Open Table Community Church

From the beginning, we were designed for work. The Gospel message is not just a ticket out of hell, but a call to redeem the work that He has planned for us ahead of time. Our inherent identity in Christ is born out of our knowledge of Him, transformed from the inside out, and propelled to do good works.

Our identity isn't displayed in outward appearances but the depths of who we are is found in the heart. We know, however, that the heart is deceitful above all things. Graciously, Jesus came so that our hard, lying hearts would be replaced by one that only He could change. Our behaviour is then transformed by what bubbles out of us.

Whatever you put in your head, is what you're going to get out. Transformation starts in our minds and it's important to consider the bulk of what we feast on in our minds. Freedom starts with what we know about Jesus. Our identity revolves around what's in our head.

We begin our identity series discussing the importance of telling our story. When we leave our dreams in God's hands, he weaves a testimony of His glory and power. It is that testimony and the blood of the Lamb that will overcome the enemy. So dream big and watch God create a masterpiece.

We recap our journey through Romans and the work that Christ has DONE on our behalf. The knowledge of the gospel is what does a work in us and changes our hearts. Jesus has completed the work of our righteousness and it is our job to believe.

Learning how to lay down our arguments for the good of another in Christ is where we find ourselves in Romans this week. Jesus' sacrificial love in which he laid down his liberties for us is the model for our evangelism. The people God has placed in our lives will be changed by the Holy Spirit and not by our lists of holiness.

In a world fraught with arguments and cancel culture, our visit in Romans this morning challenges us to mind our own business while trusting the Holy Spirit to continue His work in others. Being in relationship with others will inevitably bump us up against those we don't agree with or with whom we wish would have a behavior transformation, but we must recognize that we too are in need of behavior modification. It's why Jesus came to lay down his life. So our response naturally becomes one of a life laid down for Him and for others.

Today is the heart of the indicative shift in Romans. Paul outlines that it is only when we are truly transformed and embrace the love of Christ that we will then be able to love others. It is Christ's work that enables our transformation.

We enter an idicative imperitive shift this week, which basically means we have established truth and now comes the response. The truth of God's grace that has been conveyed now requires a life change. The difference between the behavioral list Paul presents and what religion would require of us is that outward displayed evidence of true conversion is only accomplished through a complete heart change that only the Holy Spirit can complete.

In the Holy Place, the items used for worship were intended to remind the priest of the past, present, and future of Israel. As we continue our study in Romans following the progression of worship in the tabernacle, Paul points out that our contemplation must remain rooted in the fact that we are not the main character in the story. This is God's.

This week we get to see Paul’s heart of the lost and in so doing run into our own heart check. Paul admits that their refusal to follow Jesus isn’t evidence that they don’t love and serve God. On the contrary, they are zealous for God. They are merely mistaken on how to reach him. This has powerful implications for our divided contemporary world, all leading us to question our own responses to the behavior of a world that seems to have lost its mind. How do we properly respond to the Lost? Paul shows us.

Throughout our series, we have been comparing how Paul outlined Romans to the worship at the tabernacle. This week we enter the tabernacle into the holy place. The shift moves from the individual to the nation. Paul doesn't stop at just the individual's salvation but begins to focus on how God relates to the corporate church. The individual needs the collective to experience the fullness of God.

When we read passages that theologians have argued over, we can oftentimes miss the importance of the message in light of our opinions. The litmus test to gauge our correct response in Romans 8 is checking our joy in knowing we are chosen. We have come to the conclusion that suffering and pain is not from God and yet, when we pray, the Holy Spirit intercedes the will of the Father causing all things to work together for our good--what is actually best and not what is necessarily pretty. Overwhelming victory is ours as chosen heirs through Jesus and nothing can separate us from His love.

This week we leave the world of the theoretical consisting of the philosophical and theological, and we enter the world of the experiential. Paul leads us into what it means to live by the Spirit, using the word “spirit” more than twice as much in this one chapter than he uses in the rest of the book. The key takeaway is that all of the richness of this book is only ours if we have the Holy Spirit. Faith in Jesus is more than a worldview or a theology; it’s an experience Jesus called being “born again” and according to Paul, the Holy Spirit confirms with our spirit that we are children of God. This is an experience that we need. Join us as we dig into what it means to know that you are God’s.

In this message, we find sin to be more stubborn than we had hoped. Paul struggles with his sin and as he does, he learns something important. Sin is a noun. It’s so much more than something we do. It’s a brokenness, a darkness, a wickedness inside the human heart. We didn’t sin by breaking the law, the law showed up to reveal the true condition of our hearts. But if sin is more than a behavior, then living by faith is more than sin management. Paul brings his struggle with sin to a climactic peak that many struggle with and in the end, he surrenders. Join us as we fight right along with Paul through this life tempered by sin.

Free at last. We look at what the Bible means when it says “free”. We are not free to do whatever we want. That’s not true freedom. True freedom is doing what you were made to do. We were made for a purpose and sin interferes with that purpose, but since we are dead to sin, we can pursue our real calling. We dive into the original call of humanity to bear God’s image, to be fruitful and multiply and to rule in God’s place. Being freed from sin allows us to ask how we might fulfill that calling. Dive in to find what your life can look like now that you are free at last.

This week Paul gets theological. As we step from the altar to the Laver in the Tabernacle that is the Book of Romans, Paul starts to deal with our sin. Now that we are saved, are we allowed to sin? Not at all. In fact, according to Paul, the key to no longer being driven by sin is to understand that we are dead. The entire system of sin and death said, “if you sin, you die”. We sinned and in baptism, we died with Jesus. The covenant of sin and death is fulfilled so we no longer have to live under that covenant any longer. It’s our job to believe that.

This week we stop to take in just how the nature of our lives have changed in light of Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf. We are no longer hiding from. God is not angry with us. We don’t need to strive to please a demanding Father. Paul declares boldly that we are at Peace with God. He emphasizes this reality by reminding us to what length God went to love us when we were His enemies and if God would sacrifice His son for us when we were sinners, how much more will he offer us Grace as His children. We are at Peace with God and that changes everything. Above all else, it opens the door to real growth and maturity.

It is here we unpack the idea of Grace and Faith not as theological concepts but as relational realities between God and His People. Rooted in ancient Roman economic concepts, Paul uses this clear metaphor to introduce an idea of love and commitment that informs these powerful Greek words. Don’t miss this week as we learn what it means to live by faith in the one who has shown us grace.

Romans one, two and most of three are Paul’s declaration that we are all sinners. From those who turn from God in chapter one and get released to all manner of sin to those who sit comfortably in their self-righteousness in chapter two, to everyone who might slip through the cracks in chapter three, Paul declared boldly that “all have sinned and fallen short”... That means you. This is essential to the Gospel narrative as Grace can only be Grace when it’s undeserved and this depravity is something we all need to come to grips with. It’s the door to Grace.

We spent this week outlining the Book of Romans and even more than that, learning why this Book is so important. We also learned that the Gospel is not a new idea. God has been telling this story of salvation since the moment humans fell. The layout of Romans is mirrored all over the Bible and it drives us to never settle. We should continue going deeper and deeper in our relationship with God as this is what we were made for.

Today, Esther Heintzelman unpacks what it looks like when we get lost… when we stray from God’s promises. We all know if we fail to learn from the past, we’re doomed to repeat it and because we don’t learn well, history always seems to repeat itself. God’s people seem to fail over and over again and we do it almost exactly like those who came before us did. History repeats itself… But when we look more closely at those old stories of human failure and especially at God’s response, we find that God is always faithful. As many times as we fail, God forgives and redeems. History, His Story, repeats itself and when it comes to his faithfulness, this is good for us. Just as God was faithful to His People back then… History repeats itself and He’s faithful to us today.

This week we dive into the New Covenant. Jesus turned things upside down when he dusted off an old obscure passage in Jeremiah that promised a New Covenant and while celebrating Passover with his disciples, Jesus says THIS is about THAT passage… THIS is the New Covenant Jeremiah was talking about. But what makes it so new? Jeremiah gives us hints that make a lot of what Jesus taught make more sense. Join us as we unpack the final and greatest covenant in the I Promise Series.

This week we look at the Davidic Covenant. As the Rabbis and teachers sat in Babylonian captivity, wondering how they had lost all that God had promised, they found the Prophets explaining how they had failed to keep their end of the Covenant offered through Moses. But that wasn’t all they found. They found hope in the promises that God had made to David. God promised David a special heir to sit on his throne forever. God was not done with Israel yet. The People of God clung tightly to the hope found is this Unconditional Covenant God made to this shepherd turned king. Everything Israel is as a nation hinges on this promise and everything we know about Jesus does as well.

This week we touch briefly on the Noahic Covenant, but dive deeply into God’s promise to Abraham. This ancient conversation between God and a 75 year old, childless man, has shaped more of our world than can be understood. God’s promise to make this man’s name great is still being fulfilled 4,000 years later. God’s promise to make this man with no children into a great nation is evident every day Israel continues on the earth. And God’s promise to bless the entire world through the descendant of this man is at the core of what it means to be a Jesus follower. The Abrahamic Covenant is hard evidence to the faithfulness of God. When God speaks, everything changes.

We launch our study of the Covenants of the Old Testament with the Adamic Covenant. God Promises Adam that if he sins, he will experience a death. As God unlocks what that death is to look like, we find comfort in knowing that life is supposed to be difficult. When our lives are hard… When raising our kids is hard… When our marriages are hard… When our relationships are hard… When our jobs are hard… it’s not a sign that we are doing something wrong. It’s a sign that God was right, as He always is. We experience the promise God made to Adam every day. Everything it means to be human can only really be understood in the context of Genesis chapter three so this is where we must start. But we don’t stop there. Our hope comes from the secret promise hidden in God’s words in this fateful chapter. Things won’t always be this way!

Having established the Holy Spirit’s relational nature (as close to us as the air we breathe), we dive into the function of the Holy Spirit. To do this, we unlock the structure of the Creed and how the three articles help us to outline the list of things that are assumed when we say that we Believe in the Holy Spirit. We find that the church organization, the fellowship of believers, our personal salvation, and so much more are all the work of the Spirit of God. Our job is to welcome this beautiful presence into our lives and our world. Though our job is to remain faithful as we love and serve God, we pray everyday for the Holy Spirit to move mightily in ways that only He can!

We start into the third article of the Apostle’s Creed, and as we begin our study of the Holy Spirit, we start with the relational essence of the Spirit of God. In both Testaments of our Bible’s, the word “spirit” means “breath”. There is nothing more intimate than breath. Entering into us even as it proceeds from the Father and Son. We answer the question, “Why did Jesus have to ascend to the Father?” and we discuss what it means to have the very Breath of God dwelling in us in a relationship more intimate than had previously been imagined. What does it mean to live with a God who desires to be that close to us?

This week as we examine the second part of the second article of the Apostle’s Creed. We look deeply into the function of Jesus. Having established that Jesus is both fully God and fully man, we dive into His role as Savior. The Creed focuses entirely on Jesus’ suffering, death, resurrection, ascension, return and reign. It mentions nothing about his life. We examine why this is as we find where true Grace enters the story and our lives.

We dive into the second article of the Apostles Creed, I believe in Jesus. We start by looking at Jesus' nature, being both fully God and fully man. He is the Son of God and the Son of an all too human woman, Mary. This complexity not only challenges us, but it offers us access to the most incredible being in the universe. We are invited to rely and depend on that Jesus. As we take Him on the terms that we are offered in Scripture, we find ourselves in relationship with the eternally existent, Son of God.

We look at what it means to believe in the God who is not only the maker of heaven and earth, the creator of everything that is, but also the God who reveals Himself in relational terms like Father. And to believe in a God who is not only all powerful and infinite, but also intricately interested and involved in our lives, should and must change us. We simply can't remain the same if we try give ourselves to such a God. Faith demands more.

We start this year with a dive into the Apostle’s Creed. As the anchor that insures us that we have not moved too far from the faith of the original believers in Jesus, the Creed serves as a great source of foundational truth. We start by looking at why the Creeds are so important and how they depend on the powerful Latin word, “Credo”. God is not asking us to mentally acknowledge him that way we do a math problem or historical reality… He wants us to depend and rely upon Him.

We spend the morning looking back at the past year’s messages as we talk about Joshua leading God’s people into the Promised Land. Joshua, confused, emotional, and possibly angry, had just lost his mentor and friend, Moses. Joshua found that life only moves forward and despite the turmoil he found himself in, he could do nothing by staying close to God and continuing to advance the Kingdom of God.

In today’s message we look at Joy. We discuss the difference in our brains between Joy and happiness, and the way that we can feel joy even when we are not happy. We also talked about how lacking our world is in Joy today. The background music of our daily lives today is a hedonistic happiness that lacks both healthy boundaries and any Joy at all. Only by clinging to God and experiencing Him for ourselves, not the idea, but God himself, can we find lasting joy.

In week three of our Advent Series we look at the power of Hope. But hope, like nitroglycerine, is not only powerful, it’s dangerous. There is nothing more detrimental than disappointed hopes and disappointed hopes seems to be what the world is selling today. We are constantly asked to put our hopes in the wrong things. The Psalmist very specifically warns us against that kind of hope and instead tells us to hope only in God, the One who can bear up under our hopes.

This morning we look at a Psalm of Solomon. The son of a songwriter who set out to honor God the way his dad did. Solomon was convinced that “love” was the best way to define the relationship between his dad and his God but as Solomon set out to write a love song to God, he found that he needed to define what love should look like, which includes justice and righteousness and flourishing. We find that this love is way less romantic and way more practical than we are used to, but the greatest lie in in the world is that if you don’t agree with me, you don’t love me.

We kick off this Advent by looking at Psalms 42 where the Psalmist recognizes that he can command his own soul to stop listening to the background music of this world and instead, pick a better song. We set out to, in this series, to call attention to the soundtrack, the Score, of our lives so that we can stop singing along to music that doesn’t fit our calling. Like the Psalmist, we command our soul to sing songs of peace.

We close this year’s Saints Series with a look at Edith Shaeffer. Married to a great thinker and apologist, she found a real faith should transform you and cause you to love real people, right where they live. After years of ministry to children, she found simply godly hospitality to be her greatest tool for not only drawing people, but showing them what faith looked like in the world. She invited thousands into her home and loved them like family and by doing so, changed the world.

This week, Esther Heintzelman walks us through the Prophet Elijah’s darkest moments to find that we are never alone. God’s most profound and world-changing saints are the ones that we never hear about. The ordinary, nameless, faithful followers of God are the foundation of God’s Kingdom. Elijah learned that he was surrounded and would be succeeded by 7,000 ordinary saints like you and me.

As we kick off this year’s Saints Series, we look at Michael Faraday, a saint and scientist who worked in a time when multiple disciplines were theorizing a world without God. Faraday, while surrounded by voices declaring God to be dead, looked deeply into the universe and found his faith more and more deeply drawn to the Maker of heaven and earth. He showed us that when you start with a deep faith in God, you will find Him everywhere but when you start with foolishness (The fool says in his heart there is no God), you will find only more foolishness.

As we wrap up our Setting the Table Differently series, we look at the two things required by the Old Testament tithe… That we GIVE and GO. The Jews not only gave their tithe, but they traveled to the Lord’s Presence to share and fellowship together. GIVE and GO! We look at ways to give to OTCC and ways to connect and form community with our people.

As we set the table differently, we must bring our best tithe. Whether it is money, time, or gifts, your presence matters. Engage with the community of believers around you so that the seed you plant, God will grow and multiply to bring a harvest.

Setting the table differently will always begin with community. It is vital to the perpetuation of a healthy church. This begins with our individual health so that we are able to engage each other, for we are unable to give something out of nothing.

The church today is experiencing a similar trend that the master in the parable Jesus told in Luke 14 experienced. We have prepared a table, and yet our culture has legitimate reasons they cannot join. As a church, we must wrestle with what it means to set the table differently in order that no one is left from the invitation to join us in the presence of the Master.

If you are in the Kingdom of God long enough, you will run the risk of losing or misplacing your faith. The key to finding it will be recognizing it "didn't just get up and walk away." It may require you to move some things that are hindering you from placing your faith in Jesus.

Joy and peace in the face of adversity is found in the releasing of control. You can let go of those things that don't really matter and find the most important thing, your purpose in Christ. Your pursuit of that purpose is what it means to walk in freedom.

A miracle principle in the Kingdom of God is that of bringing our “not enough”. It involves taking inventory of what we have, no matter how small, leaning on our community, and investing in our family during the process. God takes the little and multiplies it.

In this upside down kingdom, the gate may not seem like one you would want to pass through. Our lowest point or most desperate need is often the way we enter into the recognition of God’s presence and it is what then becomes our testimony to the greatness of our King.

Open Table Community Church is a community organized by and around the Word of God, to cooperate in the Mission of God of furthering the Kingdom of God. We accomplish this by gathering in worship together around a common teaching and a common table, by living in fidelity to Christ and one another, and by working together to bring reconciliation to the four relationships broken by sin in the Fall.

In the Kingdom, we have been given a playbook to follow as we live out our purpose and calling. We look to those who are following Jesus and hold Jesus’ example as our compass on our journey. Not everyone and everything is imitatible, however, we should set for ourselves a goal to be someone who is worthy of imitation as we ourselves follow Christ.

When faced with anxiety, the underlying attack is of our identity. As kingdom people, our worries are not insignificant, however our understanding is that our God is bigger. The challenge then is to be present and bring the worries of the day to our loving Father who knows what we need before we even ask.