Advertise on podcast: West Asheville Baptist Church

What does a Roman coin have to do with our everyday lives and faith? More than we might think. In Luke 20, we find Jesus cornered by religious leaders who pose what seems like a simple yes-or-no question about paying taxes to Caesar. But Jesus refuses to be trapped by a false choice. Instead, he asks to see a coin and poses a question that cuts straight to the heart: whose image does it bear? That question echoes across centuries and lands squarely in our laps today. We were made in the image of God, as Genesis 1 reminds us, and that identity carries with it an ultimate allegiance and a profound responsibility. The passage introduces us to two words that reshape everything: render and image. To render is not merely to give, but to give back what is rightfully owed. And the image on that coin points us toward a deeper question about whose character our lives actually reflect. This sermon kicks off a series on stewardship, and it begins not with budgets or time management, but with something far more foundational: the recognition that everything we have, including our influence in this world, belongs to God. Caesar may have a claim on certain things, but God has the ultimate claim on us. That changes how we engage our families, our neighbors, our communities, and even our civic responsibilities.

What if everything we assumed about who is right with God turned out to be completely wrong? In Luke 18, Jesus tells a parable that would have stopped his original audience cold. Two men walk into the temple to pray -- a Pharisee, the picture of religious devotion and moral discipline, and a tax collector, the ultimate social and spiritual outcast. Every listener that day would have predicted the same outcome: the Pharisee walks away justified, the tax collector walks away empty. But Jesus flips the script entirely. The man who came with nothing but his sin and a desperate cry for mercy is the one who goes home justified. The man who came with a resume full of religious achievement leaves with nothing. This parable cuts right to the heart of a question we all need to sit with: are we trusting in our own spiritual track record, or are we depending entirely on the mercy of God? The greatest help we will ever receive is not something we can earn or manufacture. It is mercy we could never deserve and righteousness we could never produce on our own.

What if the struggles, uncertainties, and trials we face are not signs that God has abandoned us, but rather evidence that he is actively at work in our lives? This sermon draws a powerful parallel between the Israelites wandering in the wilderness and our own journey through a complex and often difficult world. Using Deuteronomy 8, verses 2 through 7 as its foundation, the message reminds us that God did not accidentally place his people in the wilderness, just as he did not accidentally place us here. He led them with intention, provision, and purpose every step of the way, and he is doing the same for us. The wilderness was not a punishment. It was a construction site. God was building his people through hunger, vulnerability, and uncertainty so that they would be ready for the land he was preparing to give them. The same blueprint applies to our lives today. Every trial, every storm, every season of hardship is part of a divine construction process. We are not finished products. We are projects in progress, and the one doing the building does not abandon what he starts. The encouragement here is not to simply endure hard times, but to reframe how we see them entirely.

What does it look like to bring honest, imperfect faith to God? In this message drawn from Mark 9, we encounter a desperate father whose son has suffered since childhood, and whose cry to Jesus cuts right to the heart of what genuine faith actually looks like. The father does not arrive with polished confidence or a rehearsed theological argument. He arrives broken, exhausted, and conflicted, and he says something that many of us have felt but perhaps never dared to voice out loud: Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief. This message walks us through three distinct moments in life when that cry becomes our own. There are seasons when we need to be saved and realize that our own goodness will never be enough to bridge the gap. There are seasons when we simply do not understand what God is doing, when prayers seem unanswered and pain feels louder than promise. And there are seasons when we have quietly drifted into self-reliance, managing life in our own strength without ever meaning to push God to the margins. The father in this story holds up a mirror, and what we see reflected back is our own struggle with doubt, dependence, and the gap between the faith we want and the faith we have. The good news is that Jesus does not turn the father away for his incomplete faith. He meets him exactly where he is.

What do we do when life brings us to a place where we feel completely overwhelmed and out of options? In 2 Chronicles 20, we find the nation of Judah staring down an alliance of three armies bent on their total destruction. Outnumbered and outmatched, they do something unexpected -- they turn to God in worship and prayer before a single sword is drawn. This powerful story challenges us to reconsider our first instinct when crisis hits. Instead of scrambling for solutions or reaching out to the nearest human ally, Judah's king gathers the entire nation -- men, women, and children -- to fast, pray, and declare their dependence on God. The declaration at the heart of their prayer is striking in its honesty: we do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you. That raw admission of helplessness becomes the very posture through which God moves on their behalf. The central lesson here is that worship is not merely something we do when everything is going well. Worship is the courageous act of fixing our eyes on God precisely when circumstances feel most out of control. This message invites us to examine where we instinctively turn when life gets hard, and whether we are willing to let our uncertainty drive us toward God rather than away from Him.

What do we do when everything in our lives seems to be falling apart at once? Psalm 38 takes us deep into that raw, unfiltered place where sin, sickness, loneliness, and opposition all converge at the same moment. David does not sugarcoat his situation. He names it plainly: his burden is too heavy, his strength is failing, his friends have gone distant, and his enemies are closing in. Yet within this desperate cry, we discover something remarkable about the nature of prayer itself. Sometimes prayer is a carefully constructed sentence. Sometimes it is a single cry. And sometimes it is nothing more than a groan directed toward heaven. What Psalm 38 teaches us is that God receives all three. The psalm pivots on a single verse where David shifts his gaze from his circumstances to God, and in that shift, nothing changes externally yet everything changes spiritually. Faith, we learn, does not require us to have all the answers. It simply requires us to know who to turn to when we do not.

What happens when we reach the absolute end of ourselves? When every effort has been exhausted, every solution has failed, and the storm just keeps raging? In Matthew 14, we find the disciples in exactly that place -- out on the sea, rowing all night, battered by wind and waves, with no rescue in sight. And it is precisely there, in the darkest watch of the night, that something extraordinary happens. This message walks us through one of the most vivid and human stories in all of Scripture, where Peter steps out of a boat onto churning water simply because Jesus said one word: come. The central lesson is both simple and profound -- when we reach the end of ourselves, we find that Jesus is enough. The storm does not create our need; it exposes it. And what gets exposed is not weakness to be ashamed of, but the very place where faith begins. Whether we are facing relational storms, personal crises, or seasons of doubt, this passage reminds us that whatever feels like it is over our heads is still under the feet of Jesus. We are invited to consider what it looks like to cry out, even imperfectly, and discover that the hand that corrects us is also the hand that catches us.

What does it look like to be the kind of person others come to when someone wants to meet Jesus? That is the question at the heart of this message, and it is answered through the life of Andrew, one of the lesser-celebrated disciples whose defining characteristic was remarkably simple: he kept bringing people to Jesus. From the moment he encountered Christ in John 1 and immediately went to find his brother Simon Peter, to the feeding of the five thousand in John 6 where he noticed one boy in a crowd of thousands, Andrew modeled a way of living that was always oriented toward others. The spiritual lesson here is both convicting and freeing. We do not have to have all the answers, master theology, or know what Jesus will do with the people we bring to him. Andrew himself did not know. He simply knew that Jesus could do what he could not. Our responsibility is not transformation. It is faithfulness. That single shift in perspective has the power to change the way we see every person we encounter, whether at a family dinner, a grocery store, or a workplace. The invitation Jesus extended to Andrew, come and see, became the very invitation Andrew passed on to everyone around him. The question this message leaves us with is a personal one: are we passing that invitation on?

What if the most important question we could ask ourselves today is not about our own spiritual comfort, but about someone else's eternity? That is the challenge at the heart of this message. Drawing from Luke 15, we are invited into a powerful exploration of what it means to be burdened for the people in our lives who are far from God. Jesus tells two stories back to back, a shepherd who leaves 99 sheep to find one that is lost, and a woman who turns her entire house upside down searching for a single lost coin. The point is not the sheep or the coin. It is the person. It is always about the person. We are challenged to think of one specific individual, someone with a name and a face, someone we love, who does not yet know Jesus. When we attach a name to the mission, everything changes. The search becomes urgent, personal, and unstoppable. Heaven itself rejoices when one sinner repents, which means our one is not just important to us. They are important to God. This message calls us to move from passive belief to active, sacrificial pursuit of the people around us who are still lost.

What does it mean to go from spiritually dead to fully alive? That is the question at the heart of Ephesians chapter 2, and the answer reshapes how we understand our past, our present, and our future. The passage does not soften the reality of who we once were. We were dead in trespasses and sins, aligned with the influence of darkness, and living entirely for our own desires with no regard for God or others. It is a bleak picture, and if the story ended there, there would be zero hope. But it does not end there. Two words change everything: but God. Those two words introduce the hero of the story, and the hero is not us. God, rich in mercy and driven by great love, steps in not when we have cleaned ourselves up or earned his attention, but precisely when we are at our worst. He makes us alive together with Christ, changes our alignment from darkness to the presence of Christ himself, and shifts our entire motivation from self-centered living to a life rooted in grace. This is the story of redemption, and it is not just a historical event. It is a living reality that continues to unfold in our lives every single day. What does it mean to go from spiritually dead to fully alive? That is the question at the heart of Ephesians chapter 2, and the answer reshapes how we understand our past, our present, and our future. The passage does not soften the reality of who we once were. We were dead in trespasses and sins, aligned with the influence of darkness, and living entirely for our own desires with no regard for God or others. It is a bleak picture, and if the story ended there, there would be zero hope. But it does not end there. Two words change everything: but God. Those two words introduce the hero of the story, and the hero is not us. God, rich in mercy and driven by great love, steps in not when we have cleaned ourselves up or earned his attention, but precisely when we are at our worst. He makes us alive together with Christ, changes our alignment from darkness to the presence of Christ himself, and shifts our entire motivation from self-centered living to a life rooted in grace. This is the story of redemption, and it is not just a historical event. It is a living reality that continues to unfold in our lives every single day.

What does it mean to truly welcome someone? Not just a handshake or a smile, but a deep, intentional, sacrificial act of making room for another person? That question sits at the heart of this message drawn from Ephesians 5:1-2, where we are called to be imitators of God as dear children, walking in love the same way Christ gave himself for us. The striking truth is that we do not welcome others because they are like us. With roughly 80,000 possible differences between any two people in a room, the odds of finding common ground on our own terms are slim. We welcome others because we are becoming like our Father, and our Father welcomed us first. That reframes everything. Welcoming people is not a personality trait or a church program. It is a spiritual discipline rooted in the gospel itself.

What does it truly mean to belong to one another? This message digs into the heart of Christian community by exploring Ephesians 4, where the apostle Paul lays out a compelling vision for what the church can become when relationships run deep. We are challenged to wrestle with a deceptively simple but profoundly demanding idea: everyone matters always. The passage anchors our unity not in what we have in common with each other, but in who we have in common, namely Christ himself. That distinction changes everything. Unity is not uniformity. It is an agreement to work together in spite of our differences, what the text calls concord, a cooperation that acknowledges real tension but chooses the mission over personal preference. We are also confronted with the uncomfortable truth that we are difficult people trying to love other difficult people, and that the depth of our love is most clearly revealed not in how we treat strangers but in how we treat those closest to us. This is where faith becomes real and where growth becomes visible.

What if the single most transformative thing we could do for our faith required no special talent, no advanced knowledge, and no perfect track record? That is exactly what we explore as we walk through Ephesians chapter 3, where Paul lays out one of the most remarkable prayers in all of Scripture. At its heart, this message reframes prayer not as a religious duty we check off a list, but as the language of dependence, an honest admission that we cannot be everything we need to be on our own. Paul does not pray for the circumstances of the early church to change. He prays that the people themselves would be changed, strengthened from within, rooted and grounded in love, and filled with the fullness of God. That distinction is everything. It challenges us to examine what we are actually asking for when we pray and whether we are trusting God to do the deeper work inside us rather than simply rearranging the world around us. The spiritual lesson here is both humbling and freeing. God is not searching for impressive, self-sufficient people. He is drawn to those who know they need Him and return to that dependence every single day. If we have been treating prayer as optional or as a last resort, this message calls us back to the urgent and important truth that prayer is the primary way we stay connected to the only source capable of changing us from the inside out.

What does it actually mean to honor God with our lives? Not just on Sunday mornings, but on a Tuesday afternoon when no one is watching and nothing feels particularly spiritual? That is the question at the heart of this message, and the answer might challenge the way we think about faith entirely. Drawing from Ephesians 5:15-17, where Paul urges us to walk circumspectly, redeeming the time because the days are evil, we are confronted with a vision of the Christian life that is far more expansive than a weekly worship service. Excellence, as this message frames it, is not about perfection. It is about faithful, intentional stewardship of every moment God places before us. The way we speak to our families, the honesty we bring to our work, the patience we extend to someone who frustrates us -- these are not small things. They are the very fabric of a life lived in worship. Paul's progression from calling himself the least of the apostles to eventually naming himself the chief of sinners reveals something profound: the closer we walk with God, the more we recognize our need for Him. That is not discouragement. That is the mark of genuine spiritual growth, and it is an invitation for all of us to keep walking.

What does it mean to truly belong? Not just to feel welcomed, but to have full standing, full knowledge, and a permanent home? Ephesians 2:19-22 pulls back the curtain on one of the most profound transformations the gospel produces. We once lived as strangers and foreigners, outsiders with no history, no legal standing, and no claim to anything. But through Christ, we have been made fellow citizens, natives of the same town, related by the blood Jesus shed for us. This message drives home a truth that cuts straight to the heart of what the church actually is: not a building, not a program, not an organization, but a living temple being constructed from the lives of people who were once far from God and are now brought near. The gospel does not merely forgive us. It gives us a home.