Transcript

It's Risky Business, Part 2

It's Risky Business, Part 2

This is going to be a part two of a series of a sermon I started a few weeks ago called It's a Risky Business. The fact of the matter is the way of Jesus is the way of risky love. The way of Jesus is a way of risky love. I look at how the world talks about love and you listen to radio and sometimes I'll listen to K-fan, the local sports station and get caught up in all the significant important things in life. You just listen to the dialogue of so many of the people on the radio and how it's just so clearly plain, they don't really get it. Everybody has a cry in their heart to be needed, to be loved, to be valued. That's how God made us. And yet so few people truly understand how to truly love somebody.

The Jesus Way: Love Your Enemies

The Jesus Way: Love Your Enemies

I don't want this message to confuse you or to bring you into a place of guilt. That's really not the point. And yet the whole concept of loving your enemies is a real thing. And so hopefully we can, we can just see how Jesus did it, we can see who Jesus did it with and we can start, ourselves, to try to practice this.

A Conversation with Nick & Jo Lembo

A Conversation with Nick & Jo Lembo

We had a dear friend, Dan Grooters, who is still part of this church, who 25 years ago got his video camera out and would video tape and then he would make duplicates and take it down. He did all the work. There was this guy from out of town, I think New York or out east somewhere. He ended up showing up at our church service. Well, we've ended up forging a 25 year friendship and he and his wife Jo, were part of our church for many years. I'd like to introduce Nick and Jo Lambo. Why don't you please come? They are going to share with us this morning.

Come As You Are, But Leave Transformed By Jesus

Come As You Are, But Leave Transformed By Jesus

There are no prerequisites to the gospel. There are no restrictions to the gospel and those of us like Hope Community, we embrace the gospel message. We even have signs around on the wall that says, "come as you are amen". There are churches today that have the moniker of come as you are, because there are no limitations or restrictions for the invitation to come to Jesus Christ, but__ everybody say, "but" that message is incomplete without his tagline. That tagline goes something like this' come as you are, but leave transformed by him. That's the title of our message this morning, because it's not simply about coming and being a part of some fellowship or some social club.

A Heart Healthy Lifestyle

A Heart Healthy Lifestyle

Today is the anniversary of 9/11. You recall the many people who lost their lives that day. There is an echo that sometimes goes throughout our country about never forgetting. There is a balance that we have to have between being vigilant and not holding anger and bitterness in our hearts. There has been sins committed against each other since the dawn of time. The real antidote for letting those sins affect your life all the way to the grave is for us to learn how to walk in a way of releasing those sins against us and stuff. We all have them, we've all committed them and we've all had them committed against us.

The Jesus Way: Generosity of Spirit

The Jesus Way: Generosity of Spirit

Today we are going to talk about generosity. Generosity is a Jesus way, but it doesn't begin with money. Generosity begins in the heart and it's formed in us as his love heals us. What he does over time is he creates in us a generous spirit. That's really what we are going to talk about today. We won't be talking about giving money. We'll be talking about giving ourselves and we'll be talking about giving to others. Nobody ever left the presence of Jesus that they weren't a better person for having been with him. Always, he invested something in them and they left with more than they came. It wasn't just healing. It was a sense of self-worth. It was a sense of value. It was a sense of being loved, and he wants us to carry that with him.

It's Risky Business

It's Risky Business

I do believe that God has something very special for Hope Community. Not that he doesn't have anything special for other churches; he does. But the unique thing that God really wants for us is to follow the word that he said to his disciples when he said, "A new command I give on unto you, that you love one another as I have loved you." We don't even ask God to help us love in the way that we want to be loved, but rather we need to ask God to help us love as he has loved us and keep that as our model.

Being Jesus to Our Community

Being Jesus to Our Community

What was astonishing to me as I have read some history on, obviously, the tragedy of slavery in our country is that the golden rule was actually used by ministers to perpetuate slavery rather than to abolish it. So if the golden rule was used by Christian ministers to support both sides of the slavery issue. You have the abolitionist who used the golden rule to prohibit slavery, and you had the pro-slavery people that use a golden rule to purport it. I began to think to myself and ask myself, there seems to be a real limitation here on the value of the golden rule. It all depends on who the focus is of it. And I concluded that we needed a different gold standard.

Love In Action

Love In Action

It's time to move from lip service to actually looking like what we believe in Christ. There was a song by Tina Turner that says, "What's love got to do with it?" Well, Ms. Tina, when it comes to the church of Jesus Christ love has everything to do with it.

The Jesus Way: Pray Without Ceasing

The Jesus Way: Pray Without Ceasing

Prayer is one of those things we've been inoculated against in the church. We've all heard enough about it. So, let's wake up to what prayer really is because, for the most part, our understanding of prayer is a little bit short of what the Lord intends for it to be anyways. The beginning of a new understanding happened to me a long time ago.

To Be In Christ Is To Be Led By the Spirit

To Be In Christ Is To Be Led By the Spirit

A major thing that we were blessed with from the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, is the ability to now choose to live a life that's pleasing to God, or we have the choice to live a life that's dominated by our sinful desires. Yes, if you are in Christ, you now can choose to live this life to live right before God or not.

Unhitch Your Wagon

Unhitch Your Wagon

Jesus is good. He's good all the time. Picture in your mind, the condition of the world, when God had to write on tablets of stone that his people should not kill each other or shouldn't take another man's wife, covet another man's property, that if another man was blessed and he had a nice plow you shouldn't steal it and kill him in the process. Picture a world where God had to write on tablets of stone, that you were to actually tell the truth to one another instead of lying to one another. Just picture that world for a moment and realize how sad a day it was when God wrote The Ten Commandments.

There Is Gold Out There

There Is Gold Out There

There is so much in this one sentence or phrase: do to others, what you would like them to do to you. This is the essence of all that is in the law and the prophets. Before his time on earth was done, Jesus would teach his followers to actually transcend this moral principle. It was a relatively new thing. It was obviously a new thing in a very stunning way for his listeners. Believe it or not, Jesus wasn't actually the first person to make a religious maxim of a statement like this.

A Different Freedom

A Different Freedom

It's more important we live our mission than we know it. Then we can articulate it. Hallelujah. A couple weeks ago, I shared on this wonderful, wonderful story of Jesus encountering the woman at the well. And all of the religious and cultural things that in that one single encounter that Jesus was coming really against, there were five, what I would call, external identity markers. That's a term I wanted to use intentionally today because in our culture today, people are identifying as fill-in-the-blank.

Bearing Fruit As We Walk In Christ

Bearing Fruit As We Walk In Christ

I believe as pastors, preachers, ministers, servant of the Lord, we have specific assignments in the earth. We have specific assignments overall, the reason why we are here, and then when we are in a ministry setting, we have different assignments to do in the Lord. Those assignments change from season to season. I believe that one of the assignments or the mandates that the Lord has for us at this season is to help the body mature. The Lord has burdened our hearts to see where we are at as a church community to show us, not in a condemning way, but to help the body grow up. One of the areas that we see that the body needs to grow up in is this fruit-bearing aspect of our lives.

The Ways of Jesus: An Introduction

The Ways of Jesus: An Introduction

We want to start a theme and we are calling it the Jesus Way. What we are going to do is every time that we share, we want to share about one of the ways that Jesus has ordained us to live that results in blessing in our life, because we are living right now in a culture where everything is being turned upside down. There are all kinds of options that are being laid before you and your children and your grandchildren about choices you can make about life. Every one of those options is going to end up with a result.

Eternal Father

Eternal Father

It's so easy as Christians to buy into the culture that we live in. Our culture today is saying, you need to put a boundary around yourself. You need to do this. You need to stop people from doing that. I just don't see anywhere where the life of Jesus was a boundary. He was tired. He was weary. People would come to him and he wouldn't say, "Well, I'm not in my office right now. These are not my office hours."

The Ministry of Healing, Part 3: Partnership with Holy Spirit

The Ministry of Healing, Part 3: Partnership with Holy Spirit

This morning's message is on the ministry of healing. I've said it before, but just to say it again, the reason that we even embarked on this is because I think many of us understand that there seems to be a clear sign that the father is bringing his church into a season of answered prayer. Not just Hope, but his church. It includes Hope. And so I just felt like it's really a great time to talk about prayer and to talk about the ministry of prayer and to talk about the ministry of healing, because we all want to be inspired. We want our faith to be enlarged, and we want to begin to pray more. Because if we are in a season of answered prayer, then clearly the more we pray, the more answers we are going to see. And so we want to be inspired to pray. We want to see faith rise up in us to pray.

The New and Improved Version

The New and Improved Version

How many like new and improved things? Sometimes people talk about the good old days and they are referring to a time that they have forgotten most of what the good old days were like, when you had to carry water to the cabin or go out to the pump and get it and heat it for just a sponge bath, no hot showers. Some of those kinds of things. And let me tell you something; I do not long for the good old days. amen.