Defining Moments Part 2 - God’s Will For Your Life

Defining Moments Part 1 - So Many Choices

Life is full of choices. Which career path do we take, what college do we attend, should I marry this person or wait. All of these questions can be a bit overwhelming.

In this message, we walk through the importance of choices and what God is calling us to do.

Reckless Love Part 5 - What’s Stopping You?

The role of pride in anyone’s life can be damaging. In this message, we deal with how pride gets in the way of love. We often can tie our accomplishments and failures to our identity, inside of this the love we have can get out of whack. To love recklessly we have to get back to where love comes from, and that is our creator God.

At the end of this series, we are faced with the challenge to love radically each and every day. May your prayer be that you eliminate pride and love recklessly.

Reckless Love Part 4 - Love Your Enemies

Week 4 of the series The Reckless Love continues with examining the importance of loving those that don't always seem to love you.

Jesus provided tons of examples of how to love others. One of the biggest ways He demonstrated His love was by holding no conditions to His love. The challenge that sits in front of us is how we will let love be shown to those around us. Will our conversations be full of grace seasoned with salt or full of salt seasoned with grace?

Reckless Love Part 3 - Say, Say, Say

Words are a powerful. Nothing has more impact then words that are spoken for you or against you. Those who love recklessly have an overflow of words that are supportive, encouraging and life giving. Pastor Clay Monkus continues the series, Reckless Love by talking about how words impact others and how you can be grace giving in your words.

Reckless Love Part 2 - The Other Side

In this message Clay Monkus explores one of the biggest barriers that we face in really recklessly loving other people in the way that God has called us to. This barrior is our current cultures mindset of “us” versus “them”; that we believe that if you are on the "us" side, then you are good, right, loveable and matter, but if you are on the "them" side, then you are bad, wrong, unloveable and ultimatly don't matter. 

This idea does unbelievable damage to us really being able to become reckless lovers. But Jesus attacks this idea that he knows we all struggle with.

Mark 4:35 "That day when evening came, he said to his disciples, “Let us go over to the other side.”

Reckless Love Part 1 - What is Reckless Love?

The challenge of love is at the core of Jesus teaching. It is a simple commandment to go and love but one of the hardest things anyone will ever have to do.

So what does it mean to be Reckless? To go and love in a reckless way? Pastor Clay dives into what could be the very thing that changes the landscape of christianity...Love.

Easter 2018 - Unbelievably Believable

If you think the death and resurrection of Jesus are unbelievable, this one thing might change your mind.

Soundtrack Part 5 - With God

Every day is just a collection of moments. There's 1,440 minutes in every day. 1,440 opportunities for you to connect to the presence of God. The goal comes back to this idea of how many of those minutes can I live in the conscious awareness of God's presence.

Psalm 16:8 says, “I have set the Lord always before me.”

Soundtrack Part 4 - Courage

Pastor Jospeh teaches us that a life with God gives us courage to chase our own lions. 

2 Samuel 23:20-23
20There was also Benaiah son of Jehoiada, a valiant warrior son of Jehoiada, son of Ish-hai. from Kabzeel. He did many heroic deeds, which included killing two champions of Moab. Another time, on a snowy day, he chased a lion down into a pit and killed it. 21Once, armed only with a club, he killed an imposing Egyptian warrior who was armed with a spear. Benaiah wrenched the spear from the Egyptian’s hand and killed him with it. 22Deeds like these made Benaiah as famous as the Three mightiest warriors. 23He was more honored than the other members of the Thirty, though he was not one of the Three. And David made him captain of his bodyguard.

Soundtrack Part 3 - Dealing With Pride

Using the story of Jacob, Pastor Brad Medford teaches us that our pride is one of the biggest things that gets in the way of our being able to hear the Soundtrack of God in our life. 

Soundtrack Part 2 - Overflowing with Gratefulness

In this message Pastor Joseph McMurry teaches us that there is something that happens when we realize what we have been given. When someone recommends you for a job or a promotion, when someone appreciates your service and gives you a referral, when you have a need and someone comes through for you. Something happens when we realize what we’ve been given. We become grateful.

Col 4:2 - Devote yourselves to prayer with an alert mind and a thankful heart.

When we recognize the presence of God in our lives, the response that makes sense is gratitude.

Soundtrack Part 1 - Your Burning Bush

Soundtracks have a way of setting a mood… they help us interpret what is going on. They also add color to things. Just like movie soundtracks have a way of setting a mood or taking us back to a moment, being in the presence of God has that same effect.

EPIC Part 7 - The Story You Tell

As we wrap up this amazing series on Frredom with God, we look into the life of Jospeh and ask ourselves, "What story do I want to tell?" Because what is true of yesterday doesn't necessarily have to be true of tomorrow.

EPIC Part 6 - Saved to Serve

In Mark 10, we are introduced to a blind man, Bartimaeus, doing what he does every day of his life. He is sitting along the roadside begging. Day after day he does the same thing. You have to imagine that after all these years, resignation has set in. Hoplessness. Then, Jesus walks past, calls him over, asks him a simple question and his life is never the same. And in this simple question Jesus reveals his heart for rescue. He is asking that simple question of you today? What is the question? Listen and find out.

EPIC Part 5 - Identity Theft

EPIC Part 4 - Captivating

Set deep in the heart of every woman are three core desires. 1) To be romanced 2) To play an irreplaceable role and 3) To have a beauty all her own to unveil.

Look at the movies you love and the books you read. Watch little girls at play. You will learn something very important about the feminine soul. These are the desires that shape a woman’s hopes and dreams; they are essential in order to live life as a woman. Most of the time these desires are misplaced, forgotten, or misdirected. But these desires do not simply go away. They go underground and surface later in addiction, control, and shame.

We pay a high price when we neglect the core passions of our God-created hearts.

EPIC Part 3 - Wild at Heart

Albert Schweitzer said, “The tragedy of life is what dies inside of a man while he still lives.”

That's too many of our stories. We're alive on the outside and we're dying a little bit more on the inside every single day. What we have to understand is that something has been assaulted. It's been compromised. It's been wounded and it's been surrendered in you. Something is still missing in your life. You were created for something so much more and you know it.

EPIC Part 2 - The Larger Story

For most of us, life feels like a movie we've arrived to forty minutes late.

Sure, good things happen. But tragic things happen, too. What does it mean? We find ourselves in the middle of a story that is sometimes wonderful, sometimes awful, but usually a confusing mixture of both. And we haven't a clue how to make sense of it all. No wonder we keep losing heart.

If you walk into any mall, amusement park, or hospital, you will typically run into a very large map with the famous red star and the encouraging words "You are here." These maps help us orient ourselves and provide perspective on things.

This is the Big Picture. This is where you are in that picture. Hopefully you now know where to go. You have your bearings.

Oh, that we had something like this for our lives.

"This is the Story in which you have found yourself. Here is how it got started. Here is where it went wrong. Here is what will happen next. Now this—this is the role you've been given. If you want to fulfill your destiny, this is what you must do. These are your cues. And here is how things are going to turn out in the end.”

We can.

We can discover the Story.

Maybe not perfect clarity. Maybe not in the detail that you would like. But in greater clarity than most of us have now, and that would be worth the price of admission. 

I mean, to have some clarity would be gold right now, wouldn't it?

EPIC Part 1 - The Story of Your Life

This message series is about a subject that has changed the lives of a lot of people in our church. But there's more to it than just that. This series is about the foundational pieces of how we help people grow. How we help people move from surviving to thriving. Really, it’s the foundational piece of all that we do as a church.

But there's so much more to it than that. The message in this series is a message that saved Pastor Clay and his wife from a dead life of religion and disappointment. It is a message that helped him renew his relationship with his three children and re-framed his priorities. It was learned in the midst of one of his most desperate times, and it gave hope when honestly, life didn't seem to have much hope left.

The truths in this series introduced Pastor Clay to a relationship with Jesus that, despite the fact that he'd grown up in church and had been a pastor for 15 years, he never dreamed or imagined could be possible.

And it's done the exact same thing for lots of other people around at Next Level Church.

And here's the good news, it has the potential to do the exact same thing for you.