I want to take a few moments this morning and celebrate what kind of church we are. One of the things that the leaders of NC2 decided up front was that we would not be a church that had to become someone else when we gather together. We decided that we didn’t want to get all dressed up if we didn’t really like getting dressed up. We didn’t think there was anything wrong with getting dressed up, but when you get dressed up because that’s what’s expected – that’s kind of wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

I think it is great to be in a church where we talk about our marriages. It is great to be in a church where you don’t have to hide and pretend that everything is OK in our marriages. The church ought to be a place of healing, openness, and growth in our marriages.

Some of you already have great marriages, and your challenge in this series is to keep working at keeping your marriage great. Some of you are in really mediocre marriages and my hope for you this series is that you will say, “Enough of that. We’re going to have another conversation. I’m going to forgive one more time. We’re going to move towards a vision of marriage that is good.” And for some of you, you are in rocky, painful marriages, and it is my intent in this series that you will find hope for your marriage. Read the rest of this entry »

If somebody were to ask you, “What’s your favorite command in the Bible?” What would you say? A lot of times we think of commands as obligations or burdens or things that I have to do. When I asked myself that question initially, there was a part of me that sort or rebelled inside of me. I don’t naturally like commands that tell me to do something. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been talking about prayer, and today is the last of a four part series and to kind of some it all up. Jesus had some very specific things to say about prayer and they’re different than many of the ways and ideas that we’ve learned about prayer. And we said something pretty offensive upfront about prayer and we’ve been saying it all along and I’ll say it again, “It could be that you’ve been praying wrong, or that you’ve been praying incomplete.

That might be hard to come to grips with and I wouldn’t say it except that the people that were following Jesus, said to him one day, “Jesus, teach us to pray.” And he didn’t say, “you already know how to pray, just pray, just talk to God, you can’t get it wrong. All prayers are the same, all prayers are acceptable.” On the contrary, and we’re going to see specifically today, Jesus said, “Ok, I’ll talk to you about prayer.” Read the rest of this entry »