South Fellowship Church

{Ryan Paulson:} Our teaching text is Matthew 4:12-23 today.  If you have your Bible, you can open up there.  I'm going to read it, then Larry Boatright is going to come teach it.  When Jesus heard that John had been put in prison, he withdrew to Galilee.  Leaving Nazareth, he went and lived in Capernaum, which was by the lake in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali---to fulfill what was said through the prophet Isaiah:  "Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles---the people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned."  From that time on Jesus began to preach, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near."  As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew.  They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen.  "Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will send you out to fish for people."  At once they left their

If you really packed the guys in, you could probably get 15 people in one of those boats.  These guys were pros and they'd been on this sea hundreds of times in their lives.  They'd been there in the middle of the night because some of the best fishing happened in the middle of the night.  As they started to go across that 13 mile journey from one end of the shore to the other in the Sea of Galilee, a huge storm just came out of nowhere and started buffeting against their boat.  You can imagine wind and waves and water rushing to your face.  You couldn't see anything anyway since it was pitch dark; three in the morning by this time.  Inevitably, the question had to come up, because all the disciples would have been asking it:  Whose idea was it that we cross the lake in the middle of the night?  You guessed it!  Jesus's idea.  You wonder if there was a conversation that happened back and forth:  Man, we've been trusting that guy with an awful lot, is he trustworthy, because it certainly seems like this little

February 13th, just this last week, flight 5763 took off from the Orange County Airport on its way to Seattle.  It didn't quite make it there, because over the High Sierras, it hit what you might refer to as a little bit of turbulence.  One of the passengers reported that, along with the flight attendant, the drink cart hit the ceiling of the aircraft.  Another passenger said that the plane did not one but two nosedives, sort of ninety degrees down.  Just imagine being at 34,000 feet, cruising altitude, having your plane, that's sailing through the air, immediately doing a ninety degree nosedive, and the flight attendant next to you in the air.  Five people were injured.  The plane had to land in Reno and didn't make it to Seattle because five people had to be hospitalized. If you've ever been in a situation of turbulence, either in an airplane or in life, you know that you don't just have thoughts in your head that affect the way that you interact with that situation.  Your whole body gets into it, doesn't

I can remember when I was freshman in college and went and purchased the album that song (Obsession) is off of.  It was written by Martin Smith, but recorded by David Crowder.  I remember lying in my bed in my dorm room at Colorado State, having my Discman next to me.  I was listening to the song and thinking to myself, "My heart does burn.  Jesus, I want you.  Closer than my skin, yeah."  All that stuff Crowder's singing, I want it.  I was going onto high school campuses and telling people about Jesus; people that didn't want to hear about it...it didn't matter to me.  My heart burned. Around that same time, I started to want a Jeep CJ-7.  My heart burned for that too.  I went out and bought one, not knowing anything about car mechanics and having zero propensity for repairing anything.  It was a 1985 CJ-7 and it didn't have a hardtop (just a soft top) and soft doors.  I remember driving away thinking, "This is my freedom."  I was on my way home---it was a 45 minute drive from where I purchased the car to m

Last weekend as the elders were headed up to Estes Park for our retreat, our middle school group was also heading up to a retreat at Buena Vista.  They had left at 5:00 p.m. and were heading up 285 and there was a sign over the road that said, "Road Closure in Fairplay," which isn't a good thing if you're headed to Buena Vista.  Through a few radio calls back and forth to the various vans, they decided to take a little bit of a detour.  They eventually found themselves at Wadsworth and Chatfield, right near where they left from!  From there, they headed up I-70 to miss the road closure and what was suppose to be a two-and-a-half hour trip up to the mountains ended up being a five hour excursion.   Isn't it interesting how we spend most of our lives trying to avoid situations like that and they're the very things that stick with us?  Have you ever thought about that?  The perfect trip isn't usually the one you remember the details of, it's the one that was a total mess.  You remember that trip where nothing w

Dr. Scott Wenig - Guest Speaker

It's a bit of irony that some of the greatest movements in the history of the church have been birthed out of some of the sharpest disagreements.  Some of the things we celebrate most started off as.....well, a fight.  They started off as people on two sides of the aisle unable to come to a conclusion and having very different opinions about the way that things should progress.  In Acts 15:1-2, we see one of those situations.  But some men came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, {The brothers---the church in Antioch) "Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved."  And after Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them, Paul and Barnabas and some of the other were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this question.  What follows, in Acts 15, is what we will refer to as the Jerusalem Council.  It was one of the church's first ever business meetings. You didn't want to miss a business meeting in the early church t

Last week we started a series we're calling "Life is A Maze....ing."  We're talking about discovering God's will.  It's these questions we all have ---- What job should I take?  What city should I live in?  What relationship should I pursue?  We all have these questions, don't we?  God, what do you want me to do with my life?  If you're God, and I believe that you are, and you have a plan, and I believe that you do, how do I align myself with it?  We spend a lot of time, and we might lose a lot of sleep asking that question?  At times it can be laborious and at times it can be a little bit annoying to go God, I just don't know.  That feeling of 'I don't know' is also the very feeling that makes us feel like we're alive.  If we did away with that, if we knew exactly what to do at every moment and time and we were just robots being controlled, life wouldn't be nearly as amazing as it is.  The reality is that God has given us choice.  He's given us freedom.  If you came last week, that's why you're back today, b