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Some seasons of life look like a loss. A diagnosis, a broken relationship, a prayer that hasn’t been answered in years. In Acts 7, we meet Stephen, a man chosen to help feed widows who now stands on trial for blasphemy against the temple and the law. Instead of defending himself point by point, he tells the council their own story.God spoke to Abraham in Mesopotamia, far from any temple, and promised a nation to a man with no children. God was with Joseph in a pit and a prison, and used his brothers’ cruelty to save Israel. God met Moses, a fugitive shepherd, in a burning bush and called a patch of desert holy ground. Again and again, it looked like God had lost. Each time, He was at work.Stephen’s words cut the council to the heart, and they stoned him. As he died, he saw Jesus standing at the right hand of God, and he prayed for the men killing him.We can’t keep God inside a building, a set of rules, or one corner of our lives. He is with us in the mess, and He is still in control.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

Sermon Summary:We pick up in Acts 5 with a church that looks nearly perfect. Barnabas lays the money from his field at the apostles’ feet and earns a nickname. Ananias and Sapphira watch, and they want a little of that honor. They sell their land, keep part of the money, and let everyone believe they gave it all.Peter reminds them that the land and the money were theirs the whole time. Nobody required the gift. The trouble was the lie.We see ourselves in this story. We let people think we pray more than we do. We say we’re fine when we’re drowning. Jesus said our hearts follow our treasure, and James invites us to confess to one another so we can be healed. God treated hypocrisy seriously at the very start of the church because what gets set at the beginning runs through everything after it.God also gives us time, and we shouldn’t assume there will always be more of it. So we bring our real selves to him. We can start with one honest sentence. God, this is where I really am.Scripture in this message. Acts 5 and 6, Joshua 7, Leviticus 10, Psalm 32, Matthew 6:21, Luke 12:1, James 5:16, 1 Corinthians 12. Watch the full message, share it with a friend, or join us for a service this Sunday.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

Sermon Summary:Peter and John walk up to the temple at the hour of prayer, and a man who has never taken a step sits at the gate called Beautiful. Peter looks him in the eye, has no silver or gold, and gives what he has in the name of Jesus. The man walks, then jumps, and goes into the place he spent his whole life sitting outside of.Peter and John soon stand before the same council that condemned Jesus. The leaders see their calm and realize these ordinary men have been with Jesus. A life changed by God leaves very little for us to argue about.Then the early church prays. They spend most of the prayer remembering who God is and what he has said, and only then do they ask for boldness. The room shakes, and they speak the word of God boldly.Boldness is behavior born from belief. What we believe decides how we act. It can look like inviting a coworker to church or handing someone a book. God is still active, and we are invited into what he is doing in our generation.Scripture covered in this message is Acts 3:1 through 4:31, with Acts 1:8, Psalm 2, and Psalm 118. Watch the full message, share it with a friend, or join us for a service this Sunday.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

Sermon Summary: Most of us know the feeling of being handed something big before we feel ready. The first followers of Jesus knew it too. They waited in Jerusalem as he told them, and on the day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit came on all 120 of them. Ordinary people began declaring the wonderful works of God in languages they had never learned, and a crowd from every corner of the known world heard it in their own tongue.This week we lingered on that gift of tongues. We saw that it is mostly a way of speaking to God, a prayer language where our spirit reaches him beyond what our minds can put into words. Romans 8 reminds us the Spirit helps us when we don't know what to pray.We also saw how gently the Spirit works. He never forces anyone, and this gift was never meant to rank believers or prove anything. Paul prayed in tongues often in private and kept his public teaching plain and clear.So we can ask. If there is more in our hearts than our words can carry, God welcomes that request, in his time and his way.Scripture referencesActs 2:1-15, 1 Corinthians 12:11, 1 Corinthians 12:31, 1 Corinthians 14:2, 1 Corinthians 14:14, 1 Corinthians 14:18-19, Romans 8:26, Ephesians 4:8, Ephesians 5:18Watch the full message, share it with a friend, and join us for a service this Sunday.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

Sermon Summary:We're starting a new series in the book of Acts, the story of what happened after Jesus left the earth. Acts doesn't read like a theology book or a biography. It reads like history, and it's the only book in the New Testament that doesn't really end. Luke sets the pen down mid-story because the story is still going, and we're part of it.In Acts chapter 1, Jesus gives his followers one instruction before he ascends to heaven. Wait. Wait for the Holy Spirit. Even the risen, glorified Jesus relied on the Spirit's power, and he tells his disciples they'll need that same power to be his witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. We look at what it means to be baptized in the Spirit, why Jesus stayed vague about timing, and the different ways people in Acts end up telling their story, from Peter's bold preaching to a blind man who just keeps saying what he knows. We close with two simple steps for anyone who wants more of that promised power, being a child of God and asking to be filled.Scripture references: Acts 1:1-11, 1 Corinthians 15:6, John 16:7, Luke 11:13, Ephesians 5:18Join us in person or online as we walk through Acts together. Watch, share, or bring a friend next week..URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

Today we paused our regular series to celebrate Move Up Sunday and to talk about the kids and teenagers in our church family. Looking at Mark 10:13 to 16, we saw how Jesus stopped the disciples from turning children away and told the adults in the room that they were the ones who needed to change, not the kids.We walked through four things that make up what the Bible calls childlikeness. Trust, because children receive everything as a gift instead of earning it. Wonder, because kids never get bored with the good things in front of them. Presence, because they live fully in today instead of worrying about tomorrow. And forgiveness, because they know how to let something go and get back to playing.We ended by praying over every child and teenager in the room, asking God to protect their hearts and remind us that a calling from God does not wait until someone grows up.Scripture referenced: Mark 10:13-16, Psalm 63, Psalm 134, Luke 18:9-14, Psalm 95:7-8, 1 Samuel 3, Luke 2:41-47, Jeremiah 1, 1 Timothy 4:12, Acts 2:17.Watch the full message above, and if you'd like to join us in person, we'd love to have you at an upcoming service.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

We spent this week on the fourth core value of our church, knowing our greatness. We started in Ephesians, a letter written to a small group of believers living in the shadow of a massive pagan economy. Paul spends three chapters reminding them who they are before he ever tells them what to do. Then he pulls out an image every Roman would recognize, the victory parade thrown for a conquering general, where captured treasure was handed out to the people. Paul says Jesus did exactly that after the resurrection. He took the spoils of his own victory over sin and death and gave them straight to us, in the form of our gifts. From there we looked at Bezalel, a craftsman filled with God's Spirit to build the tabernacle, and at Jesus himself, who spent eighteen years as a carpenter before he preached a single sermon. We talked about how the church in Corinth ranked gifts by how flashy they looked, and how Paul corrected that by comparing the church to a body, where the hidden parts are often the most essential. We are not spectators. Every one of us carries something the world needs. Scripture references: Ephesians 4:7-11, Psalm 68, Exodus 31:1-6, Mark 6:3, 1 Corinthians 12:4-6, 12:14-21, 1 Peter 4:10

We started this morning in a strange place for a Sunday, an orphanage in Romania in the early 1990s. When Ceausescu's regime fell, workers found thousands of children who had stopped crying because they had learned no one was coming. Psychologists called the pattern they saw in these kids indiscriminate friendliness, kids so starved for touch they would wrap themselves around a stranger's leg for a few seconds of contact. Most of us never lived through anything close to that. But a lot of us carry the same quiet belief. There is not enough love, not enough grace, not enough security, so we grab what we can get and hold on tight.We call that the orphan mindset, and scripture names it too, using the word slave. A slave lives in someone's house but never belongs to the family. From there we walked through Mark 5, the story of Jairus and his dying daughter tangled together with the story of a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years. She reached out and touched the tassel on Jesus' cloak, believing the healing promised in Malachi was woven right into it. Jesus stopped everything to find her, not to shame her, but to call her Daughter, the only time in the New Testament he uses that word for a woman. Then he walked into a dead girl's room and said two words that meant get up, honey.Both stories point the same direction. Wealth couldn't buy Jairus a single minute. Poverty couldn't disqualify the woman from being healed. Uncleanness and death, the two most contaminating things in that culture, both got overpowered by what was in Jesus instead of the other way around. Paul says the same thing in Romans 8, that we were not given a spirit of slavery back to fear, but a spirit of adoption. We looked at how that plays out practically, in our emotions, in how we treat people, in how we handle being wrong. The invitation this week is simple. Stop sneaking around God hoping he won't notice your mess, and let him call you what he already calls you.Scripture referenced: Mark 5:21-34, Psalm 23:1, Malachi 4:2, Romans 8:15Watch the full message, share it with someone who needs it, or join us in person for the rest of the Pursuit series.

We thrive through relationships with others as we show up authentically, with kindness and honor. That is one of our core values, and this week we dug into why something we were built for can feel so hard.We started with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who ran an underground seminary in Nazi Germany and later wrote about what he called the wish dream, the fantasy version of community we carry in our heads. He warned that if we love that fantasy more than the real, flawed people in front of us, we will end up destroying the very community we wanted.From there we walked through First John, a letter written into the wreckage of a church split. John keeps pointing back to one command, love one another, and traces contempt and grudges all the way back to Cain and Abel. Jesus does the same thing in Matthew 5, saying that anger and contempt live in the same family as murder.We looked closely at 1 John 3:17, where the Greek word for our gut, our internal organs, is splagchnon. John uses it to talk about where compassion actually lives, or gets shut off. He is saying love is not just a head belief, it has to move into the deepest part of us and then out into our hands and feet.We also leaned on C.S. Lewis, who said that protecting our heart from love does not keep it safe, it just locks it in a casket where it slowly hardens. And we talked honestly about the difference between forgiveness and enabling harm. You can release bitterness toward someone while still setting firm boundaries to protect yourself and your family.The hope underneath all of it is this: we are not called to love people in our own strength. We are already fully known and fully loved by God, and once that truth reaches our gut, love has somewhere to flow from.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

We opened a new six-week series called Pursuit, and right away we drew a distinction between a value and a pursuit. A value can sit framed in a lobby and never touch your life. A pursuit means you are running after something, even when you are stumbling.The pursuit we started with is this one: we treasure God's presence. And treasure is a big word. We looked at Jesus' parable in Matthew 13, where a man finds something buried in a field and sells absolutely everything he owns just to buy that patch of ground. That is what treasuring looks like. You trade it all, and you do it with a smile.We walked through three ways God's presence shows up in scripture. His omnipresence means he is in every room, every parking lot, every hospital corridor, holding it all together. His indwelling presence means that when you follow Jesus, the Holy Spirit moves in permanently. And his manifest presence is when God becomes undeniably felt, when your worn-out soul gets a deep, real rest.We spent most of our time in Isaiah 6. The year King Uzziah died was a year of national grief and political fear. And into that specific moment, God showed Isaiah a throne that had never once been empty, covered by a robe whose train filled the entire temple, a record of every kingdom under his authority.Three things happen when Isaiah encounters that presence. He sees God clearly. He sees himself clearly, specifically naming the sharp, anxious, fear-driven words that had been coming out of his mouth. And then the coal from the altar touches the exact thing he confessed, and the guilt is gone.After that, when God asks who will go, Isaiah does not ask for the job description. He just says, send me. That is what an encounter with God's presence does. It reorders everything without argument.We closed with communion and with this invitation: come into the presence, let your problems get right-sized, let the fire touch the broken places, and get ready to be sent.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

We picked up right where we left off last week, with Jesus coming up out of the water at his baptism and heading straight into forty days in the wilderness. No food, no comfort, just the devil waiting for him at the end of it. Where Adam failed in the garden, Jesus stood firm in the desert, and he did it using the same practices we talked about last week: prayer, scripture, fasting.From there we followed him into Galilee, where he started preaching that the Kingdom of God had come near. That phrase shows up over a hundred times across the Gospels, and it meant something specific and dangerous to the people hearing it. These weren't people wondering what happens after they die. They were living under Roman occupation, watching their neighbors get crucified along the road, and waiting for God to actually do something about it. When Jesus said the kingdom was already here, he wasn't offering comfort. He was making a claim that could get him killed.We talked about why Jesus taught in parables and why he called himself the Son of Man instead of announcing himself outright. It kept him one step ahead of Rome while still speaking directly to anyone who knew their Scripture, especially Daniel 7.Then we shifted to something we don't talk about enough. Jesus had a sense of humor. We walked through the plank in the eye, the camel and the gnat, the fish with a coin in its mouth, and Jesus letting his friends think he was a ghost before he strolled out onto the water. We looked at him showing up on a beach after the resurrection, cooking breakfast like nothing had happened, recreating the very moment he first called those same disciples.This is the real Jesus. Not the solemn figure we've flattened him into, but someone playful, subversive, and fully human. The invitation is the same as always: come and know him, not as a concept, but as a friend.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

We spend a lot of time talking about what Jesus did. This week, we slowed down to think about who he was. We started in a familiar place, the acknowledgment that nearly all serious historians agree Jesus existed. But the goal wasn't to argue for that. The goal was to actually meet him. To spend some time with the man who changed the calendar, rearranged the world, and somehow managed to get accused by his critics of being a drunk and a glutton. We looked at what we know about Jesus as a real, historical human being. Where he lived. What he ate. What he probably looked like (shorter than you imagine, darker skin, built like someone who worked with stone and walked about 20,000 miles). We talked about Mary and Joseph, poor and devout and terrified, doing the best they could. We talked about Jesus wandering off at twelve, his siblings thinking he had lost his mind, and his mother holding onto every strange thing she witnessed. But more than biography, we looked at the practices that formed him. Prayer three times a day from before he could talk. Scripture deep enough in his body that he could quote from 24 Old Testament books off the top of his head. A weekly Sabbath that interrupted everything. Hospitality practiced in a home without servants, where you washed feet because that was just what you did. These weren't extras. They were the ground his life grew from. The invitation this week is simple. Read about him. Pray to him. Spend actual time with him. Not just at church, but on an ordinary Tuesday, in the middle of your regular life. You cannot follow someone you don't know. And knowing Jesus starts with letting him be a real person, the kind you can picture, talk to, and walk with.

This week we are stepping into 24/7 prayer, and we are doing it because we believe God moves when His people make space for Him. We looked at 1 Timothy, where Paul is writing to a young pastor named Timothy, who is nervous, young, and leading a church in one of the most spiritually chaotic cities in the ancient world. Paul's first instruction to him is not a leadership strategy. It is a call to wage what he calls "the good warfare," and the way we fight that war is through prayer.We talked about how prayer is a first response, not a last resort. Too often we treat prayer like a backup plan instead of the thing that actually connects us to power. We used the picture of a phone at six percent. We have an infinite power source available to us, but without the cord, there is no connection. Prayer is that cord.We also looked at Psalm 42, the panting deer, and realized that verse is not about peace. It is about desperation, a deer being chased until it is out of breath. We talked about the father in Mark 9 who brought his sick son to Jesus and said, "I believe, help my unbelief." That kind of honesty is exactly where God meets us.We walked through the Lord's Prayer, and we looked at James 5, which tells us that whether we are suffering or cheerful, prayer and praise are our response either way.Our hope this week is that this room stays full of prayer around the clock, and that we would become people who cry out to God not only in crisis, but as a way of life.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

Most of us picked up our picture of the end of the world from somewhere other than the Bible. A novel, a movie, a footnote in a study Bible. This week we went looking for where that picture actually came from, and traced it back to one man in the 1830s, a study Bible in 1909, and a series of paperbacks and movies that turned his idea into common sense. Then we opened the actual passages. In 1 Thessalonians 4, Paul isn't writing an escape plan. He's comforting a grieving church that thought their dead loved ones had missed out on Jesus coming back. The Greek word behind "meet the Lord in the air" describes a welcoming party going out to greet a king and walk him home, not an evacuation. In Matthew 24, Jesus points us to the story of Noah to explain what "taken" and "left" mean, and in that story, the ones taken were taken by judgment. The ones left were safe in the ark. We also looked at why judgment doesn't have to be something we dread. For people who have actually needed things made right, a good God who judges is not a threat. It's the promise that nothing gets left crooked forever. The Bible doesn't end with a warning to get our act together. It ends with an invitation. Maranatha, come Lord Jesus, is what you say about someone you love who is almost home. If you're grieving someone who died before you thought they should, this one is for you. They didn't miss anything. They're not behind. They're ahead of you, and the same God who is bringing them back is the one we're waiting on together.

We closed out this series by asking what we actually believe happens at the end of the story. Most of us grew up with a picture of heaven that never really came from the Bible. Souls floating up to clouds, harps, pearly gates. That picture owes more to Greek philosophy than it does to Scripture. Plato taught that the body is a prison and the goal of life is escaping it. The real hope in the Bible runs the other direction.We walked through Revelation 21 and 22, where John sees a new heaven and a new earth, and the Holy City coming down out of heaven to earth. Not us leaving for somewhere else. God moving in with us, for good. We looked at Isaiah 65, where the picture of eternity is houses being built and lived in, vineyards planted and eaten from, real work that never gets stolen from us again. We looked at 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul describes our future bodies as a seed becomes a plant, the same thing, fully grown and fully realized. And we looked at Romans 8, where all of creation is described not as dying but as groaning like a woman in labor, on its way toward being born into something new.We traced the whole arc of the Bible from a garden in Genesis to a garden city in Revelation. A tent built like a garden, a temple carved like a garden, a man buried and raised in a garden, and finally a whole renewed world grown up into what Eden was always meant to become.The application this week is simple. Gratitude. Thank God for your body, the one you have and the one that is coming. Thank him for the parts of this earth you love. Thank him for the people you have lost, and for the reunion that is coming. Thank him that he is not done with this planet, and he is not done with us.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship