Woodland Hills Church Sermons Audio Podcast
Summary: Get the most recent sermon audio and video from Woodland Hills Church. Located in St. Paul, MN, our goal as a church is to tear down walls between social classes, genders, races, and most of all, between people and Jesus Christ. Many other resources (including sermon study guides, presentation slides and our entire sermon archive dating back to 1992) are available for free on our web site. Most sermons are by our Senior Pastor, Greg Boyd.
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- Artist: Greg Boyd
- Copyright: Copyright 2019 Woodland Hills Church
Podcasts:
Psychologists use Rorschach tests to reflect what is inside a person. How we see the world and even how we read Scripture works in a similar way.
Ephesians 3:14-19 is perhaps one of the most powerful descriptions of love we find in Paul’s writings. The love Paul speaks of is so great he is forced to press the boundaries of language to express it.
In the parables of the lost sheep, the lost son, and the lost coin, it becomes clear that it is we who are lost and God who seeks to find us. Those in the position of danger are the ones who presume upon their relationships with God.
In the parable of the lost coin, the woman calls her friends and neighbors together to rejoice with her when she finds it. Greg explores why she was so excited to recover a single coin of seemingly limited value.
In the story of the prodigal son, the focus is typically on the younger son who runs away and squanders his father’s wealth frivolously. His sin is as obvious as his disobedience. The elder son is also relating badly to his father, but in a more subtle way.
Typically, we call the famous parable by Jesus “The Prodigal Son,” but that title is actually a bit misleading. The point of the parable is not the younger (Prodigal) son’s recklessly extravagant living. Instead, it’s about God’s recklessly extravagant love.
We, as Jesus followers, are called to reflect God’s love in this world. We are to live lives of love, as imitators of God. We are to do everything in love and live in the unity of love with other Christ followers.
God's love for us is overwhelming! But that's not the whole story. As we receive God's love we are able to return that love to God and others.
God’s desire for us is that we become all that God created us to be. Life is the process in which we can resist or yield to God’s desire for us. When we yield we sense God’s burning love as warm and liberating. When we resist we experience God’s burning love as pain and wrath.
God’s love is victorious! But perhaps not in the way that you’d expect. We often associate victory with our ability to control or defeat others but God’s victory encourages our freedom rather than squelches it. (We love discovering art that connects us to God in unique ways. Thank you to Dale Johnson for incorporating his art into this weekend's sermon.)
The love of God expressed in Christ on the cross shows the radical lengths God is willing to go to restore us. This healing of our relationship with God takes the form of a covenant, not a contract.
The love of God expressed in Christ on the cross was “foolishness to the Gentiles” and “a stumbling block to the Jews”. God’s love is scandalous to us all in different ways.
It is impossible to fully grasp God's love because it is infinite! The best we can do is humbly recognize our limitations in this way and give ourselves over to the overwhelming love that God extends to us.
In the story of the Prodigal Son, the son leaves home and experiences intensely that something is missing. Eventually he comes to his senses and goes home to his father. Greg connected this desire that the son felt to the German word sehnsucht which is a powerful form of longing that we all feel at times in our lives.
For our Good Friday service, Greg looked at the life and death of Jesus using three different Marys. Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene.
