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I've forgotten almost everything about fifth grade. Except one word. One word spoken by someone whose name I can't even remember. And decades later, I'm still living with its effects. Why do words have so much power over us? In James 3, we're warned that our words can bless or curse, heal or destroy, even set entire lives on fire. But James is after something deeper than just watching our mouths. Because the words we speak reveal something about the words we've believed. And that raises a question God has been asking since the beginning: Who told you that?

Who's said, "let me know if you need anything" in the last month? In James 2:14-26, James asks one blunt question: what good is a faith that only talks? He pictures a sister with no coat and no food who gets a blessing (go in peace) and nothing else. Then he writes the line that made Luther nervous: "a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone." Does this contradict the apostle Paul? Is the Bible arguing with itself? James calls two unlikely witnesses: Abraham, the father of a nation, and Rahab, a prostitute of Jericho. He ends with a picture you can feel in your own lungs: faith without action is a body without a breath. You'll wrestle with the gap between what we say and how we live. If that leaves you wondering whether your faith is even alive, there's a gentle word for you too. The breath comes from Jesus, who walked into a locked room full of scared friends and breathed on them. Download this week's group discussion guide.

Nobody likes feeling used. But what happens when we realize we do the same thing to other people... often without even noticing? James 2. Two men walk into a church. One wears a gold ring and a toga bleached brilliant white (with urine, it turns out). The other owns one outfit, and it’s filthy. James asks a simple question: who gets the good seat? In the Roman world, giving the rich man the best seat wasn’t just smart. It was considered the moral thing to do. But James says the judgments we make in 1/10th of a second reveal what we really believe about God, about other people, and about ourselves. This message explores favoritism, status, usefulness, and the strange freedom of discovering that God does not love you because of what you can do for him. Used people use people. But loved people are free to love people. And in the kingdom of Jesus, mercy triumphs over judgment. Download this week's group discussion guide here.

There's a kind of not-knowing-yourself that's harmless, even sweet. And there's a kind that can rip your life apart. James writes to people who say "Jesus is Lord" but whose lives tell a different story. He calls them double-souled. Divided. And the worst part is, they can't see it. They're self-deceived. So how do you find the gaps in your life when you're the last person who can see them? James gives us three telltales: what makes you angry, what comes out of your mouth, and how you treat people who can do nothing for you. And then he puts a mirror in front of us, exposing the gaps between who we think we are and how we actually live. It's frightening. And ultimately freeing. Download this sermon's group discussion guide here.

When something hard happens, your instinct says: I'm being set up. In James 1:12-18, Jesus' own brother, the one who once thought Jesus had lost his mind, takes that suspicion head-on. In this sermon, we walk through what to do when life presses on you, where the pull toward our worst choices actually comes from, and what God has to do with any of it. Along the way, there's a pear tree that the teenage Augustine never stopped thinking about, a fishing rod, why you can crave what you don't even enjoy, and Jesus alone in the wilderness, facing the same question underneath all of it. You'll wrestle with whether God is behind your hardest seasons and what you really believe about His face. You'll also meet a surprising claim at the center of the text: your wanting doesn't get the last word. His choosing does. Download this week's group discussion guide here.

Hardships will come. Choose joy. Easy to say. Terrible advice if you don't understand what James actually means. James isn't telling you to feel happy when your life falls apart. He's saying something far greater: that the very thing you hate might be the thing God is using to make you whole. In this message, we continue our study of the Letter of James — likely the earliest writing in the New Testament. James picks up three themes he'll develop across the entire letter: how you suffer, how you talk, and what your relationship with money says about you. But the one he starts with — the one he thinks everything else depends on — is what hardship is doing to you. So what is it doing to you? And why does James think you should call it joy? If you've ever been in a season of suffering and wondered whether God forgot about you — or worse, whether he even likes you — this message is for you. Download the group sermon discussion guide here.

That tension. James has a word for it: double-souled. And if you don't do something about it, it's going to tear you apart. In this message, we begin our study of what scholars believe to be the earliest New Testament writing: the Letter of James. But this letter has quite an edge to it. His message can be summed up in three words: "You adulterous people." So that needs some explaining. Who exactly is this James? And what could he possibly mean calling me adulterous? If you (like me) have ever found yourself fully devoted to Jesus... and not fully devoted to Jesus... at the same time, this message is for you. Download the group discussion guide for this sermon here.

I spent years studying the Bible, and it almost killed my faith. Turns out you can master every word and still miss the whole point. In Luke 10, an expert in the Scriptures tries to get Jesus to enter into his convoluted debates over the meaning of the text. Instead, Jesus invites him to enter into the Word of God. It's a whole different way of reading the Scriptures as prayer.  It's something Christians down through the ages have called Lectio Divina. It's ancient but has largely been forgotten in our times. Today we are going to (re)learn this ancient way of praying God's Word in the hope that we might encounter the living Jesus in His living Word.

The first time I got a $20 tip, I felt amazing. A year later, anything less felt like an insult. How did I become so ungrateful? Luke 17 tells us. Ten men with leprosy cry out to Jesus. And all ten are healed. But only one comes back to say thank you. And Jesus wants to know: What happened to the other nine? As we follow Jesus’s question and pull on this thread through the Scriptures, we discover that gratitude is not just a life hack. Not just the polite thing to do. It's what happens when you finally see reality clearly: you didn't make yourself, you're not keeping yourself alive right now, and every good thing you have is a gift you did nothing to earn. To say “thank you” is to agree with the way things actually are. And Jesus suggests that just might have something to do with being saved.

The first time I prayed for my enemy, I said the words, but I felt hollow.  In Matthew 5, Jesus dropped the line early Christians quoted more than any other — love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. It's the sentence that made them recognizable in a world that had never seen anything like it. It's also the one we skip. So, we go back to what Jesus was actually quoting and what he means by a word we translate 'perfect' — which turns out to be different than what we originally thought.   Then, we stop talking and try it. 5 minutes. 4 names. 4 words. You may find out your love has edges. That's not failure. That's a road that's torn up, and it's the one He's putting back together.

You can do everything right and still come apart. That's Martha in Luke 10 — busy, resentful, and missing that God is standing in her living room. Most of us aren't falling apart because we're doing something wrong. We're falling apart because we're doing too many things right — and somewhere in all of it we've lost track of why we started. Luke has a word for that. So does a sixth-century pope who ran a collapsing city and still found time to pray. So, it turns out, does the research. This message is about what it takes to stay whole when everything in your life is pulling in a different direction — and why a five minute prayer practice might just be the difference. Then we're going to try it. Five minutes a day for thirty days, starting together at the end of the message.

Which, if you've ever tried to pray, kind of sounds ridiculous. But it's true. You should pray. In this series, we'll look at four prayer practices that will change your life and our world. But before we can go there, we have to make sure we're talking about the same thing. What kind of prayer actually changes us and our world? Three words: Hear. Awe. Behold. We'll sit with the prayer Jesus prayed every morning and every evening, ask what could possibly make a distracted/divided person fully present, and look at how the earliest Christians drew themselves when they prayed.

Someone throws the party of a lifetime. Everyone is invited, then only a few show up — and their excuses are completely reasonable. In Luke 14, Jesus is at a dinner table where everyone's working the room, angling for a better seat. So he tells them about a banquet where the guest list gets thrown out, and the host sends his servant to the streets — then out past the city — until the house is full. The people in the story say, 'Please excuse me, I can't come. They're just busy. A field. A purchase. A wedding. Good things, all of them. This week: what it costs to be reasonably, responsibly occupied — and what it means that the host keeps going further out to find the one who'd never believe there was a seat for them.  If you've been working the room your whole life — this one's for you. If you've been sure you were never on the list — this one's especially for you.

In California, there's a vineyard that pays every worker the same — first hour and last. Jesus told a story like that. It still makes people furious.  In Matthew 20, a landowner hires workers at dawn. Then at noon. On and on, until 5 o'clock, an hour before quitting time. And he pays every one of them the same. The crew that worked twelve hours in the sun is livid. And here's the uncomfortable part: they're not entirely wrong. Something in this story violates every instinct we have about fairness and effort and getting what we 'deserve'.  That's not the flaw of the parable. That's the point of it. If you've been working since dawn and quietly keeping score —this one's for you. If you've been standing around all day wondering why nobody has ever come for you —this one is especially for you.

What do you do with the people who make you feel unsafe? In Luke 10, a religious expert asks Jesus a simple question — 'Who is my neighbor?' — hoping to draw the line somewhere comfortable. Jesus answers with a story so scandalous that we've spent two thousand years softening it: it's the 'first misnamed parable' (Copan). But, to the original audience, "good" and "Samaritan" didn't belong in the same sentence. The hero of the story is the person you were raised to hate.  In this message, we walk the dangerous road between Jerusalem and Jericho, discovering why your brain is wired to see 'not like me' as a threat, and to sit with the question Jesus refuses to let us dodge: not who counts as my neighbor? But what kind of person am I becoming? Along the way — a conversation with a stranger, on a plane, that turned this whole parable inside out.  You've heard this story. You haven't heard it yet.