99 CHURCH

What is the Bible? This week, we tackle this simple question that has life-changing implications. Together, we explore Scripture as a library of writings—both divine and human—that tell one unified story leading us to Jesus. Along the way, we consider how understanding genre, context, and authorship can transform the way we read the Bible, moving us beyond information and into formation.

The Bible is one of the most influential books in human history, yet many of us find it confusing, frustrating, or difficult to understand. This week, guest speaker Jess Gracewski explores a simple but transformative idea: Scripture was written for us, but it was not written to us. As we learn to read the Bible with humility, context, and curiosity, we discover a God who invites us to draw near, wrestle honestly, and be formed into people who become a blessing to the world.

Most followers of Jesus would agree, at least in theory, that Scripture is an essential part of our faith. And yet, so many people struggle with the Bible. We begin a new collection of teachings exploring the beauty and the mystery of Scripture. This week, we talk about what posture we should approach the Bible with.

Most of us want to be loved, but few of us want to risk being fully known. So we put on masks, even at church. In this sermon, Yesuto closes our True and False Self series by inviting us to take the courageous step of honest community. We explore why we need each other, how to share our struggles wisely, and how the church can become a place where vulnerable stories are safely held.

The Biblical concept of love is always active. God calls us to a life of compassion, a love that moves outward in action. But we live in a culture that's replaced compassion with sentiment, a love that's never acted upon. How do we move beyond sentiment into compassionate love? This week, we see how embodying compassion is the best way to break out of the false self and enter into the true self.

What parts of your life are motivated by fear, rather than love? The false self is the identity we all carry that's born out of fear. But how do we return to our true identity, given by God in love? This week, we go back to the beginning in the Garden of Eden to discover God's divine plan for setting us free from the false self.

Who we believe God to be has a profound impact on our lives. Many of us go through life thinking we're worshipping the true God, when in reality, we're actually worshipping a false version of him. The false self is rooted in a distorted view of God. This week, we expose some of these false versions of God that we carry, and reveal who God truly is.

We know we want to live from our true selves – but what's really driving the false self underneath it all? This week, we dig into the deep-seated beliefs that fuel our need to perform, control, and self-protect. Through a powerful framework of God's greatness and goodness, a personal story of anxiety, and the raw honesty of a father's cry in Mark 9 – "I believe; help my unbelief" – we discover that the journey from false self to true self isn't about gathering more information. It's about moving from belief to conviction on the true character of God: finally sitting down and letting God take our full weight.

We continue our teaching from last week, as we explore the life of Peter through the framework of the six Stages of Faith. What we find is a fascinating case study of the journey of shedding the false self and uncovering the true self.

Within each of us, is what the ancients throughout history called the false self. It's the self rooted in who we think we should be, rather than who we actually are. The journey of faith calls us to shed off the false self and embrace the true self, the fullness of who God created each of us to be. But how do we get there? What does this look like? This week, we explore a helpful framework called the "Stages of Faith," to discover how we can step into the truest version of ourselves in God.

One of the hardest things to do as a storyteller is to tell a story when everyone already knows the ending. Who cares about a story we already know the ending to? But there are those rare exceptions, when the ending is so good, that it actually enhances and redefines the rest of the story. Today, we explore the ending of the Easter story that has the power to shape each and every one of our stories.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Jesus calls us to be peacemakers, an invitation that is both attractive and troubling. How can human beings be peacemakers when our long history of violence, systemic injustice, institutional failure, and moral cowardice testify to our continued inability to guarantee anything but destruction? Looking at Palm Sunday, we will see that Christ is doing something cosmic and strange by entering Jerusalem as a king who is preparing to die, and revealing to us something radically new—a peace that originates from outside of us, given to us as an inheritance from his future kingdom.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. There is a lot to grieve in our world today. But we are notoriously bad at mourning. We are a society addicted to comfort and repelled by grief. But all throughout Scripture, we see a God who isn't afraid of our sadness, who isn't overwhelmed by our pain. This week, we explore what it means to be those who are comforted in our mourning.

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. As people part of modern day western civilization, this might the hardest beatitude for us to understand. What could we possibly know about persecution? Yet we find that this blessing isn’t just for those who are literally following Jesus at the cost of their lives. This blessing applies to the rest of us too, albeit in an indirect way. This week, we explore how God might be forming us through the circumstances in life that we don’t choose.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Most of us assume righteousness means being a good person and following the rules. But that definition often leaves us feeling exhausted, guilty, or empty. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus offers a radically different vision. This week, we explore what righteousness actually looks like in the kingdom of God—and how seeking right relationships with God and with others leads to the life we were made for.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. The beauty of this Beatitude is that the blessing is not in receiving this kind of mercy, but in giving it away. There's a kind of blessing reserved only for those who have learned the divine art of giving others mercy. This week, we explore the symptoms of an unforgiving heart and how mercy shows us a better way.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Out of all the Beatitudes, this might be the hardest for us to grasp. Is there any other verse in the Bible that goes against the ethos of our age more than this one? Our world just doesn't work this way. But Jesus invites us into something more. This week, we talk about meekness and how our world desperately needs followers of Jesus who believe and embody this Beatitude.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Many of us have mistaken pure in heart to mean perfection, or sinlessness. But to be pure in heart means something quite different. How do we see God? This week, we continue our study of the Beatitudes as we learn about what it means to be pure in heart.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Jesus opens the Sermon on the Mount with a startling claim: the good life belongs to the poor in spirit – the powerless. Far from glorifying misery or offering a future consolation prize, Jesus is naming a present reality – one that dismantles our illusions of control and redefines where true peace, freedom, and flourishing are found.

We live in a time where people within the church have vastly different ideas about what it means to be a Christian. How do we know we are faithfully following Jesus in our context and in our time? We find the answer to that very question in one of the greatest sermons Jesus ever preaching: the Sermon on the Mount. This week, we begin a new collection of teachings centered on the upside down nature of God's Kingdom, as we study the Beatitudes.

Spiritual formation doesn't happen by accident. We are shaped by what we intentionally do, again and again over time. This week, we explore how we are formed through the stories we believe, the habits we live into, and the relationships we surround ourselves with.

What does it look like to embody love? Many of us want to love our neighbors… but we’re busy, overwhelmed, or unsure if our effort even matters. This week, Yesuto wrestles with those obstacles and reminds us that faith without action is dead. Following Jesus means centering the vulnerable, choosing humility, and stepping into real service.

What if the disconnect many of us feel in our faith isn’t from a lack of belief—but from a lack of embodiment? We find throughout Scripture that faith was never meant to be lived only in your head. It was meant to be lived in your body. This week, we establish a theology of the body and how God calls us to lived embodied lives of faith.

Waiting is an inevitable part of the human experience. There's no getting around it. Advent reminds us that much of life is lived in the tension of waiting. The question isn't IF we'll wait, the question is HOW we'll wait. This week, we study Psalm 130 as we discern how God wants to meet us in our waiting.

In the journey of faith, we are so prone to forget the goodness of God. And in forgetting, fear stands taller than God's promise in our lives. Gratitude is what helps us overcome our fears and clearly see God's fingerprints in our everyday experience. Today, we explore the subtle temptation of entitlement and the power of praying gratitude.

As we conclude our time in the book of Ezra, we find some troubling things happening in the final two chapters, that highlight a temptation we all face as followers of Jesus. Rather than taking personal responsibility for how far we've drifted from God's heart, we blame some external force or circumstance. This week, we explore what it means to rebuild our altars from the inside out and return to God's heart.

What do you do when the Bible—or moments in your own life—trouble you? This week, we look at a challenging passage in Ezra 9–10 and use it as a case study for navigating our own "what on earth is happening?" moments. We talk about how to examine our assumptions about God, Scripture, and human nature, and how that process can keep us from getting spiritually stuck and instead move us toward deeper trust, wisdom, and intimacy with God.

What if the things we built in life weren't just dedicated to ourselves? What if we became a people who dedicated our careers, our relationships, our homes, and our entire lives to God? What if we lived as if they served a holy purpose beyond ourselves? This week, we explore the power of dedication as we follow the story of the Israelites dedicating the temple to God in the book of Ezra.

In Ezra 4, the people of God stop building the temple. What caused them to stop? Discouragement and distraction. In our lives, discouragement and distraction often cause us to stop building our lives with God, to stop our progress of growth and maturity. How do we combat discouragement and distraction? This week, we explore the power of having a sacred posture.

In this week’s sermon, we take a short detour from Ezra to the book of Haggai to hear a convicting word about what happens when we stop rebuilding the “House of the Lord” in our lives. Haggai 1:3 says “Is it a time for you yourselves to be living in your paneled houses, while this house remains a ruin?” Guest speaker Dan Fang encourages us to examine and self-reflect on what our “paneled houses” may be, as well as re-dedicate ourselves to building God’s house in our lives.

In a world where many say “all religions are basically the same,” how should Christians respond? As we move into chapter 4 of Ezra, we explore what it means to seek truth and why Christianity’s view of a loving, self-sacrificing God stands apart.

We don't know how to rest. Statistics show that American employees are burning out at a faster rate than ever before. We are literally working ourselves into the ground. But God has an answer to our restlessness: Sabbath. This week, we explore the eight and final ancient festival, the Sabbath, as we learn how to live in the rhythms of rest and worship.

None of the claims of the Christian faith work unless Jesus resurrected. Scripture tells us that Jesus was the firstfruit of resurrection, which means resurrection is for all those who belong to him. This week, we study the Feast of Firstfruits, as we learn that worship looks like giving God your first and your best.

We often find ourselves stuck in our own stories: stories of defeat, stories of pain, stories of discouragement. But when we worship, we're thrust back into God's story. All of a sudden, our stories are re-contextualized and we see our stories in light of God's grander story. This week, we study the Passover festival and learn how we can worship today.

God pours out His life, provision, and Spirit into us. The problem is, we are a people who leak. We are like broken cisterns, that cannot overflow into others. This week, we look at Pentecost and see how it informs the way we are called to worship today.

God loves reconciliation. When we show mercy and grace to one another, the same way God has shown them to us, that's worship. This week, we study the Day of Atonement, an ancient festival that teaches us how to worship God through apology and absolution.

How often do we stop working, and make time to look back and thank God for all He's done? The Feast of Trumpets was an opportunity for the people of God to express their worship through recognition and reliance: recognizing God's faithfulness in the previous year, and relying on God's faithfulness in the upcoming year. This week, we explore how we can express this worship of gratitude annually, monthly, weekly, and daily.

If you ever want to know what the love of God looks like, it looks like hospitality. We're reminded that God doesn't just save us, he sustains us. God doesn't just deliver us, he dwells with us. This week, we study the Festival of Tabernacles and learn how we can worship God today through hospitality.

We imagine spiritual maturity as the need to confess less. But it's actually the opposite. Spiritual maturity means more confession, not less. This week, we study the Festival of Unleavened Bread, as we continue learning about the different expressions of worship we can bring before God at the altar.

For many of us, the Sunday worship gathering feels irrelevant or disconnected from the rest of the week. This leads to a passive engagement that places a bulk of the responsibility on spiritual leaders to feed us and stir us up to worship. But we find that God actually expects all of his people to show up, prepared with something to offer him. This week, we explore what kind of sacrifices God is longing for at the altar and how we can bring him our world in worship.

For the people of God, rebuilding the altar of worship started with a radical reshaping of how they spent their time. But it wasn't just their daily schedules that revolved around worship. Their entire year was reoriented towards worship. Last week, we talked about what it means to reclaim the clock. This week, we talk about reclaiming our calendars for worship.

The most important element of Christian worship is time. Living a life of worship requires us to radically redefine how we approach time and how we use it. This week, we explore how time is not meant for productivity, but for faithfulness.

After returning from exile, God gave the Israelites instructions for how to use their gold and silver—not to build idols, but to build vessels for worship. Today, He calls us to do the same. In this message, we explore how generosity leads us away from financial stress and into deeper worship, community, and purpose. And we look at how generosity reorients us toward God, empowers the church to serve others, and shapes us into people of faith and joy.

Why do we gather as a church? What is the purpose and design for our Sunday gatherings each week? In the book of Ezra, the temple lay in ruins because the people had forgotten what the temple was designed to do. Rebuilding the house of the Lord meant rediscovering its purpose and design. This week, we get to the heart of why we gather as a church, and what should happen every time we get together.

In a world full of complex issues and divided opinions — even among faithful Christians — what does it mean to follow Jesus with honesty and humility? This week, we explore how to find comfort with uncertainty. Drawing from Paul’s letter to the Romans and the teachings of Jesus, we see how God invites us into a deeper kind of faith — one built not on having all the answers, but on trusting Him through the questions.

Whenever God wants to do something in our world, He always looks for a people whose hearts are open and available to being moved by Him. We find in the book of Ezra, that the first people to return back home out of exile, were those whose hearts were moved by God. They were the first responders. This week, we explore how we can be the first responders to what God's doing in our unique context.

What makes 99 a church, and not just some random community or club? It's that at the center of our togetherness is the worship of God. This week, we begin a new collection of teachings on the book of Ezra, as we respond to God's calling for us to rebuild the altar of worship in our community.

The problem is not the seed. The problem is the soil. God is always speaking. God is always moving toward us in love. God is always working on our behalf. The problem is that the soil of our hearts often prevents the seed of the God's blessings from bearing fruit in our lives. This week, we read through the "Parable of the Sower," as we identify four different types of soils, or heart postures, that we often take in our relationship with God.

We all inherit a mixed bag from our family of origin. There are unhealthy things we've inherited, but there are also beautiful things as well. This week, we talk about generational blessing, and how God gives us agency to decide what legacy we want to continue or create for our family and the next generation.

Our lives are shaped by invisible scripts—messages we believe that have been formed by past experiences, that affect how we live today. But what if some of these scripts aren’t true? Together, we ask God to help us confront the lies we've believed and embrace the better story He is writing for our lives.