Sermon text: Matthew 18:15-22

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So this week has been an interesting week. I believe that God changes us. And when I say that - I don't just mean that one day we are doing drugs, drinking beer by the gallons, lying, cheating, stealing, worshiping movie stars, our wallets . . . and everything else . . . and then we accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior . . . and bam, life is perfect. We stop all of that and now sit in our houses for hours reading the Bible, praying and sipping decaffeinated coffee.

No, when I say that I believe that God changes us . . . I mean that God never stops changing us. I really mean this. You should know what God is working on inside of you right now. No one is there. We don't figure it all out at some point. I don't care if you are at the beginning of your spiritual journey or the end . . . God is still trying to change you. To mold you more and more into who he created you to be.

Sermon text: Ephesians 4:25-32 & James 1:19-21

When I was in high school I had a dirt bike that I used to ride around our horse farm. It couldn't be licensed for the road, but it was great. I would just ride around the farm and try to jump things and run through the creek. Well one evening the motorcycle was not running well so myself and some friends pulled it down the street behind the three-wheeler to a friend's house. We worked on it for a couple hours, got it back going, and then decided after dark, to ride it back to the farm. I rode the three-wheeler and went directly back to the farm which was less than a mile from my friend's house. One of my friends rode the motorcycle and instead of going straight back to the farm decided that it would be a good idea to race up and down the road to make sure everything was running fine. That's when things began to go badly.

My friend did not know that down the street was the local chief of police's house. And as anyone that has spent time with motorcycle's knows, there is a very different sound that a dirt bike makes than a regular motorcycle that is licensed to be ridden on the road. And so that night the chief of police was watching television and heard a dirt bike in the neighborhood and called into the police station to report it.

Sermon text: John 16:5-15

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Today we begin 4 weeks dealing with several of the questions that you put in the sermon suggestion box over the past several weeks. There is no way we can get to all of the questions, but where possible I have combined the topics to cover most of them in one of these 4 sermons. The reality is that some of the questions or suggested topics are so large that it would be impossible to address them adequately in 30 minutes, so for the next 4 weeks each sermon will be 3 hours long. Just kidding. We simply won’t be able to get into the deep details of some of the topics, but I keep all the suggestions and hopefully we will use them as a basis for choosing sermon series and Discovery Hour classes in the future.

This week we are going to discuss the Holy Spirit. There were several questions in the suggestion box concerning the Holy Spirit and then Dave Timmerman’s small group stuffed the box full of questions about the Trinity. No big deal, in 30 minutes or so I am going to rehash 2,000 years of discussion.

Sermon text: Ephesian 4:1-16

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October 18, 2009

Today we are wrapping up our sermon series on the church and the vision that God has called Riverside to have. This is really a jumping off point for us to think about our collective identity. What we have been doing is taking the themes that God has given us through his Word and discussing how they apply to what we want to do both in our individual lives and in our church.

We have pointed out three movements: planting seeds or allowing the Holy Spirit to get going in us, developing into mature plants or disciples that follow after Christ, and finally producing fruit or producing life change in ourselves and other people. These are the three movements that make up the Christian’s faith walk and they are the movements that we want to emphasize when we think about what it means to be Riverside.