Woodland Hills Church

This week Greg goes through the covenant God made with king David, and touches on some of the foundational beliefs of Woodland Hills involving finding security only from Jesus instead of human kings, and how God always finds a way to bring beauty out of our sins.

As we continue our Long Story Short series through the lens of covenant and kingdom, in this message we explore the connection between relationship and responsibility in the story of the Isarelites making a golden calf for worship while Moses is on Mt. Sinai. It's all too easy for us to get impatient and lose trust in what we can't see. Grace explores the struggles of the Israelites by reflecting on her own experience in building idols in her personal life.

In the fourth part of our Long Story Short series, Greg zooms in on the calling of Abraham in order to discover the ways in which God's Kingdom is like a mustard seed.

In this third installment of our Long Story Short series we explore what the overall narrative of the Bible is as it relates to our Covenant with God, and the Kingdom ways we're called to live here on earth. Today, we look at the story of the Flood through the lens of the cross finding that there's a new lesson about God's character and God's posture to us when we sin. Greg ends with one practical way we can live out our covenant to God inspired by this passage: by caring for the earth and all it's inhabitants.

In the second part of our Long Story Short series Greg takes a look at what happens when Adam and Eve disobey God by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and what universal lessons we can learn from them about who we were originally designed to be. Life in the Kingdom revolves around trusting God for provision and honoring his prohibition. It's this focus that keeps us secure in our identity and not looking for life elsewhere through judging eyes. We are to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, and him crucified, and this will keep us from judgment of others as well as keep a clear picture of who God is.

Today we started out our new series called Long Story Short, where we will go through the whole bible book by book, looking at the key stories through the lens of Kingdom and Covenant. David started us out at the beginning in Genesis 1 and 2, to explore where the themes of covenant and kingdom show up and what they mean for our identity and intended vocation in the world.

Our guest speaker, Nicole Bullock, focuses on John 5:1-8 and unpacks what it looks like for us to "take up our mats and walk."

In this fifth installment of our Take Heart series, we explore what it means to be encouraged in one solid truth: that God's love for us is unceasing and he is present with us in the midst of incredible brokenness. Discouragement can come when we have a broken picture of God, but we can be encouraged that God always looks like Jesus and Christ crucified. But first, we need to understand the difference between believing something and experiencing something.

In this fourth installment in our Take Heart series we explore what it means to be encouraged in our ability to build skills and competence in the areas God has entrusted to us. Discouragement can come externally from factors outside of our control that can be overwhelming, but it can also come from feelings and patterns of passiveness within that keep us from enacting what God has trusted us to do. 

Today with David, we looked at God's desire for encouragement and what kind of posture we should have in encouragement. He looks closely at the nostalgia of the Israelites when the temple was rebuilt and how it keeps us from seeing the ways God wanted to encourage them in the present rebuilding.