Hope Lake Country

When we remember that the purpose of marriage is to reenact the gospel, we can begin to live out the gospel in our marriages.

When there’s a gap between your desires and your spouse’s behavior, fill in the gap with patience and forgiveness.

At the heart of flourishing relationships is unconditional love and unconditional respect.

When couples don’t get what they want out of a relationship, they often resort to unhealthy responses. God, however, designed marriage to be a covenant. That’s why the only way to get what you really want in marriage is to treat it as a submission completion.

Meditation helps us identify our unwanted emotions. Now, how do we deal with them? We have to realign them. We have to bring them into conformity with truth. In this message, we’ll learn a simple way to take any emotion in our life and realign it with God’s truth.

The Holy Spirit, working in our lives, produces good fruit. Instead of masking the unwanted emotions in our life, he produces new emotions. How does He work? Psalm 1 tells us that the key to the Spirit’s work is meditation on the Word of God. Meditation is how we take in the water of God’s truth and bring it into ourselves. So what is meditation? Meditation is thinking in God’s presence. It is speaking to one’s own soul in the presence of God. It is the bridge to life-transforming prayer. To sit quietly for prolonged periods of time with God can feel awkward. Even painful. But without prayer, we can never fully know ourselves. In this message, we’ll discover how meditating on the Word helps us surface and identify the unwanted emotions in our lives. Until we name them, we will never be able to get rid of them.

We all have unwanted emotions in our lives. The problem is that we tend to mask our unwanted emotions instead of dealing with them. We mask the very reason for which God gave us these emotions. We’ll begin this series by seeing how important it is to surface and deal with the emotions that we would prefer to ignore.

Who Needs Christmas

Christmas is a time of hope and joy. Except when it isn’t. It’s a time that can be more stressful than any other time of year. It can leave us feeling worn out and burned out. Today we come to a character in Jesus’ family tree who was also burned out. His circumstances were overwhelming and he had little hope that God was with him. Yet God gave one of the greatest Christmas prophesies to this unlikely candidate. The virgin will be with child and will call him Emanuel.

When Matthew finally ties Jesus back to King David, he still can’t help but draw our attention to the biggest scandal of David’s life: the incident with Bathsheba. God had made David an unconditional promise of his faithfulness, but David did the most unfaithful thing we can imagine. Why, of all the great things David did in his life, does Matthew remind us of the worst thing he did in his life? In this message, we’ll see that our sin does not negate God’s faithfulness.

Many of us have picked up nicknames in our past. Some are terms of endearment. Others are labels of mockery. Many times, people aren’t even aware of the nicknames that others have given them behind their back. Well, Jesus had someone in his family tree who had a notorious nickname. And her nickname was not a term of endearment. She was known as “Rahab the prostitute.” Yet, Matthew doesn’t rush right past that fact. Rather he makes sure that we know that there was an infamous prostitute in the Jesus’ family tree. Matthew had his own nickname. And, again, it was any but a term of endearment. He was called “Matthew the tax collector.” In this message, we’ll discover that no matter what nickname you might have earned, Jesus calls people to follow him, even while they are still wearing their labels.

While everyone’s family has their share of issues, the family tree of Jesus is filled with some particularly shady characters. The first we come across is Judah. While Judah would eventually become a respected name in Jewish culture, his past contained a very dark secret. By contrast, his brother, Joseph, was a very good and vitreous man. Yet, despite Joseph’s “goodness,” God chose Judah—sin and all—to become the ancestor of Jesus. Why? Because in the story of Judah, we discover that God makes his grace available to people who have never even made themselves available to God.

Luke begins his gospel with the famous story of Christmas. His story includes the angels, the shepherds, the wonder and awe of the well-known Christmas story. Mathew, by contrast, begins the Christmas story with (wait for it), a genealogy. What many of us pass over as dull and tedious was anything but dull when Matthew’s original audience read his story, because they knew the backstories of the people in the family tree of Jesus. In fact, Matthew seems to go out of his way to allude to the scandalous lives of the people who made up the family tree of Jesus. Matthew didn’t include them in spite of his gospel story. Matthew included them because they were the point of the gospel story.

It’s not our church attendance or our singing that creates the kind of religion that God accepts. The religion that God accepts is one that helps people who are in need. This year, we’re setting a goal for our biggest Christmas offering ever, to give away more money than ever, to do more good than ever, and to practice a religion that honors God.

All of us have an emptiness inside (vain conceit, selfish ambition, etc.) that longs to be filled. Our quest to fill it leads us into all kinds of immaturity and sin. At the end of Galatians, Paul teaches us that only when that emptiness if filled with God, alone, can we then lead lives that truly glorify Him and bless others in the world.

One of the grand narratives of the Bible is the story of homelessness and homecoming. The reason for this is because we are spiritually homeless, seeking a true home for our souls. Home is the place where you are at rest. Home is the place where everything fits. Home is the place where everything feels right. And that eludes us. But the story of Jesus is that he lived homeless and he died homeless. He did this so we could be given the eternal home we long for. Jesus became homeless so we could have a home—Jesus had to go through hell in order for us to reach heaven.

The first thing that we learn in the Bible is that God is a God who speaks. He reveals himself through words. He also reveals his will and his eternal purposes for our lives. In this message, we’ll look at why the Bible is critical for knowing the living God who saves.

If you read the gospels of the life of Jesus, you’ll notice that there were two things that left Jesus amazed—Jesus was amazed when a person had a great BIG faith, and he was amazed when a person had a complete lack of faith. In this message, we will discover that when it comes to faith, it is not the size of your faith that saves you, it is the object of your faith. And, in Jesus, we have a very secure God upon whom we can safely rest our faith.

At the heart of the Reformation, there was question—the question was: “How is a person saved?” We’ll start this series by explaining what it means to be saved. Paul tells us that there is a life we are saved from, there is a life we are saved for, and he tells us what we are saved through—all of it is by grace. Not only could there be no other way to be saved, grace is the best way to be saved. This is the secret to peace and deep joy.

According to Jesus, it’s possible for a church to have great doctrine and great morals, yet still be able to lose the presence and power of Jesus. And at Hope, we’re not immune from this risk. As we wrap up the Pi Squared series, we’ll talk about the kind of church that Jesus loves and wants to attend.