Saints‘ Hill Church Podcast

Hearing His Voice

This last Sunday Andoni gave a teaching on the importance of God’s voice in our lives.

The main goal of the prophetic is to be reminded of who you are. God is always reminding us of who we are so that when the enemy tries to tell us who we’re not, we can identify that quickly and disagree with it. It’s crucial to be able to distinguish God’s voice from ours and from the enemy’s.

God won’t use the strategies of this world to bring about the kingdom in and around you. Only when we know who we are, and who He is for us, will we have the courage to step into the more that He has for us. The enemy will place burdens on you, but God will take what the enemy intended to harm you, and He’ll bless you with it. Then you get to use that testimony as a weapon against the enemy for the rest of your life.

May we fall deeper and deeper into relationship with Him, and in doing so, become increasingly familiar with the voice that gives and sustains life.

Holy Spirit 101

This last Sunday we had the privilege of hearing from Jake Vigil. His teaching took us back to the basics of the Holy Spirit. We learned that the Holy Spirit is a good gift from God that has a purpose. The goal of the Holy Spirit in us is that we would grow in Christlikeness AND move in power. As a church we are on a quest for that radical middle.

The Holy Spirit is a person that reveals a person, not an it.
The Holy Spirit is the giver and sustainer of life.
The Holy Spirit guides us, purifies & convicts us, and empowers us.

We pray that through this teaching you are able to look at your relationship with the Holy Spirit with fresh eyes. Have you quenched the Holy Spirit’s power in your life? Have you taken advantage of the Holy Spirit for your own gain? Our relationship with the Holy Spirit is a gift and God is delighted when we use the gift the way it was intended to be used.

How to Cry Like Jesus

Jesus both wept and commanded resurrection. What sort of vision of life did he have that provided this ability?

This last week Alex gave a teaching on how to cry like Jesus, which begins with getting the same vision for our lives that He had for His. We believe that God is developing in us an ability to do something we haven’t seen much of in the Church: The ability to acknowledge the pain and suffering of this world and yet walk in faith and trust. 

Our goal is to see human suffering the way Jesus saw it, so we can respond to it the way He responded to it.

What is Saints’ Hill?

This last Sunday Alex took some time to explain the why behind Saints’ Hill again. As we move into a new building and a new season in the life of our church, we feel it is always important to go back to the foundation.

Through the overarching narrative of the Scriptures, we see that Jesus made intimacy with God possible for anyone who wants it. The point is that Christians can be a people who have nothing to fear. When we fully embrace our priestly identity, our life changes in three ways, and these three things have shaped this church:

A commitment to God’s Presence, single focus transformation, and church as research & development, and family.

Jesus first came down the hill to get us, so that we could live lives of meeting with Him on the hill. This reality is what has shaped Saints’ Hill as a church. 

 

The King is Here: Resurrection is The Truest Thing

This last Sunday we celebrated Easter together by talking about resurrection! When we look around at the atrophy of life and death’s inevitability we find ourselves asking, is there even truth? Is there anything solid to place the weight of one’s life upon?

Jesus answers this question with His resurrection. Resurrection is truth. 

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Jesus didn’t come just to get you into Heaven, He came to get Heaven into you! So that resurrection would touch whatever you touch. That you would live and work from a place of triumph rather than defeat throughout all of life. When you have Him, and He has you, you will lose your tomb as well. 

Relationships & Sexuality: Same Sex Attraction

This last Sunday Alex gave a teaching on same sex attraction as we continue in our Relationships & Sexuality series. This teaching should serve primarily as a meditation on the role that the Bible plays in your life.

We all have glasses we put on before we read the Bible. The glasses tell you what to allow in and what not to. Our glasses are our hermeneutic. Alex does a deep dive in this teaching of all the different types of hermeneutics out there, and shares a little bit about why he takes a more objectivist approach when it comes to reading & interpreting the Scriptures. Alex’s encouragement to us was not to simply agree with what he thinks, but that we would really examine our hermeneutic. The way we read the Bible affects how we view God and how we understand the gospel, things that are majorly important.

Giving your life to Christ changes your identity, it doesn’t just tweak your beliefs. We are far more concerned with building up sons and daughters who know how to receive love from their Father than good theologians. Find out what He says about you, give yourself over to Him, and watch what happens!

Relationships & Sexuality: Marriage

This last Sunday Alex Rettmann gave a teaching on Christian marriage as covenant, sanctification, and as an image of Christ and the Church.

All the way back in Genesis 15  we see that covenant is this: “I will be to you as I should be even if you are not to me as you should be.” This type of love is only possible when the marriage runs on reverence to Christ, not just chemistry. If you have Christ as your source of love and identity, you are filled up to the degree that you can give your spouse love and respect even when they are not giving it to you.

Marriage exists to make you holy. It strips you of all self protection and lays you bare before your partner so they can join in on your sanctification — to present you even more beautiful before God. Marriage will put demands on you that actually make you more beautiful, more serving, more loving and more self-sacrificing.

Lastly, marriage is to be an image of Christ and the Church. The Bible gives us the principle of Christ as the model of leadership. It is the job of each married couple to figure out how this works itself out in their specific context in a way that the wife feels loved and served like Christ has loved and served the Church, and the husband feels honored and respected. Again, this type of marriage only exists where the husband and the wife submit to each other out of reverence for Christ.

Christian marriage is a beautiful reflection of the love of Christ — the One who loved us not because we were worthy of love, but to make us lovely through His love. If you missed this teaching, you can go back and listen to it on our podcast. See you Sunday!

Relationships & Sexuality: Christians and Sex

As we continue in our Relationships & Sexuality series, we spent time on Sunday talking about Christians and sex. We are living in the success of the Sexual Revolution, but has it been liberating? Are we more free?

In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he makes the argument that freedom is not actually the ability to do whatever you want, but the ability to choose in line with design. This looks like the strategic loss of lesser freedoms for more important freedoms. -- Sexual sin has the ability to master you, so limiting your sexual freedom to the context of God’s design - one man, one woman, in the lifelong covenant of marriage - actually serves your best interest. In a biblical worldview, there is nothing physical that isn’t spiritual. God cares deeply about what we do with our bodies. To paraphrase Paul, your body is a temple for God - you are not your own!

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May He strengthen us to delight in our union with Him, and live in abundance as a result. 

Relationships & Sexuality: Men Women/Brothers Sisters

On Sunday we began a new series on relationships & sexuality and this week we dove into the relationship between men and women. Together, men and women image God in a unique way.

We see that Genesis is a story about design. The way God designed humans tells the truth about how we function best. When we neglect the truth being told by His design, we return to chaos and disorder. The Bible celebrates sexual difference, and if we don’t acknowledge and honor that difference, we fail to receive the fulness of the Imago Dei in our lives.

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Our aim with this series is start the conversation and meditation on human sexuality and relationships. To meditate on the design on God and examine the way we approach Scripture as it relates to this topic. Our prayer for Saints’ Hill is that we would have good relationships, great marriages, and ultimately family for every person who is in Christ.

The King is Here:At Your Word I Will

This last Sunday we had the privilege of hearing from our very own Mariah Fredericks. We read through the story in the beginning of Luke 5 where Jesus asks the disciples to take Him at His word and step into obedience even when it didn’t make sense.

When we say yes to the Lord, our perspective is shifted, our purpose unfolds, and our participation is invited. Jesus is equipping His saints to act on a yes — to respond to Christ’s call on our lives in a new way and follow Him with greater obedience out of love and joy. Participation in the kingdom of God looks like taking Him at His word. We don’t get to partner with fear and lack because if He called us into something, He’s going to provide.

Obedience breaks us open and leads us into further communion with God, with more room for the Holy Spirit to move. Obedience to a word from the Lord breaks the “nets” we are trying to fill ourselves.

As sons and daughters may we journey deeper into the kind of trust that says yes at His Word and not at our human understanding.