Cutlerville East Christian Reformed Church
Episodes
584 episodes
Turning Points in Experiencing God
Life has turning points, including a life of experiencing God. As God calls you into relationship and to join him in his work, there are at least two major turning points where you could miss experiencing God working through you: a crisis of fa...
Pentecost: The Bride’s Graduation
This time of year, many families are focused on graduations. Graduation is the end of one type of General Fund Offerings and Percent of Budget 5/12 5/5 4/28 4/21 Last 4 Wks. $4,647 72% $2,328 36% $15,117 236% $3,249 51% $25,341 99% education bu...
Experiencing God in Trust and Obedience
If we want God’s best, we must sometimes go through the furnace of testing until we fully display God’s intended design in our life. Perhaps no one understood this better than Abraham. In this story, the heat was turned up! Here we see a God wh...
The Church and Preaching
Preaching is important. In fact, the Heidelberg Catechism reminds us that it is one of the “keys of the kingdom.” It opens the kingdom by proclaiming the Gospel message so people might accept by faith a relationship with God through Jesus Chris...
God’s Covenant: The Next Generation
We’ve been working our way through some of the stories in the book of Genesis, and we last looked at Abraham’s life of “experiencing God.” Abraham made his mistakes, tried to fulfill covenant his own way, but ultimately trusted God and obeyed h...
The Church and Discipline
Jesus passed the keys of the kingdom on to his Apostles and, ultimately, church leadership. These keys give the church the authority to “open and close the kingdom of heaven (God).” One of the two main ways is through the preaching of the Word,...
Scandal of Grace: Discounted Birthright
We move quickly from the second to the third generation of covenant promise. Isaac serves more as a bridge between Abraham and Jacob, whose life will span most of the rest of Genesis (though his son Joseph is the greater focus of 37-50). If Abr...
Do the Ten Commandments Belong in the 21st Century?
Even some Christians say the Ten Commandments are not for New Testament Christians. We live by grace, not by law. That’s why it surprises some people, if they read the Sermon on the Mount carefully and correctly, to hear Jesus say: Yes, absolut...
Scandal of Grace: Stolen Blessing
Last week we looked at how God chose Jacob over Isaac’s firstborn son, Esau. Even though it was promised by God while the twins were in Rebekah’s womb, Jacob takes matters into own hands by buying the birthright for a bowl of soup. At this poin...
God Versus Self
In our culture, “self” is the goal of life, the core of life’s meaning, the highest value. Each self becomes its own moral universe, guided by self interest. What could be more alien to the first commandment, to have no other gods? Jesus speaks...
Scandal of Grace: Covenant Promise
Genesis 27:41 - 28:22 We’ve been talking about the Jacob section as a “scandal of grace.” Jacob, the second son, was chosen by God to be the son of blessing, and then blessed by Isaac (despite some shenanigans). So Jacob has been confi...
Living Worship
John 4:19-26; Exodus 20:4-6 The Samaritans of the first century were a product of mixed marriages with foreigners, leaving them half-Jewish (or less). The religion of Samaria had held on to only the Torah proper, the first five b...
The Scandal of Grace: A Tangled Web
As we work our way through Genesis, we've been looking at "the scandal of grace" - that God, out of His grace, sometimes acts in scandalous ways or allows what seem like scandalous things to happen. Thus far we've seen a second son chosen...
The Command of Truth
One of the ways Jesus dealt with the third commandment had to do with oaths. I would guess that's not a major issue in our lives today. Few of us ever have to take an oath in court, although many of us have taken marriage vows. But at the...
Scandal of Grace: Wrestling Match
Can you point to a key event in your life, a seminal moment in which the direction of your life changed for good? Perhaps it was a career decision, meeting your future spouse, coming into a relationship with Jesus Christ. We are goi...
Thanks God It's Sunday!
TGIF, "Thank God It's Friday!" is a popular saying people use to celebrate the end of work's drudgery and look forward to the coming of the weekend, with all of its fun activities. For most, Sunday simply becomes the second day of that we...
Honoring Our Parents
Paul has been talking to the Ephesians about relationships in people’s lives, starting with a marriage relationship and ending with one’s work (slave-master!) relationship. He notes that both are two-sided. In between, he turns to the relations...
Family Ties and Tie-ups
Jacob heads back to Canaan, coming face-to-face with his brother Esau and re-settling in the promised land, part of the covenant promise. Over three chapters about Jacob’s messy family, we can learn some lessons: From Jacob and his family, we c...
Pro-life and Pro-love
By age 16, a child has seen well over 30,000 murders on television or in the movies, and no telling how many as a participant in video games! Have they, have we, become callous to killing? What does it mean in the 21st century: you shall not ki...
The Dreamer
If Abraham’s life was marked by faith (in experiencing God) and Jacob’s by the “scandal of grace” (God’s grace), then Joseph’s story is about dreaming and the realization of those dreams. Joseph’s life seems a living illustration of Romans 8:28...