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What does it really mean to worship God as He truly is? In this message, we are confronted with one of the most subtle yet dangerous tendencies in our spiritual lives: the objectification of God. Drawing from the story of the golden calf in Exodus 32, we explore how the Israelites were not necessarily trying to abandon God altogether, but rather trying to shrink Him down into something more manageable, more visible, and more controllable. And if we are honest, we do the same thing. We treat God as an accomplice to our ambitions, an echo of our own opinions, a vending machine for our desires, a subject to be studied without ever being experienced, or an emotional support animal who exists to comfort us without ever challenging us. Each of these tendencies strips God of His personhood and reduces Him to a tool we use for our own purposes. The second commandment, which forbids graven images, is not just an ancient rule about statues. It is God's direct call to us across the centuries: do not objectify me. As we reflect on which of these patterns shows up most in our own lives, we are invited into a moment of honest reckoning and genuine repentance, one that can deepen our faith and restore a truer vision of who God actually is.

Worship is more than a song, but the songs we sing are still important. Maybe at some point you've wondered why music is such a big part of what the church does on Sunday mornings. But aside from the fact that music has been used in worship since the earliest periods of the Bible, and aside from the fact that praising with music is repeatedly commanded in scripture, perhaps the most compelling reason for why we sing is that God uses musical worship to form us into who we are meant to be. In this message, Cody explores how worship through music and art shapes our hearts, deepens our relationship with God, and strengthens us to face life's challenges. Whether we're experiencing breakthrough or learning to endure hardship, singing together forms us into people who love God with our whole hearts, souls, and strength.

What if we could sit in on a strategy meeting where the enemy was plotting against our spiritual lives? That is exactly the lens this message invites us to look through. Drawing from Romans 1:18-23, where Paul describes humanity exchanging the glory of the immortal God for mere images, we are walked through seven of the primary ways God reveals himself to us: through Jesus, through Scripture, through nature, through stillness and prayer, through community, through remembrance, and through suffering. The real power of this message comes when we flip the perspective and ask ourselves how an adversary whose entire mission is deception would go about blocking each one of those channels. The answers are uncomfortably familiar. Shortened attention spans, constant noise, isolation disguised as connection, an endless news cycle that breeds anxiety and forgetfulness, and easy escapes from the pain that God sometimes uses to draw us closest to himself. This is not abstract theology. This is a map of our daily lives, and recognizing the terrain may be one of the most practically useful things we can do for our faith.

What does it truly mean to worship God? Most of us associate worship with Sunday mornings, lifted voices, and gathered congregations. But Romans 12:1-2 opens up something far broader and more demanding. Paul's call to present our bodies as living sacrifices reframes worship as a whole-life response to the mercy of God. Before Paul ever tells us what to do, he spends eleven chapters showing us what God has done. That sequence is not accidental. The mercy of God is not the reward for our worship; it is the very foundation and motivation of it. We worship not to earn grace, but because grace has already been given. When we grasp the weight of what Christ accomplished for us, the only fitting response is to offer everything we have and everything we are back to Him.

Throughout Scripture, God repeatedly reveals His heart for people who find themselves on the outside—the overlooked, the rejected, the broken, and those who simply don’t feel like they fit. Through the stories of Hagar, Rahab, and the Samaritan woman, we see God refusing to be confined by the fences people build around Him: He sees an Egyptian slave girl in the wilderness and allows her to name Him; He rescues a Canaanite prostitute and writes her into the lineage of Jesus; and He reveals His identity as Messiah to a Samaritan woman whose life had been marked by shame and broken relationships. These stories remind outsiders that there is a place for them at Christ’s table and that their otherness may even give them a unique perspective on the tenderness of God. But they also challenge insiders to examine the boundaries they have created around who God can love, speak through, and use. When God moves beyond the borders we have drawn, perhaps the problem isn’t with God—perhaps the problem is with our fence. The God of heaven and earth is God on both sides of the fence.

What happens when the gospel crashes into the places we least expect it to go? In Acts 8, we find one of the most surprising missionary stories in all of Scripture -- the good news of Jesus reaching Samaria, a region defined by centuries of deep-seated hatred and mutual distrust with the Jewish people. This is not a tidy, predictable story. It is full of unexpected characters, unlikely moments, and outcomes that left eyewitnesses stunned. The central lesson woven through the entire account is that the gospel is not limited to people we like, cultures that are easy to reach, or territories that seem spiritually fertile. God's reach is wider than our assumptions, and his story is always longer than the moment we happen to witness. We are invited to reconsider who we have quietly written off as beyond redemption -- and to ask ourselves whether God might actually be at work in those very people right now, long before we ever show up.

What does it truly cost for the gospel to reach us, and are we taking that cost for granted? This message pulls us into the story of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, whose faithfulness under the most brutal of circumstances helped ignite the spread of the early church. Drawing from Acts 7 and 8, we are reminded that the gospel is a free gift, but it arrived at our doorstep carried by generations of men and women who suffered, bled, and died to pass it on. Stephen's final words, spoken from his knees while rocks were being hurled at him, echo the very words of Christ from the cross, and they challenge us to examine the depth of our own devotion. Three powerful lessons emerge from his story: the gospel came to us with a cost, our pain can reveal our purpose, and the gospel can thrive even in the most unfavorable conditions. If we have grown comfortable with the good news, this is an invitation to recover a sense of awe and gratitude for what it took to get here.

Today we are launching into the final block of our yearlong series on the practices: "PRACTICE: OFFER;" with our first practice of the block being "missions." Colby starts us off by revisiting the framework Jesus gave the original disciples when he told them, "You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth." What does it truly mean to be a witness? Acts 1:8 gives us one of the most powerful and far-reaching commissions ever spoken, and it turns out it belongs not just to the original disciples but to every one of us. This message takes us on a journey in four directions, beginning with a look back at how the gospel actually reached us. Someone prayed. Someone spoke. Someone lived faithfully in front of us. That chain of ordinary people empowered by the Holy Spirit stretches back two thousand years, and we are the living proof that it works. As we reflect on who carried the gospel to us, gratitude becomes the natural response, and that gratitude fuels our desire to carry it forward. The central insight here is both simple and stunning: the gospel does not advance through sophisticated strategies or institutional power, but through ordinary believers who are willing to be witnesses right where they are.

In “Wisdom for the Wind,” Brock explores what the Bible can teach us about navigating the disruptive circumstances—or “storms”—that inevitably enter our lives. By comparing Jonah’s storm with the storm Jesus calms in Mark 4, the message argues that storms can have very different sources and therefore require different responses: some are connected to our own disobedience and may be used by God to call us toward repentance and surrender; some are simply the collateral damage of other people’s choices; and some may arise precisely while we are walking faithfully and should be met with spiritual resistance rather than self-condemnation. Because we rarely know the source of someone else’s storm, the sermon urges humility, compassion, prayer, and a refusal to judge what others are going through. Ultimately, however the storm began, the central hope is that God is sovereign enough to use every kind of storm for our good—even taking what the enemy intends for evil and turning it into a display of His power and grace.

What if communion and community are not two separate religious activities, but two sides of the same coin? Hebrews 10 draws a striking line between the blood of Christ and the body of Christ, revealing that one always leads to the other. When we gather around the table, we are not just remembering a sacrifice -- we are being reminded that the sacrifice created a family. We were saved out of something, yes, but we were also saved into something: a kingdom, a people, a body. Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 12 press this point home, reminding us that we are individually members of a body that only functions when all its parts are present and engaged. That realization changes the way we think about showing up for one another. It is not optional. It is not an add-on to personal faith. It is part of what it means to belong to Christ.

Most of us are in possession of a handful of family recipes that have been passed down to us. While having the recipe might not give us the skills to make a sweet potato casserole just as good as our great aunt did, having the recipe is still a precious gift. Family recipes, after all, are a form of condensed wisdom—rendering down countless hours of trial and error and hard-earned lessons into a few words. Christian Community requires several things to work as it was intended to. In this message, Brock draws upon his 25 years of ministry to lay out a simple recipe for a Christian community that lasts. He argues that genuine spiritual community requires Christ at its center, a culture of honest repentance, loving accountability, and the mutual practice of seeing and being seen. Each ingredient builds upon the others, forming a practical and theologically grounded framework for what the church is called to be together.

This first teaching on the practice of community explores what it means for the church to collectively be the body of Christ in the world. He argues that in Christ's physical absence, the church is commissioned and empowered by the Holy Spirit to continue the work Jesus did during his earthly ministry. Drawing on Paul's treatment of communion in 1 Corinthians 10, the sermon presents a multi-layered understanding of the bread as representing Christ's historical body, our participation in that body through communion, and the church as Christ's living body in the world. Brock challenges the congregation to think about communion not in terms of fragmentation but multiplication, just as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fish to feed thousands. The sermon then turns to the blood of Christ as the singular bond that unites the church, arguing that shared opinions, values, and politics are secondary to the two things that truly bind believers together: their sin and Christ's blood.

What if the ancient practice of Sabbath is less about following a rule and more about being set free from one? This sermon dives deep into the biblical roots of Sabbath, tracing it from the creation account in Genesis all the way through the giving of the law at Mount Sinai. The central passage, Exodus 20, reveals that the Sabbath commandment was never just a personal spiritual discipline. It extended to servants, foreigners, and even livestock, making it one of the most radically equalizing laws in the ancient world. The profound insight here is that God was essentially telling Israel: do not become a new Egypt. Do not recreate the system of exploitation and endless labor that you were rescued from. When we understand Sabbath through that lens, it stops being a quaint religious observance and starts looking like a countercultural declaration that people matter more than productivity. For us today, that raises a powerful and uncomfortable question: in our habits of consumption and constant busyness, are we inadvertently recreating the very systems that God designed Sabbath to dismantle? This is a message that challenges us to examine not just how we rest, but what our restlessness reveals about what we truly believe.

This message confronts a truth many of us live with daily: we're exhausted. Not just physically tired, but emotionally, spiritually, and relationally drained. The culprit? We've been betrayed by the myth of balance. We've structured our lives like pie charts, dividing ourselves into compartments for work, family, exercise, finances, friendships, hobbies, mental health, diet, rest, and religion. We believe health means keeping all these pieces in perfect equilibrium, serving ten different bosses simultaneously. But here's the soul-crushing reality: when we invest more in one area, another inevitably shrinks. More time at the gym means less time with family. Extra work hours to pay off debt means fewer moments with friends or at church. This pursuit of balance becomes a never-ending cycle where one boss is always disappointed, one area always neglected. We lay our heads on pillows at night, cataloging our failures rather than celebrating the gift of another day. Jesus offers something radically different. His words don't call us to balance but to allegiance. Seek first the kingdom. Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow. Jesus lived with beautiful simplicity, asking one question each morning: 'Father, what do you have for me to do today?' What if our rest isn't found in perfectly balanced lives but in undivided hearts devoted to one Father, one purpose, one King?