Woodland Hills Church

This sermon addresses the mystery of God as it relates to how God will overcome evil at the end of time. When it looks like injustice, hate and war are winning the day, how God wins through love is truly mysterious. However, love will win in the end, even though we do not see how and we do not have the ability to ascertain God’s plans. We can trust that there is more to what God is doing than we can directly see at this point.

Greg Boyd begins the new series titled Testify! by helping us see the crucial role that the unseen agents, called angels, play in the biblical story. We are invited to rethink the role that angels play in our story and the story of the world, and to embrace the reality that we live in a spiritual war zone.

God calls us to the way of generosity and Dan Kent shows how this call is much larger than a set of rules for how we use our money. It’s about recognizing the story of the world versus the story of God. To be shaped by the world’s story is to only see what we possess because there is no ultimate victorious ending. But to be shaped by God’s story is to see the grandeur of what God is doing and the culmination of all things, which dwarfs anything that we can store up for ourselves.

Greg calls us into the Jesus way of forgiveness, contrasting it with the way of bitterness. He does this by explaining the parable of the unforgiving servant, as he helps us to see the inherent destructive forces that control our lives when we choose unforgiveness toward those who do us harm.

Cedrick Baker challenges us to walk in the way of integrity, living with our actions aligned with our beliefs. In this way of life our actions are not determined by what fits the situation, but by how our conscience determines what we will choose to do in the moment. 

In this sermon, Dan Kent challenges us to enter into the way of empathy, which he says is crucial to our ability to connect with others by sharing in their feelings. It is a way exemplified by Jesus as he entered into the common human condition so that he might know what we experience from the inside.

God calls us to live in contentment, which comes in two forms. First, there is basic lifestyle contentment, where we are at peace when our basic needs are met and we are not driven to pursue unnecessary things. Second, there is radical contentment, where we are living without anxiety, when we are facing a situation that could cause it. In this sermon, Greg offers us direction in how we can grow in both kinds of contentment.

This first sermon in our Walk the Way series addresses the importance of practicing gratitude and how it impacts our ability to receive God’s salvation. Greg Boyd looks at the story of Jesus healing the ten lepers, and how only one returned to express his gratitude to Jesus, and in doing so received something the other nine did not. 

Our world surrounds us with despair and darkness, and we long for a place of hope. Dan ties this reality into Revelation 8 and 9, where the trumpet judgments bring destruction to the earth. He looks for and finds hope in the midst of the destruction, showing us how we can hold on to hope in the midst of chaos. 

In this sermon, Greg Boyd explains the meaning of the seven trumpet judgments and how they apply to our modern context. Specifically, Greg addresses the image of the seals on believers’ foreheads, demonstrating how God has sealed us, thereby giving us confidence in the character of God to complete the work that he has begun in us.