Creekside Community Church of Elizabeth

Creekside Community Church
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Christianity
  • Updated Weekly

Our mission is to be a living expression of Jesus Christ. Our weekly sermons and additional messages are aimed at providing those outside the Christian faith a safe place to explore who Jesus was, and to equip followers of Him to grow in their faith and be equipped to serve Him more faithfully. If you'd like more info about our church community, or would like to partner with us, go to www.creekside.cc. We'd love to help you take your next step with Jesus.

  1. 11h ago

    Somebody's in my seat (Acts 13)

    Same sermon. Same city. Same week. Half the people were thrilled, and the other half ran the preacher out of town. What made the difference?This week we launch Word Spreads, a new series through Acts 13-20. In Acts 13, a praying church sends out its two best leaders, and Paul preaches a message in Pisidian Antioch that brings almost the whole city out the next week. Some are overjoyed to learn the good news about Jesus is for them too. Others, the regulars who'd been there all along, are anything but. Join Pastor Luke Heirendt as we ask an honest question: when new people show up, which side are we on?For more info about our church community, or to connect with us, go to www.creekside.cc

  2. Sep 28

    Making it Right (Forgiveness Week 3

    Somebody has to move first.That's usually where it stalls. Two people, one broken relationship, and both of them waiting on the other one to pick up the phone. Or one person who knows perfectly well they were the one who did the damage, and has no idea what to actually do about it now.In the final week of Forgiveness: Grace That Cost Everything, Pastor Luke Heirendt works through 2 Corinthians 5:18-20 and the other half of what we've been talking about. Forgiveness is something you can do alone. Reconciliation takes two, and it can stall at any point if one person won't do their part.Along the way: why Jesus tells both the offender and the offended to go, what separates a real confession from "I'm sorry if you were hurt," why Zacchaeus offered four times what he took when nobody asked him to, and how to tell the difference between someone who feels bad and someone who has actually changed.And if the person you'd go to will never be willing, there's a word for you too. As far as it depends on you.A repaired relationship might be the loudest sermon you ever preach.For more info about our church community, or to connect with us, go to www.creekside.cc

  3. Sep 21

    Settling the Score (Forgiveness Week 2)

    Saul had been hunting David for years. Then one afternoon he walks alone into the very cave where David and his men are hiding, and David's men tell him this is the moment God promised.What David does next is the whole sermon.In part two of Forgiveness: Grace That Cost Everything, Pastor Luke Heirendt works through 1 Samuel 24 and the question most of us get wrong about forgiving people: does it mean pretending the wrong didn't matter? David cuts off a corner of Saul's robe instead of taking his life. He follows him out of the cave and names exactly what Saul has done, in front of everyone. And then he asks the Lord to judge between them, and refuses to lift his own hand. He doesn't give up on justice. He gives up the right to carry it out himself.Then Saul weeps and apologizes, and David still goes up to the stronghold instead of going home with him.If you're carrying something from someone who hurt you, and reconciliation isn't possible or isn't safe, this one is for you.Forgiveness doesn't drop the case. It moves it to a higher court.For more info about our church community, or to connect with us, go to www.creekside.cc

  4. Sep 16

    Back to the Grave? (Forgiveness - week 1)

    If God forgives everything, every time, with no limit, then what's actually stopping any of us from living however we want?That question sits underneath a lot of our uneasiness about grace, and most of us are too polite to say it out loud. There's a second one we don't say either: if I really have been forgiven, why do I still feel like I owe?In part one of Forgiveness, we're in Colossians 2:9-15, and Paul takes both questions apart at once.He's careful about the idea of a certificate of debt. He doesn't say it was misplaced, or torn up, or quietly overlooked. He says it was nailed to the cross of Jesus. That's where it went, and that's what it cost.Then he says something simple economics has no category for. You were buried with Christ. You were raised with Him. God didn't just clear your account. He ended the person who ran it up.Forgiveness isn't simply a transaction. It's a burial. And if that's true, the question isn't what's stopping us from going back. The question is why anyone would want to.For more info about our church community, or to connect with us, go to www.creekside.cc

  5. Sep 9

    Flesh and Blood Forever (Embodied #4)

    Nobody gets out of this body in good shape. Some of us are watching it happen slowly, in the mirror, and possibly making frantic plans to outrun it. Some of us are watching it happen to someone we love, a parent, a spouse, faster than we're ready for, and starting to wonder if the kindest thing left to hope for is that it would just be over. Both of those are ways of deciding the body is the problem. What if it isn't?In the final week of our series Embodied, Pastor Luke Heirendt closes with the passage where Paul, whose own body was being worn down by beatings and imprisonment as he wrote, refuses both of those conclusions. He calls death "the last enemy," not a doorway, not a friend, not a release, but something scheduled for destruction. And he says a strange thing at the center of it all: what feels like being worn out is actually, somehow, producing glory. Not despite the suffering. Through it. The Christian hope was never a soul floating free of its body. It's a body, this one, made new. Which means nothing done in it, not the labor, not the caregiving no one else sees, is wasted.For more info about our church community, or to connect with us, go to www.creekside.cc

  6. Aug 31

    The Plate and the Mirror (Embodied #3)

    Almost nobody has a simple relationship with food. Either you think about it more than you would like to admit, or you have spent years managing it, or both. And the culture offers you two ways out that look like opposites and function like twins. One says enjoy it, you have earned it. The other says get disciplined, get in shape, get control of yourself. Most of us have tried both. Most of us have watched both fail, sometimes in the same week. Which raises a question worth sitting with. What if the problem was never the food, or your fitness routine?In week three of our series Embodied, Pastor Luke Heirendt turns to a passage in Colossians where Paul describes a set of religious rules that sound remarkably like modern diet advice. "Do not handle. Do not taste. Do not touch." Paul's verdict is blunt: rules like these have an appearance of wisdom, but no power whatsoever to stop the indulgence of the flesh. Which means the discipline you keep reaching for was never going to fix the appetite you keep fighting, because you cannot solve worshiping your stomach by worshiping your body. From there the message goes somewhere most conversations about food never go. Ezekiel describes a city God judged for having too much, and the charge is startling: they were arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned, and they did not help the poor at their door. The fullness was not really the problem. What they stopped seeing was. The test of your love for God isn't your plate or your mirror. It's your neighbor.For more info about our church community, or to connect with us, go to www.creekside.cc

  7. Aug 24

    Flesh and Blood Family (Embodied #2)

    You have more ways to reach people than any generation in history, and somehow it has never been easier to go a whole week without anyone really seeing you. About half of American teenagers now use an AI companion regularly, and a third of them say those conversations are as satisfying as talking with a real friend. It is easy to shake your head at that until you notice your own version of it: the group chat that stands in for a visit, the friendship maintained entirely in reactions and replies, the hard thing you would rather manage privately than hand to somebody. Nobody sat down and chose this. We just kept taking the option that cost less. But is a friendship that costs you nothing actually a friendship at all?In week two of our series Embodied, Pastor Luke Heirendt turns to a short letter the apostle John wrote to a church being worked over by teachers who claimed Jesus was never really human. John is fierce about it, because if Jesus was not flesh and blood, He could not save our flesh and blood. And then, at the end of that same letter, John does something small that turns out not to be small at all. He stops writing. He says he has much more to say, but he does not want to use paper and ink, because he would rather come and see them face-to-face so their joy can be complete. He was an old man. The roads were long and slow and genuinely dangerous. He chose the trip anyway. Put that beside the letter to the Hebrews, where the church is told to spur one another on, using a word that means friction, the kind you can only create in the same room, and a pattern starts to show: there are around sixty "one another" commands in the New Testament, and almost none of them can be obeyed from a couch. You can't one another if you're not around one another.For more info about our church community, or to connect with us, go to www.creekside.cc

  8. Aug 17

    Flesh and Blood Faith

    Somewhere along the way, most of us picked up the idea that faith is an inside job. The real you is your heart, your soul, the invisible part, and your body is just the vehicle carrying it around. It is why "saving souls" can sound like the whole point of Christianity, why heaven sounds like leaving, and why the most physical parts of your life, what you eat, whether you actually show up, a body that is wearing out faster than you would like, can feel spiritually beside the point. But that version of the story has a problem it cannot solve. If Jesus came to save souls, why did He need a body? And why, after the resurrection, does He still have one?In this first message of our series Embodied, Pastor Luke Heirendt walks through Mark 5, where Jesus is on His way to heal a dying girl and stops for a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years. She is sick, she is unclean, and she is not supposed to be in that crowd at all. What Jesus does next refuses every shortcut available to Him. He does not let the healing happen and keep walking, as though only her body mattered. He does not tell her the bleeding is beside the point, as though only her soul mattered. He turns around, deals with her shame along with her sickness, and tells her that her faith has saved her, using the same word the New Testament uses for the forgiveness of sins. From dust and breath in Genesis to an empty tomb outside Jerusalem, this is a physical story from beginning to end. God saves people. Not parts of them.For more info about our church community, or to connect with us, go to www.creekside.cc

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Our mission is to be a living expression of Jesus Christ. Our weekly sermons and additional messages are aimed at providing those outside the Christian faith a safe place to explore who Jesus was, and to equip followers of Him to grow in their faith and be equipped to serve Him more faithfully. If you'd like more info about our church community, or would like to partner with us, go to www.creekside.cc. We'd love to help you take your next step with Jesus.

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