October 4th - Cascades At The Core: GOD CENTERED LIFE!
Is God at the center of your life, or is He just one of the things you've added to it?
Pastor Anthony kicks off the church's annual six-week core-values series with Value #1: a God-centered life. He starts with a thumping washing machine and a bike wheel to make a simple point. A wheel only works when the hub holds the center and every spoke pulls inward. Move something else into the middle, and everything starts to wobble.
From there he works through the difference between a God-centered life and a God-added one. He looks at Matthew 22:37, Proverbs 3:5-6, Colossians 1, John 16:33 and Joshua 1:8, and at the prodigal son in Luke 15. Anthony names the things that quietly take the center: success, money, kids, approval, even politics. He explains how drift happens gradually, like a Camaro with one lug nut per wheel that looks fine until it isn't. The heart of it is the difference between working for God and walking with God, and the reminder that the goal is direction, not perfection.
The episode closes with a panel Q&A on how to check where your center really is. The panel suggests looking at your checkbook, your calendar, your close friends and your spouse, and talks through the difference between shame and conviction. Communion is next Sunday, and Pastor Michael will preach on loving people first before the church returns to Genesis.
Key topics: A God-centered life | Core values series | Idols and drift | Working for God vs. walking with God | Shame vs. conviction | Direction, not perfection
Church of the Cascades | Bend, Oregon | Values series
29 Sept 2026
September 6th - Genesis 21 - In The Wilderness
"You happy?" "No." Two letters that ended a marriage-saving conversation in one word — and started Pastor Anthony's own wilderness story.
Twenty years before this sermon, Anthony quit a growing youth ministry, moved in with his in-laws, and started answering customer service calls, all because his wife told him the truth about how miserable she was. That's the doorway into Genesis 21 — Hagar and Ishmael, cast into the desert with nothing but bread and a skin of water, living out consequences they didn't create.
Three lessons carry the message. Sometimes the wilderness isn't your choice — Hagar didn't pick this, she's wandering inside decisions Abraham and Sarah made years earlier. Sometimes it is your choice, and Anthony doesn't let himself off the hook there either. But even when Hagar reaches the end of what she can do — laying her son under a bush because she can't watch him die — God hears. Not a polished prayer. Just crying. And when she can't see a way forward, God doesn't create a well out of nothing; he opens her eyes to the one that was already there.
The line the whole sermon turns on: you can feel abandoned by people without being abandoned by God. Hagar named him El Roi back in chapter 16 — the God who sees — and Anthony's point is that the same God shows up again in chapter 21, in a different wilderness, because he never left the first time.
Key topics: Wilderness you didn't choose vs. wilderness you did | Why God hears messy, unpolished prayers | Provision that's already there before you see it | El Roi — the God who sees, twice in the same story | Consequences vs. condemnation — grace that doesn't erase what came before
29 Sept 2026
September 13th - Genesis 22 - The Lord Will Provide
Three days walking toward the hardest thing God ever asked a man to do — and provision was already coming up the other side of the mountain.
Twenty-five years after God first promised Abraham a son, and years after Abraham tried to force that promise into being through Hagar, God asks for the one thing that makes no sense to ask for: take Isaac, the promised son, and offer him as a sacrifice. Pastor Jackson walks through Genesis 22 in four movements — no explanation for the request, no hesitation in Abraham's obedience, no reservation in Isaac's willingness to go, and no limitation on what God ultimately provides.
The details do the heavy lifting here. Isaac isn't a helpless child but a grown man in his physical prime, walking up the mountain carrying his own wood, trusting his father because he's watched his father trust God his whole life. Abraham tells his servants "we will come back" — plural — because according to Hebrews 11, he believed God could raise the dead if it came to that. And all the while a ram is already caught in a thicket on the other side of the mountain, provision already in motion before the test even began.
Jackson ties the whole story straight to the cross — the same word for "only begotten son" used here appears only one other place in Scripture, John 3:16 — and lands on Jehovah Jireh, the God who sees what we can't and provides before we ever ask. The conversation after gets unusually personal: Anthony, Aaron, and Michael talk honestly about wilderness seasons nobody chose, numbing out instead of dealing with pain, and what it actually looks like to worship instead of worry when circumstances haven't changed yet.
Key topics: Testing vs. tempting — the difference that matters | Isaac as a willing participant, not a helpless victim | The ram already provided before the climb began | Jehovah Jireh — the Lord who sees and provides | Worship as a heart posture, not just a Sunday activity
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