Pastor Rich reflects on the Holy Spirit's Guidance on our Celebration Weekend to mark 30 years of being a Vineyard Church and 30 years of Rich being our Senior Pastor.
Pastor Rich continues the series "30 Years of Following the Spirit" by examining our call to worship the Lord in Spirit and truth.
Pastor Rich begins our month long series celebrating the church's 30th anniversary as a Vineyard church with a sermon about experiencing the Holy Spirit.
In this message, Pastor Rich reminds us that God sometimes makes us wait. It is often through pain, suffering and waiting that God helps us grow and be transformed. And as we grow, we can find joy in waiting.
The Chilean miners felt joy when they were rescued from the collapsed mine. A young man felt joy when he was adopted and became a part of a family. These stories illustrate how joy should be our natural response to God because of the salvation we find in him. Pastor Rich reminds us in this sermon that a good memory of where we've been is vital in "Finding Joy in God's Salvation".
To finish our Silent Killers series,Pastor Rich discusses the motivations, consequences, and the cure for envy.
Pastor Rich continues his Silent Killers series with a sermon about guilt and how we can deal with it in a spiritually healthy way.
Many people grapple with finding self-worth. In traditional societies, people often find their self-worth from others. In our own culture, many people look inside themselves to find self-worth. Pastor Rich lays out for us how we don’t want to look outward (to others) or inward (within ourselves) to find our self-worth, but we want to look upward to God our Father to find our self-worth in him.
We entrust quite a bit of our well-being to leaders. We trust them with everything from our physical well-being to our financial and even emotional well-being. But what happens when leadership is unhealthy and has a negative or even toxic impact on our lives? In this sermon, Pastor Rich helps us identify dangerous leadership by three types of behavior and leads us all to the Cross of Christ for its remedy-- leaders and the led alike.
1 Timothy chapter 2 has been interpreted for hundreds of years in a way that has prevented women from holding positions of leadership in various religious groups. As a result, countless women have internalized the idea that they are inferior to men and less legitimate as leaders. In this sermon, Pastor Rich biblically refutes the interpretations of this passage that have kept so many women from leading others. He tells women their service in leadership and in ministry are not based on gender but only on a call from God. If you would like more information about women in ministry, including Vineyard's position and past sermons Pastor Rich has preached on the topic, click here: http://www.vineyardcolumbus.org/ministries/women/resources/ .
Pastor Rich kicked off the new sermon series "The Making of a Leader" this week. Over the next several weeks, we will look at 1 Timothy and see how the Apostle Paul advised Timothy to be the leader that God called him to be. This week, in 1 Timothy 1, we learned some practical ways a young leader can start out strong. Find a mentor. Don't quit. Deal with problems. Make the main thing the main thing. And, finally, don't do anything stupid!
Surely, we all want to be whole. We all want to share long, healthy lives with our loved ones. We all want to experience joy and to see the conflict, struggle and pain in our lives wiped away for good. In this sermon, Pastor Rich unpacks the meaning of "Shalom" and its connection to the wholeness the world craves so deeply. He unveils for us the access we all have to finally seeing a world fully alive.
Money affects nearly every aspect of our lives-- our relational, emotional and even physical lives. And when we have more desires or plans than we have money, the effects of the resulting stress can be devastating. Financial stress has been linked with many cases of severe depression and cited as a common reason for divorce. In this sermon, Pastor Rich responds to the financial stress we experience with a message from the Gospel of Matthew. He helps us reframe our relationship with money, our approach to money and our use of money in order to become more financially alive.
Pastor Rich set up our upcoming Fully Alive campaign by reminding us that goal setting is biblical. As our church looks into becoming more Fully Alive during the season of Lent, Pastor Rich encouraged everyone to set goals to become more spiritually alive, more physically alive, more emotionally alive, more relationally alive and more financially alive. He gave some very practical steps in not only setting goals, but accomplishing those goals.
It's easy to grow complacent and settled into the cultural expectations that often confine our choices. But God often calls us outside of those expectations-- regardless of our age, our gender, or our life situation. Pastor Rich challenges us to change our life-guiding question from "What do I want out of life?" to "What does God want out of me?" When we open ourselves to be used by God in spite of what the world expects of us, we can do great things for God.
Research as shown that the most lasting and fulfilling happiness there is doesn't come from buying more things-- it comes from collecting more meaningful experiences. We are beginning to crave a great experience more than we crave the next fashion trend or the coolest gadget. It's no wonder that Jesus Christ left us a Holy Spirit, not just to be passively aware of, but to be deeply experienced. In this sermon, Pastor Rich explains what it looks like to deeply experience or be filled with the Holy Spirit and challenges us to live a Spirit-filled life.