August 23, 2026
"Joy & Pain" - Dr. Seth Humphries
You finally get the job, the house, the healthy baby, the promotion you prayed for — and somehow you're still exhausted, still grieving, still bracing for the next thing to go wrong. What do you do when the blessing you asked God for shows up wearing the same clothes as your pain? Psalm 126 doesn't pretend those two feelings cancel each other out.
Dr. Seth Humphries opens Psalm 126 — Israel's song of return after 70 years of exile — and refuses to let the celebration erase the trauma underneath it. This message sits in the real tension between what God has done and what still hurts, and names three things you have to do with that tension instead of just pushing through it.
In this message you'll learn:
Why the Bible's picture of a "soul wound" explains how you can love Jesus and still need a therapist
What REM sleep and epigenetic trauma reveal about pain your body remembers long after your mind has moved on
How a broken wrist, a hidden cast, and an impatient teenager became an unlikely picture of what God's discipline actually looks like
The difference between pushing away from God in a hard season and asking what He's trying to correct in it
Why a farmer plants seeds facing downward and in straight rows — and what that has to do with where you put your tears
What a six-year-old's broken toy taught her father about giving your grief somewhere to go
This is for the person who feels guilty celebrating a blessing because of what it cost to get here. For the caregiver counting the days. For anyone who's been told to just be grateful when what you actually need is somewhere honest to put your grief. Your tears aren't wasted — they're seeds, and there's a harvest coming.
📖 Scripture: Psalm 126:1-6
16 Aug 2026
Do You Know Who You Are?
August 16, 2026
"Do You Know Who You Are?" - Pastor Rich Johnson
Before you built your resume. Before you had your best year or your worst one. Before you knew what you believed. Somebody already answered the question you're still asking: do you know who you are?
On a baptism Sunday, Pastor Rich Johnson steps back from the waterline and asks what's actually happening underneath the surface. Reading from John 1, he traces three words that hold the answer together — and what happens when we try to build an identity on just one or two of them.
In this message you'll learn:
What the Greek word "baptizo" actually means — and what pickling a cucumber has to do with your baptism
Why Jesus heard "This is my Son, whom I love" before he preached a single sermon, healed a single person, or performed a single miracle
The story behind two photographs Pastor Rich's father mailed him in college, and the one verse that met him in his doubt
What Henri Nouwen spent a lifetime learning about belovedness, and why achievement and applause couldn't give it to him
Why belief without belovedness turns into performance, belovedness without belonging turns into isolation, and belonging without belief curdles into something else entirely
How an old Negro spiritual sung by enslaved people escaping north carries the same message as the water in this sanctuary today
This is for anyone who has believed all the right things about God and still doesn't feel like they belong to him. It's for anyone still trying to earn a love that was already spoken over them before they could do anything to deserve — or lose — it. Wherever you are in the water, the voice hasn't stopped speaking.
📖 Scripture: John 1:29-34, Galatians 2:20, Romans 6
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9 Aug 2026
Our Christlikeness as an Act of Worship
August 9, 2026
"Our Christlikeness as an Act of Worship" - Pastor Rich Johnson
Obedience. Just reading that word might have made something tighten up inside you. And honestly? That reaction makes complete sense.
For too many of us, obedience has been weaponized. It has been used by legalistic churches, controlling homes, and abusive systems to silence, shrink, and manipulate. It has been collapsed into blind compliance. It has been stripped of love and replaced with fear. And so we have done what any reasonable person would do — we have quietly removed it from our vocabulary, our relationships, and our walk with God.
But what if we've been working with a broken definition this whole time?
In this final message of The Reason Why We Sing series, Pastor Rich Johnson takes us into Psalm 119 — the longest chapter in the entire Bible — and makes a case that obedience is not the fine print underneath worship. It is one of worship's native languages. And when it flows from trust instead of fear, from delight instead of duty, from Christ-focus instead of comparison, and from a praising heart instead of a performing one — it becomes something altogether different from what most of us have experienced.
In this message you'll learn:
Why obedience has been so deeply wounded in our cultural and religious experience — and why that wound deserves to be named honestly
What the Hebrew root word for "precepts" actually means — and why it's the language of a trusted friend, not a soldier falling in line
The difference between practicing scales out of duty and practicing them out of delight — and what that has to do with following Jesus
Why comparison is a shame machine — and how fixing our eyes on Christ is the only thing that actually removes shame
What Thomas à Kempis meant when he wrote: "Obedience from necessity is a burden, but obedience from love is worship"
Whether obedience is a word that fills you with dread, brings up old wounds, or simply feels like something you've drifted away from — this message is an invitation to approach it from a completely different angle. Not as a leash. Not as a chain of command. But as a love language between you and the God who already calls you his beloved.
📖 Scripture: Psalm 119:1-8 | Psalm 19:7-11 | John 14:15 | Galatians 4:19 | Romans 8
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