“I got this” is one of the most dangerous things a Christian can say.

Pastor Anthony continues the core-values series with Value #3: growing together. He opens with a story about a bathroom in Israel, where he walked in saying “I got this” and realized he should have asked a few more questions. From there he builds toward the point of Ephesians 4:11-16: Jesus grows us through one another to become more like Him.

He walks through three movements in the passage. First, put your faith to work. The Dead Sea has water flowing in and nowhere for it to flow out, so nothing can live there, and a faith that only takes in and never practices what it hears goes stagnant the same way. Second, Jesus is the standard, not the person next to you. That includes learning to say “I don’t know,” and to speak the truth in love instead of unloading your frustration. Third, find your people and play your part. Even the parts of the body nobody notices matter, and you can sit in a full room on Sunday and still be deeply alone.

The episode closes with a panel conversation on how to tell whether you’re consuming or practicing, how to measure spiritual maturity without comparing yourself to others or condemning yourself, and practical steps for building real community in the church.

Key topics: Growing together | Ephesians 4:11-16 | Putting faith into practice | Jesus as the standard | Truth in love | Finding your people | Spiritual maturity

Church of the Cascades | Bend, Oregon | Values series

"You happy?" "No." Two letters that ended a marriage-saving conversation in one word — and started Pastor Anthony's own wilderness story.

Twenty years before this sermon, Anthony quit a growing youth ministry, moved in with his in-laws, and started answering customer service calls, all because his wife told him the truth about how miserable she was. That's the doorway into Genesis 21 — Hagar and Ishmael, cast into the desert with nothing but bread and a skin of water, living out consequences they didn't create.

Three lessons carry the message. Sometimes the wilderness isn't your choice — Hagar didn't pick this, she's wandering inside decisions Abraham and Sarah made years earlier. Sometimes it is your choice, and Anthony doesn't let himself off the hook there either. But even when Hagar reaches the end of what she can do — laying her son under a bush because she can't watch him die — God hears. Not a polished prayer. Just crying. And when she can't see a way forward, God doesn't create a well out of nothing; he opens her eyes to the one that was already there.

The line the whole sermon turns on: you can feel abandoned by people without being abandoned by God. Hagar named him El Roi back in chapter 16 — the God who sees — and Anthony's point is that the same God shows up again in chapter 21, in a different wilderness, because he never left the first time.

Key topics: Wilderness you didn't choose vs. wilderness you did | Why God hears messy, unpolished prayers | Provision that's already there before you see it | El Roi — the God who sees, twice in the same story | Consequences vs. condemnation — grace that doesn't erase what came before

Is God at the center of your life, or is He just one of the things you've added to it?

Pastor Anthony kicks off the church's annual six-week core-values series with Value #1: a God-centered life. He starts with a thumping washing machine and a bike wheel to make a simple point. A wheel only works when the hub holds the center and every spoke pulls inward. Move something else into the middle, and everything starts to wobble.

From there he works through the difference between a God-centered life and a God-added one. He looks at Matthew 22:37, Proverbs 3:5-6, Colossians 1, John 16:33 and Joshua 1:8, and at the prodigal son in Luke 15. Anthony names the things that quietly take the center: success, money, kids, approval, even politics. He explains how drift happens gradually, like a Camaro with one lug nut per wheel that looks fine until it isn't. The heart of it is the difference between working for God and walking with God, and the reminder that the goal is direction, not perfection.

The episode closes with a panel Q&A on how to check where your center really is. The panel suggests looking at your checkbook, your calendar, your close friends and your spouse, and talks through the difference between shame and conviction. Communion is next Sunday, and Pastor Michael will preach on loving people first before the church returns to Genesis.

Key topics: A God-centered life | Core values series | Idols and drift | Working for God vs. walking with God | Shame vs. conviction | Direction, not perfection

Church of the Cascades | Bend, Oregon | Values series

Same wife. Same lie. Same king problem. Just a few chapters later — and Abraham should absolutely know better by now.

Pastor Anthony opens with a golf illustration that goes exactly how you'd expect — a great range session, a confident walk to the first tee, and then Shank City, two fairways over, every single time. Genesis 20 is the spiritual version of that: Abraham, 20 years into walking with God, having personally experienced God's provision and covenant, pulls the exact same "she's my sister" move he pulled back in Genesis 12. Same fear. Different king. Anthony doesn't let himself or the room off the hook — this is Romans 7 in real time, the thing Paul himself couldn't fully explain about his own recurring sin.

Three observations carry the message. Recurring sin usually starts with lies we tell ourselves before anything's even happened — Abraham decided he'd be killed before anyone threatened him. It gets easier to justify the longer we do it — "technically, she is my sister" is the sound of rationalization dressed up as honesty. And it never stays contained to just us — an entire household gets caught in the fallout of Abraham's fear, a pattern Anthony makes personal with his own story of a wake-up call as a teenager.

The turn is the whole point: Abraham messes up again, and God still uses him, still heals through him, still calls him back. Grace doesn't mean sin doesn't matter — it means sin doesn't get the final word. The path out isn't willpower or hiding it better. It's surrendering what keeps feeding it — confession first, then replacing the old response with a new one.

Key topics: Why we repeat sins we already know are destructive | Catastrophizing and the lies we tell ourselves before anything happens | How rationalization ("technically...") keeps sin alive | Why private sin never stays private | Confession and replacing the pattern, not just resisting it

Church of the Cascades | Bend, Oregon | Genesis series

Genesis 17 opens 25 years after God first called Abraham — he's 99, Sarah's 90, and everything about their situation says this isn't happening. God shows up anyway, introduces himself as El Shaddai (God Almighty), and does something unexpected: he changes Abraham's name before the promise is even visible. Exalted father becomes father of many nations — a name attached to a son Abraham can't yet see.

Pastor Michael walks through what the covenant actually asks of Abraham (circumcision — a response to grace, never a way to earn it), and traces the same shift forward through Jeremiah's promise of a new heart, all the way to Jesus at the table saying "this is the new covenant in my blood." The sermon's whole engine is the gap between the deal Michael made his sister keep as a kid and the deal God makes with us: we haven't kept our end. He kept his anyway.

Three truths anchor the message: God is faithful even when the waiting is long. God wants your heart, not just your religion. And our hope was never in keeping our end of the bargain — it's in Christ, who kept his. Anthony and Jackson close things out talking honestly about what it actually looks like to wait on God's timeline instead of manufacturing your own Ishmael.

Key topics: El Shaddai and the name change before the promise | Circumcision as response, not payment | God's silence isn't God's absence | Contract vs. covenant | Why our hope rests in what Christ kept, not what we keep

Church of the Cascades | Bend, Oregon | Genesis series

Waiting doesn't mean God forgot. It means God is building something you can't see yet.

Ten years after God promises Abraham and Sarah a child, nothing's happened — and the waiting starts to feel like proof that maybe it isn't going to. So Sarah proposes a shortcut: give Hagar to Abraham, build the family another way. It works, in the sense that it produces a pregnancy. It does not work in any sense that matters — jealousy, blame, mistreatment, and a broken home follow almost immediately.

Pastor Anthony tracks three movements through Genesis 16. First, the caution that comes when a promise feels too slow — "God's promise has now become Sarah's project," and control starts replacing trust. Second, the deeper danger of a shortcut that actually starts working, because results get mistaken for fruit: you can get what you want while damaging who you are. And third — the turn the whole message is really building toward — Hagar, cast out and alone in the desert, meets God there. He asks her where she's come from and where she's going, not because he doesn't know, but because he wants her to. She names him El Roi: the God who sees.

Anthony closes with an honest word for anyone who relates more to Hagar than to Abraham or Sarah — anyone carrying the weight of someone else's shortcut rather than their own — and a reminder that grace doesn't mean your choices didn't matter, it means your failure doesn't get the last word.

Key topics: The difference between a promise and a schedule | Why results aren't the same thing as fruit | How shortcuts wound the people around you, not just yourself | Hagar and the God who sees | Ishmael vs. Isaac — not settling for what you can manufacture

Church of the Cascades | Bend, Oregon | Genesis series

God gives you the victory. Then someone shows up wanting their name on it.

Genesis 14 reads like a war epic — nine kings, a kidnapping, a night raid, tar pits — but Pastor Anthony uses it to ask a much quieter question: what happens to your heart the moment after you win? Opening with Spurgeon's line that God can scarcely trust us with victory before we start "fingering it with our own hands," Anthony walks through four lessons, two from the battle and two from what comes after.

Lot drifts into Sodom one tent peg at a time — proof that "direction, not intention, determines your destination." Abraham goes after him anyway, not to lecture him but to rescue him, because private preparation produces public power and grace goes after people who made their own mess. Then, after the victory, two kings meet Abraham in the same valley: Melchizedek, who reminds him God gets the credit, and the king of Sodom, who tries to attach strings to the win. Abraham's refusal — not even a thread, not even a sandal strap — becomes one of the clearest pictures of integrity in the Old Testament, and Anthony ties the whole chapter straight to the cross, where Jesus does for us exactly what Abraham did for Lot.

Anthony and Jackson close things out from the church's brand-new amphitheater, unpacking how small compromises become major captivity, why idolatry is sneaky rather than sudden, and the tension between honest self-examination and living in denial.

Key topics: Direction vs. intention — how drift happens one degree at a time | Private preparation, public power | Melchizedek as a foreshadowing of Christ | Worship as the answer to pride after a win | Refusing to let "the wrong king" take credit for God's work

Church of the Cascades | Bend, Oregon | Genesis series

ear grasps for control. Faith opens its hands. Same guy, same book, two different postures.

Two weeks after Abraham lied his way through a famine and used his wife as a human shield, Pastor Anthony returns to Genesis — this time to chapter 13, the other half of the story. Where fear moved Abraham away from the altar, faith brings him back. He can't undo Egypt. He can't erase the failure. But he can retrace his steps to the last place he clearly heard from God.

From there, four things start happening once faith — not fear — is leading: Abraham returns to the altar instead of hiding from God. He chooses peace with Lot over being right, giving away his first pick even though he doesn't have to. He learns that what looks like a well-watered field can still lead toward a spiritually dry life — compromise never announces itself, it just asks for one tent peg at a time. And in the end, he trusts God with the outcome instead of grasping for it — open hands instead of a closed fist.

Anthony closes with a story of a homeless man who used to stand outside the church, convinced he'd messed up too badly to come in — and the reminder that repentance isn't convincing a reluctant God to receive you. It's finally listening.

Key topics: Returning to the altar after failure | Choosing peace over being right | How compromise moves "one tent peg at a time" | Open hands vs. closed fist | Faith as trusting God with the outcome, not controlling it

Church of the Cascades | Bend, Oregon | Genesis series