Listen to the unabridged sermon here: Abide - Crushing the Myths of Self, Comfort, and Speed

In our household, we have two family mottos that get repeated constantly:

1. God is sovereign and good. We need this reminder often because the world is messy, tricky, and difficult.
2. Reality is our friend. (Coined by my wife, Amy.) Because the world is broken, facing reality honestly—rather than living in wishful thinking—is essential.

These two principles frame Jesus’ final words to His disciples in John 15 and 16. Sitting in the Upper Room, the disciples were in a state of emotional shock. Communion was over, Judas had departed, and Jesus had just dropped the news that He was about to be executed.

Knowing their grief, Jesus offered them a foundational truth: to truly live, we must abide in His love. But to abide in Christ, we have to dismantle three common myths that poison our spiritual lives.

What happens when the faith framework you grew up with slowly stops working? In this episode of The Pastor Next Door, I sit down to explore the quiet, unglamorous moments when prayer feels flat, answers no longer satisfy, and emotional certainty fades away.

Listen to the unabridged sermon here: Not Lost, Not Alone

We don’t live in an easy world.

That’s not a particularly inspirational way to open, I know. But it’s where John 14 begins, and it’s where Jesus begins, so it’s where we need to start.

Navigating Faith: Deconstruction and Reconstruction

Exploring the complexities of faith in our modern world.

Welcome back to another season of honest conversations on the Pastor Next Door podcast. This time, we dive deep into the concepts of deconstruction and reconstruction of faith, a journey many find themselves on when faced with challenging beliefs.

Listen to the unabridged sermon here: The Way Down

There’s a scene in The Princess Bride — you know the one — where the pastor stands before the gathered crowd and announces, “Love, true love, is why we are gathered here today.” It’s a great line for a wedding. But it’s also, in its own strange way, the right line for John 13.

Because as we turn to this chapter, we are gathered around something too: love. True love. Except the love we find here isn’t the happy, easy, effortless kind the world likes to sell us. The love we find in John 13 is discomforting. And that discomfort is the whole point.

We tend to measure love by how easy it feels. If the relationship is smooth, we’re “in love.” If it gets hard, something must be wrong. But Scripture tells a different story. The love of Jesus is self-sacrificial. It asks things of us that the world calls shameful. It is not the love of greeting cards. It is the love of a cross.

Listen to the unabridged sermon here: Held

This world often feels like it’s spinning out of control. You look at the news, you look around, and it just feels that way. There’s an old country song by Joe Diffie called “Third Rock from the Sun” that captures it — this sense that we live on a planet hurtling through space, and things are out of control. There’s another song, from Stephen Curtis Chapman, that answers it: God is still the King of the jungle. He’s the Lion of Judah who sits on His throne, and He is still in control.

Listen to the unabridged sermon here: Blind Spots

John 7–9

We’re taking a big swing this week — three chapters at once, John 7, 8, and 9. It’s a lot of ground, but these chapters actually hang together as one connected sermon of their own. John gives us a point, then an illustration. Another point, another illustration. Two claims from Jesus, two stories that show us what those claims mean in real life. And all of it happens against the backdrop of one specific moment: Jesus at the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem.

Listen to the unabridged sermon here: Do You Want What Jesus Gives or Do You Want Jesus?

Some Sundays in a series like this, we get to sit for a long time in just a handful of verses. This week isn’t one of those weeks. John 5 and 6 together run nearly a hundred verses, and rather than crawl through them line by line, we’re going to take a big swing and look at three signs together: a healing at a pool, a feeding on a hillside, and Jesus walking on water in a storm. Each one asks us a question, and by the end, those three questions collapse into one question that might be the most important one we ever answer.

Listen to the unabridged sermon here: Faith My Eyes

This week we pick the story back up in John 4, as Jesus leaves Samaria and returns to his home base in Galilee. He’s just spent two days doing something no self-respecting Jewish teacher was supposed to do — hanging out with Samaritans, crossing every cultural line in the book. And when he finally gets back to Cana, the place where he turned water into wine, he doesn’t exactly get a hero’s welcome.

To listen to the full unabridged audio listen here: Night and Day

A study in John 3:1–21 and John 4:1–42

If you opened your Bible to follow along this week, you may have felt a small wave of panic: 63 verses in one sitting. That’s a big swing for a Sunday morning. But John’s Gospel sometimes demands it. John is telling a story, and every so often he gives us two stories, separated by a bit of material in between, that are actually meant to be read together. Their themes and connections are too good to pass up. This week we have exactly that: two of the most famous encounters in all the Gospels, laid side by side.

To listen to the full unabridged audio listen here: The Zeal that Consumes

John 2:13–25

Here’s the thing everyone notices the first time they read this story carefully: it’s in the wrong place. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus clears the temple courts near the end of his ministry — it’s the flashpoint that gets him killed. In John, it’s right here at the beginning, chapter two, before almost anything else has happened.

So which is it? Did it happen once, twice? Did somebody get the timeline wrong?

To listen to the full unabridged audio listen here: Revelation 15 - Home at Last

We’ve come to the end. Revelation has been a long, good study, and it closes with these three chapters: 20, 21, and 22. If you’ve walked with me through the whole book, this is where it all lands. If you’re just joining us, here’s the short version: everything we’re about to read is symbol and metaphor pointing to real, solid truth. Keep that in mind and you’ll be fine.

To listen to the full unabridged audio listen here: The Presence in Our Midst

We often think of God in grand, eternal, and epic terms. But in the Gospel of John, there is a fascinating shift. We move from the cosmic prologue—where the Word was with God in the beginning —straight down to a dusty riverside in Palestine. God moved into the neighborhood.

As we dive into what commentators call the “Book of Signs” (John 1:19–2:12) , we discover three profound realities about living in the presence of Christ.

Listen to the full unabridged audio here: The God Who Moved into the Neighbhorhood

For those of us who follow Jesus, we navigate a fascinating paradox. On one hand, we believe that the God of the Bible is immanent—that He is actively among us and living within us through His Spirit. We read in John 1 about the reality of a God who literally “moved into the neighborhood.”

Yet, we just as frequently talk about His transcendence. He is the Creator God, utterly beyond our comprehension, overwhelming, and infinite. He is God, and we are not.

This creates a beautiful, tricky tension: We can know God truly, but we will never know Him fully. This shouldn’t surprise us; we experience this with people too. I’ve been married for nearly 30 years, and I still haven’t exhausted the fullness of knowing who my wife, Amy, is. If that’s true of a fellow human being, how much more is it true of a divine being?

The full unabridged audio of the sermon can be found here: The Radical Reality of Adoption

If you were to sit in a seminary class on biblical exegesis, it wouldn’t take long to get swept up in the mechanics of ancient literature. You might map out the opening of the Gospel of John and proudly declare, “Look! A chiastic structure!"—feeling like a theological detective, only to open a commentary and realize scholars have seen it for two thousand years.