08/17/2026
We start a new sermon series this Sunday at our 11AM Worship Gathering in Bowman Hall 133! Here’s a description of the series:
We have domesticated Jesus. We’ve made him into whatever suits our desires. He exists to guarantee my happiness in this life. He makes my life easy. We ask: “Why wouldn’t everyone follow him?” Then we stumble on some things he said. Some really harsh and demanding things. Things that mess with our expectations, that shatter our “this is easy” view of Christianity. We see him systematically turn our definitions and boundaries of faith upside down. We scramble to explain them away. We don’t sit with the shock and the scandal of his words. But there is a cost to the choice of ignoring them. Our Jesus is too tame. Our faith never makes us uncomfortable. What does it look like to be uncomfortable in your season of life? We perhaps deem what is uncomfortable in life as “bad” or “wrong”. In light of Jesus and His commands, we need to get comfortable being uncomfortable. In serving each other, in outreach, in othersmindedness, in valuing others about ourselves, in seeking the outsider, in doing something outside of what we would prefer.
What if the most controversial things Jesus spoke give us exactly what we need to remedy our Americanized caricature of the Savior? What if the demands he made wreck our lives in the best way possible? And what if that life is actually the life God intended for us - and the place where true joy is found? In this series, we are going to explore the most shocking things Jesus spoke and what they reveal about the Kingdom he came to establish. And not as outsiders interested in making Jesus some sort of rebel to admire from a distance. But as men and women who trust that even when his words disturb us, they are for our good. And they actually give us the life we’re all looking for.