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In this message, Matt walks through Daniel 2, where a teenage exile named Daniel is thrust into a life-or-death crisis under a hostile, often ruthless king. Rather than seizing control or fighting back, Daniel serves, prays, and repeatedly hands the credit — and the outcome — back to God. Matt challenges a common assumption: that courage means taking control. Daniel's story suggests something harder — that real courage is often found in giving up control and trusting God with the outcome. Drawing on his own ongoing struggle with control in his marriage, parenting, and leadership, Matt invites listeners to ask where in their own lives they're gripping tightly to something only God was ever meant to hold

Today Eric begins a six-week journey through Daniel by looking at a teenager taken from his home to Babylon who resolves not to let the king's table define him. Daniel's wise, respectful request shows that faith doesn't always mean resisting everything. It means choosing the few things that matter and holding them with everything you have. Faith grows not by knowing more but by acting, because steps of faith are where God's faithfulness meets us. Eric closes by naming the places we're tempted to trust something else (power, money, and pleasure) and inviting everyone to take one step this week, knowing that our steps reveal who we really trust.

This weekend, Nigel preached from John 1:1-14 about where our identity comes from. John shows that Jesus is God, our Creator, our Life, and the Light of the world. We were made in God's image, but sin happens when we build our identity on ourselves (our needs, desires, and plans) instead of our Savior. Jesus became flesh, moved into the neighborhood, and paid for our sin. When we believe in His name, He gives us a new identity as children of God. This week, ask yourself: where am I finding my identity? Believe in Jesus more than you do today.

Continuing the Masterpiece series, Eric turns to a hard but necessary question: how does the family we grew up in shape the identity we carry as adults? Walking through four generations of Abraham's family and three generations of David's, Eric shows how patterns of deception, self-protection, and taking by power don't stay contained to one generation — they travel, often without anyone intending to pass them on. This is not an easy message, and it includes a direct account of Amnon's assault of Tamar, so discretion is advised. But the message doesn't end in the pain of family history. Eric points to Galatians 4 and the hope of adoption into a new family line through Christ — one where the patterns of the past don't get the final say, even though the work of facing them honestly still remains ours to do.

Most of us are carrying a name we never chose, a label absorbed so early in life it feels like a simple fact rather than a wound. This week Eric tells the story of Jacob, a man whose very name meant "deceiver," and who spent decades living up to it before God met him in the dark and demanded he say it out loud. Walking through the strange, physical wrestling match at the Jabbok River in Genesis 32, Eric shows that the road from the False Self to the True Self runs through the same kind of honest confession, naming what we've believed about ourselves before we can receive what God actually says about us. Jacob walked away from that encounter with a new name, a new identity, and a limp that never fully healed. Eric invites the congregation to sit with one question: what name have you internalized, and are you ready to let God wrestle it away from you?

Most Christians know they're forgiven — and yet still feel crushed by their ongoing struggle with sin, as if their standing with God rises and falls with how well they're doing that day. This week Eric untangles two very different biblical uses of the word "sin": sin as a legal status before God, settled once and for all through Christ, and sin as ongoing action, a daily battle believers are actively called to fight. Walking through Romans 5-6, Ephesians 2, and Colossians 2-3, Eric shows why passages like "you died to sin" so often confuse sincere believers — and why they were never meant to describe the end of the struggle, only the end of the verdict. Our BE, our identity before God, was never meant to fluctuate based on our DO. That guilt has already been forgiven. The fight continues — but it flows from a settled identity, not toward one.

As we continue to unmask the false self, Eric turns to one of the most familiar stories Jesus ever told, the parable of the prodigal son, and asks the congregation to see it differently. Both the younger son and the older son are living out of the same false self, just in opposite directions: one through wild living, one through rule-keeping and resentment. Both end up saying something devastating about themselves, "I am no longer worthy" and "I have been slaving for you", because both are trying to earn an identity that was never meant to be earned. Eric unpacks the practical shape of the False Self through the pattern Do, Have, Be, and shows how the Father in Luke 15 offers both sons something entirely different: an identity that is Be, Do, Have, received first, lived out second. The message closes with a simple but costly invitation: examine your own DO, and don't do this work alone.

Most of us know the exhausting pull to prove ourselves — through what we do, what we have, or what others think of us. Eric opens the new series Masterpiece by naming this pattern for what it is: the False Self, a way of building an identity that can never be finished and never feels like enough. Drawing from Genesis 1 and Ephesians 2, Eric shows that every person is already God's workmanship — his masterpiece — before they've done anything to earn it. The problem isn't that we're unfinished; it's that sin has stained what God already made, leaving us to chase an identity we were never meant to build. The good news is that the True Self isn't achieved. It's received — through grace, through faith in Jesus, and through the daily surrender that follows.

In this message, Matt Love closes out Grace's journey through 2 Corinthians with Paul's final words to a struggling church. Working through 2 Corinthians 13:1–10, Matt explores why God's correction is never rejection — it's always aimed at restoration. He unpacks why real spiritual authority looks like weakness before it looks like power, why self-examination matters more than proving yourself to others, and why a church that takes sin seriously can still be a place where everyone is welcome as they are. Matt shares honestly from his own life about what it looks like to invite correction in rather than run from it, and offers practical next steps for anyone ready to experience the freedom of being fully restored.

This sermon explores the question, “What does it really mean to love God?” Through Deuteronomy 6, Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 22, and 1 John, we see that loving God isn’t about organizing our lives correctly or simply putting Him at the top of our priority list. Instead, God calls us to love Him with all of our heart, soul, and strength- allowing our love for Him to shape every area of our lives. Because God loved us first, our love for Him naturally spills over into loving others. Ultimately, loving God isn’t about a list; it’s about all of life.

This message picks up where last week left off — with more to say about the holiness of God. Working through Job 37, Psalm 93, and Isaiah 6, we see a God who is not simply a better version of us but a different category entirely. From there the sermon traces the movement of Hebrews 10 — made holy through Jesus, being made holy through the Spirit — and gets painfully specific about what that looks like when we sin. Using pornography as a concrete example, the difference becomes clear between living on the wrong side of guilt and shame versus living from the position of someone who has already been made holy and is being drawn back toward God. The message ends with Revelation 7's vision of every nation standing before the throne in white robes — the destination the whole journey is heading toward.

In this message, Eric continues the Red Thread series by diving into one of the most challenging books of the Bible — Leviticus. Rather than a dusty collection of ancient laws, Eric shows that Leviticus is about one of the most urgent questions any person can ask: how do muddy, broken people get to be with a holy God? Working through the clean/unclean/defiled categories of Leviticus, the Day of Atonement, and the book of Hebrews, Eric makes the case that God's primary concern has never been your behavior — it's your position. And through Jesus, that position has changed forever.

In this message, Matt Love traces a single thread through the book of Exodus, the Gospel of John, and the book of Revelation: God's relentless desire to dwell with his people. Beginning with Israel's terrified response to God's presence at Mount Sinai — where the people chose distance over nearness — Matt shows how God's immediate response was not judgment but invitation. God's command to build the tabernacle in Exodus 25:8 was not a building project — it was a declaration that presence, not prosperity or performance, is the point of faith. Drawing on the Hebrew and Greek words behind the tabernacle and John 1:14, Matt demonstrates that when John writes that Jesus "tabernacled among us," he is making a direct and deliberate connection to the Exodus story — God crossing every barrier to be with his people in flesh. And in Revelation 21:3–4, the promise first spoken in the wilderness finds its final answer: God's dwelling place is with humanity, permanently, with every tear wiped away. If you have ever felt like faith is about getting somewhere or getting good enough, this message offers a different vision: the God of Scripture has been removing every obstacle — fear, sin, death — not to improve you or relocate you, but simply to be with you.

In this message, Eric introduces the Red Thread series — a five-week journey through the first five books of the Bible — by tracing a single thread from Genesis to Revelation: the promise of a seed who would reverse the curse. Beginning in Genesis 3 with the entry of sin, death, and the enemy into the world, Eric follows God's covenant with Abraham through to its fulfillment in Jesus, showing how the offspring promised in the garden is the same seed Paul identifies in Galatians and the same Lamb whose throne anchors the new creation in Revelation. The message lands on a simple but profound question: are you trusting the seed, or trying to be one?

In this message, Eric walks through Galatians 6:7-8 and a simple but sobering principle: you reap what you sow, you reap more than you sow, and you reap later than you sow. Using a story from his own family's life at Moe's and a hard scene he witnessed at a Panera, Eric makes the case that technology is not neutral. It's shaping who we, and our families, are becoming, one meal and one moment at a time. He closes with a specific, doable challenge: no technology at the table, for anyone.