09/02/2026
“More Than God Moments” | Pastor Dustin’s Mid-Week Message (9-2-26):
“Now behold, two of them were traveling that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was seven miles from Jerusalem. And they talked together of all these things which had happened. So it was, while they conversed and reasoned, that Jesus Himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were restrained, so that they did not know Him.” (Luke 24:13-16)
There are some stories in the Bible that are so familiar to us that we can sometimes miss the details that make them so powerful. The story of the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus is one of those stories. What is interesting about this famous story is the combination of two individuals going about their daily lives in light of what has happened and the hidden presence of Jesus.
These two men are traveling. Yes, they are, or were, part of Jesus’ disciples and yes, they have witnessed all the tragic events of His crucifixion and death. But in a sense, you can almost feel that there is a division between what they’re doing now—their “ordinary life,” so to speak—and the events they talked about.
It’s not that they’re not interested in them—indeed, they are talking about them and trying to figure them out—but they never considered for a moment that their current task, their “daily life,” was actually not removed or separate, but right in the middle of the unfolding of Christ’s story.
Indeed, even when Jesus shows up, they don’t recognize Him. They don’t imagine that God is still among them once they’ve removed themselves from the scene. They travel with Him, invite this stranger to stay with them, and still never imagine the Son of God is with them and at the heart of what God is doing.
Only when they break bread together do they finally recognize Him, and He immediately vanishes—leaving them reminiscing about how they should have known.
This story emphasizes the point that I want to talk with you all about today. You see, we too often go about life in the same way as these two on the road to Emmaus. If you ask us about our experience with God, we certainly can tell you about some wonderful things.
We might talk about our earliest memory of church or faith. I can barely remember being told in Sunday School that Jesus was going to return. One Sunday later, a man with long brown hair and a beard stood before the church. I yelled out to him, “It’s about time you showed up, we’ve been waiting!”
Other memories include receiving and reading a storybook Bible, which I loved, first joining a church family regularly when I attended my friend’s Vacation Bible School at his church.
I remember being baptized at age twelve and my preacher at the time telling me, when I came up out of the water, that I’d have to be dunked again because my toes came up the first time and I didn’t want to be missing any toes in heaven. I remember being part of campus ministries in college and becoming Methodist upon marrying my beautiful wife. I can remember, as a middle school teacher thinking about my future, first feeling the nudge toward ministry; my pastor at the time mentoring me; seminary; and then ministry in three churches, including this one.
You no doubt can share memories from your earliest years to now that have to do with your life with God. In fact, I want to encourage you to do that. What’s your earliest memory? How did you grow into or out of church and faith as you grew? How did you get to where you are in your faith?
We need to learn to start thinking of our lives of faith not as isolated incidents, but to see our own stories as evidence of God’s continual presence and working in our lives.
The men on the way to Emmaus could, at least, see the big-ticket, obvious God moments in their lives as a connected story and history. Can we? Yet all of this, the men from Emmaus could have done as well. They were actively talking about their experience with God.
Their issue, again, was not that they didn’t have experiences with God, but that they could not imagine that there was a connection between that and their routine daily experience of traveling down the road.
Jesus, of course, reminded them that God’s presence and activity aren’t limited to the large things or the obviously “spiritual” alone, like the crucifixion. He was just as present with them as they went about their normal business.
This begs the question for us then: How do we connect the “faith” or “God” moments we just thought about with our normal lives?
We need to understand, like the two on Emmaus came to understand, that our life of faith is not something to be siloed. Too often, we think about our faith over here, separate from our life over there. When we go to church or it is “time” to pray, serve, or worship, we turn on our faith switch and see what we’re doing as connected to Jesus. But then, when we go home or to work or return to our weekly routine, that God stuff is “over” for now. It might be something we think about or talk about, but we do it from the outside—like the Emmaus disciples speaking of the thing that had happened.
We need to learn to look at our own lives and histories not as two separate streams: the God/Christian stream and the “everything else” stream, but rather to start seeing how these two have always been combined, because they are and should be.
Going back to my own memories, I can remember how my love of my children’s Bible led me to answer people, when they asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, that I wanted to be a preaching astronaut so I could tell the aliens about God.
I can remember how, after my baptism, I entered middle school and tried to stay true to my faith as I was bullied and as I encountered things that went against what my faith taught was right. Sometimes I did well; other times, I had to repent. But God was there to pick me up.
I can remember how the decision to go to seminary wasn’t done in a vacuum. It required placing our house up for sale and resigning from our teaching jobs before we knew whether we’d have scholarships or jobs waiting on the other side. The house sold after eight months—one month before we had to leave town. My job offer came in a phone call on the last day of school—as last minute as it gets.
And there are the little things, too. An issue I was worried about at work gets taken care of. My God story in the big and little things isn’t so separate after all.
So what about you? How have the events and decisions in your faith life been connected to and interwoven with the “rest” of your life?
Can you describe how the faith you practiced in church, accepted at baptism, and grew in at some milestone actually played out in the normal routine of your daily life and in the places where maybe you and I aren’t accustomed to looking for God?
The disciples on the Road to Emmaus were shocked when Jesus was revealed to have been chatting with them, resting at home with them, and finally eating a meal with them. Jesus had shown Himself to be just as present in their small moments as He was on the cross.
I want to challenge all of us today to start routinely asking ourselves these questions. Don’t think that God stays at church. Don’t think that there is some difference or separation between who you are during “God moments” and who you are all the rest of the time.
We need to start seeing our lives as unfolding stories of God’s intersection with us and our lives. Every story in the Bible is like that. Most don’t focus on a person worshiping at the Temple or in the church. They focus on how the God they worship there is present in and shapes their lives outside of it.
So let’s ask ourselves: Where have I seen God at work in my past? Where might I have missed Him because I was looking for Him only in “spiritual” moments?Where might He be walking with me right now?
What are your answers to those questions today?
Blessings and Peace,
Pastor Dustin
