and authentic faith community. And asking our heavenly Father for the desires of our hearts and for things we need is often a very good thing, done with the right motives.  But sometimes our fair-weather faith becomes fickle and proves shallow when life is hard, when we confront suffering, rejection, loneliness, or when prayers seem to go unanswered. How does our faith hold up then? Ask yourself, what is my true heart motive for my Christian faith?Sermon Notes: http

You’ve taken your unfulfilled longings -- your grief and your desire. Whatever it is. And you’ve brought them to Jesus. You’ve asked Him to intervene. And whether or not He’s answered you in the way you wanted Him to. You’ve met Him. Now here we are. Every one of us. Somewhere between meeting Jesus. And the fulfillment of all of His promises to us. Every Christian is on that path. Between saying yes to Jesus. And our long way home.And you don’t know if your marriage will ever be better. Or your depression will ever be gone. Or your body will ever be healed. But you are trusting Jesus -- taking Him at His word. That by the time you get home, it’ll somehow be ok. Sermon Notes: https://www.bible.com/events/4886297222.03.27

It is easy to miss, in our polarized world, that Jesus seems to have intentionally drawn together people from across ideologies and cultures of the world to be worshippers. Jesus is not after ideologies. He is after worship in spirit and truth. This is Jesus’ language for a new heart that only the Spirit can give, a new obedience to the truth that Jesus is Lord of all. Does Jesus have our worship? This is something, whether we have followed Jesus for a long time, or we are considering him for the first time, that we have to ask ourselves. Jesus’ offer of living water comes at a price: you have to worship him alone, even at the expense of the culture, politics, ideologies, that have shaped you. Sermon Notes: https://www.bible.com/events/4885928422.03.20

Sermon Notes: https://www.bible.com/events/4885174622.03.06

Sermon Notes: https://www.bible.com/events/4885569122.03.13

We all know and feel the dissonance in our bodies and souls between who we are and who we long to be. And that’s because we know and feel the need to be born again of water and Spirit. And we know and feel that we must be born again because we must be born again.With a wide-open heart, pledge your full allegiance to King Jesus above all else and surrender to his good, true, and beautiful reign over your life. With wide open hands pursue your vocation, relationships, time, and resources with his kingdom in mind. For you are not your own but you were bought with a price through the washing of your sins by the precious blood of King Jesus.Sermon Notes: https://www.bible.com/events/4884794022.02.27

Few stories are as complex and perplexing like Jesus clearing the house in the temple. Should Christians see this as something only Jesus does? We clearly are called to embrace Him, but does that mean we follow Him in this kind of zeal? And what does that look like? Join us as we continue to see how the Word became flesh and crashed the party. Sermon Notes: https://www.bible.com/events/4884399722.02.20

In John 2, by turning water into wine,  Jesus draws his disciples to a greater faith. They learned about the kind of king Jesus is and the kind of kingdom he means to bring. It is easy to forget when the wine is flowing, that it can’t flow forever. What do we do when the wine runs out? When life’s circumstances let us down? John tells us in that moment to trust Jesus. When our wine runs out, we are often tempted to scramble and resort to all kinds of self-preservation that never works. But Jesus’ rescue plan never fails. Do whatever he tells you to do. Not because it stops the fun, but because it leads to real joy. Simple obedience to him, is not some esoteric, mystical thing. He is here and available to help us with real, everyday problems. He is not an insurance plan for your soul; He is a master of ceremonies who cares about every last detail of your life, who wants the best for you and knows how to get it. Sermon Notes: https://www.bible.com/events/4884043522.02.13

“I am in a season of deconstruction.” It is likely that you have either read, heard, or said these words in recent months. The deconstructing of faith is a popular practice these days. But what is it exactly? For some, it is an opportunity to live their authentic life free of all moral and religious authority. For others, it is a sincere attempt to determine if their faith has been formed by the words of Christ or by cultural ideologies. Regardless of the motivation, it is clear that we are in serious need of Reconstructing Faith. But in order to do that we need a solid foundation upon which we can reconstruct our faith. This is precisely what we plan to do together as we explore the foundations of the Christian faith through Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. Whether you have been following Jesus for years or you’re ready to call it quits, we want to begin reconstructing our faith together. Sermon Notes: https://www.bible.com/events/4893759422.08.21

Sermon Notes: https://www.bible.com/events/4883672122.02.06

Sermon Notes: https://www.bible.com/events/4883309222.01.30

Sermon Notes: https://www.bible.com/events/4882952722.01.23

I believe we live in a time of great skepticism and growing mistrust and yet skepticism of truth claims and the challenge of discerning what is true and what is not- is not restricted to our modern time. Through John’s witness, we see that from the opening verses of the bible through the very end, the story of God we encounter is one who greatly loves this broken material world. Let’s remember that in the original creation, God declared the material world good! That includes the stuff of this world, our bodies of flesh and blood.  And even after humankind rebelled against God with broken lives and a broken world being the tragic result, God refused to give up on his world and has chosen to redeem and restore it. In Jesus God came to rescue and redeem our world. The very act of Jesus assuming human flesh, the Word sanctified and hallowed our material bodies and our material world. Jesus is history's greatest miracle and Jesus is our greatest hope.Sermon Notes: https://www.bible.com/events/4882573522.01.16

Sermon Notes: https://www.bible.com/events/4882102822.01.09

Our Shepherd gives us eternal life, so we will never perish. And no one can snatch them out of His hand. Or the Father’s hand. Because it’s the same hand.And I pray that you would feel it right now if you’re one of His sheep. May you feel Him holding you. If you feel alone. If you feel lost, if you feel angry, if you feel disappointed or depressed. Do you see His hand encompassing you?If you feel afraid. Or maybe you feel like your faith is just so weak. Or your pile of mess-ups is just so big. And you imagine Jesus doing this -- wiping his hands of you. Not this Shepherd. Not our God. Nothing can snatch away His sheep.Sermon Notes:  https://www.bible.com/events/4893393322.08.14

Sermon Notes: https://www.bible.com/events/4881575922.01.02

Sermon Notes: https://www.bible.com/events/4881570521.12.26

Sermon Notes: https://www.bible.com/events/4881211321.12.19

He’s not just claiming to be light generically. He’s claiming to be your Light. The One who defines your reality. The true, the good, the beautiful. Who drives you to repentance and change. And asks you to trust and obey. Bring that light into your office, your family, your neighborhood, those hard decisions, those dark places of anxiety. He wants to show you the way. For without Him our lives are like the earth without the sun. A wasteland drifting aimlessly through space.And when we do walk in the light. Just sit in this promise for a minute. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life. In the Greek it is saying NEVER. NEVER EVER. No way ever!Sermon Notes: https://www.bible.com/events/4892008822.07.17

Freedom is more than a buzzword in our world; it’s an identity. We all want to be free, but what does that even mean? How will we know we are free and not just moved from one form of slavery to another?  The early followers of Jesus also weren’t clear on what it meant to be free, and so John invites us to look over their shoulders and learn as Jesus invites us to what freedom really looks like. Join us! Sermon Notes: https://www.bible.com/events/4892303022.07.24