Woodland Hills Church

This week we explore vulnerability, and how we all tend to use the serpent's tools of hiding and idolatrous performance to protect ourselves from judgment and shame. We learn that Vulnerability is the only onramp to real connection with others, and is also the key to enabling us to receive our life and fullness from God alone.

We tend to break the world in to sacred and secular, but in reality this is a false dichotomy. No matter where Jesus was or what relationship he was in He was fully present as a walking talking embodiment of the Kingdom of God. Instead of walking around with hungry hearts using others in an attempt to fill up our need for security, significance, and worth, we are called to mimic Christ in all our relationships by being filled by our relationship with the Father and letting that overflow to those around us.

For all of the events that take place in our lives from day to day, month to month, and year to year, it's important to take time to reflect, review, and ask God where He was working within these events and what He is doing through them. In the final message of 2017, Greg talks about the discipline of reviewing, and reflects on how God was working through Woodland Hills Church this past year.

For most of us the Christmas story is a religious story that has become predictable over the years. But to its 1st century audience the Christmas story was anything but religious and predictable. In this Christmas Eve sermon Greg shares, how the Christmas story was irreligious and unexpected to its original audience and how if we look at the story with fresh eyes we will see a God that pursues us relentlessly at all cost, meeting us right where we are.

As we continue our Christmas series, "Do you See What I See: Looking at How to See Christmas Through God's Eyes," we focus on the shepherds. As with most of Luke's Gospel, being centered on Jesus' interactions with the marginalized (including the shepherds as a key part of the birth story) is no accident. In Jesus' day the shepherds as a people group were one of the more despised, untrusted, unclean, & judged people in society. In this message we learn how to stop automatically categorizing who's in and who's out based on superficial judgements of worth, and how to recognize the marginalized peoples in our own society and what God might have to say through them.

Christmas is a time of year where we claim "Peace on Earth" and "Good-will toward humanity." But do we really mean that nice-sounding sentiment? Even more so, do we really understand the story that undergirds this time of year, in the first place? In our new Christmas series, "Do You See What I See," we explore Christmas as it was in the 1st Century: on the margins.

In today's final sermon in the "Overcome" series, Greg discusses the last critically important key to overcoming temptation: Community.

In this segment of the Overcome series we continue exploring the nature of temptation from a spiritual warfare perspective. Satan's primary weapon he uses against us is deception, therefore as followers of Jesus our primary defense is to saturate ourselves in the truth revealed in the crucified Christ about who God is, who we are, and what our relationship to others is to be. In this message Greg looks at each of the pieces of armor of God that Paul lays out in Ephesians 6.Extra downloads from this messageOur Identity in ChristWielding the Sword of the Spirit 

We all struggle with temptation, and it begins in our mind. But how do we resist our own thoughts? In the second message of our "Overcome" series, Greg shows us how to see our enemy and understand his strategies, and then unpacks how to overcome them.

We kick off our new "Overcome" sermon series with a talk about temptation and the core principle to overcoming it: analyzing our thoughts around a temptation and then taking those thoughts captive in Christ.