Gifts and more gifts

This was a bit crazy, but I tried to list all the spiritual gifts that are listed in the four main New Testament passages. Without going into detail yet, and in trying to survey them, my hope was to give us a sense of what God has gifted, what He has deemed that we need, what will benefit the body. Lots of opinions, but hopefully I stayed near the middle of the fence today.

Sermon, August 29

The Goal of Spiritual Gifts

Today we dug into the first few verses of 1 Corinthians 12, and saw how Paul begins to explain spiritual gifts to the Corinthians. It's a good place to start since it seems that Paul is trying to cover (or re-cover) the basics of how spiritual gifts work. Hopefully we will be able to put together all the pieces as we continue through these chapters.

Sermon, August 22

A New Direction

Now that Judges is over, we're going to head on to a new series discussing spiritual gifts. In this message, we tried to establish the historical context of the Church, its mission, and why God gave the Holy Spirit. It's basic stuff, but we needed to make sure that we were on the same page as to why things are the way they are.

Also, this is a little late in getting on the web because we had another church picnic and baptism service on Sunday after church. We had a great time down at the reservoir in Pueblo. Four people got baptized, two kids and two adults. It was really exciting to see these four make public confessions of Christ and their desire to follow Him. Keep them in your prayers, and thank God for His continuing work in people's hearts and lives!

Sermon, August 15

The Worst of Times

Judges is really a book about raw, unbridled sin. The last two stories serve as a cap to show what it means when it says "everyone did what was right in his own eyes." The stories are not pretty, in fact, the second one, if it were turned in to a movie, would no doubt earn an "R" rating. But this is where we have to come to grips with the truth of human depravity. Not that everyone is as bad as they could be, but no one is as good as they should be.

Also, we are considering moving to a paid, premium account on the file sharing server. Right now, if you download the sermons, you have to wait for 60-70 seconds, plus we have heard that occasionally some less-then-appropriate ads have come up. Hopefully soon we can rectify those concerns and make it better for everyone that uses this service.

Sermon, August 8

The Story of Samson

Samson presents some interesting elements in his narrative. By no means did we exhaust the details of his story, and certainly there is a lot more material to work with, but I wanted to show the nature of how Samson fits in to the greater whole of Judges. God can use anyone; Samson with his lusts, Delilah with her deceit. They go through the consequences, but somehow God uses them.

Sermon, August 1