Woodland Hills Church

God delights in the praises of His people. The manner in which we worship is not important. God is only concerned with our hearts and desire to worship. There are many ways to express our love for God through praise and worship, and it is in this diversity that we see the full beauty of our God.

To worship God is to reflect back to God how much he is worth to us. Our lives are an act of worship, including special times where we individually and corporately worship God. As we participate in worshipping the source of all life, love and beauty, we in turn are changed and transformed.

Our God is a great God! He is good, holy and worthy of praise. As followers of God, worship is a way of ascribing worth to God. It is expressing who God is and saying and singing what is true of him.

Jesus is both fully human and fully God. He is the beginning and fulfillment of God’s covenant with humanity. In Christ, God’s love and glory was revealed as he came and dwelt among us, serving, and ultimately suffering and dying to give us forgiveness and hope. It is the most amazing revelation in history!

God is an awesome and powerful God! He reveals his power not by control or force, but through love and sacrifice. God so loved the world that he sent his Son, Jesus, into the world, not to condemn it but to transform it, ultimately laying down his life for all on the cross. This kind of power and love was shocking then, and it is still shocking to our world today.

As Kingdom of God people, we are called to care and share with others. When Jesus commands his disciples to feed the crowd with only five loaves and two fishes in Luke 9:10-17, he is showing them that nothing is impossible with God, as everyone was fed and there were leftovers remaining. Our call is to trust and listen to how God would use us. No matter how much or little we have, God can use our faithfulness to abundantly bless others!

Up to this point in the story of Jesus, Jesus was the one who displayed the power of the Kingdom of God. At this point, Jesus charges the 12 disciples to do what he had been doing. The program given to the disciples follows a simple pattern: Do the Kingdom > Then Proclaim the Kingdom.

This last weekend concluded our sermon series on spiritual warfare, a topic that can be neglected or overly stressed in churches. As followers of Christ, it is important to recognize that there is a spiritual side to our world, in which principalities and powers are in opposition to the ways of God. In Christ, we can overcome and resist these influences both individually and collectively. To bring a biblically balanced approach to the topic, Greg Boyd (Senior Pastor) and Paul Eddy (Teaching Pastor) held a Q&A time to help answer questions from attenders. These audio files are a collection of all the questions and answers addressed during our three weekend services.

Spiritual warfare is a present reality in our war-torn world. There are principalities and powers, often unseen, which influence and distort what is true about God and His Creation. As followers of Christ, we do not need to fear these things. Rather, we are called to live in the truth of who we are in Christ, being filled with God’s Spirit and power, to come against and resist the strongholds and lies.

We live in a war-torn world of pain, hurt, violence and death. This is not how God intended creation to look. The Good News is God has sent his Son, Jesus, to defeat the powers of death, and to begin reconciling and redeeming the world unto God. When Jesus rebukes the storm mentioned in Luke 8:22-26, he is giving us a foretaste of the ultimate victory and restoration that is to come.