Northwest Church of Christ Sermons

The Praying Family

As we continue our FaithPath series, this week we spent our worship time focusing on prayer. Often we think there is a special formula for prayer. But the truth is that prayer is any time and any way we come into God's presence and bring God's will and our will closer together. For Hezekiah, this meant God changed His will to extend his life. For Peter, that meant him changing his will to go to the Gentiles as God desired. We need richer and deeper tools to fully engage an active life of prayer.

The Blessing

As we begin our series on the steps of Faith Path, the plan for families to pass faith to the next generation, we begin by focusing on The Blessing. This is the practice, common in the Old Testament, involves parents publicly proclaiming how God has favored their child and a specific desire for the child's future. The five steps of blessing children today include meaningful tough, spoken words, attach high value, picture a specific vision, and make an active commitment. When adults practice these steps in their children's lives it can make all the difference.

The Rejected Child

Jephthah's story doesn't begin at his birth. It begins when Gilead fails to provide for his mother and instead forces her into prostitution. It continues when they publicly reject him because he is a result of their private immorality. When God's people fail to know God's word and fail to provide for the weak and poor among them, bad things are always around the corner. 

Jephthah's Vow

This two week study on Jephthah's vow in Judges 11 wrestles with one of the more difficult and tragic stories in the Old Testament. On the one hand, 1 Samuel and Hebrews list Jephthah as a hero of faith. But the story is one of tragedy and loss as his daughter is sacrificed for his victories. What can we learn from this? At the very least, we learn that when God's people don't know God's Word well, the heroes will start to look like villains and villains will begin to look like heroes.

Through the Failure Fog

When we learn from our failures, it's tempting use the logic of Gamaliel that "if it succeeds it's from God and if it fails its from humans." The problem is that over and over in the Bible people see failure as something to overcome and not an indicator of God's plan. Shouldn't we do the same?

Bearing Darkness

This week our summer intern Andrew Cunningham talked about how when we are going through tough times in life and the darkness presses in around us we have a choice. Jesus always chose to push against the darkness by being the light. Now we can choose whether we will be victims and succumb to life's challenges or if we will rise up and defeat darkness. 

Refined by Failure

This week look at the stories of Moses and Gideon and how their fear of failure provided God opportunities to use their fear to grow faith. How does this process actually work and where are you in this process? Listen to find out!

Own Your Failure

If you want to succeed in life, then never blame others or try to excuse yourself when you've messed up. Take responsibility and look for opportunities to grow. In this sermon we saw how Saul was disobedient and then deceitful compared to how differently David was immoral but then took full responsibility for his sin. One lost his throne and the other was promised that his throne would stand forever. How will you respond when you fail?

Worthy of the Crowd

If you go back to the battle field where David slew Goliath, you can zoom out and see Israel's army go out every day for forty days yelling "Strong and Courageous" as they cowered before the giant. Finally David showed up and rejected the voice of fear and chose the voice of faith. In the gospels, when Peter courageously stepped out of the boat toward Jesus, eleven other Apostles sat there and watched. Today, a great crowd of heroes watches us to see if we will stay in the battle lines or in the boat or if we will follow their lead into the arena of faith (over fear). Are we worthy of that crowd?

Hope-Filled Last Hours

Bill talks about how Christians have hope, even in the face of death. We can know that death holds no power over Christians because we have confidence that our salvation means our suffering doesn't matter because it's short term and death doesn't bother us because we transition to eternal life.