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?