PROCLAIMING THE GOSPEL
OFFERING HOPE
TREASURE CHRIST
Worship in All of Life
LIFE IS TOUGH.
WE WANT TO HELP YOU NAVIGATE IT
WITH WISDOM.
SERVICE TIMES
SUNDAY
Sunday School classes: 9:45am
Worship Service: 10:45am
Student Ministries: 5:30pm
WEDNESDAY
Afternoon Small Group 1:30pm
Evening Small Group 6:30pm
EVENTS
MOST RECENT BLOG POSTS
17
Aug '26
Encouragement for the Journey of Spiritual Growth (1 John 2:12–14)
17
Aug '26
Someone very kindly handed our family a week in a house on Lake Michigan years ago. It was the sort of place we would never have rented for ourselves. Three stories, water out the windows. My parents took the first floor, the girls took the second, and Lisa and I climbed to the loft on the third.
In the middle of the night, there was a boom.
Lisa shook me awake and told me something had happened, and I said the words that will be read at my funeral: “You go find out what.” By then the girls were coming up the stairs, asking whether I had heard it. What I had was a rented house, a family looking at me, and a sound my sleeping brain had filed under breaking glass.
I went down to the basement, which was not technically part of the rental, and came back up with a curtain rod. I bent it in half and went room by room through three floors of somebody else’s house while my daughters hid upstairs. I knew the whole time that I was not equipped for whatever I was about to find. Upstairs the girls were calm, because Dad “had it.” Dad did not have it.
In the morning we found the remains of a balloon draped over a floor register. The air conditioning had kicked on, the balloons had swirled around the vent, and one wore thin and burst. In a silent house at two in the morning, it sounded like the end of the world.
That night holds an important truth. Children take their security from their father rather than from an assessment of his resources, so my daughters were safer in their own minds than I was in mine. The Christian life runs on the same arrangement, with one enormous difference: our Father actually has what the situation requires.
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10
Aug '26
Receiving the Least: Greatness in God’s Kingdom (Luke 9:46–50)
10
Aug '26
The Scoreboard We All Deny Keeping
Somebody tells you good news, and before you have finished congratulating them, your mind has started calculating. You are working out where the news puts them and where it leaves you. We arrive at Thanksgiving dinner with our children’s accomplishments loaded and ready; we keep a running tally of how many times we have done the dishes lately. We can hear about somebody’s promotion and feel a piece move three squares up the leaderboard that we pretend we don’t care about or even use.
The twelve men who lived closest to Jesus kept the same leaderboard, and Luke tells us precisely when they got it out.
“An argument arose among them as to which of them was the greatest.” (Luke 9:46)
In almost any other setting, that would be an ordinary sentence about ambitious men. However, two verses earlier, Jesus had said this:
“Let these words sink into your ears: The Son of Man is about to be delivered into the hands of men.” (Luke 9:44)
He is bracing them for His own murder, and within two verses they are sorting out the heavenly seating chart. Rather than softening the collision of these two conversations, Luke explains what led to this disastrous turn of conversation.
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03
Aug '26
What Is a Christian? Who Sets the Standard? 1 John 2:3-6
03
Aug '26
Years ago, a woman in our congregation who opened her home to foreign exchange students brought me a question she could not answer on her own. The girls staying with her were Muslim, and they were curious about her faith. One question kept surfacing at her kitchen table: what is a Christian? She wanted something clear she could actually say out loud.
Try answering it in a single sentence, and you will feel how quickly the ground shifts. Ask on a city street, and the answers come back all over the map. I am a conservative American, so I suppose that makes me a Christian. Christianity gave this country its founding principles, and I agree with those, so count me in. I believe in God, and I try my best. I expect He will let me into heaven. I accept that Jesus of Nazareth was a real man in history who died on a cross. I was baptized. Some churches would add that you need a particular haircut, a certain style of clothing, and one approved version of the Bible in your hand. Every one of those answers is popular, and not one of them is right.
Underneath the confusion lies a problem that has nothing to do with religion.
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27
Jul '26
An Advocate and the Mercy Seat – 1 John 2:1-2
27
Jul '26
We are a country that loves a courtroom. For a while it was Judge Judy playing on the television bolted to the wall of the doctor’s waiting room, and before that it was a murder trial that stopped the whole nation in its tracks, everyone leaning toward the screen to see which way the verdict would fall. There is something in us that cannot look away from a trial. Part of it is the fascination, watching the case turn on a technicality nobody saw coming. Part of it is the frustration, watching an attorney take a set of plain facts and bend them into whatever shape he needs the jury to see.
I have sat in that room more than once. Over my years here I have been called for jury duty six times, and one of those times I served as the foreman, so the picture I am about to draw is not something I read in a book. Imagine a trial where the defendant knows he is guilty. The prosecutor knows he is guilty. The defense attorney knows his own client is guilty. The judge on the bench knows it too. Every person in the room agrees on the facts, and there is no dispute to settle. Then the verdict comes back, and it is not guilty. Something strange is happening in that courtroom. Stay with that scene, because the passage in front of us is going to walk us right into it.
John hands us a couple of verses loaded with legal language, an advocate, a defendant, a charge, a verdict, and one enormous theological word that we cannot afford to skip past. Some of us feel our shoulders tense when the teaching turns to doctrine, as if the deep end of the pool were roped off for stronger swimmers. Consider why God gave us His word in the first place. He gave it to be read, to be understood, to be worked down into the way we actually think. He did not hand us a book and expect us to back away from the hard parts. These verses are basic Christianity, and He means for us to know them.
“My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” (1 John 2:1-2)
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