Port Orchard Church Of The Nazarene

The traditional view of faith is that it is the opposite of doubt. In other words, the more psychologically certain you are, the "greater" your faith must be. This view assumes that God places a value on certainty. However, it is also a barrier to new believers, is an unhealthy way to live out one's faith, and ultimately does not reflect the biblical model of faith.

It seems that far too often in Western Christianity, people have strong- albeit well-meaning and honest- convictions based on mistranslations or misinterpretations. To make matters worse, groups tend to form around these kinds of convictions, and they in turn reinforce each other's idols of certainty. This creates an "Us vs. Them" mentality that is not present in Jesus Christ. Pastor Jerry explores this issue and its implications with some help from Scripture.

Easter is all about how the resurrection confirms that Jesus is the true revelation of God. Jesus is the exact representation of God and the truth is that the mercy of God triumphs over judgment. It is our privilege to align or re-align our picture of God with the person of Jesus seen in the resurrected Christ.

The Old Testament often portrays God as either doing, commanding or threatening violence. For many, this is a huge problem because these depictions contradict the way Jesus lived and interacted with people. What are we to do with this contradiction? Is it possible that there is something else going in these portrayals of violence? We can only see what else is going on, when we understand what was going on when Jesus died on the cross. This will be the first in a series of sermons titled, "Christ’s Cross Centered."

This week, we were joined by guest speaker and worship leader Michael Miller from Marked By Heaven Ministries. He spoke from his heart about his ministry with orphans and how the spirit of family and unity is often more powerful than it gets credit for. For more information, Michael and his wife have an overview video on their YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3qXh1kojhg

In God’s mind, freedom is an end in and of itself. It is part of our nature as created beings to be free and not be ruled over- not by one another, or any agent in the spiritual realm, nor by substances or behavior patterns. For many people, addiction is one of the key stumbling blocks that perpetuate cycles of shame, withdrawl, and a lack of fullness of life. This message explores what lies at the heart of all addictions, substance or otherwise, and how we go about untangling ourselves from their grip, so we can step into the full life that God desires us to have.

This week, Pastor Jerry discussed the challenges of unforgiveness and resentment. Living from a false identity can be the greatest source of our struggle to extend forgiveness to ourselves or to others. The way to freedom from our unforgiveness is to remember the truth of who we are in Christ, and to be transformed more fully into our true identity through the renewing of your mind by reviewing God’s Word.

This week, Pastor Jerry spoke about the joy set before us. He also spoke about how freezing the metaphorical movie at the wrong frame can have a negative effect on the rest of life without us even realizing it.

Following our “Who Are You?” talk, we need to consider the issue of shame. In a blind survey, nearly half of the responders listed shame as the largest struggle in their lives. So what is shame, and what does God say about it? To begin with, let’s turn to the origin of shame, as mentioned in Genesis Chapter 3.

Surveys have shown there are six major categories that consistently showed up in western church that hold us back from growing in God. These areas are addiction, unforgiveness, depression, shame and fear, control, and anxiety. This week, Pastor Jerry focused on exposing the root of everything that holds us back from God.

This week, we were joined by Pastor Harold Eberle, who spoke on the spectrum of God's personality and how that impacts our relationships with both God and each other.

In Luke 17: 1-10, Jesus gives four distinct teachings that on the surface seem unrelated. However, when taken in context with each other, they highlight four different aspects of how we are to live in Christian community with one another.

This week, Pastor Jerry took more time to examine the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, and particularly its original audience. In the context of when Jesus told this parable- or rather, whom it was told to- the important thing to remember is that the information we have about God doesn't do us any good if we don't put it to use. After all, the Pharisees had all the information in the world on God at the time, and yet they still missed the Messiah. A person can know a truth but convince themselves that they don’t know it, if they don’t like the implication it would have for their life.

This week, Pastor Jerry took some more time to bring some light to a dark topic- Hell. The parable in Luke 16 of a rich man and a beggar named Lazarus interacting from respective 'halves' of the afterlife is commonly used as an argument for the traditional view of Hell. However, the problem with this, as Pastor Jerry mentioned last week, is that illustrations aren't always designed to be taken literally. Additionally, scriptures like 2 Peter 3:7 are completely misinterpreted, despite evidence to the contrary just two verses later. There are many more examples of this kind of misunderstanding, and Pastor Jerry walks through several of them.

This week, Pastor Jerry was back to speak on parables. As you likely already know, Jesus preferred to use parables in many of his sermons. The problem, however, is that storytelling is a bit of a lost art outside of Hollywood. As a result, it makes it unfortunately easy to miss the point of many of Jesus' lessons now that we're several centuries and a continent or two away. So Pastor Jerry decided to take a few commonly misunderstood messages and try to put them back into context.

This week, we were joined by guest speaker Nathan French. He shared testimonies and spoke about listening to God, and how God can only work in our lives where we allow Him to work.

This week, we finish up our Pre-Birth Joy series by discussing the promises of God and what they mean for us today.

This week in our Christmas series, PB&J, we will look at a few 'interesting’ aspects of Jesus’ genealogy in Matthew.

Today we will begin our Christmas series with a look at what God's plan was before time even began, why it's dangerous to think of the Incarnation as a rescue mission, and at the intimate relationship we're drawn into with God through a baby in a manger.

What is the Church? In our culture, personal preference becomes the all-important factor for many of our decisions. The problem with this is that reality itself does not conform to our preferences! We are reminded of this in a rude way every time something like an accident happens that we were not expecting. To some extent this is normal, but as a result many churches feel pressure to cater to this, to the point where the goal becomes to attract and keep as many people as possible. However, this is counter to the real message and purpose of the gospel. The message of the cross is the reality we must conform to, though the truth is not always pleasant.