Jon Taylor

Message Monday 7/25/16 – God At Work In Wisdom: Time Over Time

Jon Taylor – Lead Pastor

The average life span for someone living in the US is 78 and 3/4 years. That’s approximately 28,744 days, 689,856 hours, and 41,391,360 minutes. That’s a lot of living! But how are you living? What do you do with the time you’ve been given? How are you using the days God has given you?

In Job 14:5 we read, “A person’s days are determined; you have decreed the number of his months and have set limits he cannot exceed.” God has set a time limit on everyone’s life and your time is running out! What are you doing with they years, months, hours and minutes you’ve been given?  (more…)

Message Monday 7/18/16 – God At Work In Wisdom: Musical Chairs

Jon Taylor – Lead Pastor

The book of Proverbs is painful sometimes in it’s clarity and ability to be brutally honest and in-your-face. Take this verse: “How long will you who are simple love your simple ways? How long will mockers delight in mockery and fools hate knowledge?” (1:22 NIV) It’s pretty clear how Solomon felt about the simple, the fool, and the mocker. So why is it that so many of us can find ourselves spending so much time in the chair of the simple, or the fool, or the mocker?

It is possible for us to spend so much time in one (or more) of these chairs that we won’t be able to get out of them! Here’s what happens when we decide we aren’t going to listen to wisdom. (more…)

Message Monday 4/25/16 – God at Work Through our Work Relationships

Jon Taylor – Lead Pastor

We’ve been talking about how our jobs become purposeful when we apply God’s Kingdom values to our work – whatever it is. That includes letting God work through our relationships at work, too. One of the challenges for us as followers of Jesus is to be different from the rest of the world in our relationships. Thankfully, there are some simple (though not necessarily easy) guidelines for us in Scripture on how we are to be different.  (more…)

Message Monday 1/25/16 – Financial Freedom: Decision

Jon Taylor – Lead Pastor

We all make hundreds of decisions everyday. What time to get up, what to wear, what to eat, what route to drive, what to listen to, what to purchase… Most of them are minor decisions, but we also make some big decisions each day. Will I treat others the way I want to be treated? Will I allow my pride and selfish desires to guide my thoughts and actions? Will I submit my will to God’s will?  (more…)

Message Monday 1/4/16 – Finding Financial Freedom: Attitude

Jon Taylor – Lead Pastor

Financial guru Dave Ramsey says there are only three things you can do with money: spend it, save it, or give it. Most people who have financial struggles, worry, stress and anxiety most often have a problem with the first of those – how they spend their money. And, they don’t do enough of the second and third items, saving and giving.

Unfortunately, most Americans, Christians included, are very poor money managers. They don’t have a plan of how to spend their money and they don’t know where they’re spending their money, and they live paycheck to paycheck as a result.  (more…)

Message Monday 11/09/15 – The Sacraments – Confession

Jon Taylor – Lead Pastor

Oh, the games we play in our own hearts and minds. We think we can sin and get away with it. Or that God might not have seen that one. Or at least it wasn’t as bad as someone else’s sin. Or we just can’t admit that we sin.

We need to learn the discipline of acknowledging our sins and confessing them to God and to a trusted friend. To learn to say like the psalmist in Psalm 41:4 – “O Lord, have mercy on me; heal me, for I have sinned against you.”

Our big idea for this week was this: confession is sharing your deepest weaknesses and failures with God and others you trust, so that you may enter God’s grace and mercy and experience His ready forgiveness and healing.

God convicts us of sin through His Word, through the Holy Spirit, and through other people. Witness David when confronted by Nathan in 2 Samuel 12. When confronted with his sin, he has the only appropriate response for any of us: “I have sinned against the Lord.”

When we confess sin, we are back in right relationship with God, and we can deal with the physical and relational consequences that we experience with unconfessed sin.

I want to challenge you and encourage you to confess sin to God and to a trusted friend so you can experience forgiveness, healing, mercy, grace and cleansing.

(See Psalm 51; Psalm 32:5; James 5:16; Proverbs 28:13; 1 John 1:9)

Message Monday 07/27/15 – Kenya Update: Good News For The Poor

Chuck Foreman – Teaching Pastor

When Jesus began his ministry, he got his personal mission statement from a passage in Isaiah which was written about him centuries earlier.

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”  (Isaiah 61:1-2; Luke 4:16-21) (more…)

Message Monday 07/05/15 – Freedom

Jon Taylor – Lead Pastor

I hope you had a good time this last weekend celebrating our nation’s independence and freedom. I’m so thankful for the blessings and freedoms we enjoy in the US. There is something deep inside all of us that longs for freedom and to live unencumbered lives. Freedom was also a big part of the writings of the apostle Paul, but he wrote about spiritual freedom.

In Galatians 5:1 he writes, “It is for freedom that Christ sets us free.” What are we free from, and what are we free to do?  (more…)