United Church Podcast

The Jesus Revolution | A New Social Reality

Forming deep, meaningful relationships takes time, and it cannot happen if we allow the busyness we adopt and the isolation it causes to win the day. Deep relationships only form when our lives are unhurried and communally grounded.

And it is the desire of your heart. You want to be in a life-giving community. You want deep, lasting friendships. You want to find your people for the years ahead and the moment life ends on this side.

But there's a problem with getting what we want—the pace of our lives has led to our isolation, which leads to incredible loneliness. Researchers realised that Americans were lonelier than ever before the pandemic hit, leading them to conclude that we have an epidemic of loneliness. - Cigna Health Group

Small Group Showcase

Transfiguration Sunday

C.S. Lewis poingantly wrote, in his work Mere Christianity, “I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher ... You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool ... or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.”

― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

 Jesus left us little room to believe He is a mere man, and I believe we want to be confident about Jesus and not unsure. But there is a problem, and it may be so obvious that you overlook it. It’s doubt. Doubt is a subtle, creeping thing. It does not come on all at once.

The Jesus Revolution | Who Are My People? ft. Rev. Matt Adair

We continue in the Book of Acts in our sermon series The Jesus Revolution with guest speaker, Reverend Matt Adair.

In this sermon, Matt explains two gifts that meet us in our confusion and in our guilt that help us to get started or to continue on God's good intercultural/intergenerational road: clarity and grace.

Jesus Revolution | Tongues of Fire

You want to experience the all-encompassing divine presence of God. You do. So do I. How do I know? You could spend your Sunday morning in many other ways, but we are here together—both online and in the room—and experiencing His presence is the primary reason we are here.

Yes, some of us thrive in the community of church. Some of us might be present out of some sense of duty. But underneath all of the other “why’s” is an embedded longing to experience something transcendent. That longing is woven into our souls.

Even if you are a sceptic, I imagine you have wondered what lies beyond what we consider our “rational” world. And if you have ceased to live with wonder, is that any way to live at all?

The Jesus Revolution | Upper Room | Acts 1:12-26

We continue our series through the book of Acts. A few points from this weeks sermon:

Prayer is our great power.

God is forming a family from all peoples, for all peoples.

God’s word is always fulfilled.

Sin makes us run from God when we don’t know grace.

God sees your needs and your motives.

God makes His will known in unmistakable ways.

Jesus Revolution | Ascension

The Kingdom has not yet been fully manifested, and even for those of us who follow Jesus, the tension is real. We live in the tension of believing a better world has begun, but it is not fulfilled. War still rages. Poverty persists. Death is a reality for every living thing, and the wicked seem to keep rolling. 

The problem is we feel the tension of experiencing the Kingdom of God in our lives and communities before it is fully realised in the entire universe. We still see or have unbelief. Sin and brokenness shout to us that God’s will has not found its full expression. 

And how does that leave us feeling? The answer to that question could splinter in a thousand ways, but the word that surfaced for me is angst. It is an angst that makes us look to people, leaders, politics and systems to solve generations-old issues that will only dissolve when God’s Kingdom is fully realised. 

It is an angst that cultivates doubt and fear. It is an angst that quietly cries out in our hearts, “God, if you were real, you would solve this…”

The Jesus Revolution | Deluge | Acts 1:1-5

“Is it real?” That is the question that haunts our faith if we are followers of the way of Jesus. The question surfaces at night when we cannot sleep and stare through the darkness at the ceiling. It is the question that sometimes causes us to pull away, isolate ourselves, or take a hiatus from gathering with the spiritual family of the church. It is also the question we fear most being asked of us by anyone we know who does not practice the way of Jesus. You want it to be real. You want the story of Jesus and the unfolding narrative of God to be true, or there would be no reason for you to gather with a church. You want to believe and act on that belief.