Busyness Left Unchecked Is a Threat To Your Very Life

As our church gathered to celebrate our two year anniversary, we also paused to consider the future years, and, Lord willing, decades of the ministry of Sovereign Grace Church fo Santa Ana and what it will take to persevere into the future. We’re convinced from Scripture that one of the most important components to perseverance is the ability of the people who comprise the church to regularly rest. And while the kind of rest we’re talking about includes physical rest, it’s much deeper and more profound than mere bodily reprieve. We need to learn to develop habits of regularly resting in the finished work of Christ.

Listen to this to this week’s sermon here.

By Being A Person Who Shows Compassion To People

As we finished up the book of Jonah together, we finally learned what it was that caused Jonah to flee to Tarshish after hearing God’s command to go and prophecy to Nineveh. He suspected God would show them grace. And when God did show them grace, it made Jonah angry enough to die. In this picture lesson, God teaches us something significant about His unchangeableness and something deeply concerning about the contradiction in Jonah’s heart. You and I are prone to living, even unknowingly if we’re not careful, with the same contradiction.

Listen to the message to learn the lesson Jonah failed to learn

Who Would You Least Expect God To Save?

In the third message in our series in Jonah, Jeff Schlieder guided us through the third chapter, where the city of Nineveh unexpectedly repents and turns toward the God of Israel. Like Jonah, we expect those whose lives oppose God to either overcome us and lead us away from God or we often hope, like Jonah, that they would somehow be destroyed or “driven out”. But when the grace of God through Christ is entered into the equation, a third and better way is introduced. Jesus drew the world to Himself without being overcome by the world, thus making the third option of grace possible. We should have a confident hope in God to save even our most unlikely neighbors.

Listen to the message here.

Jonah Didn’t Realize His Need For Grace Until He Hit Rock Bottom - Literally

In our second message in the book of Jonah, we finally met the great fish. But as has already been established, the story isn’t about the fish. At the end of the matter, it’s not even about Jonah. It’s about a great God and His great grace. Jonah 2 should haunt us with a sense of need for the same grace that Jonah was shown. The question that’s posed to you and me: will you listen to it?

Listen to this week’s sermon here.

The Final Book In Our Minor Prophets Series

One particular and minor element of the book of Jonah has been what readers and students have myopically focused on for centuries in the church - the big fish. Everybody knows that Jonah was swallowed by a big fish. But once we realize that the book of Jonah is about so much more than a giant aquatic animal, we avail ourselves to riches from God’s Word that stand to transform how we view nonChristians, how we understand God’s mercy and more. This past Sunday, in the first message from chapter 1, we learned that no matter how undesirable obeying God’s Word is to you, you cannot flee from God’s presence. You can simply live joyfully or miserably in God’s presence.

Listen to the message here.

Christmas In September

In the fourth and final sermon out of the book of Micah, God elevated our attitude toward the lowly by showing us through Micah 5:1-6 that He often works through insignificant people and insignificant circumstances to accomplish His greatest purposes.

The Messiah Was Born In Bethlehem To Remind Sinners That New Life Could Be Born In Our Hearts

We learn this foremost through the fact that Micah prophecies that God’s Messiah would be born in the most unassuming little town. The breadth of applications that this burins to our lives is staggering. Listen to last week’s sermon to elevate your attitude toward how God might work through lowliness in your life.

Listen to the message here.

Do Justice, Love Kindness, Walk Humbly With Your God

Last Sunday, in our third message in the book of Micah, we came across the Bible’s most famous passage regarding “social justice” - Micah 6:8. This verse is used as the basis for service projects, feedings ministries and short-term missions trips around the globe. But it’s important to understand why Micah said these words to the nation of Judah. In Micah chapters 6-7, we discover that in order to have the right motivation to serve the lowly among us, we have to recognize and acknowledge our spiritual lowness; our moral poverty. That realization positions us not as “Saviors” to our neighbors, but humbles us to know that we’re as needy as anybody for God’s grace. Furthermore, when we’ve received God’s grace for our moral poverty, we’re able to do social justice in a way that addresses the needs of the whole person - both physical and spiritual needs.

Listen to last week’s message

God Will Not Allow Oppression of the Lowly To Go Unpunished

Continuing on in our sermon series through the Minor Prophet book of Micah, Jeff Schlieder preached the second message in the series from Micah 3:1-12. Through the book of Micah, God wants to elevate your attitude toward the lowly. In this particular passage, He does this by reminding of the judgment that awaits those who prey on the lowly. While this is a sweet comfort to those under the weight of oppression, it’s also a call to repentance to those who knowingly extract and extort from the poor for their own personal gain.

For anyone who falls in the latter category, which, at the end of the day turns out to be all of us, the remedy is to repent of that sin and turn to Christ, who, though He was rich, yet became poor for our sake.

Listen to the message here.

Our Greatest Need When We Gather Together Is To Have a Genuine Encounter With God

Last Sunday, we had the joy and privilege of hosting Dustin Smetona, pastor at Sovereign Grace Church of Orange. He preached a message from Isaiah 6:1-8 reminding us of the importance of our Sunday meetings together. While Sunday morning worship can seem routine and unremarkable on the outside, we need to remember the profound significance of why it is we gather. Dustin explained four needs that we have that God meets for us through our Sunday morning worship. Whether you’ve been attending church for a week or 30 years, listen to this sermon.

Listen to the message here.

A New Book: Micah

For the past four weeks, we’ve studied the book of Joel. Now, as a church, we turn to the book of Micah in our Minor Prophets series occurring over the course of summer and fall, 2019. Micah teaches us to “elevate our attitude toward the lowly”. This past Sunday, from Micah 2:1-11, we discovered that God is not indifferent to oppression or the poverty it causes, but that He detests it. Furthermore, we learned that oppression doesn’t happen in a vaccuum. Oppression has a cause. That cause has to do first not with our attitude toward the poor, but our attitude toward God.

Listen to the message here.