It is never too late to turn away from sin and choose Jesus.

As people become more inclusive and seek to be less offensive, the topic of human sin has become somewhat unpopular. Yet the bible is decisively clear that sin is something we all struggle with, and if we do not choose to turn from sin and obey Jesus, we will regret it in every aspect of our lives.

Sin and spiritual forces of darkness manipulate us into choosing shallow immediacy over genuine happiness. They manipulate us into choosing bitterness over forgiveness, and selfishness over relationships. We can avoid talking about sin all we want, but tat won't resolve the reality that sin exists, and it will destroy our eternity with God if we do not confront it in our own lives and choose to follow Jesus over our own sinful paths.

Check out this message from Elder Gary Bell on the subject of sin as he wraps up our series on Thought Pollution.

God wants to flood your life with His presence.

God's presence brings hope, healing, provision, and fulfillment. Everything we need and everything we want becomes truly evident in God's presence. Being with God in relationship makes us whole. We run dry when we try to force fulfillment without God being our sole source of supply. God's presence is like a river that flows, carrying every source of goodness and joy within it. When the river of God's presence flows through our lives, we are completely satisfied by it in every way. But when we depart from God and distance ourselves from Him, everything that flows from the river of His presence flows around us, and we miss out on all He has for us. Jesus tells us in John 15 that he is the vine and we are the branches, and when we remain in Him, we will bear good fruit.

Your life will overflow with all of God's goodness the more you remain in Him. God wants you to be overflowing with His goodness. He doesn't desire us to be starving for hope and purpose and provision. God's heart is to satisfy you in a relationship with Him and to meet every need you have as a result of that relationship.

Check out this much-needed message from Pastor Rich as he continues our series on Thought Pollution!

The further you are from God, the more you will try to take God's place and control everything.

Some of us are willing to try anything to be noticed. To feel accepted and loved. We will conform to any scene or thought group and attempt to redefine ourselves if it makes us feel love and closeness with others. Many people do this with pain. We use our anxiety and our trauma to garner sympathy and attention in hopes that we will find a new identity that makes us feel important to others.

In the end, though, all of these attempts to redefine ourselves and take control of our situation leave us broken and unfulfilled, always lacking in what God really has in store for us. Because God is our Creator, He alone can define who we are and what is good for us. When we try to take control of where our identity, love, and goodness comes from, we end up making things so much worse. The closer we are to God, the more we understand ourselves. And the closer we are to God, the more we can enjoy real intimacy and love with others.

Check out this power-packed message from Pastor Joey as he continues our series on Thought Pollution!

A moment of reflection can save us from a lifetime of regret.

There's a popular lie out in the world today that insists we will find happiness if we follow our own hearts. In the movies, that sounds great, but in reality, that leads us nowhere. The popular moniker, "live your truth" is actually a big lie. We think it will bring us fulfillment and make us happy, but we just end up anxious, exhausted, and self-obsessed with no satisfaction in sight.

In the bible, king David gives us a great example of what this looks like. He was spending time where he shouldn't have, looking at a woman he had no business looking at, and found himself pursuing exactly what he wanted by taking the woman for himself. David's decisions resulted in murder, pain, and devastation, not happiness or fulfillment.

Check out this thought-provoking message from Pastor Bethany as she continues our series "Thought Pollution."

You might think you can handle carrying the opinions and values of society around you while also prioritizing God's purpose for your life, but in the end, God gets pushed aside, and life takes over.

It's a lie that we can live up to the world's expectations and still live close to the heart of God, following Jesus. There is no real relationship between the world's priorities and God's. The apostle Paul puts it this way, "What do righteousness and wickedness have in common? What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? Come out from them and be separate says the Lord. Let us purify ourselves."

God created us to be perfectly content and fulfilled by being with Him constantly. We find ourselves bombarded with stress, anxiety, and hopeless expectations as soon as we try to compromise our proximity to God with proximity to the values of this world. It's not just busyness, it's thought pollution: We cannot live immersed in the world and continue to live close to the heart of God.

Check out this awesome message from Pastor Rich as he continues our series "Thought Pollution!"

As human beings in the 21st century, we are constantly bombarded with ideas, suggestions, political narratives, moral virtues, and entertainment. Our brains weren't designed to compound the amount of information we dive through every day. Yet here we are, trying to keep up with trends, ideas, and media. At some point, we're going to find our life empty and hollow, despite being bombarded with information. We are told by God to guard our hearts, for it is the wellspring of life.

We can try to void being too busy, but the danger is more than simply avoiding busyness: The danger lies in trying to keep all of the world's expectations and information in our heart while still keeping God the most important thing in our lives. Thought pollution is when our thoughts appear to be on the right track but are pressed by competing ideas and values of the world today.

We all like to hold on to things in this life. We seek treasures and pleasures, health and wealth, and everything else that pines for our attention. But Jesus warns us that giving ourselves away to Him is the only way to live.

In Mark chapter 8, Jesus tells his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me.”

Jesus is asking us today to give our lives away to Him. If we try to hold on to our lives and live for ourselves, we will actually lose everything.

Jesus said these words as he was on his way to the cross, about to give his life away for us. Jesus was the perfect example for us of what it looks like to give our lives up for God, because Jesus obeyed His heavenly Father by doing the very same thing.

At the end of the day, every wordly pleasure we can wrap ourselves in will leave us empty and naked in this life, not contributing to anything we can take into eternity.

Check out this thought-provoking message from Pastor Rich as he wraps up our series, "Upside Down Kingdom."

No one thrives by burying their sin. They thrive by letting God bring it to light and set them free.

Our sin and our shame ruin our lives and subsequently ruin the lives of those around us. In the Psalms, King David tells us that when he hid sin in his heart, it ate away at his soul and whithered his bones. This is exactly what sin does to all of us. It eats away at us. It consumes us and buries us in shame to the point where we live a complete lie when we're out in public, trying to hide the darkness destroying us inside.

God's answer? Stop hiding it. Stop burying it. The kingdoms of this world believe you should hide your sin and shame, or be ridiculed and dismissed completely. But God wants to bring those sins to the surface, forgive them, and set you free from guilt and shame. God's kingdom brings sin to light and heals us from its effects.

Check out this powerful message from Pastor Kason we as continue our series "Upside Down Kingdom."

God is smarter than we are.

Everyone seeks after the wisdom of celebrities, political leaders, influencers, authors, and pop stars. The assumption is, that if they have so much influence, power, and money, they must be smart, right?

But the Bible tells us that God's wisdom outshines human wisdom every time. In 1 Corinthians, Jesus' sacrifice on the cross for us defies every assumption we have about wisdom, but, "God uses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise." God used death to bring us life, and he used suffering to bring us healing. Everything seems upside down, but that's how God works. He understands things that this world finds foolish. But it's this world that's upside down.

Check out this inspiring message as Pastor Bethany explains the key differences between God's wisdom and human wisdom as we continue our series, "Upside Down Kingdom."

What does it mean when Jesus says, "the first shall be last and the last shall be first?"

Jesus often made statements that seemed contradictory to how the world around us works. But Jesus understood something no one else did: The Kingdom of God operates in a manner completely different from this physical world. When Jesus' disciples get into an argument about which one of them is his greatest disciple, they try to undermine each other by asking Jesus to allow them to sit at his right hand in heaven someday. But Jesus claims that the greatest disciple is the one who serves in the most humble position. The person who is considered "least" in the world's eyes is the greatest in God's kingdom. Those who follow Jesus do not walk in the ways of this world anymore. They live by a set of principles established by heaven for eternity.

Check out this life-changing message on the realities of God's kingdom as Pastor Rich kicks off our new sermon series "Upside Down Kingdom."

We are a church that exists to see 3 things happen: To see people

1. Experience God

2. Know God

3. Share God

We experience God through worship experiences on the weekends and small gatherings like Crews throughout the week. We get to know God better through sound teaching, Bible study, academic education, and encounters with the Holy Spirit. We share God by proclaiming His love and salvation in our church, in our community, and in our world through several means, including organizations that preach across the globe and fight for social justice and human value.

Join us as Pastor Rich sits down with Pastors Phanuel and Presanna Robinson from our church in India, with Pastor Kason who oversees our gospel outreach strategies in Central New York, and with other local leaders and business owners, we partner with to further these 3 purposes for the kingdom and glory of God!

Jesus does NOT WANT ANYONE to go to hell.

Jesus knew, believed, and warned us of the realities of hell. It is a real place. And God's desire is that no human would reject Him and choose hell over a relationship with Him. 1 Peter 5 tells us God's will is that no human would perish in hell.

Scripture tells us that one day God will cast the devil and his followers into hell for eternity. Those who choose to follow the devil will end up with him in eternal punishment. Some people wonder if hell in the Bible is literal or figurative. The fact of the matter is, if hell is figurative, it is immeasurably worse than what the Bible even describes. God has done everything for us by paying for our sin and repairing the way back to Him through Jesus. All we have to do is choose Jesus.

Prep your heart for this serious message as pastor Rich shares on the realities of hell as we continue our series on heaven and hell.

One day, God will make the world as it should be. We call that Heaven.

Heaven is so much more than just some far-off place that people go to when they die. The Bible gives us incredible depictions of the reality of Heaven. Revelation 22:3 tells us that someday when God returns to make everything right again, there will no longer be a curse on anything in the universe. Heaven will be perfect, literally.

Heaven is not some place where all of our earthly desires are given to us. In fact, your desires will be completely different in heaven because you will be sinless. You will be perfectly fulfilled. Heaven is also not Jesus and a bunch of naked babies flying around singing with harps. It is not a boring place. There are many inaccurate depictions of heaven in our society, but the Bible gives us an objective reality of what Heaven is like.

Heaven is a place that consumes us with every good promise from God. It strikes us eternally with awe and wonder. Heaven's beauty is beyond mortal comprehension, and its glory is limitless. Check out this inspiring message by Pastor Kason on the glory and wonder of Heaven!

The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom

Some people like to think that “fearing God” simply means “respecting God” or being in awe of God. While that’s partly true, it’s not the whole truth. The incredible justice and righteousness of God gets left out of some of our depictions of God because we don’t like dealing with the fact that we are all accountable to Him, and being on the wrathful side of God means we have to face up to things in our lives that don’t belong there. But if we’re going to accept the truth, we need to accept that God’s love and God’s justice are both equally part of His character. We can water down our understanding of God to make it suit what we want, but that doesn't make it true.

Check out this week's heavy message from Lead Pastor Rich Ryfun as he kicks off our new sermon series, "Heaven and Hell."

God’s heart is for mercy.

Every day we are faced with small moments where we can compromise our faith or trust God and stay close to Him. In the story of Abraham’s nephew, Lot, he made small decisions based on greed and personal gain, and those decisions led to compromise.

Where is God showing us that we’ve compromised our faith and placed ourselves in precarious positions that lead to harm rather than the protected places God prepares for us? This morning Elder Gary Bell talks with us about the warning signs of slipping away from God through compromise, and the need to keep our focus on God’s plan in even the small things in life, before they lead us away in big ways.

There is power in your obedience to God.

In spiritual warfare, people usually think of demon possession, miracles, healings, and angels and demons fighting in a cloud over our heads. While spiritual war is a reality, that's a very narrow understanding of what spiritual warfare is.

Everything we do in life participates in spiritual warfare, and our obedience to God is our greatest weapon in that battle. When we are operating in obedience to God, we find ourselves secure behind God's borders, with the fullness of His kingdom backing us. But when we choose our own path and disregard obedience to God, we find ourselves stuck behind the borders of the kingdom of darkness and vulnerable to everything that the evil kingdom has to throw at us.

Check out this timely message from Pastor Joey as we dive into week 2 of our series, "In the Trenches."

We are all engaged in a war, and it isn't waged with human weapons. There is a spiritual battle taking place every day, and we are in the trenches. The apostle Paul tells us that he continues to strive every day until he can attain the prize God has for him in Christ Jesus. He does not simply participate in life, he strives to win.

By the power of the Holy Spirit, we fight the powers of darkness and the devil, and we fight to win. We fight for our families, we fight for our spouses, and we fight for our future.

Check out this powerful start to our sermons series "In the Trenches" by Pastor Rich.

You will not value the ways of God until you fathom the love of God.

Over the last several decades, younger generations have become completely unfamiliar with biblical language about God and what it means to serve him. Postmodernism says we are supposed to pursue every desire of our hearts, and that we are not morally good until we allow ourselves to sample every aspect of self-expression until we find fulfillment. But God's ways are ultimately far more fulfilling than our desires and our attempts at discovering our most authentic self,

Check out this message from pastor Joey on Acts 17 and how Paul shared Jesus with a community that was completely unaware of who God is and how much He loves them.

If you have given your life to Jesus, you are a child of God.

Maybe you can't wrap your head around that fact. If you've had earthly parents who never validated you, it's hard to fathom what true love from a Perfect Heavenly Father looks like.

We all struggle with this in our own way. It's easy to see pain and invalidation in children and teens, but adults deal with it too. Maybe we're better at hiding it, but we are all broken people looking for validation and acceptance from our parents, or from our spouses, or from our bosses and leaders.

God, knowing what we really need, is the only One who can genuinely validate us. He does this by washing away all of our sins and mistakes through Jesus' sacrifice, and brings us back into a relationship with Him, bearing His image and sharing in His family as children of God.

Check out this incredible message from Pastor Rich as ew continue this sermon series on rediscovering our "authentic self."

On this Sunday, Pastor Steve WIlliams of MFI (Ministers Fellowship International) joins us to talk about the increasing tension in the world around us, and how we as the Church are to view the circumstances as we carry the light of the power of Jesus Christ in us. From our identity as image-bearers of God, to our place as redeemed citizens who now live in God's kingdom, Steve reminds how we are shaped by God, and how the world around us can find hope by viewing God's work in our lives!