Greenville Oaks Church Message Podcast

This Sunday Wade will launch his new Advent series focusing on the cast of characters who encounter the baby Jesus before or after his birth. This week we’ll meet an elderly couple who embody a question essential to understanding the meaning of Christmas.

This Sunday we'll explore why it's essential for Christians in our context to recover and own our identity as missionaries. There are many good reasons to think and act like a missionary. Wade will share an oft overlooked one revealed in Acts 10.

In Acts 8, an angel tells Philip to go to a deserted city on a seldom travelled road. This strange command leads to an encounter with an Ethiopian eunuch who desperately needs to hear some good news. The story ends with the eunuch continuing on his way rejoicing. After we explore this story on Sunday, I hope you leave rejoicing too.

In Acts 7, Stephen preaches a sermon that gets him stoned. This week Wade will explain why Stephen's sermon made his audience so angry, while trying to avoid the same fate as Stephen. Should be fun, but please leave your rocks at home.

Near the end of Acts 4, Luke describes a church of which I'm sure we'd all like to be a part. But I wonder how many of us would like to belong to the church he describes in Acts 5:1-11? This week we'll approach the story of Ananias and Sapphira with emotional and intellectual honesty and perhaps discover why it may be the most relevant story for us in Acts.

In Acts 4, we see the followers of Jesus responding to challenges in powerful ways. What is it that enabled them to experience such an amazing life of faith and how do we allow God to work among us in similar ways today?

In the economy of Jesus, followers of Christ invest money and possessions in the community as a demonstration of God's love for all creation. A people with met needs point the world to a God whose love exceeds.

In Acts 3, Peter miraculously heals a man who had been lame for over forty years. When reading stories like this, it's tempting to fixate on the miracle, which can cause us to miss the larger point of story. This week we’ll see how this story about a miracle points us to something much bigger.

During the season of Advent, it's customary to revisit the story of John the Baptist, whose primary purpose was to prepare the way for Jesus. This Sunday we'll imagine what John might say to us as we prepare for the coming of Christ.