Saints‘ Hill Church Podcast

What is Saints’ Hill?

This is a question we’ve been asking as we’re turning the corner of five years as a church. We feel like God has given us an answer to this question that will mark Saints’ Hill for years to come:

The people of Saints’ Hill will be a house where God lives, a gate between heaven and earth, a Presence-filled, leaking temple whose river refreshes all people.

The greatest gift we can give Newberg is a covering of glory, an ease of access to His Presence that brings life. 

We are asking as a family, that God would give us the ministry of the temple, that He would lead us into whatever pleases Him. 

This last Sunday, Jim Traut shared with us the importance of treasuring God’s word.

The Bible is like a compass that always points us in the right direction. It always points us to what is true. It always points us to Jesus.

Our human experience of life on earth is chaotic and ever changing, but God’s truth never changes. If you want to know what is actually true, you need to learn how to love reading your compass. 

Jim challenged us with four simple things: commit to reading the word, trust and obey, approach the word with humility and tenderness, and make the word of God your treasure.

Are you willing to take God at His word, let Him shape your thinking and transform you by what is true?

We pray that today you receive a fresh new longing for the living, active, powerful word of God!

On Sunday we began our annual vision series. Every year in the fall we take time to revisit and highlight our core values as a church to recenter and direct the year ahead. 

We began in Luke 9 - where we see that the main thing that keeps Jesus followers from walking in the authority and the power they’ve been given is distraction that leads to wrong belief. 

If we are constantly focused on what other people think, comparing ourselves to them, or defining success for ourselves, we will be ineffective in the very places we should be powerful. We are to depend on God for daily strength and live in obedience to His word. 

Distraction will eventually lead you into believing lies about God and about yourself, this is how the enemy renders you ineffective. We believe that as a church we are being called to higher things, to have authority in our identity and power in our lives. This comes when we apply the blood to all of our fears, our thinking, and our desires. 

This last Sunday we were joined by special guest, Teresa Dion from After the Rain Christian Counseling.

 

Teresa shared from her heart about what the ready bride of Christ looks like.

 

Throughout the Scriptures, the Church is referred to as the bride of Christ. Jesus lived a perfect life, died on the cross, was raised from the dead, and gave us the engagement ring of His Holy Spirit so that we would be able to prepare ourselves to become His bride when He returns.

 

Upon His return he will be looking for a holy, pure, undefiled bride. We cannot present ourselves to Him this way if we are in bondage to sin or giving ourselves to other loves. 

 

The ready bride is free! Free from sin, shame, and fear. But we don’t get free in our own strength, it is only by receiving the free gift of righteousness by the grace of God that we become who we were made to be.

This last Sunday Alex Rettmann walked us through Luke chapter 9. We were reminded that the most important question we must answer in this life is Who is Jesus?…

Who do you say God is? And, what do you think He is like?

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These questions are crucial in this day because if we don’t answer them for ourselves the crowds, friends, culture etc will answer it for you. A key to getting the right answer is knowing Christ and does He know you intimately. In our discovery, we are challenged with the simplicity of either Jesus is beautiful or he is ugly or an eye sore. In other words; Jesus is either the One you need or not - Either you lean on Him or you are ashamed of Him

Let’s say no to fear! And, may we be a bold people that daily pick up our crosses and follow Jesus and have lives that speak of His Lordship.

 

Be blessed!

On Sunday Alex taught through the story in Luke 9v10-17 where Jesus feeds the five thousand.

 

In this story Jesus is giving a lesson about who gets used by God and why. What’s so interesting about this passage is that who is asked by Jesus is not who is used by Jesus. The little boy with his loaves and his fish showed us that God uses those who are available, those who really trust that He has something to do through them, that He really can use their weakness for his enduring glory. 

 

If you only bring your energy, your gifts, and your strengths to God, you will never see him do beyond what you have asked, thought, or imagined. 

 

When we bring the little we have, our weakness and our exhaustion, it’s there that he’s able to work…because it’s his strength not our own. 

This last Sunday one of our good friends Kenny Snyder shared with us what it means to pilgrimage with the Lord. We are all on a pilgrimage in this life towards our true self in Christ. It is a journey for the love of Christ. 

 

Pilgrimage teaches us to stay connected to God in every season, so that we grow in dependence on Him. Like the Scriptures say, “whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it” (Luke 17v33). Give God your yes before you know what it is He’s called you to. Know that your pilgrimage will be different from your neighbor’s - we don’t measure ourselves by one another. Remember His promise to you, that He will always be with you. You have everything you need because you have Him.

This last Sunday, one of our Saints’ Hill missionaries, Mariah, took us through Luke 9v1-12 and shared testimonies with us from her time in Barcelona.

 

In this passage of Scripture we get a template for how Christ sends us on mission. Mission should always be initiated by intimacy with God. Just like In Acts 2, we are to urgently wait on the Lord, and go in the power of His Spirit. We are instructed to travel light. God gave us everything we needed when he gave us His authority - to rely on anything else is to dilute the power of God. 

 

When we do these things, not only will people be saved, healed and delivered, but others will become curious about the power of God demonstrated through your life. This is what it means to live on mission with God, whether it’s in a  foreign country or at your place of work, God has prepared in advance good works for you to carry out by the power of His Spirit.

On Sunday, we got to hear from Austin and Breanna Smith on what it means to be unoffendable. 

The reality is there’s no shortage of ways to be offended in life. We live in a world with human beings, so the potential to be offended will always exist. But Jesus has more for us, He is the solution and the one we must turn to if we want to see this cycle of offense end.

How we choose to think when our emotions are agitated by someone else is the key. We can either dwell on it, simmer, and let offense grow, OR stop, look to Jesus, and let Him soften our heart toward that person.

Our feelings of offense must be held up against the cross so that we see how Jesus would respond, and then we ask and believe for the power to respond how He would respond. 

Jesus was able to endure the ultimate offense because he was fully secure in the Father’s love for Him. Devote yourself to understanding how much God loves you, and your identity as His child, and you will build a firm, unoffendable foundation for your life.

This last Sunday we were joined by a guest speaker, Rev. Beau Brumley. Beau picked up where we left off, in Luke 8. 

 

Up until this point in Luke’s account, we’ve seen Jesus demonstrate His power over nature and over the demonic. In Luke 8v40-56 Jesus demonstrates His power over sickness and death by healing the woman who touched the fringe of His garment, and raising Jairus’ daughter from the dead. 

 

Do you believe that Jesus has authority over nature, the demonic, sickness, and even death? Immediately after these stories, we read about Jesus sending out the twelve disciples with that same authority, to do the same things He had been doing. 

 

We can’t avoid this as disciples of Jesus. He showed us how to do the stuff and then told us to go do it. When we exercise the authority that we’ve been given, people encounter God and His glory gets magnified. May we be attentive to His prompting for this reason!