College Wesleyan Church Sermons

Ethan Linder:“Honor your father and mother” is the first commandment with a promise. But even if this commandment is good advice, how is it good news? How are we expected to follow this one when relationships are frayed? This sermon will explore this commandment, Jesus’ redefinition of the “family,” and paint a picture of what it means for us to live into our own families (and the family of God) across generations.

Lori Minor: The Sabbath is not a rule to keep. It is a response to our relationship with God.

Steve DeNeff:What does it mean to misuse the name of God? What does it mean to use the name properly? This sermon will explore how we can live into this commandment: only by revering the name YHWH (Law) can we treasure it, then be at home with it: “Father” (Gospels), and center our lives around the gravity of God’s life, doing “everything in the Name” of the one who called us (Epistles).

Steve DeNeff: God’s command against idols is not simply about statues or images; it is about the ordering of our loves. This sermon invites us to ask: What are we giving our hearts, bodies, habits, and imaginations to? The call of God is not merely to avoid false worship, but to become whole people whose lives are re-formed around him. We cast down idols not because worship is optional, but because we were made to worship the living God with undivided hearts and embodied lives. Since we are made in God’s image - in fact, we are the only part of creation that is - idolatry is a distortion of not only God, but of us as well.

Andrea Summers: God did not rescue Israel from slavery simply to give them rules. He rescued them to form them into a holy people whose hearts belonged wholly to Him. In Exodus 20, God frees His people externally. In Mark 12, Jesus reveals that the commandments are fundamentally relational, rooted in love of God and neighbor. In 1 Thessalonians 5, we see God’s final intention: not just outward obedience, but inward transformation of spirit, soul, and body through the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit. True freedom is not the absence of restraint, but a heart so transformed by the Holy Spirit that obedience becomes love rather than coercion. God’s goal is not merely compliant behavior, but wholehearted devotion.

Steve DeNeff: There are three levels of obedience. Most are stuck in the first. But freedom awaits us in the third.

Ethan Linder: On Pentecost, the Spirit forms the church as a people who confound the world’s categories of insider and outsider, near and far, clean and unclean. In Christ, those who were once far off are brought near, old hostilities are put to death, and strangers are made members of one household. This sermon invites us to see the church not merely as a place we attend, but as a Spirit-filled community of blessing, reconciliation, and belonging where God is building (and inviting us into) a new way of being human.

Emily Vermilya: The Ascension teaches us to stop looking somewhere else for the fullness of life with God and begin recognizing the reign of Christ already present here, even in what remains unresolved.

Steve DeNeff:"Resurrection is a weapon. It is a shot that reignites a fiery engagement between forces claiming lordship over creation. It is not only about a man. It's about a war." And since our battle is not against flesh and blood, we cannot use conventional weapons nor engage in the adversary in the same way. These are the weapons, and this is how we fight.

Steve DeNeff: The power that raised Jesus from the dead is the power, not to overwhelm our adversaries but to endure them, to expose them, to convert them.

Steve DeNeff - John 14:15-24. Obedience is the first and last lesson in discipleship: If we love God, we will obey him. But if we obey God, does that mean we love him? In fact, there are 3 reasons to obey God and not all of them are equal. To obey God for love is the highest form of obedience. What are the others? And how do we know which one motivates us?