This week we begin our journey into a one of the most important, and yet neglected Advent stories, a story so important that without it we don’t have the story of Jesus. 

Before we get into our Advent series, we wanted to take a moment and talk about the prominence of the unlikely messenger throughout Scripture.  Throughout the entire history of Israel, God's plan is moved forward through the most unlikely of messengers.  

Since the Great Reformation, the church as a whole has slowly removed itself from the very heart beat of the church loving God and loving neighbor.  We have traded it for confessional doctrines that unfortunately end up being an inch deep.  The problem with this is, well, Jesus.  Jesus never talks this way - every.  Jesus came to build a church of doing.  A church that actively loved their neighbor and enemy.  A church that embraced and cared for the stranger.  This is the church of Jesus, a church of doing. 

In this week's sermon we are reminded that there is something more reliable and sure than our own ability to control and manage our circumstances. After two weeks of Jesus appealing to things like nature and the quiet life, he now makes a final appeal to the nature of God. 

In this week's sermon, we will hear Jesus call us to the great reversal of church's prioritization of defensiveness often camouflaged by spiritual talk. Before Jesus has called us to a way of telling the story, he has called us to live it.

In this week's sermon, we will explore Jesus' reminder that there is more to life than the things we often worry about.  To help us remember this, Jesus will appeal to what many call, "God's Second Book" in order to help us declutter our minds from the noise pollution that often causes anxiety. 

This sermon we delve into two realms of existence, seen and unseen.  The defining properties of those realms, temporary and eternal; and the reward Jesus mentions seven times.  

In this week’s B Side, Matthew takes the very esoteric, intangible conversation from part one, to the tactile through some biblical, historical, personal and examples.

This week we began talking about the section in the Sermon on the Amount pertaining to personal piety.  We discovered that the actual acts of piety within this section are secondary to how we practice piety.  In today's sermon begin this section not simply talking about how or where we practice these acts of but rather, we begin with where we find God, in the place of Silence. 

This past Sunday we had our quarterly business meeting; however, this time we did something a bit different.  Our pastor, Matthew Hansen, did a short talk about leadership structure, the four major identities of the institutional church, and a peek into where we plan on heading in 2025.

A deep dive into Matthew 5:27-32, a text about marriage, adultery, and divorce, as mentioned in the Sermon on The Mount.  We decided to assign this topic to the B Side to allow us the needed time to dig deep into these complex issues.  In this talk we set the stage and context that allows us the understanding to hear and better understand Jesus' words on divorce, which we will talk about in part 2. 

Today we continue our study through the Sermon on the Mount. Within Christianity we throw around a lot of phrases without deeply seeking out the deep meaning of those phrases.  Since the beginning, we have been told that the vocational identity of humanity is to be the image of God, to mirror God to the world.  In today's message Jesus makes it clear what that means to be like God. 

Through Moses, God gave a law to his people.  The law was not about simply obeying a rule, but rather had a purpose beyond itself.  It was to be a shaping mechanism, a system that helped Israel become God's people to the world around us.  Today we will begin a miniseries on God's law through the voice of Jesus. 

Before the church is called to do something, we are given an identity.  The doing is how we express that identity, and that identity is our vocational calling.  In today's sermon, we are going to spend some time talking about the original vocational call of Israel and its expansion beyond borders into the church.

Jesus is the new Moses giving a new law to a new people.  Today we took some time to identify, define, and explain who the people of God are.

Today begins a new series on Jesus' most well known sermon, The Sermon on the Mount. Today's message introduces terms, creates framework, and gives thought to what it means to engage this sermon in a more practical way. 

James’ junk drawer (the remaining sections of the book) contains what I believe to be an ancient version of what we call the first rule of resiliency - be here now. As we wrap up our series on James, the sermon serves as a call to our church specifically and the importance being and living deeply right where we already are.

If the previous three sermons were a mini series on wisdom, today is the spin off.  Today we read the text, travel in to the esoteric, and then back into the tactile.  Using our limited words, we dive into the idea of what it means to live on into the world to come. 

If any book in the New Testament can be categorized as wisdom literature, it is the book of James. For the past three weeks, we have been discussing the idea of wisdom as God's creative power creating order out of chaos. In today's message we get into the nuts and bolts of the wisdom of the world vs. the wisdom of God.

We dive into how wisdom was understood in the ancient world, a world that understood wisdom to be much more than good decision making skills, but rather the literal power of God to create a good order.  Furthermore, this wisdom was not simply God's to use, but an energy that God assigned to his people in order to follow in his footsteps as his image bearers to create the order of God out of the order of chaos.