Woodland Hills Church

One need not look very far to see examples of discord, hostility and disunity within humanity and even within creation. Culture wars, political wars, theological wars and military wars abound. What, we might ask, is the source of all this hostility? And, more importantly, what is the source of true peace, true unity, true harmony? Paul tells us in Ephesians that Jesus is the one true peace. Jesus IS our peace and the Holy Spirit is the unifier. A new president or policy or military leader or social activist will not bring peace. Only when people accept the one (Jesus) who IS peace, who IS harmony will true unity come.

We wrapped up our summer God In Us sermon series with a Q&A night on Tuesday, August 30. It was hosted by Greg Boyd, our senior pastor, and Paul Eddy, our teaching pastor. It was a Q&A on the Holy Spirit and spiritual gifts.

Hope is a vital part of life. In this segment of our summer series on the Holy Spirit, Seth explores how the Holy Spirit fuels our hope by giving us a vision of God’s plan for the world and by empowering us to take action towards bringing that plan into reality.

As we continue our summer series on the Holy Spirit, this week Seth explains the role of the Holy Spirit in producing fruit that serves as evidence of a follower’s life in the Kingdom. As a way of understanding the fruits described in Galatians 6, a description and function of the soul is first explored. We use our will not to grit our way into a Jesus looking life, but rather to surrender our life, in order to gain the life the God promises. Our job is to surrender. The Holy Spirit's job is to produce the fruit in us.

In this sermon Greg goes over the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit. After explaining each gift, he addressed why he believes these gifts are still relevant and important for the church today. He ends with an encouragement to zealously seek after all gifts God has for you.

This next sermon in our series, titled God in Us, focused on the meaning, biblical background and practical application of being filled with the Holy Spirit. This phrase has created much controversy in the church today while often creating more division than unity. The evidence in Scripture emphasizes that there is a difference between having the Holy Spirit as a follower of Jesus and the act of being filled with the Spirit, but that this filling of the Spirit looks more like the extravagant love of a married couple than any spiritual test.

This message is the fifth sermon in the series. It lays the foundation for identifying, understanding, and utilizing spiritual gifts.

In this fourth message of the God in Us series we explore what it means that the light of the world has taken up residence in us. Throughout scripture we see the theme of darkness and light battling back and forth. In Genesis we read of the Spirit hovering over the darkness and bringing order to the chaos, light to the darkness. In the gospel of John, Jesus calls himself the light of the world, and promises his followers will have the Holy Spirit in them if he goes away. So what does it mean to have the light of the world living inside us?

God makes amazing promises over the kind of life we can live through the power of the Holy Spirit. This power will flow out of us like a river of living water. But we frequently experience a distance between the kind of full life that God promised and the kind of life we live now, don’t we? So how can the distance of this gap begin to close? Paul tells us, one of the key ways in which we can do this is through the practice of being transformed by the renewing of our mind. The primary place in which The Holy Spirit meets with us is in our minds, and we, through the power of the Spirit, can choose our thoughts, we can set our minds on things that are above.

This weekend's sermon is a response to the recent police/black lives matter conflicts from Baton Rouge, Dallas and here in Saint Paul. We took a break from our current 'God In Us' series to talk about this together.