This week, we learn from Jesus’ Parable of the Weeds that the world is God’s field. And he is the master gardener who tends for and cares for it as he sees fit. Our job is to be faithful sowers of good seed in our world. Ours is not to judge good fruit from bad, but to trust that God will judge and separate the good from the bad in his way.  

Sometimes life and faith are complicated. The writer of Ecclesiastes embraces this complexity by stating that God is in the moments we understand and the moments we don’t. The things we love and things we hate. In this new season, we are going to focus on living in the grey of dialectic tension. Today we start with the book ends of life:  a time to be born and a time to die. And we will see that God is with us from the very first moments of life to

Amidst the travel log of Paul’s third missionary journey found in the later part of the Book of Acts, Luke tells a fascinating story about Paul and a young man named Eutychus. It’s a story that connects deeply with our church’s calling today. A story that reminds us that Cascades does not exist for the sake of its members alone, but to be a people who are sent out to be part of whatever God is doing in the places where we have been planted.  

In Ephesus, the Gospel of Jesus took root and peoples lives began to change. People began abandoning their worship of Artemis, a local deity who controlled them. And when people’s lives changed, industries changed, the Artemis silver shrine manufacturing trade suffered, causing a riot.   

After Corinth, the Apostle Paul moved on to Asia Minor where he stayed in the bustling metropolis of Ephesus for nearly two years. There he found folks who worshiped many things but the living God. When he told them about Jesus Christ, both Jews and Greeks believed in him, received the Holy Spirit, and were dramatically changed from the inside out.  

When the Apostle Paul left Athens, he was humbled intellectually and theologically by a group of philosophers who challenged his argument for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He was so discouraged that he shook the dust off his feet and moved on down the road to Corinth. While there, he realized that people wouldn’t believe because of his persuasiveness, but because of the power of God. There is a very important lesson for us to learn here as well, particularly

This week, we see how in Acts 17 the Apostle Paul took the Good News of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles in Athens. God opened a door for him to share his new “ideas” with the intellectuals of the Areopagus. Some people laughed.  Some disbelieved. Some asked questions. And a few believed. The truth of this shows us that our job is faithfulness, not successfulness. Though Paul was not as successful as he had hoped, he did exactly what God had called him

The Book of Acts The Gospel of Luke tells the story of Jesus’ life, ministry, death, and resurrection. The Book of Acts continues that story as the Church was birthed and how Jesus’ ministry continued on through his disciples under the power of the Holy Spirit. This summer, we will be focusing on Acts as we learn how God uses ordinary people like us to do His perfect and holy will. So please join us as we hear from a variety of guest preac

What would you do if Jesus gave you the opportunity to do over one of your worst life mistakes? What would you do differently? How might you pick up the pieces and try again? That is exactly what happens in our scripture story when the resurrected Jesus meets Peter on the beach and re-commissions him to fishing for people and not fish.  

What would be so hard to believe that you could not just take other’s word for it? During the same week of Jesus’ resurrection from the grave one of his disciples, Thomas (where we get Doubting Thomas) just could not believe that Jesus had truly risen from the dead. Jesus meets him right where he was at and provides the proof that leads Thomas to say, “My Lord and My God.”