Cedar Mill Sermon Podcast

The Lord’s Table is more than a ritual we observe; it reveals the character of our faith and the kind of community we are becoming. Through the divided tables of Antioch and Rome, Paul confronts the exclusion, judgment, and contempt that threaten Christian unity. Because we are justified by faith in Jesus, every believer is welcomed as a full heir of God’s promises, regardless of ethnicity, gender, social status, background, or secondary theological differences. This does not mean truth is unimportant, but it does mean our disagreements must remain beneath the greater reality of the gospel. The table does not belong to us, and we do not decide who is worthy to sit there—Jesus is the host. His table calls us to lay aside superiority, extend generous hospitality, and become a community marked by “faith expressing itself through love.”

We live in a world where we are more connected than ever, yet somehow more lonely, divided, and disconnected from one another.
In the first week of The Table, Pastor Dave explores why, knowing the distraction, division, and drifting apart we would face, Jesus gave His people a meal. Through Paul’s words to the divided church in Corinth, we see that Communion is more than remembering something that happened long ago—it is an invitation to be reconnected to the story of Jesus, to Jesus Himself, to one another, and to the future He has promised.
At the Table, we are reminded that His story is our story, His people are our people, and grace calls us to put down our divisions and truly come together.

Envy is more than wanting what someone else has. As one writer puts it, “Envy is feeling bitter when others have it better.” It begins quietly, often with insecurity. Then insecurity leads to comparison, comparison grows into resentment, resentment devolves into jealousy, and jealousy can create its own kind of madness.
Proverbs 14:30 says, “A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones.” Envy is a happiness killer because it turns our eyes away from God’s love, away from gratitude, and away from who God has made us to be. But freedom begins when we own up to envy, refuse to feed it, find our worth in God, take pleasure in who He made us to be, and learn to rejoice in the success of others.

The Bible’s first murder story opens with God asking, “Why are you angry?” and the book of Jonah closes with God asking, “Is it right for you to be angry?” When the God of the Universe keeps asking us the same question, we should probably consider it. Anger is not the enemy; anger is a signal that something is wrong. But wrath is what happens when anger is cherished, fed, and weaponized, when we stop having anger and anger starts having us. All series long in “The Deadly 7” we’ve explored sins that want to capture & corrode our lives, and wrath is so dangerous, because it disguises itself as righteousness. But our God is slow to anger, and His patience/meekness must empower us to be people who walk in freedom from wrath. Part of that freedom comes from understanding our anger before it becomes wrath so this week, we allow God to ask us the same question He asks Jonah & Cain, “Why are you angry?

Eating is a gift from God. It’s part of being human. Yet there is a pull for it to make us less human. The way we interact with food says much about our appetites and our priorities. The meals we eat in the day come with opportunities. Opportunities to become more thankful, more generous, and closer with God and others, and also the opportunity to be entitled, to act out of scarcity, and to be isolated. In this week’s message we will be looking at the whole of Scripture and asking God to give us his vision for food.

Most of us picture sloth as the lazy person on the couch, but the ancient church saw something far more dangerous and far more familiar. They called it acedia, a quiet spiritual apathy, the slow cooling of the heart toward God, toward others, and toward the very life we were made to live. In our comfortable suburbs it rarely looks like significant sin and shows up as isolation, numbing distraction, and as a faith we keep putting off until later. In Jesus’ parable of the talents, one servant does not squander his master’s gift; he simply buries it, chooses a comfortable path & plays it safe. Underneath his sloth was fear, and underneath the fear was a misguided understanding of his Master as harsh. This is the root issue, that we don’t trust the Goodness of our God in a way that empowers us to live lives of real, risky, radical faith. So this week we step back from our lives to think, consider, evaluate and ask Where have we been burying our lives and calling it rest?

In today’s message, we dive into the deadly sin of lust. It’s important for us to remember that lust isn’t only about sexual temptation; it can show up as vanity that longs for admiration, power that seeks to control, and indulgence that pursues pleasure apart from God’s loving boundaries. Scripture shows us that lust begins in the heart, and when allowed to grow, it can have destructive effects on every area of our lives—including the relationships we hold most dear. But the good news is that Jesus, in kindness and grace, invites us to bring our sin into the light, not to shame us, but so that healing can start to take place. By the work and power of the Holy Spirit, our desires can be renewed and reordered, and we can learn the better way of love—patient, kind, truthful, unselfish, and full of hope.

Greed is the sin nobody confesses because it never feels like a sin. It looks like prudence, planning, and even responsibility. In Luke 12, Jesus tells the story of a man whose land produced so abundantly that he chose to build bigger barns to hold it all. Then Jesus calls him a "fool," not because he saved, but because of what drove the saving. In this sermon we'll explore what sits underneath greed: the unspoken assumption that there's not enough and that what you have, you might lose. Psychologists call this a "scarcity mindset," and it’s the opposite of the mind of Christ. This means God isn't just calling us to new behaviors, but to a new way of thinking, believing, and seeing the world. And yet, knowing that our behaviors also shape our thinking, God offers us a new way of living that kills greed and cultivates generosity in our hearts. In the end, we'll discover that when we embrace dependence, trust, and faith in God rather than Mammon, we truly find the peace, joy, and security we were looking for all along.

There is a sin so close to us we can barely see it, one that masquerades as confidence, self- reliance, and drive. This week we launch a new series, "The Deadly 7," by tackling the most deceptive of them all: Pride. Using King Nebuchadnezzar's stunning rise and catastrophic fall in Daniel 4, alongside Jesus's parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in Luke 18, we discover that pride isn't just loud arrogance, it's the quiet, deep-down conviction that we are the center of our own story and that what we've built, we've built by our own power. The good news is that God offers something better. Humility, not as weakness or self-loathing, but as the quiet freedom of a creature who has stopped grasping and started resting in the Creator. This series will ask the same question every week: What is this sin promising you? What is it actually costing you? And what is Jesus offering in its place? This isn't about being better. It’s about being free.

Early in the Bible's story, in Genesis 11, humanity speaks with one voice and uses that gift not to fill the earth with God's name but to build a tower to "make a name for ourselves.” Towers aren't the problem; it's what we build them for. The names we manufacture always eventually become babble: thin, fleeting, temporary, light, superficial — too small to satisfy the soul. So, God scatters. But He doesn't just rebuke, He restores. At Pentecost, what Babel could not build, the Spirit gave. Acts 2 shows us how people from every nation gathered around the name above every name and declared Jesus Christ as Lord! But what does that mean for us? This week we come together as an entire church to ask: "Will the names we are attempting to make for ourselves satisfy our souls?"