All Saints Church

Going Home

The Christmas story is about being homeless, in exile, rejected, and marginalized. We have sentimentalized and sanitized the Christmas story: Baby Jesus, furry animals, shining star. That is not the story. The story is quite brutal. It tells how God, in Christ, lost his home so we could be home with Him.
Read Isaiah 35:1-10

The Spirit Of Christmas

The spirit of Christmas is so much more than how we experience it today. Jesus isn’t just human, he isn’t just divine. He is both: God and man. That means he isn’t just a prophet or sage to tell you how to find God. He is God come to find you.
 
Christianity is a religion of grace and mercy. It deals with the selfishness, ambition, and sin in our own heart and lovingly makes us aware of it. It brings us to repentance and confession and gives us hope for a life that is now and a life that is to come. This is a faith for everybody. This is the spirit of Christmas
Read Isaiah 11:1-10

Light In The Darkness

This is a very famous passage in the book Isaiah. This really gives us a powerful understanding of the meaning of Christmas from the perspective of the first Testament. Tim Keller says it like this, ‘this is telling us that Christmas means an unexpected, ultimate light through the God-man which can only be received by grace.’
This passage tells us a couple things about the mystery of God in Christmas. I say mystery, because there is so much underlying the Christmas story that we don’t see, haven’t heard, or quite frankly, ignore. We see the wrapping paper and the bow. This event, the arrival of the light into the darkness was startling, mind-blowing, and quite literally took the world by surprise.
Read: Isaiah 9:1-7

Worship

You can’t say to Jesus come in as my savior, stay out as my Lord. He is both. Crown him or kill him. In Luke 19:28-40 the people treated Jesus like a King. This passage goes after the heart, because it tells us how to have an encounter with Jesus as it explains what Jesus came to do. Jesus can’t change your life and transform your life if you don’t regard him as King of your life.
It’s important to understand what the Bible says about Jesus the Messiah. It shows that he is a human hope. The idea of Messianic hero that comes back to save everyone and everything is the stories all humans love to read over and over again.
Read: Luke 19:28-40

Communion

The heart is an organ that cannot be worked directly, it is worked indirectly through the muscles in your legs, arms, etc. This is why exercise is good for you. The same is true spiritually, the heart, interior person, is worked indirectly through spiritual exercises (bible study, prayer, etc). One of the most profound, yet often ignored, spiritual exercises is the Lord’s supper. It’s one of the two sacraments that the protestant church has observed historically. The other is baptism.
 
We are going to look at Luke 22:14-20 and ask the question, how does the exercise of communion allow us to grow spiritually?
Read Luke 22:14-20

Generosity

We are looking at the disciplines: reading scripture, prayer, meaning in life, and today we are looking at generosity. When the bible talks about coming into relationship with Jesus, it changes your relationship with money. Part of the experience of a relationship with Christ is what you do with your money.
 
One of the glaring things about this passage is how the only wealth that is permanent is God’s Kingdom. All other wealth is temporary. A wise investor puts it all in the Kingdom of God.
 
Our time, gifts, money, and resources are spent toward things that will last. This is what is logical according to Jesus. However, we struggle with living this out. Let’s look at a wealth that sets us free from our enslavement to money.
Read: Luke 12:13-21, 32-34

Prayer

As a follower of Christ, a question that is asked frequently, "how do I cultivate my spiritual life?" We read scripture; we can see our work as an aspect of your calling. We should also pray.
A lot of us, when we hear the word “prayer,” come to all different kinds of conclusions about what it is. When we think about prayer it is really a deep look into our deepest desires, longings, and aspirations. Those things that get at the core of what we want in life. Let's take a look at how to cultivate and shape those desires through prayer.
Read: Luke 11:1-13

Being Persuasive Without Persuasion

Jesus gives us the tools and power that is available to us to live this life with poise and joy. And we all know, this isn’t an easy world to live in. We have resources to help us live in this world.
Jesus sends his followers into the world; Christ followers are sent people (John 20:21). When Jesus calls people, he sends them into the world to serve others; just like he did. This is a resource for us that helps us live in the world. We can be persuasive without persuasion. It’s the understanding that helping others flourish is life giving for the other, as much as it is for us.
Read: Luke 5:4-25

The Truth Of Scripture

This is a familiar passage of scripture, we read the Devil confronting Jesus and running through temptations of need, wealth, and power. Jesus deals with this through the Word of God. We are going to look at dealing with the trials, temptations, and difficulties of life using the Scriptures.
 
What disciplines are necessary to grow in our relationship with Jesus? There is an enemy of our soul that wants to make us ineffective, weak, and vulnerable. There are tools and power available to us to live this life with poise and joy.
 
We are going to learn the complexity of evil and the strategies of evil. Finally, we will learn to defeat evil using the truth of the scriptures.
Read: Luke 4:1-13

Power And Glory Forever

We now come to the phrase, “for yours is the kingdom, power, and glory, forever and ever...amen.” This phrase doesn’t sound like a prayer, it sounds more like a statement of what is and is to come. There are a lot of things we are asking for in the Lord’s prayer, “daily bread, deliverance from evil…” at the end, we just rest in God. We enjoy God. Not asking for anything, just resting in everything we need.
Read: Psalm 27:1-14