Port Orchard Church Of The Nazarene

In the next installment of the "Learning, Living and Giving the Good News of Jesus" series, Pastor Jerry focused on finding our purpose in life through Christ’s kingdom. In the days of the early church, the message of Jesus changed the world, until the world changed the message. As has been so eloquently demonstrated by Monty Python, it can be easy to misinterpret the gospel for one reason or another. This makes it all the more important to go back to the source to clear up our own confusion.

This week, Pastor Jerry continued in the Evangelism series, focusing specifically on how Jesus saved us from sin. The word 'saved' typically has an implication of helping somebody who needs to be rescued, but it turns out there was more to the cross than that. When Jesus died for us, He freed us from our sins and brought us into the life of freedom we were designed for. Pastor Jerry dives into this in this week's message.

In the fourth installment of the '''Learning, Living and Giving the Good News of Jesus" series, Pastor Jerry focused on how Jesus shows us God’s Perfect Love. In 1st John 4, John writes about how we need to "love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God... The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love." In addition to exploring this passage, Pastor Jerry also responds to more questions from the congregation.

Continuing on in his Evangelism series, Pastor Jerry focused more on the negative consequences of well-intentioned, albeit misinformed, messages. As Pastor Jerry has mentioned, there have been several well-regarded preachers trying to simplify the gospel through the wrong lens, unintentionally making God seem as scary as they can with as few words as possible. In addition to wrestling with this, he responds to a few more questions he has received relating to evangelism.

This week, we were joined by guest speaker Dan Schiopu from Woodland, Washington. He spoke about how some verses, such as Exodus 2:4, have been left in their time, despite the fact that they still have perfectly valid- albeit less literal- applications today. Additionally, he spoke on a few areas where the Bible seems to contradict itself, and how to handle seemingly conflicting scriptures. He also pointed out that ultimately, we matter more to God than what we believe.

This week, Pastor Jerry elaborated a bit on evangelism. Many Christians believe in the idea that others will see God in the way they live their lives. While this is perfectly good and valid, some people leave it at that and never actually share the good news of the Gospel with anyone. Pastor Jerry expands on how to effectively balance these and how both are important aspects of our Christian walks.

It seems that an unfortunate number of people suffer from a severe case of 'evangel-phobia,' which is the fear and/or disgust of everything associated with the word “evangelism." This is obviously quite unfortunate, because the word “Evangelism” means, "proclaiming and sharing the good news of the salvation story." Pastor Jerry discusses this in this week's sermon.

This week, Pastor Jerry is joined by Nate Sylling and Nikki Climer to respond to a few questions about the Restoring Revelation series. There (have?) been a lot of 'non-traditional' views and ideas expressed in the series so far, and an important part of growing in faith is to be able to honestly discuss what may be challenging. If you have any questions that weren't answered here, feel free to send them our way.

This week, Pastor Jerry continued in the Restoring Revelation series and the theme of rereading the Book of Revelation as symbolic, rather than literal. Even outside of Revelation, there are verses that have been taken out of context, whether it be taking something meant to be symbolic as literal, or assuming that a verse referring to a past event still has yet to happen. Pastor Jerry takes a fresh look at some of these verses and tries to give a clearer view based on historical context.

This week, Pastor Jerry continued the Restoring Revelation series, speaking specifically to some of the symbolism of Revelation. Some people have taken this symbolism too literally, sometimes with disastrous results, despite the fact that the language used was more metaphorical than concrete. Pastor Jerry takes another look at some of these verses to try to show what John really meant when he wrote the Book of Revelation.

This week, Pastor Jerry continued on in the Restoring Revelation series, answering some questions relating to God's methods of judgement and warfare along the way.

This week, Pastor Jerry continued in the Restoring Revelation series, focusing on the slain Lamb of God.

This week, we were joined again by Jonathan Krause, who spoke on his own journey of becoming free from the shame of childhood abuse. This message does deal with the topic of sexual abuse, so if you're going through the healing process of a similar situation, you may wish to proceed with caution.

The Book of Revelation can be an incredibly confusing and even frightening read- but it wasn't meant to be either. In fact, behind the alarming imagery lies a beauty that demonstrates the self-sacrificial love of Christ and His victory over the darkness we encounter in our lives. This week, we will take another look at what the disciple John wrote and why.

This week, Pastor Jerry began a series titled, "Restoring Revelation." Everyone believes the world will one day come to an end; however, we disagree on how, when and why. Many Christians use the book of Revelation as a road map for the end of the world, taking it as a literal depiction of the future. However, this isn’t the reason that the book of Revelation was written. It was written for a specific time and place, and for a specific reason. Over the next few weeks, we’ll talk about this book and what it means to the Kingdom and our lives.

This week, Pastor Jerry finished his series, "The Origin, Evolution, and End of Religion," speaking on- you guessed it- the end of religion. As illustrated in John Chapter 5, there was more than one instance of Jesus subverting the religious norms of the time for the sake of proving that God was- and still is- bigger than their box could hold at times. Ultimately, it proves the point that while the Bible itself doesn't save us, it still points to the person who does.

This week, Pastor Jerry continued in his series, "The Origin, Evolution, and End of Religion," focusing on the evolution of religion. Because of mankind's understanding that God was some far-off entity who needed to be appeased, we began coming up with a series of traditions and rules to hopefully get God to draw close to us for a while. We used things like burning incense and sacrificing animals to try to please Him. However, the problem with this plan is that God never asked for any of it.

This week, we were joined by guest speakers Nate Sylling and Jonathan Krause, who spoke on our new identity in Christ and what it means in comparison to our old flesh.

This week, Pastor Jerry began a series titled, 'The Origin, Evolution, and End of Religion,' and as one might infer, began by discussing the origin of religion. Throughout this series, religion is defined as "Any system of belief, behavior and belonging that we use to achieve access to the ultimate." Back in the garden, Adam and Eve were created to be in relationship with God. Unfortunately, ever since the Serpent brought in confusion, religion has become the Church’s dominant way to interact with God. Now, however, He is calling us away from a rule-driven religion back to a grace-based relationship.

Looking back through the Old Testament, there seems to be several instances of God showing characteristics that don't exactly line up with the character of Jesus. However, if we read back through it assuming that it is all about the cross of Christ, then we can see how God adapted to the level of the cultural conditioning of the Old Testament authors, appearing violent as a result. In addition, when we read carefully, we can actually see the nonviolent character of God breaking through within the passages of violence themselves.