Mountain Park Church

What are you holding onto for your security and your future? In Mark 14, Mary breaks a jar of pure nard worth a year's wages and pours it out on Jesus. To seek first the kingdom, sometimes we need to let go of the things we are placing our trust in besides Jesus.

What does it mean to seek God’s Kingdom first? To seek for something means to look for it everywhere. To seek God’s kingdom is to look for God’s heart in every area of our life. But what kind of eyes are you looking with? In Matt 6:22 Jesus teaches using a Jewish idiom about healthy eyes and unhealthy eyes to describe two different ways to look at the world around you.

How do you handle Halloween as a follower of Jesus? In John 17 Jesus is praying to the Father and he asks the Father to help us live in the world but not be of the world. But what does it really mean to be in but not of? And equally, what is the difference between having faith in Jesus but not the faith of Jesus? Halloween is a great case study for what it might look like to be in the world but not of the world.

God has a vision for your life. It is a vision not for what you could or should do on your own with your own strength. His vision is to partner with you in His plans to redeem the world. His vision is for us to live deeply connected to Him so that we can carry His kingdom life and goodness to the world around us.

If you grew up in a family that didn’t attend church, communion can be an odd and confusing thing. If you grew up in different streams of the church, communion may have been talked about with different language and emphasis on either being symbolic or on mystical substance. In this message we are unpacking how communion fits within God’s big beautiful vision for humanity through the body and blood of Jesus.

As his torture and death loomed, Jesus gathered his closest friends and followers together for a meal. It was during this meal that Jesus begins to express to them what he most deeply wants them to know. John 14:1 opens with Jesus telling them not to be troubled or afraid and that they can trust him. It is fear that blocks our ability to trust God with our lives. Those fears are rooted in lies that we end up putting our trust in because they are more real to us than anything else. God’s vision for us is to learn to trust him, but to trust him we need to know what he is really like.

How does God engage with the dark and broken reality of the world and it’s people? Does he wait until we fix things up a little, tidy up the rough spots and make ourselves a little more presentable before He enters the picture? The story of scripture paints the picture of a God who isn’t intimidated or afraid to enter into dark and broken places. In Jesus, we see this vision of God’s carried out in scandalous and breath taking ways. Jesus interacted with, touched and spent time with the unclean and defiled of society and they did not make him unclean, he made them clean. That is the story you’ll hear from our friends Scott and Nicole. They are a living testimony that God’s vision for us is a lot bigger and more beautiful and expansive than we could ever imagine.

Often when we talk about vision it is centred around what we are doing, what our church is doing and how it is going to do it. We use big bold statement to talk about what we are doing. This opening to our vision series is different. The Holy Spirit was nudging us with a different starting place—His vision, Jesus’ vision, the vision of the Father for humanity to be deeply connected to him. His vision to live with us in unbroken intimacy and love. In order to get our vision for him right, we need to see his vision for us and the world around us first.

What are you hungry for? What are you chasing after? The whole bible is a unified story that finds it’s climax and purpose in Jesus. Even obscure passages in the Old Testament have deep connection to Jesus, his heart for us and how it is in him that our deepest needs are met.

Many of the Psalms are a retelling of the story of the Israelites, a story that is being passed from one generation to the next of God’s character and presence at work. These stories were meant to be passed along from generation to generation so that people would not forget. What are the stories that you are passing along to your children or grandchildren?