Guest Speaker Shane Willard.
Mission:Haiti
series: mission
title: Haiti (same mission, different places)
teacher: Kenny Jones
date: October 14, 2018
Esther
God is Love
Everyone's Burden
Detroit Rock City
sowing and reaping
time
nine: commission
Faith that Can't Sit Still
introduction: cultivate
if you have no gauge on what is important, then you have no way to measure whether or not you are on the right track. That is what Core Values do… they keep us disciplined… they keep us on mission… they give us something the bounce whatever it is we are doing, off of, and see… IS THIS FURTHERING THE MISSION?
Paint the World with Love
Impartation
#7 The Church (part 2)
series: Love Incorruptible
title: The Church (part two)
date: June 4, 2017
teacher: Jacob Bender
scriptures: Ephesians 4:1-16, 1 Corinthians 12:27, Psalm 68:18, Luke 9, Colossians 1:18
The Reconciliation Table
Courage Church 12 Year Anniversary Service
title: The Reconciliation Table
date: October 9, 2016
teacher: Jacob Bender
scriptures: 2 Corinthians 5:16-21, Psalm 23, Genesis 31, Luke 15:22-24, Luke 14 (The Great Banquet).
#11 Praying
series: Red Letter City
title: Praying
teacher: Jacob Bender
date: June 26, 2016
scriptures: Luke 11:1, Matthew 6:5-15 (main passage), Matthew 18:20, Acts 3:16, Hebrews 4:16, Leviticus 16
FEATURED VIDEOS:
#9 Love Your Enemies
series: Red Letter City
title: Love Your Enemies
date: June 12, 2016
teacher: Jacob Bender
scriptures: Matthew 5:43-48, Matthew 16, Matthew 18, Leviticus 19:18, Proverbs 24:17, Romans 12:21, Luke 22:36, Matthew 26:52-53, Luke 23:34, Luke 6:46, Matthew 22:34-40, Matthew 10:34-36, Revelation 19:15, Isaiah 49:2, Isaiah 11:4, Ephesians 6:17 (rhema), John 1:14, Hebrews 4:12 (logos), Romans 12, Psalm 23, Psalm 23:5
FEATURED VIDEOS:
#4 Anger
series: Red Letter City
title: Anger
teacher: Jacob Bender
date: May 1, 2016
scriptures: Matthew 5:21-26, Psalm 145:8-9, 1 John 4:8, Ephesians 4:25-27, Ecclesiastes 7:9, Hebrews 12:14-15, Exodus 20, Deuteronomy 5, Ephesians 2, 1 John 4:19-21
This is an issue that a lot of people deal with… and for most of us, the way we deal with it is to stuff it. The problem is that the things you stuff tend to grow roots in the grounds of your heart… Hebrew calls it a “root of bitterness,” - what happens is, if you never process your feelings, you will get so used to having them that you will begin to justify them. Because they will feel natural to you. And what Jesus is saying here is that when that happens, things can get very ugly very very quickly.
and then there is this:
A lot of people have what I call an “Angry God syndrome.”
They have this idea in their head that God is mad at everybody all the time… and they paint this picture of a God who is upstairs waiting, rubbing his hands together in excitement, licking his lips in anticipation of the moment when he gets to finally bring judgment on our nation, and on this group of people, and on this type of person. and the bible does talk about God being angry with wickedness, and there is plenty of talk in the bible about God’s judgment…
But here is the issue.
and this is why the sermon on the mount is so incredibly crucial to our lives... Because people believed all sorts of things about God back then… things that were not right.
Things that were not love.
“God is love.”
AND people today believe all sorts of things about God that are not right. Things that are not love.
and whatever you think that God is like, if you truly believe you are a follower of him then you are going to try and be that… Isn’t that what Jesus says in Luke? A disciple is not better than his teacher, but he will be like him.
So we have this nation of “Christians” who want to be like God…
but they think God is angry all the time!
and this leads to all sorts of problems. Because if God hates this type of person, then you can hate this type of person.
Because we are just trying to be like God.
So… as people who have Jesus in our lives… who are disciples of Jesus and who want to be more like the God that we serve… I think that it is incredibly important that we understand what God is like.
Does God ever get angry? Yes.
Is God living in a constant disposition of anger toward the world? No.
the rest is in the sermon.
#3 Defining the Romance
series: Cultivate the Romance
title: Defining the Romance
date: January 17, 2016
teacher: Dawn Bender
#5 Culminating at Grace
Series: The Narrative of Grace
Title: Culminating at Grace
Teacher: Jacob Bender
Date: December 13, 2015
scriptures: Matthew 1:16-15, Matthew 1:1, 1 Corinthians 1:27, Matthew 18:20, Leviticus 25:1-7, Leviticus 25:5, 2 Chronicles 36:18-21, 1 Peter 2:5, Galatians 6:2.
Q: is everyone’s sabbath year the same? So if I start working in 2003, and you start in 2005, is my sabbath year 2010, yours 2012 or both in 2010?
A: You can read about it in Leviticus 25, but essentially what Happened was God said to the Israelites “when you come into the land I have given you… The land shall keep a sabbath.” So the way I have always understood it (I am not 100 percent though) is that from the time they all arrived, together, the cycle began.
How that applies to you today may vary… For me the primary takeaway from the sabbath year is, “do you trust God, truly? With everything?”
Simple, but in the new covenant, that is how I personally apply it.
Q: Do you think that Luke’s genealogy pertains to Mary & not Joseph? It would resolve some apparent contradictions between Matthew and Luke’s genealogies, but wouldn’t that also mean that Jesus was physically of the line of David through Mary?
That’s a great question, one that I wish I had mentioned in the sermon, and one that we don’t know for certain the answer to. It would make sense that the genealogy would belong to Mary because they are the same until we get to King David, and then the genealogy in Matthew continues through David’s son Solomon (the King) and Luke’s genealogy continues through David’s son Nathan. However, it is hard to say for sure because even Luke’s genealogy begins by saying (Luke 3:23) Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about thirty years of age, being the son (as was supposed) of Joseph, the son the Heli… Luke’s genealogy is listed in the more traditional way, only listing the Father and son, and actually takes it all the way back to Adam.
The other question that arises in Luke comes from Luke 2:4-5, when it says that Joseph goes to Galilee to register, because HE was of the house and lineage of David. It said that he went to be registered with Mary, who he was engaged to, who was pregnant, and it was during that trip that she gave birth to Jesus. The way this is written seems to emphasis that he needed to be registered, not her, and that she was marrying into the family.
Matthew in general follows the story of the birth of Jesus from the perspective of Joseph, while Luke takes it more from Mary’s perspective, also adding more weight to the possibility that the genealogy in Luke belongs to Mary. (ie – in Luke, we read about Mary’s encounter with her cousin, Elizabeth, about John the baptist leaping in Elizabeths womb when he is in the presence of the Christ living in a pregnant Mary. It also records Mary’s song the magnificat, and the angel of the Lord visits Mary in Lukes account, where Matthew records when the angel visited Joseph, and the battle that Joseph had internally to keep Mary as his wife after everything that had happened. Romans 1:3 also says that Jesus descended from David “according to the flesh” which many also use as evidence that Mary was also a descendant.
In this message, I should have made this more clear, because it is very possible that Mary was also of the line of David, but we know without a doubt that Joseph was, and because this study is on the genealogy in Matthew, we tried to look at it from the perspective of whom Matthew was writing to. Matthew was written to the Jews, to win the Jews to Jesus, and he knew that in that culture, if the Father, adopted or not, was not of the family line, they would never have accepted him as the savior.
So at the end of the day, Mary needed Joseph to not leave her alone on Christmas, and the Jews needed Joseph to accept Mary if they were going to accept Jesus. It can be said with certainty that Joseph was of the family line of David, and in the case that the genealogy in Luke does belong to Mary, it would reconcile some complicated issues between the two genealogies and would have fulfilled the prophecies with or without Joseph but it would not change the fact that to the Jewish culture whom Matthew was writing to win to Christ, Joseph was a key to this story.
