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Them People sermon series.
Jude perfect sermon series.
How To sermon series.
The Art of Neighboring sermon series.
Told sermon series.
The Beauty of Grace sermon series.
Summit sermon series.
We've heard it said that "Jesus is the greatest gift" and that is true! But the gifts that He brings with him: love, hope, joy and peace, are really, really good gifts! But the gift giving doesn't stop with Jesus giving us gifts.
When Jesus is born in our hearts, our lives should be filled with and overflowing with love, hope, joy and peace. Others should receive the gifts Jesus brought to us through us!
You get up early and you run. And run and run and run. It’s exciting at first. Exhilarating. The morning feels majestic. But there comes this moment. Where majesty turns to monotony. Pleasure becomes pain. And a scandalous thought rises up inside of you: Stop.
You don’t dare quit now. In fact, you run harder. There is a name for that moment, that mindset. Runners have a special phrase for it.
The Kick.
Their are prayers that are down right scary to pray. Prayers like, 'Lord break me.' 'Lord use me however you want.'
But God can be trusted when we pray these prayers. God is faithful. He knows what He’s doing. He’s not out to make our lives miserable, or shame us, or enjoy putting us in situations so that we’ll be afraid or embarrassed. He is out to grow us, and push us to become the men and women we were each born to become. He is making us more like Jesus, which is far better than staying where we are.
The disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray in Luke 11.
'Teach Me' is a back to school series that is based from the Lord's Prayer that Jesus taught His disciples.
The Psalms were the iTunes of the Old Testament of the people of God. They were the things that were sung. Today we may sing praise and worship songs that we hear on the radio. Well in those days, they were singing the Psalms.
This Summer 2015 we are going to walk through the Psalms together and see what we can learn about prayer.
A few summertime sermons on prayer and its relationship with our lives.
Impossible Prayers, is our new sermon series where we are challenged to have faith to pray and ask God for what may seem impossible to us (humanly speaking), but is possible with God.
Based on a "Mission Impossible" Theme, we look at crazy, bold, illogical, "impossible" prayers that people have prayed in the Bible.
3rd annual Live Like Josh gathering where we remembered Josh Hernandez, lifted up Jesus, and loved one another. Jesse Hernandez preached from the Bible story about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and the fiery furnace, and talked about the importance of trusting in God.
Believe, was the theme for our Easter celebration in 2015. When faced with the resurrection of Christ, each of us must face the same question. Do you believe?
A 2015 Bara Church sermon series about the 7 sayings from the cross when Jesus was crucified.
People don’t dream of getting a divorce when they grow up. We don’t hope that our families become divided. Of course we don’t.
We want unity.
Being together, or unified, is something that we desire because it’s what God desires, and this is because we’re made in His image and likeness.
Hebrews 12 says that, as believers, we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses (Hebrews 12:1). A lot of times we think we’re doing things on our own. We do things not thinking about people watching us.
But there is an audience that is for us. As we live out our faith, there is an audience in heaven and on earth watching us as we go. Let's give them something to root for.
Joel shares about where we are as a church, and what our hope and vision is for 2015 and beyond.
Pray. Pray continually. When you pray. Pray for us. Pray for your enemies. This is how you pray. Pray for the sick. Knock, seek, ask ... Pray.
Bara Church's mission will always remain to know Christ and make him known. But God has gifted us with some very specific instructions for the year 2015: Pray.
Before the gospel will ever make sense to us, we have to understand the why. And the why is love. John 3:16 says that, “for God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him, shall not perish, but have eternal life.” God loves us. And He has loved us so that we could and would love others. We spent an entire year looking for love throughout the Bible. And it wasn't a hard search. Looking for the love of God isn't hard. Loving others for God is hard. Pastor Joel challenged us all year to pray a simple prayer: “God, please give me one person to love for you today. Amen.” Well, 2014 is coming to a close. But his prayer is that we never stop praying that prayer and that we never get tired of loving people with the love of God!
We know the Christmas story quite well: we’ve followed the exhausted engaged couple as they make a tough trip to Bethlehem only to find no vacancy signs outside of every inn. We've been asked to smell the stink of the stable, study the social status of the shepherds and follow that single star in the sky. We commendably call on retailers to keep Christ in Christmas and we religiously remind people that “Jesus is the reason for the season.” We are clear that Christmas is really about a Savior coming down and not Santa coming to town.
But do we know the reason for the Redeemer? Are we clear on why God sent us Jesus? Why did God give his Son? Love.
The Last Supper was more than a mere meal. It was an experience of incredible intentionality. To describe it as primarily a dinner is to downplay the dramatic display of divine humility. It was a sacred moment between a man and his closest friends, yet included his closest foe too.
The Last Supper can be studied, painted and pondered, but it cannot be forgotten. For it is a forever reminder of a beautiful truth: Jesus loves us and has graciously given us a seat at the table!
The devil loves to see us scared to death and so he gives us fear. And our Father hates to see us live in fear so he gave us Jesus. And because of Jesus and what he did on the cross, we don't have to live in fear. Pastor Joel challenge us from the Word of God to not only face our fears, but to see that because of God's love, we can send them to the grave! Death to Scared: Perfect Love Drives Out Fear is a three part series that focuses on fearless faith of Daniel, Esther and Stephen. Let's stop living scared to death so that we might live lives that bring death to scared.
The devil tries to get us to believe that God is holding out on us, and that His goodness to us is only partial. We sin whenever we fall into the lie that God is not enough.
When we feel tempted to sin, we have the opportunity to get away with murder. As Paul says, we can put to death the misdeeds of the body by God's Holy Spirit.
Be humble! James orders. Submit to God! Stop sinning! James is as forthright as an Old Testament prophet; it is hard to miss his point. Modern readers of James face the same dilemma as the first recipients of this unsettling letter. His words are easy enough to understand, but hard to do. James forces us to look past the knowing of faith and to take a long look at the doing of faith. He asks the tough question, "What kind of love is to be seen in our lives?"
Ta·boo: noun - Conversations or topics that are prohibited or frowned upon by culture.
We're not culture. We are the church. In fact, we are Bara Church. And we hold fast to the words of Paul in Acts 20:27 - "I did not shrink back from preaching to you the whole counsel of God."
So if it's in the Bible, we're gonna preach it. Even if it's painful. Because Bara believes that nothing's too painful to preach.
Life is a journey with many ups and downs. And through it all God is there with us. Every brutal and beautiful mile.
We should be begging God every single day to see things as He does. So many problems we have in life comes from us only seeing things from our perspective.
Sometimes you have to be broken in order for God to see you through.
When we grasp that it is good to be broken by His plan, we learn to stop complaining about His plan, because ultimately we are guaranteed to be brought through His plan.
It's God's kindness that leads to our repentance. He doesn't just relate to us as a distant judge. He's a Father.
Which story are you telling with your life?
Are you leading a life of vain pursuit, that will ultimately end in the grave. Or has the resurrected Savior brought your life new meaning, hope, and a future?
The understanding that God has no ordinary strategy, reflected in the fact that God uses no ordinary situation, points to the truth that God is no ordinary Savior.
Faith, Hope, & Sempiternal Love
