Woodland Hills Church

Shawna Boren walks us through the difficult images of the opening verses of Revelation 11 and demonstrates how they are connected to the truth that God’s presence protects his people in times of trial and trouble. We can be comforted because no situation that we face can ever displace us from the reach of God’s love. This was true for the early church and it is true for us today.

This passage offers an interpretive challenge to a verse that seems to say that the people of God actually commit violent acts against their enemies. However, when you look beneath the surface of this complex imagery, it actually paints a picture of the way of the cruciform Christ and how the church overcomes through peace.

This sermon explores how God invites and challenges us to take in his word, to the point of internalizing it into the depths of our souls. When we do this, we allow that truth to flow through us to others, specifically those who have not become followers of Jesus.

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.