The Upper Room Fellowship

The Upper Room Fellowship
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The Upper Room Fellowship of Columbiana Ohio's sermon audio // www.urfellowship.com

  1. Aug 9

    Pursuit :: Splagchnon // Chris Holm

    We thrive through relationships with others as we show up authentically, with kindness and honor. That is one of our core values, and this week we dug into why something we were built for can feel so hard.We started with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who ran an underground seminary in Nazi Germany and later wrote about what he called the wish dream, the fantasy version of community we carry in our heads. He warned that if we love that fantasy more than the real, flawed people in front of us, we will end up destroying the very community we wanted.From there we walked through First John, a letter written into the wreckage of a church split. John keeps pointing back to one command, love one another, and traces contempt and grudges all the way back to Cain and Abel. Jesus does the same thing in Matthew 5, saying that anger and contempt live in the same family as murder.We looked closely at 1 John 3:17, where the Greek word for our gut, our internal organs, is splagchnon. John uses it to talk about where compassion actually lives, or gets shut off. He is saying love is not just a head belief, it has to move into the deepest part of us and then out into our hands and feet.We also leaned on C.S. Lewis, who said that protecting our heart from love does not keep it safe, it just locks it in a casket where it slowly hardens. And we talked honestly about the difference between forgiveness and enabling harm. You can release bitterness toward someone while still setting firm boundaries to protect yourself and your family.The hope underneath all of it is this: we are not called to love people in our own strength. We are already fully known and fully loved by God, and once that truth reaches our gut, love has somewhere to flow from.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

  2. Aug 2

    Pursuit :: High and Lifted Up // Chris Holm

    We opened a new six-week series called Pursuit, and right away we drew a distinction between a value and a pursuit. A value can sit framed in a lobby and never touch your life. A pursuit means you are running after something, even when you are stumbling.The pursuit we started with is this one: we treasure God's presence. And treasure is a big word. We looked at Jesus' parable in Matthew 13, where a man finds something buried in a field and sells absolutely everything he owns just to buy that patch of ground. That is what treasuring looks like. You trade it all, and you do it with a smile.We walked through three ways God's presence shows up in scripture. His omnipresence means he is in every room, every parking lot, every hospital corridor, holding it all together. His indwelling presence means that when you follow Jesus, the Holy Spirit moves in permanently. And his manifest presence is when God becomes undeniably felt, when your worn-out soul gets a deep, real rest.We spent most of our time in Isaiah 6. The year King Uzziah died was a year of national grief and political fear. And into that specific moment, God showed Isaiah a throne that had never once been empty, covered by a robe whose train filled the entire temple, a record of every kingdom under his authority.Three things happen when Isaiah encounters that presence. He sees God clearly. He sees himself clearly, specifically naming the sharp, anxious, fear-driven words that had been coming out of his mouth. And then the coal from the altar touches the exact thing he confessed, and the guilt is gone.After that, when God asks who will go, Isaiah does not ask for the job description. He just says, send me. That is what an encounter with God's presence does. It reorders everything without argument.We closed with communion and with this invitation: come into the presence, let your problems get right-sized, let the fire touch the broken places, and get ready to be sent.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

  3. Jul 27

    My Friend, Jesus :: Camel Swallowing // Josh Osborn

    We picked up right where we left off last week, with Jesus coming up out of the water at his baptism and heading straight into forty days in the wilderness. No food, no comfort, just the devil waiting for him at the end of it. Where Adam failed in the garden, Jesus stood firm in the desert, and he did it using the same practices we talked about last week: prayer, scripture, fasting.From there we followed him into Galilee, where he started preaching that the Kingdom of God had come near. That phrase shows up over a hundred times across the Gospels, and it meant something specific and dangerous to the people hearing it. These weren't people wondering what happens after they die. They were living under Roman occupation, watching their neighbors get crucified along the road, and waiting for God to actually do something about it. When Jesus said the kingdom was already here, he wasn't offering comfort. He was making a claim that could get him killed.We talked about why Jesus taught in parables and why he called himself the Son of Man instead of announcing himself outright. It kept him one step ahead of Rome while still speaking directly to anyone who knew their Scripture, especially Daniel 7.Then we shifted to something we don't talk about enough. Jesus had a sense of humor. We walked through the plank in the eye, the camel and the gnat, the fish with a coin in its mouth, and Jesus letting his friends think he was a ghost before he strolled out onto the water. We looked at him showing up on a beach after the resurrection, cooking breakfast like nothing had happened, recreating the very moment he first called those same disciples.This is the real Jesus. Not the solemn figure we've flattened him into, but someone playful, subversive, and fully human. The invitation is the same as always: come and know him, not as a concept, but as a friend.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

  4. Jul 19

    My Friend, Jesus :: Come and Find Out // Josh Osborn

    We spend a lot of time talking about what Jesus did. This week, we slowed down to think about who he was. We started in a familiar place, the acknowledgment that nearly all serious historians agree Jesus existed. But the goal wasn't to argue for that. The goal was to actually meet him. To spend some time with the man who changed the calendar, rearranged the world, and somehow managed to get accused by his critics of being a drunk and a glutton. We looked at what we know about Jesus as a real, historical human being. Where he lived. What he ate. What he probably looked like (shorter than you imagine, darker skin, built like someone who worked with stone and walked about 20,000 miles). We talked about Mary and Joseph, poor and devout and terrified, doing the best they could. We talked about Jesus wandering off at twelve, his siblings thinking he had lost his mind, and his mother holding onto every strange thing she witnessed. But more than biography, we looked at the practices that formed him. Prayer three times a day from before he could talk. Scripture deep enough in his body that he could quote from 24 Old Testament books off the top of his head. A weekly Sabbath that interrupted everything. Hospitality practiced in a home without servants, where you washed feet because that was just what you did. These weren't extras. They were the ground his life grew from. The invitation this week is simple. Read about him. Pray to him. Spend actual time with him. Not just at church, but on an ordinary Tuesday, in the middle of your regular life. You cannot follow someone you don't know. And knowing Jesus starts with letting him be a real person, the kind you can picture, talk to, and walk with.

  5. Jul 12

    Knocking At Midnight

    This week we are stepping into 24/7 prayer, and we are doing it because we believe God moves when His people make space for Him. We looked at 1 Timothy, where Paul is writing to a young pastor named Timothy, who is nervous, young, and leading a church in one of the most spiritually chaotic cities in the ancient world. Paul's first instruction to him is not a leadership strategy. It is a call to wage what he calls "the good warfare," and the way we fight that war is through prayer.We talked about how prayer is a first response, not a last resort. Too often we treat prayer like a backup plan instead of the thing that actually connects us to power. We used the picture of a phone at six percent. We have an infinite power source available to us, but without the cord, there is no connection. Prayer is that cord.We also looked at Psalm 42, the panting deer, and realized that verse is not about peace. It is about desperation, a deer being chased until it is out of breath. We talked about the father in Mark 9 who brought his sick son to Jesus and said, "I believe, help my unbelief." That kind of honesty is exactly where God meets us.We walked through the Lord's Prayer, and we looked at James 5, which tells us that whether we are suffering or cheerful, prayer and praise are our response either way.Our hope this week is that this room stays full of prayer around the clock, and that we would become people who cry out to God not only in crisis, but as a way of life.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

  6. Jul 6

    The Whole Story #12 :: Maranatha // Chris Holm

    Most of us picked up our picture of the end of the world from somewhere other than the Bible. A novel, a movie, a footnote in a study Bible. This week we went looking for where that picture actually came from, and traced it back to one man in the 1830s, a study Bible in 1909, and a series of paperbacks and movies that turned his idea into common sense. Then we opened the actual passages. In 1 Thessalonians 4, Paul isn't writing an escape plan. He's comforting a grieving church that thought their dead loved ones had missed out on Jesus coming back. The Greek word behind "meet the Lord in the air" describes a welcoming party going out to greet a king and walk him home, not an evacuation. In Matthew 24, Jesus points us to the story of Noah to explain what "taken" and "left" mean, and in that story, the ones taken were taken by judgment. The ones left were safe in the ark. We also looked at why judgment doesn't have to be something we dread. For people who have actually needed things made right, a good God who judges is not a threat. It's the promise that nothing gets left crooked forever. The Bible doesn't end with a warning to get our act together. It ends with an invitation. Maranatha, come Lord Jesus, is what you say about someone you love who is almost home. If you're grieving someone who died before you thought they should, this one is for you. They didn't miss anything. They're not behind. They're ahead of you, and the same God who is bringing them back is the one we're waiting on together.

  7. Jun 29

    The Whole Story #11 :: Renovation, Not Evacuation // Chris Holm

    We closed out this series by asking what we actually believe happens at the end of the story. Most of us grew up with a picture of heaven that never really came from the Bible. Souls floating up to clouds, harps, pearly gates. That picture owes more to Greek philosophy than it does to Scripture. Plato taught that the body is a prison and the goal of life is escaping it. The real hope in the Bible runs the other direction.We walked through Revelation 21 and 22, where John sees a new heaven and a new earth, and the Holy City coming down out of heaven to earth. Not us leaving for somewhere else. God moving in with us, for good. We looked at Isaiah 65, where the picture of eternity is houses being built and lived in, vineyards planted and eaten from, real work that never gets stolen from us again. We looked at 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul describes our future bodies as a seed becomes a plant, the same thing, fully grown and fully realized. And we looked at Romans 8, where all of creation is described not as dying but as groaning like a woman in labor, on its way toward being born into something new.We traced the whole arc of the Bible from a garden in Genesis to a garden city in Revelation. A tent built like a garden, a temple carved like a garden, a man buried and raised in a garden, and finally a whole renewed world grown up into what Eden was always meant to become.The application this week is simple. Gratitude. Thank God for your body, the one you have and the one that is coming. Thank him for the parts of this earth you love. Thank him for the people you have lost, and for the reunion that is coming. Thank him that he is not done with this planet, and he is not done with us.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

  8. Jun 21

    The Whole Story #10 - With His People // Chris Holm

    On the day of Pentecost, fire showed up again. Centuries earlier, fire and smoke covered Mount Sinai when God gave the law to Moses, and anyone who touched that mountain paid for it with their life. Fifty days after Passover, on the same festival that marked that moment, the fire of God's presence returned. This time it skipped the building and landed on people. A room full of fishermen, a former tax collector, and a group of faithful women became, in an instant, living temples for the presence of God.We look at why that moment didn't end the way Sinai did. The cross changed the situation. When Jesus took on our sin and our brokenness, the temple curtain tore in half, and the danger of getting close to a holy God disappeared. The Spirit moved in to do what He had wanted to do from the start, live with His people, in His people.We also look at the list of nations in Acts 2, a list that mirrors the Table of Nations from Genesis, right before the Tower of Babel. At Babel, humanity tried to climb up and grab God's authority for itself, and ended up scattered. At Pentecost, God came down, and the Spirit gathered the nations back together, languages and all.From there, the early church put that gathering into practice. People sold what they had to cover what others needed. Nobody was shamed into it and no law required it. It was a living preview of the kingdom of God, a Jubilee economy lived out at the kitchen table.We close by looking at the actual grammar behind the Great Commission. "Go" is a participle. It assumes we're already going somewhere, every day, to work, to the store, to school. The command is to make disciples wherever that going already takes us. Our assignment this week is simple. Help one person take one step closer to Jesus, wherever they happen to be starting from.URF WEBSITE: ➤ http://www.urfellowship.comSOCIALS: ➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/urfellowship/➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/urfellowship

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The Upper Room Fellowship of Columbiana Ohio's sermon audio // www.urfellowship.com

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  • Creator
    The Upper Room Fellowship
  • Years Active
    2017 - 2026
  • Episodes
    477
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © The Upper Room Fellowship