Sermon text: Haggai 1:1-11
The book of Haggai sits at a striking crossroads in Israel’s history, and understanding what led to this moment matters. After Solomon’s death, the kingdom split into northern Israel and southern Judah. The northern kingdom fell to the Assyrians around 722 BC, while the southern kingdom held on for roughly another century before Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian forces conquered Judah in multiple invasions between 605 and 587 BC, ultimately destroying Solomon’s temple and carrying the population into 70 years of captivity, just as had been prophesied.
Sermons
Is That Your Final Answer?
Sermon text: Matthew 21:28-32
By this point in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus is deep in a series of tense confrontations with Jewish religious leaders. Just before this passage, they had challenged his authority, and he had turned the question back on them regarding John the Baptist’s authority—they refused to answer, so he refused to answer them. Their religious system, built on rigid tradition and personal profit, was actively blinding them to genuine faith, even as they insisted publicly on their own righteousness.
The Race Before Us
Sermon text: Hebrews 12:1-3
Hebrews 12 opens with “therefore,” and understanding that word requires looking back to chapter 11—commonly known as the Hall of Faith. After defining faith in its opening verses, the chapter catalogs figures like Noah, Abraham, Sarah, and the prophets, each commended for trusting God’s promises before those promises were ever fulfilled. The book of Hebrews itself, written by an unnamed author (despite some older Bible headings attributing it to Paul) to Jewish believers wavering under mounting persecution and tempted to return to Judaism, builds a sustained case for one central idea: Jesus is better—better than the law, better than the priesthood, better than anything Judaism alone could offer.
Lift Them Up
Sermon text: Exodus 17:8-13
This passage recounts a pivotal early battle in Israel’s wilderness journey—only weeks after crossing the Red Sea, the nation faces an attack from the Amalekites at Rephidim, in the southern desert not far from Mount Sinai. The Amalekites, descendants of Esau, were a nomadic desert people who would remain hostile toward Israel for generations, later connected even to Haman in the book of Esther through the title “the Agagite.” Deuteronomy 25 later reveals a particularly despicable detail about their tactics: they attacked from the rear, targeting the weak, elderly, and stragglers trailing behind Israel’s massive procession—a million or so people who had been enslaved brick-makers mere months earlier, now suddenly required to fight as soldiers with virtually no weapons or military experience, against a mobile, camel-riding enemy on their home terrain.
The Gilgal Project
Why we call ourselves The Gilgal Project. Based on passages from several books of the Bible. The name “Gilgal” describes the place where Israel camped immediately after crossing the Jordan River into the promised land, under Joshua’s leadership following Moses’s death. Understanding what happened there reveals seven distinct dimensions that shape what this fellowship is meant to embody.
Humble Instruction
Sermon text: Acts 18:24-28
This passage introduces Apollos, a Jewish man from Alexandria—at the time the second-greatest city in the Roman Empire, renowned for its library, lighthouse, and university. Described as eloquent and mighty in the Scriptures, Apollos would have been trained in the more vivacious, emotionally expressive rhetorical style typical of Alexandria, distinct from the more reserved delivery favored further north in Greece and Rome. That stylistic difference likely explains some of the factionalism Paul later addresses in 1 Corinthians, where believers had begun aligning themselves with favorite teachers—Paul, Apollos, Peter—based on delivery and personality rather than substance, even though all were preaching the same gospel. Paul himself, by contrast, explicitly rejected relying on polished rhetoric, telling the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 that he came to them in weakness and trembling, deliberately avoiding persuasive human wisdom so that their faith would rest on God’s power rather than eloquence.
A Tragedy of Errors
Sermon text: 2 Samuel 6:1-11
Understanding this passage requires backing up to explain how the ark of the covenant ended up away from Jerusalem in the first place. Back in 1 Samuel 4, Israel’s leadership—spiritually compromised at the time—took the ark into battle against the Philistines as a kind of magic talisman rather than out of genuine reverence, and it was captured. What followed was a series of disasters for the Philistines: the idol of their god Dagon collapsed before the ark, their cities were struck with tumors, and eventually they sent the ark back to Israel on a cart pulled by nursing cows, along with golden images of tumors and rats as a guilt offering. When the ark arrived at Beth Shemesh, 50,000 men died after looking inside it, and it was finally relocated to the house of Abinadab, where it remained for decades—now, under David’s reign, finally in territory secure enough to bring it home to Jerusalem.
How Free are We?
This message grew out of a Bible study conversation exploring why God would create humanity knowing some would end up destroyed for disobedience. The core response—that freedom itself is one of God’s great gifts, alongside salvation in Christ—sets up a distinction worth exploring carefully: human freedom versus spiritual freedom, roughly parallel to the distinction between common grace (extended to everyone) and special grace (given specifically to believers).
Keep It Simple
Sermon text: 2 Kings 5:1-19
This account sits during a troubled period in the northern kingdom of Israel—mid-9th century BC, decades after the united kingdom split following Solomon’s reign, with Israel to the north never once having a godly king and now facing regular raids from neighboring Syria (Aram). Against that backdrop, the passage introduces Naaman, commander of Syria’s army—a powerful, respected man who happens to have leprosy, though likely not the severe Hansen’s disease but something closer to a chronic skin condition like psoriasis, serious enough in that culture to carry real stigma. Notably, Scripture attributes his military success directly to the Lord, reflecting a recurring Old Testament pattern where God used foreign nations as instruments of judgment against a disobedient Israel.
There’s So Much More
Sermon text: John 6:26-29
A recent Barna Group study found something notable: for the first time in years, Gen Z (ages 15-30) and millennials are attending church more frequently than older generations—roughly every other week, nearly double their pre-pandemic attendance. Barna attributes this to a rising spiritual openness, a desire for authentic belonging, relational connection, and spiritual mentoring, along with a documented craving for real, in-person community following the isolation of the pandemic years. Interestingly, young men in these generations are now out-attending young women, apparently drawn by a search for structure, purpose, and traditional values in an unstable world.