Arbor Church

Guest speaker Mike Howerton continues the series with a reminder that God is with us in our tests… and that He will bring us through them, just as He did for Shadrach, Meshach, and Abendego in the fiery furnace.

If you’ve ever failed a test, you’ll relate to this message about The Rich Young Ruler and his encounter with Jesus. Tests reveal the contents of our heart, and in this case, there was more love for wealth than for Jesus. Listen and imagine what your response might’ve been.

Our new sermon series looks at people in the Bible who were tested, starting with Jesus himself – a man who endured a trial directly from the enemy himself. What can we learn from how Jesus handled his trials, and from the shapes and patterns they took in His life?

Jesus looked at him and said, “You are Simon the son of John. You shall be called Cephas” (which means Peter.) – John 1:42. But Simon’s name change wasn’t so simple; like ours, his story is messy, full of ups and downs and slips back to his old identity, ready to defend Jesus to the death one day and denying him the next. Scott outlines the four basic phases he went through (and we go through) as Jesus defines who we are.

In Saul’s story, we see a name change become a LIFE change. This story speaks so much hope to those of us who feel we’re too far gone for God to love us or have a purpose for. If He could do it for Saul, He can do it for us.

Just like Jacob, we struggle to surrender our future and identity to God. In this message, Pastor Garrett shares how to rest, not wrestle, in who God says we are.

In our new series, we’re studying some people in Scripture who were so wholly transformed by God that that He commemorated the occasion by giving them new names. Abram (or, as he’s now more commonly known, Abraham) was the first of these, a man of faith whose new identity as a father of nations must have seemed, at first, a cruel joke…

Most of us don’t think of ourselves as greedy people, but we all struggle with it to some degree – and perhaps more than we realize. What exactly is greed? Why is it wrong? And how in the world can we undo it?

We’ve all heard the saying “Pride comes before the fall.” Perhaps that’s why the scriptures have so much to say about pride… because God doesn’t want us to experience the pain associated with falling. This week Garrett walks us through a story Jesus told that highlights how spiritual pride can get in the way of us experiencing the fullness of life that God intends for us.

If you were in the church scene in the 90’s, you can’t have missed the WWJD bracelets everyone was wearing – What Would Jesus Do?. In our new series, we’re turning that question on its head: What would Jesus undo? And this week, it’s that spiritual meh, the “enough Jesus to get me by” doldrums we’ve all walked through at one time or another. Jake shares one simple thing you can do to undo spiritual indifference in your life.