Pastor Jeremy Stephens

Tag: This is the Life

  • More Than a Chore Chart

    My daughters are entering their summer break from school. Like every parent, we’re beginning this summer season full of optimism, hoping that the girls will do more than sit on the couch, wasting away the hours by watching mindless television and playing video games. We’ll have chore charts, activities, and responsibilities for them to balance…

  • Order Matters

    Do you remember learning about “order of operations” in middle school? Maybe the mention of PEMDAS just gave you PTSD! We suffered through countless homework assignments designed to remind us that it wasn’t enough to know how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. The order in which we performed those operations could create drastically different…

  • Unity under Pressure

    We all love the idea of unity. We repeat phrases like, “There is no ‘I’ in team,” or “teamwork makes the dream work,” or “we are only as strong as we are united.” Yet in reality, pressure often exposes how fragile unity can be. As difficulty increases, people naturally drift toward self-protection, isolation, and defensiveness.…

  • Not Earned, but Worthy

    In Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, an Army platoon risks everything to rescue a single soldier after his brothers are killed in combat. The film’s tension increases as members of the search party lose their lives during the rescue mission, forcing the rest of the team to wonder if saving Private Ryan’s life was worth…

  • A Candle That Never Goes Out

    On a cold October day in 1555, two English pastors were led to the center of Oxford to be burned alive. The first, Nicholas Ridley, was the highly intellectual bishop of London. Disciplined and sharp, he was incredibly influential in shaping the Protestant reforms in England and played a key role in developing the English…

  • When Paul Corrected My Critique

    I loved my time in college at Cedarville University. One of the things that distinguished it from other Christian colleges was its commitment to chapel every weekday at 10 a.m. Through my four years of college, I heard some of the greatest speakers in the country open the Word and preach. However, with roughly 1,000…