Cityview Community Church - Sermons Cityview Community Church

PODCAST



Promise
May 12, 2024 | Brandon Cooper

This sermon discusses the role of the Holy Spirit in assuring believers of God's love and acceptance through adoption by faith in Jesus Christ. It emphasizes that the Spirit helps overcome doubts by sealing believers as God's children and heirs with Christ. Despite present struggles, believers can be confident in their future inheritance by sharing in Christ's sufferings and glory. The Spirit applies the salvation accomplished by Jesus to transform believers and bring them into God's purposes.







TRANSCRIPT_______________________________________________+The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.

Good morning church. Gonna go ahead grab your Bibles, you can open up the Romans chapter eight will pick up where we left off last week, Romans eight verses 14 to 17, Romans 814 to 17, as you're turning there, if you've ever been ziplining, or anything like that, you know, the terror that accompanies that moment, especially if you're a little bit afraid of heights, as certain members of our pastoral team are, or if you're even more afraid of your kids on the heights, and they were there with you in Costa Rica again, I'm speaking hypothetically. So, you know, in that moment, when the terror is gripping you, you need assurances, right that like it's going to how do I know I'm not going to fall and thankfully, there are people there to offer you those assurances. And usually it involves the carabiner, right? Because that's the part that kind of hooks you in, so that once it's locked, you're safe. You're all good, you're not going to fall. This is I'm competent to heretical analogy. And so I apologize for that upfront. But in some ways, the Spirit is like our carabiner. Right. It reminds us that we are hooked into God and that He won't let us go, that we cannot fall away from grace if we are well and truly saved because the spirit has us. We think about salvation. We talk a lot about Jesus and understandably but think about how important the spirit is to our salvation. Here's Paul in Galatians three, verse 13, very familiar to us. But he goes on in verse 14, and there's something in there that we maybe sometimes miss Paul writes, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole. He redeemed us in order that the blessing blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ, Jesus said that by faith, we might receive the promise of the Spirit. Did you hear that? Did you catch that? Jesus redeemed us from the curse of the law, so that we could receive the promised spirit. That's how important he is. And that is also our topic today, the idea of promise, the spirit is the promise. And at the same time, the spirit seals all God's promises to us so that we know he will bring them to fruition, there's that carabiner idea, because God promised him to us, we can be sure that he will keep all keep us until all God's promises are true in. So that's what we're gonna see as we keep going in Romans eight. So last week, if you weren't here, or just remember, we were talking about the power that the spirit provides for us the power to overcome sin so that we are transformed. What it is just agonizingly slow change sometimes isn't it's he ever had that where like, I could use more of the power. And so in those moments where we struggle with sin, still, you know, the question comes up, like, how do I know that I'm saved? you've ever had that thought? Never just been like, am I even a Christian? In light of what I keep doing? Or when that happens? You know, you have that sense of is the father displeased with us disappointed that we haven't put sin to death fully yet. There's their real questions. Let's see how Paul answers them as we proceed.

PODCAST





Power
May 5, 2024 | Brandon Cooper
Brandon Cooper preached about living in the power of the Holy Spirit for personal transformation and growth. The Spirit gives believers power to overcome sin and live according to the Spirit rather than the flesh. Cooper encouraged tapping into the Spirit's power through prayer and Scripture for holiness, church unity, and evangelism. All Christians are called to rely on the Spirit's gifts and presence as they witness to others about Christ.






TRANSCRIPT_______________________________________________+The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.

Good morning church, we're gonna go ahead grab your Bibles, you can open up the Romans chapter eight, Romans chapter eight will be in verses five to 13 this morning, as you're turning there, someone recently gifted my family a bouncy house, not a big one or anything like that. But you know, just a fun one, especially for the boys. And so, first sunny day, we kind of brought it out got it all set up, you know, it's a big to do to pull it out of the bag unfold the thing I got to figure out where to tie everything off and whatnot. And, you know, get plugged into the boys are are standing there, you know, kind of mouths agape and heart racing and stuff like they just they can't even believe what's about to happen right now. And so, you know, drumroll kind of moment and flick the switch and nothing happened. So anticlimactic. So turns out, the ground fault had tripped. And so, yeah, we, you know, we got to fix it, it was going but you know, the problem at the moment, at least, was that there was no power going to the bouncy house. And how many of us feel that way? How many of us live that way, when it comes to the Christian life, like, we feel like we're just missing power for what it is that we've been called to do. So that's what we need is also what thank God the Spirit provides. And that's what we're looking at this morning. This is the second week in our short series on the Spirit. Because it is a short series, we're kind of laser focused here on the basic ministry of the Holy Spirit in the new covenant, which is to mediate Christ's presence to us. So the Spirit makes Christ presence felt to us so that three things happen. First, we talked about last week, and that's personal fellowship with Jesus, Kyle talked a lot about that. And then second, is our personal transformation into Christ's likeness. And that's what we're talking about this week, the power available for that, and the third, you get to come back next week. So I'm not gonna tell you, but if you and I are going to be more like Jesus, we are going to need a power outside of ourselves, like change isn't happening without some external power, it would feel a little bit like I think how many of us approach the Christian life would be like me grabbing the little tube on the bouncy house and trying to blow the thing up like a balloon, like we just don't have nearly enough of what we need. In order for this to happen. There will be no change without this power source, the Spirit of God, that's exactly the point Paul makes in our passage this morning. So main idea I'm gonna give to you up front. It's very simple. It's basically just the title of the sermon, but it is this live in the Spirit's power, or live in the Spirit's power? That's not new information. I did not just blow any minds, right there anything like that? The big question, of course, that many of you are asking even as you read that, as sure But how, and that's hopefully we're gonna get today, I'm going to steal a bunch of illustrations from JD Greer, just FYI, upfront, so no accusations of plagiarism later. Okay. So, from the book, Jesus continued, but he says the Spirit's power, it's a little bit like our pituitary gland, in the sense that, you know, maybe, you know, you know,

PODCAST





Presence
April 28, 2024 | Kyle Bjerga

Kyle Bjerga preached on Jesus' teachings about the Holy Spirit in John 14-17 and how the Spirit is better than having Jesus physically present. Jesus promised to send the Holy Spirit as another advocate to continue his ministry of teaching and reminding believers. The Holy Spirit indwells believers and points them back to Jesus through ongoing revelation and spiritual promptings. Believers must be receptive to the Spirit's promptings by obeying and prioritizing God's presence. Kyle encouraged cultivating awareness of the Spirit through prayer and responding to the longings he places in believers' hearts.






TRANSCRIPT_______________________________________________+The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.

Well, good morning. You can go and grab your bibles turn to John chapter 14. If you're using one of the black pew Bibles there in front of you, there'll be on page 875. If you have been to the to Washington to see and seeing the Washington Monument pretty much everywhere you can there you can look up and see the monument there, this large stone pillar. It was one time the largest building in the world just for a short time. But at nights if you've been there, it's even more of an impressive structure as these 1000s of dollars worth of lights are pointing up. And at it, this stone pillar is very impressive. Now imagine you go there at night, and you take your phone your camera, and while all the tourists are taking pictures of the monument, you walk over to the lights and take pictures of the lights. Everyone's gonna look at you like what are you doing? That's not the reason we're here. We're here to see the structure. The lights are just showing us what this looks like. Nobody's saying wow, those lights are awesome. The stone pillar is brilliant. It looks great at night with all these lights. So you wouldn't do that. Because the lights if they're working and their function is they're supposed to you're just supposed to illuminate the structure in front of it supposed to show off the brilliance of the monument. And that really is the role of the Holy Spirit. The whole Holy Spirit is there to illuminate to shine on who Jesus is to bring glory to Him. J I Packer calls it his floodlight ministry, quietly turning everyone's attention away from himself and instead to the Savior. And so it's important to have this background as we dive into looking at to the Spirit, because we're here for three weeks, which means we cannot do a full theology on the Holy Spirit. So we're going to touch on a lot of things, but we're not gonna be able to fully develop everything. So it's good to have that background. And he is pointing us to Jesus, Romans eight two calls in the spirit of life, which is where the series title is taken from. So we're not going to do this full theology, the spirit, but as Brandon even just prayed, this is what we're looking at, in this three week series, how the Holy Spirit mediates Christ's presence with us. How he mediates Christ's presence with us the personal fellowship that we can have with God through the Holy Spirit. And we'll do this by looking this week at the presence of the Holy Spirit, the power next week, and finishing up a couple weeks with the promise of the Holy Spirit. So that's kind of the big picture of where we are and where we're going in this series. Now, for today, we're in John 14. And John 14 through 17 gives us the largest, the biggest selection of teaching that Jesus has about the Holy Spirit in his ministry. And this section of Scripture, John 14 to 17 is called a farewell discourse. And it's the farewell discourse because Jesus is preparing his disciples for what life without him will look like, at least life like they knew it. And what that looked like, you know,

PODCAST





My Body & My Neighbor
April 21, 2024 | Brandon Cooper

20240421_BrandonCooper_MyBodyMyNeighbor

Brandon Cooper delivered a sermon series on the embodiment of Christ's love through our physical bodies. He emphasized the importance of face-to-face relationships and physical presence in serving others according to Scripture. Cooper warned against replacing real human connection with technology and argued for prioritizing local community over national news consumption. He encouraged listeners to evaluate how they can better embody Christ's love through physical acts of service in their immediate communities.






TRANSCRIPT_______________________________________________+The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.

Well, if you wanna go ahead, grab your Bibles open up the second Corinthians chapter four will be in verses seven to 12, mostly this morning, kind of zeroing in on verse 10, in particular, second Corinthians chapter four, as you're turning there we are, of course, living in a digital age. And that means that we increasingly inhabit the thin spaces of virtual communities, you know, marked by things like very nationalized political, or cultural conversations. And these sorts of conversations and communities are replacing the thick spaces of place, and family, and faith communities, they're, of course, very poor substitutes for all of these things, too. So it's no surprise that as a culture, we are increasingly lonely. Now, we've talked about this before I've even quoted Robert Putnams Bowling Alone as kind of the A good example of this, the title comes to the fact that there are more people bowling than ever before, but fewer people bowling in leagues than ever before their bowling by themselves. And he goes through a whole list of different ways that this is manifesting. And some of the issues that come along with it. This is so bad that in the United Kingdom, they have actually appointed a national minister for loneliness, to deal with the epidemic. And it is an epidemic, it is a health epidemic, even it is killing people. Being lonely. Being friendless, is worse for your health makes you more likely to die early than the combination of drinking heavily, eating poorly and smoking. Which is remarkable when you think about it, cuz it's not a great combination right there as long as we're talking about the allergy of the body, but it is very real. So for example, 19 93% of men reported that they had no close friends 3%. Today, that number is 15% fivefold increase. And among men under the age of 30, the number is 28%. In other words, the graph is going like this, right. So this is a real problem that we have got to talk about. And we acknowledge the elephant in the room. It is driven by technological advances like that has what has brought this about. And so we're going to need a critical approach to how we use technology. Technological advancement is a Faustian bargain if you remember your Dr. Faust is from your literature days sold his soul to the devil to get wisdom, yes, there is good stuff that comes from it. But there might be a little bit of a selling of our soul in the process, technological advancement gives but it does also take away and not always an equal measure. So one of the ways we see this, of course, is that we get, you know, we get our news from everywhere, all at once. I mentioned before, we have kind of a national conversation, so we don't get local news, we just get world news all the time, we are always connected. Like right now you are connected with your devices, the overwhelming majority of you some of you are probably even getting notifications, as I'm talking about different things that are happening around the world. And some of the ways we talk about that even that word connected by the way, it's almost Orwellian.

PODCAST



My Body & My God
April 14, 2024 | Brandon Cooper

This sermon discusses how our bodies belong to God and are meant to honor him through worship, sanctification, and discipline. It addresses sins related to the body like lust, gluttony, and sloth. It encourages caring for our bodies through exercise, diet, and rest while recognizing our resurrected bodies will be fully submitted to God. Our worth comes from Jesus purchasing us with his blood, not from our physical appearance.








TRANSCRIPT_______________________________________________+The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.

Good morning church. Well, Kyle is not kidding. We're about to tip over again. He'll sit on this side today. All right, that's fine. That's fine. Go ahead, grab your Bibles open up to First Corinthians six will be in verses 19 and 20, especially this morning, although we'll be jumping around a bit as we did last week as we try to develop this Theology of the Body. As you're turning there. It was in 1966, the English men's national team won their first and only World Cup in the sport that they invented soccer or football as it's more properly called. They're in their home stadium at Wembley. And so they want under the captaincy of Sir Bobby Moore. And so he had the privilege of receiving the trophy from Queen Elizabeth the second. And he's ascending the steps in your thinking like this is the crowning glory of his life, except it wasn't as glorious a moment as you might have thought. Why? Because as he's ascending the steps, he notices that the Queen is wearing pristine white gloves. And he has to shake her hand. And he is not pristine anymore. He is caked in mud, including his hands. So as you can see on the video, he's actually frantically wiping his hands on his you know, wherever he can find a dry spot, trying to get them clean enough to shake the Queen's hands. I mentioned this. Why? Because it's how many of us feel as we worship God bodily. Like how dare we approach God when we're as as filthy as we are, as we start wiping our hands, in the hopes that that will make some difference, not without reason, by the way, like I understand why Bobby Moore was actually caked in mud, we are actually caked in filth, we use our bodies to sin, to offend God and defile ourselves regularly. Paul talks about this all over the place. Here's Romans seven, for example, he says, For I delight in the law of God in my inner being. But I see in my members, that is the parts of my body, another law waging war against the law of my mind and make me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members, wretched man that I am Who will deliver me from this body of deaths marked by death characterized by death, we use our bodies to sin. And perhaps most egregiously, as we'll see, in the passage we're looking at this morning, sexual immorality would be one really obvious example. And that's not all we're going to talk about this morning, but it is the context. So as I mentioned, gonna be in First Corinthians 619, and 20. I'm gonna read 12 to 20, though, just so we've got some context, as we get to these all important verses. Let me read it for us. Starting first Corinthians six, verse 12, I have the right to do anything you say. But not everything is beneficial. I have the right to do anything, but I will not be mastered by anything. You say food for the stomach and the stomach for food and God will destroy them both. The body, however, is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord and the Lord for the body. By His power, God raised the Lord from the dead and He will raise us also, do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ Himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never, do not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her and body for the said the...

PODCAST


My Body & My Self
April 7, 2024 | Brandon Cooper
Brandon Cooper preached about embracing our identity as embodied beings created by God. He argued that we should accept our physical bodies instead of trying to change them. Cooper also discussed lovingly counseling those struggling with gender dysphoria to accept the bodies God gave them. The sermon encouraged gratitude for our bodies and living according to God's design rather than our desires.



TRANSCRIPT_______________________________________________+The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
Good morning church. You want to go ahead and grab your Bibles, you can open up to Psalm 139. Psalm 139, will be in verses 13 to 16. This morning, as you're turning there, I remember reading in an article, it's probably about a year ago, and I could not track it back down. So I don't have specifics for you. But I'm someone who struggled with gender dysmorphia, I had said, and then I'm quoting here, during puberty, you know, my body began to go through changes that I did not consent to. I thought that that was a very interesting phrase, because there's some assumptions underneath that expression. One, of course, and maybe most importantly, is that my body is separate from the real meaning non physical me that I am something more than my body. And so then my body might be out of whack with who I really am. And kind of a second assumption baked into that, of course, is that we have every right and every reason to make physical reality conform to our desires. And of course, we do this all the time. By the way, when you're too hot, you turn on the air conditioning, there's a physical reality of heat. And then through technology or technique, we try and make reality conform to what we want to experience. So we see these two impulses these these two assumptions all over the place today, of course, gender and sexuality, one of the big ones technology as well, so that we can control the physical world, especially with the rise of things like artificial intelligence, where there's this idea that there's kind of a mind separate from the physical. We've got body image issues, of course, like eating disorders, and what this is a real thing. You can look it up by the way, selfie dysmorphia, or at the more philosophical level, you see things like the rise of transhumanism, which is the idea that the next stage in evolution is that we actually unshackle ourselves from the constraints of the material world and become pure consciousness. You see this and of course, sci fi movies like The Matrix Ready Player One, the framework and Marvel's Agents of SHIELD. We bring a lot of this into the church as well. I mean, think of some of our language, even when we will say things like, oh, you know, we're all about winning souls. Not bodies don't care about those. We're just here to win souls. And of course, we see this how technology is shaping our approach to church as well with things like live stream and whatnot. You know, a lot of us can tell stories to our kids who almost don't believe us. On Friday nights, we used to drive to a physical building, with a blue and yellow sign out front, and pick our way through a limited selection of VHS tapes to rent and bring home right? And that just almost seems unbelievable. Now, what if 20 3050 years from now we're trying to tell our kids or our grandkids or whatnot, that on Sunday mornings we used to drive to a physical building, in order to gather physically with God's people for church. What's the point of this catalogue? Why are we going through all of this you can see we've got body issues. We got body issues today, like we need a sound Theology of the Body and a solid foundation on which to stand today, because we exist as our new series says, in the flesh, we exist in the flesh, we are embodied people,