Built Together - Pt. 1
This Sunday, Pastor Jake kicked off a new series exploring how we can participate in the church God is building. It is primary to remember that God is the true builder. Our role is to recognize that, and then humbly submit to His plan, and cooperate with the work He wants to do. The actual church is the people of God, not a building. Therefore, it's vital that we continue to recognize this and grow into who God is calling us to be as individuals, as a local church, and as participants in the Church in Knoxville and beyond.
Built Together - Pt. 2: Our Heart
This week we explored how important it is as the body of Christ to have our hearts aligned with the Lord and each other. The primary way we can grow in this is to be a worshipping community. We are called to worship God sacrificially with our whole heart for who He really is. The bi-product of this kind of worship produces renewal in our lives individually, and unites us in community centered around the purposes of Jesus and a growing love for the family of God.
Built Together - Pt. 3: Our Nature
This week we explored several key aspects of how the Bible describes the church community. We need to understand our nature as the church and live out this truth. It gives us clear direction on how to live in relation to our Father in heaven, and with one another. We are an interconnected body, a building that needs the structure and support of constant gathering, a family that gives us a place of love and relationship, a flock that receives care, nurture, and support from one another and ultimately from the Good Shepherd.
Built Together - Pt. 4: Our Joy
Building a community of believers is an endeavor that can feel intimidating at first glance. There is some difficulty that can come when people are doing life together. However, John 15 tells us that there is great joy when we love each other well. As we are moving towards our new physical building, let us also work to build a community that enjoys the gifts of diversity, love, and perseverance, working to outdo one another in showing honor.
Built Together - Pt. 5: Our Healing
In this week’s sermon, we spent time reflecting on the healing that comes when we live in awareness of the other members of the body of Christ and choose to cooperate with the work Jesus is doing to restore his body. In Romans 12:12-18 Paul gives us a very practical application for how we can love well through our contributions, hospitality, and actively sharing in the lives of others. Let’s purpose to live in full awareness of the body of Christ, and love each other well.
Built Together - Pt. 6: Built up in Love
In this week’s message, we heard from our good friend Mark, as he unpacked the vital importance of having a healthy, biblical view of the Church. Often, we can have subtle, broken thinking that skews how we view the church and our role within it. One of our primary issues is how individualistic we have become in our reading of scripture and our understanding of our relationship with one another in the church. May we all have our mindset renewed to understand the crucial role of being in a community of believers who are being built up in love.
Built Together - Pt. 7: Spiritual Gifts
This week we begin a new section in our series as we continue learning how to operate in love to build up the Body of Christ. We will spend the next several weeks exploring the spiritual gifts. Let’s respond as Paul encourages us in his 1st letter to the Corinthian church, not to be ignorant of these gifts, but open to the Spirit of God and how he chooses to equip us so that we may walk in His Power, motivated by His Love, in order to build up and encourage others!
Built Together - Pt. 8: Spiritual Gifts Continued
This week we are continuing our exploration of the Spiritual Gifts as we work through Romans 12 and 1st Corinthians 12. We pray you are encouraged and the whole body is built up, as you discover, use, and grow in the gifts that the Holy Spirit so graciously imparts into our lives.
Built Together - Pt. 9: Spiritual Gifts 3
This week we finished up our exploration of the spiritual gifts by focusing on the gift of speaking in tongues and interpretation of tongues. While often a controversial topic, the scripture encourages us to seek this gift and gives clear direction on how to handle it in a healthy way that encourages and builds us up individually and corporately. May we always remember that God himself is the gift. Therefore we grow in Him as we cultivate a relationship with the Holy Spirit, we walk in love with one another, and we eagerly desire and pursue the spiritual gifts for the purpose of building up the church.
Built Together - Pt. 10: Time and talent
As humans, we are born with a finite amount of time and individual gifts and talents. It is important for us to identify our gifts and talents and also to steward them well. This week, by looking at the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000, we learned about the importance of rest, tending opportunities to love well, looking to Jesus for solutions, and participating in the miracle that God is doing in and around us. We may feel inadequate, but he doesn’t measure us by how much we have; we are measured by how we use it. If we take our talents to Him, he is the great multiplier, and he can do things that we cannot even ask or imagine.
Built Together - Pt. 11: Thanksgiving and worship
Today Pastor Jonathan teaches us about thanksgiving and worship. We take a fresh look at Psalm 100 and we see that every act of worship and thanksgiving is a response to the God who first loved us. He always initiates and we respond.
Built Together - Pt. 12: Treasure
This Sunday we returned to our Built Together series and focused on using our Treasure to build up the church. There is a key mindset shift that Jesus invites us into in Luke 12, calling us to move from striving to stewarding. The Lord is our generous provider, and we can learn to trust Him for provision and lean on Him to help us use all that is in our care well.
Built Together - Pt. 13: Built on the Rock
This week Jonathan Allen spoke about the familiar parable of the houses built on the sand and on the rock. He discussed the three characteristics of the wise man: coming to Jesus, hearing from Jesus, and doing what he says. As Christians, we should be making all decisions by going through all three steps in this process, but too often, we neglect one or more of these crucial pieces. As a church body, we want to build our house on a strong foundation, so when the inevitable floods of life come, we can be a safe space for our community to take shelter.
Built Together - Pt. 14: Presence
This Sunday we discussed the importance of God's presence in our church. Jesus' primary message to the disciples in John chapters 14-17 was that they learn to abide in him, being rooted in a loving, healthy relationship with God. This is such a vital part of a healthy, mature church body, that we must rely upon the presence of God. This will produce healthy fruit in the life of the church, and empower us to reproduce the life of Jesus in others.
Built Together - Pt. 15: Fellowship
Fellowship is a common word in the church world. We normally use it to describe the fun and easy meals we enjoy together after service or a Wednesday evening hangout, but what does real fellowship actually look like? When we are really sharing our lives with other believers in the body, we need to be open to the difficult and challenging times that sometimes will occur. Luckily, we have a God who promises us the help we need to love others well which leads us to the blessings that come when we live in true fellowship with one another.
Built Together - Pt. 16: Discipleship
As followers of Jesus, discipleship should be a part of our everyday life. When Jesus first called Andrew and Peter, he gave them three simple instructions that still apply to us today: follow, change, and mission. It can be tempting to choose one or two of these instructions to live out, but without all three, we are missing out on the full life that we are promised in Him. As individual believers and as a church body, may we be actively choosing to follow him, allowing him to change us, and staying on mission with him.
Built Together - Pt. 17: Mission
As we wrapped up our series this week, we spent some time reflecting on how important it is for the church to live on mission with Jesus. In the book of Acts, we have many wonderful examples of people being present and intentional to minister to others, attentive and responsive to the Holy Spirit’s prompting, and willingly facing their fears and life’s challenges to bring the hope of Jesus to a world in need. May we learn from their examples and embrace a lifestyle of living on mission!
