Hope Church - Fort Worth, TX

Hope Church
  • 5.0 (13)
  • Christianity
  • Updated Weekly

Since 1978, helping people get traction on their journey with Jesus Christ. For more information go to hopechurch.com.

  1. 1d ago

    3C: The Hidden Idols You Never Knew You Had

    What happens when good things become ultimate things? In this episode of The 3C Podcast, the guys continue the conversation about the heart—why pressure often reveals what's really going on inside us, how our reactions can expose deeper desires, and why we shouldn't "waste the squeeze" when life gets difficult. They also explore some of the hidden idols that can quietly take God's place in our hearts. And they aren't necessarily bad things. Ministry, family, plans, belonging, knowledge, theology, and even our memories of the "good old days" can become dangerous when we begin looking to them for what only God should provide. How can you tell when something good is creeping onto the throne of your heart? What does your response when it's threatened reveal? And how does Jesus actually transform us from the inside out? It's an honest conversation about pressure, priorities, idolatry, spiritual growth, and learning to keep God where He belongs—at the center of everything.

  2. 3d ago

    Be Transformed: Guard Your Heart

    Pastor Matt opens with a vivid image: Jesus doesn't want to be a guest in your life, peeking into only the rooms you're comfortable showing Him. He wants your heart to become His home — every room, every closet, every hidden corner. The heart, as Pastor Matt explains, is not simply the seat of emotions, but the command center of life itself. As Proverbs 4:23 puts it, "Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life." Your words, relationships, decisions, and habits all flow downstream from whatever is happening in your heart. The danger, Pastor Matt warns, is that our hearts are never neutral — they are always worshiping something. Jesus makes this clear in Matthew 6 when He says, "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Whatever sits on the throne of your heart will ultimately direct your life. Even good things — family, success, comfort, approval — become dangerous when they become ultimate things. And as Jeremiah 17:9 soberly reminds us, the human heart left to itself is deceitful and desperately sick, incapable of fixing itself. But that's exactly where the gospel shines brightest. God promised through the prophet Ezekiel, "I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh, and give you a heart of flesh" (Ezekiel 36:26). Pastor Matt calls this a heart transplant — and it's available to anyone who surrenders to Jesus. Behavior modification alone will never produce lasting change. Only a transformed heart, made new by Jesus, can produce fruit that lasts.

  3. Aug 12

    3C: Is Your Phone Discipling Your Kids?

    Pastor Matt Sturdevant and the pastoral team at Hope Church gather around the table to dig deeper into Sunday's sermon on winning the battle for the mind. The central text, Romans 12:2, calls believers not to be conformed to the world but to be transformed by the renewing of their minds. As the Phillips translation puts it, "Do not let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold, but let God remold your minds from within." The team walks through a practical "discipleship audit," asking honest questions: What gets the first word of your day? What gets the most time? Where do you instinctively go when you have questions? The answers to those questions reveal who — or what — is truly discipling your mind. The conversation gets personal as the pastors share how social media, anxiety, and current events have each tested their own thought lives, and how returning to God's Word and Biblical community has made a real difference. Pastor Matt also challenges parents directly, pointing out that a parent's greatest failure with technology may not be what they give their kids, but what they passively allow. Devices aren't just entertainment — they are formation, shaping children's understanding of truth, identity, beauty, and value. Technological freedom, he argues, should never outpace a child's level of maturity and character. The team closes by getting practical about how to actually take thoughts captive, leaning on tools like the "Hey, Say, Pray, Obey" framework, the thought filter of Philippians 4:8, and the four ordinary means of grace: Scripture, prayer, Biblical community, and obedience. None of it is dramatic or flashy — it's the same faithful, boring-but-it-works training, day after day. As Pastor Brian puts it, keeping the Shield of Faith raised isn't a one-time act; it's a practiced discipline, strengthened over time through consistent, ordinary faithfulness.

  4. Aug 10

    Winning the Battle for Your Mind

    Pastor Matt opens with a penetrating question: "Could there be a lie influencing your thoughts, attitudes, or decisions that you have never recognized as a lie?" Building on the previous week's foundation of faith, he turns the focus to what comes next in the Christian journey — transformation. Anchoring the message in Romans 12:1-2, he makes the case that God transforms our lives by renewing our minds, and that lasting change doesn't begin with trying harder, but with thinking differently. Salvation, he reminds us, happens in a moment, but transformation happens over a lifetime. Pastor Matt draws a sharp contrast between two forces described in Romans 12:2 — being conformed by the world, which presses in on us from the outside in, and being transformed by God, who works from the inside out. He warns that our minds are always being shaped, and that every day we are being discipled — either by the world or by the Word. The world, he explains, disciples us to follow our feelings and fit into culture, while the Word disciples us to follow Jesus and be transformed by His truth. Like Eve in Genesis 3, who accepted a lie before she ever reached for the fruit, we are reminded that long before a sin becomes visible, it usually becomes believable. To help his congregation fight back, Pastor Matt offers a practical three-step battle plan: identify the lie, confront the lie with truth, and continue to take every thought captive (2 Cor. 10:5). He also outlines four ordinary but powerful ways God renews our minds — Scripture, prayer, Biblical community, and obedience — and challenges the congregation to move from merely trying to actually training for godliness, as Paul urges Timothy in 1 Timothy 4:7. The sermon closes with an invitation to write down the lie you battle most and pair it with a truth from God's Word, because freedom begins when God's voice becomes louder than the lies we've been believing.

  5. Aug 5

    The 3C Podcast: Our First Episode Ever!

    Pastor Matt and the team at Hope Church launch the 3C Podcast as a companion to their Sunday messages, diving deeper into ideas that didn't fully fit the sermon or deserve more unpacking. The first episode picks up from a message on Biblical faith, built around the big idea that faith is not simply believing the right things about Jesus, but responding to him with a trust that renews the mind, transforms the heart, and deploys the life. Pastor Matt draws a sharp distinction between historical or intellectual belief and saving faith, pointing to James 2:19 — "even the demons believe and shudder" — to show that knowing facts about God is a far cry from belonging to him. The conversation gets refreshingly practical as the pastors share personal stories of what "everyday faith" actually looks like — trusting God through a daughter's gymnastics injury, releasing control over a college-bound teenager's decisions, and dying to self in the middle of an ordinary parenting moment. They also walk through a spiritual health self-assessment introduced on Sunday, encouraging listeners not to obsess over their score or compare themselves to others, but to use it as a baseline — a starting point to ask better questions, identify next steps, and measure growth when the assessment is revisited at the end of the series. The goal, as Pastor Matt puts it, is simple: the version of you today should look more like Jesus than the version of you yesterday.

  6. Aug 2

    More Than Believing

    Pastor Matt opens the Fully Engaged series by drawing a striking distinction between people who know the Bible and people who are actually growing in it. After more than twenty years in ministry, he has observed that it is entirely possible to believe all the right things about Jesus — to attend church faithfully, to know sound doctrine — and still never be fully surrendered to Him. To help the congregation honestly assess where they are, he walks them through a Spiritual Health Assessment organized around three words: head, heart, and hands. The big idea anchoring the entire series is this: God wants my mind renewed, my heart transformed, and my life deployed. From there, Pastor Matt unpacks three foundational statements about the nature of faith. First, Christianity is rooted in reality — not blind leaping, but trust built on evidence. John wrote his Gospel so that people would believe, and he pointed to miracles, eyewitnesses, and the empty tomb to make his case. Second, faith is more than agreement. Drawing from James, Pastor Matt reminds the congregation that even demons believe the facts about Jesus and shudder — yet they refuse to surrender. Knowing about Jesus is not the same as belonging to Him. Third, faith demands a response. Just as Matthew left his tax booth and Peter left his nets, genuine faith always produces movement — from the inside out, from a renewed mind to a transformed heart to hands that serve, give, and live on mission.

  7. Jul 29

    The Summer Interview Series Finale: Jacob & Katie

    Christian Impact directors Jacob and Katie Willebeek-LaMair sit down to share their stories of faith, marriage, and ministry. Jacob grew up moving between Arizona, Illinois, and California, making an early decision to follow Jesus as a child but drifting during a difficult middle school season before genuinely recommitting in high school. A pivotal moment came in college when a mentor named Neil helped him see that following Jesus wasn't something you left at church — it was a whole-life surrender. That truth, rooted in Galatians 6 and Hebrews 12, set Jacob on a path of real discipleship and eventually ministry. Katie, who grew up at Hope Church as a staff kid, came to faith at age five and was shaped by a community that modeled sacrifice for the kingdom. A summer trip to Chico, California cracked open her heart to evangelism and ultimately led her to move there, where she and Jacob would eventually meet, marry, and go on full-time staff together. After years of fruitful ministry in Chico, God called them — through a conversation with Pastor Matt Sturdivant, a confirming word from Ruth 2:11, and a Cross Conference that seemed to speak directly to Jacob — to move to Fort Worth and launch Christian Impact from the ground up. Starting with zero students, they've spent five years learning what it means to be faithful when ministry doesn't look the way you imagined. One of their deepest lessons has been releasing the pressure of flashy results and trusting God with the fruit, while staying committed to reaching students on two-year community college campuses that most college ministry strategies overlook entirely. They close with a warm and honest conversation about sharing the gospel. Both Jacob and Katie encourage people to stop letting fear be the deciding factor, reminding listeners that statistics show most people are open to spiritual conversations. Jacob's lawn mower illustration captures it well — God is doing all the pushing, but He graciously invites us to put our hands on the handle. Whether it's asking someone "Do you go to church anywhere?" or walking a friend through a gospel conversation, the encouragement is simple: learn what the gospel actually is, get some reps in, and trust that God is the one doing the real work of drawing people to Himself.

  8. Jul 27

    The Unstoppable Mission

    Pastor Matt returns to the pulpit to close out a 16-week journey through the Book of Acts, reminding the congregation that Acts is not simply a history of the apostles, but a living account of what the risen Lord Jesus continues to do through ordinary, Spirit-filled people. The big idea of the message is clear: the mission of Jesus is unstoppable, and now it's our turn. Drawing from Acts 27–28, Pastor Matt walks through three lessons — the mission cannot be stopped by storms, faith looks forward even when the future is uncertain, and the gospel keeps moving forward — showing how every apparent setback in Acts became an opportunity for gospel advancement. A central theme of the message is the nature of Biblical faith. Pastor Matt points to Paul's courage in the middle of a violent Mediterranean storm, noting that Paul's confidence wasn't in the ship, the captain, or the weather — it was in God. Referencing Proverbs 3:5-6, Pastor Matt reminds the congregation that faith has never required perfect understanding, but it always requires trusting a perfect God. He challenges the church with a simple but convicting truth: faith doesn't remove uncertainty, but it changes how we walk through it. Pastor Matt closes by connecting the Book of Acts to Hope Church's own future, introducing Vision 2028 — a plan to launch a new gospel work in the DFW area by the church's 50th anniversary. Grounding the call in Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and the warning of Judges 2, he reminds the congregation that every generation decides whether the gospel advances through them or stops with them. He invites the church to pray boldly, live on mission right where they are, and trust that the same God who was sovereign over Paul's storm is sovereign over theirs.

See All (99)

5
out of 5
13 Ratings

About

Since 1978, helping people get traction on their journey with Jesus Christ. For more information go to hopechurch.com.

Information

You Might Also Like