Litchfield Church of the Nazarene Podcast

If you have ever tried to quit something, really meant it, and then done it again a week later, Jon Stoe has a word for what you're dealing with.

Part three of Battle in the Heavenly Realms moves from where the battle started to where it actually gets fought. Paul locates it precisely in 2 Corinthians 10, and it isn't out there somewhere. It's in your head.

Jon works through what a stronghold ...

Here's a question most people have never thought to ask. Why was Lucifer in the Garden of Eden in the first place?

Not how he got in. Why he was there.

Jon Stoe spends part two of Battle in the Heavenly Realms on that question, and the answer comes from an unlikely place. A prophecy in Ezekiel 28 aimed at the king of Tyre, in what is now Lebanon. Except halfway through, the prophecy stops desc...

In the late 1800s, doctors believed disease simply appeared out of nowhere. Then a French chemist named Louis Pasteur said something that sounded absurd: there are living things too small to see, they're on your hands and your food and everything you touch, and they can kill you.

...

A woman who had worked the front desk of his church for thirty years told David Graves she missed him. He asked what she missed, expecting something about his preaching. She said she missed his smell.

That turns out to be the sermon.

In the last message of the week, Graves goes to 2 Corinthians 2, where Paul describes God leading us in triumphant procession. It's a specific image. A Roman triu...

Growing up in a pastor's home meant that whoever turned up at church on Sunday came home for lunch. Five kids, plus company, and the company got served first.

David Graves remembers counting the pieces of chicken as the platter went around. He also remembers what his mother said every week when it finally reached him.

He returns to 2 Corinthians 9 for a second look, this time at what God provi...

God is able. Most people in a church can say that sentence without thinking about it.

David Graves spends a morning asking whether anyone actually believes it. He works through five verses in the New Testament that each say the same thing a different way. He is able to keep you from falling. He is able to guard what you've entrusted to him. He is able to help you when you're tempted. He is able to save com...

If a stranger stopped you in the Walmart parking lot and asked what the driving force in your life is, what would you actually say?

David Graves opens with that and then runs through the answers he's collected over decades of ministry. Success. Family. Pleasure. Belonging. None of them wrong, exactly.

Paul gives his own answer in 2 Corinthians 5. Christ's love compels us. Graves digs into that...

There's an official definition for a collectible. An item worth far more than it originally sold for, because of its rarity, its popularity, or its condition.

David Graves has boxes of Topps baseball cards his grown sons keep refusing to take off his hands. He also has a point to make about where value actually comes from.

The text is 2 Corinthians 4, where Paul calls us jars of clay. Graves e...

In some countries, taking a selfie is against the law. Too many people were walking into traffic while they did it.

David Graves opens a week of camp meeting with that, then asks everyone to take a different kind of picture.

The text is 2 Corinthians 3, where Paul reaches back to Moses coming down the mountain with his face still glowing, and then covering it up as the glow faded. Graves, a Ge...

There is one book in the Bible that never mentions God. Not once. Gustavo Crocker picked that one to preach at an ordination service.

It's Esther, and he reads it as a story about the church. Esther is the church. Mordecai is the Spirit. And the word that reaches her, while she's safe inside the palace, is that being comfortable and being safe are not the same thing. Esther held no office and had no title....

What happened in the heart of Billy Graham before he rented that first auditorium? What was going on inside Mother Teresa before she gave her life to the sickest and poorest people in India?

Those are the questions Steve Hoffman opens with. He's the District Superintendent for the Prairie Lakes District, which covers Minnesota and both Dakotas, and this is his annual report to the churches.

Th...

Excuses are like belly buttons. Everybody has one.

Moses had real reasons not to go back to Egypt. He was 80 years old. He was wanted for killing a man. He wasn't a good speaker. Every one of those was true.

God doesn't argue with any of it. He asks something else entirely: what is that in your hand?

Gustavo Crocker, a General Superintendent in the Church of the Nazarene, works th...

Missionaries usually bring pictures. Camilo Gonzalez left his at home.

He had planned to show the photos and the video, the way missionary speakers do. Then he sat with the theme of this year's district assembly, The Next Yes, and changed his mind about what he was supposed to bring.

What he brought instead was Isaiah 6, and a question about the four words everyone quotes from it. Here am I, s...

Jesus talked about money more than he talked about heaven or hell. Half his parables are about it. Jon Stoe wants to know why.

The answer he lands on is uncomfortable: according to Jesus, the number one competitor for your heart is not the devil. It's your bank account. Jon works ...

A hundred years ago this church did not exist. In 1898, the man who would eventually plant it was in a Litchfield city park, training young men to go fight in Cuba.

District Superintendent Steve Hoffman traces the line from J.G. Morrison, a Methodist pastor who prayed for fifty mi...

On a scale of one to ten, how thankful are you? And here's the harder follow-up: would the people who know you best give you the same number? Guest pastor Darlene Stratton opens with those two questions, then walks through seven documented benefits of gratitude. Better relationships. Better sleep. Fewer aches and pains. Less depression, less aggression, mo...

Twenty years after the resurrection, the church had its first real fight, and it wasn't with Rome. It was with itself. Gentiles were coming to faith by the hundreds up in Antioch, and a group of believers back in Jerusalem sent missionaries north to inform them that Paul had left something out. If you want to be saved, they said, you have to keep the law o...

Two apostles. Two prison cells. Two prayers for a miracle. James got the sword. Peter walked out free in the middle of the night, chains on the ground, past sixteen soldiers, without anyone waking up. Same God. Same church praying. Completely different outcomes. In this message from Acts: To the Ends of the Earth, Lead Pastor Jon Stoe goes straight at one of the har...

Philip was in the middle of a revival. People were getting saved all over Samaria, the kind of ministry most pastors only dream about. And right in the middle of it, God told him to leave. Go south, to a desert road in the middle of nowhere, where there was nobody. In part eight of Acts: To the Ends of the Earth, Lead Pastor Jon Stoe opens with his own...