Church at the Cross : Sunday Messages

Welcome to the weekly podcast of Church at the Cross in Grapevine, TX, led by Pastor JR Vassar. Our mission is to help people and places encounter Jesus. Wherever you are today, our hope is that you would be encouraged, challenged, and inspired to take the next step in your relationship with Jesus. For more info, visit churchatthecross.com!

The Pride of Babel | Genesis 11:1-9 06/02/2025

Grace and the New Creation | Genesis 8:20–9:17 05/25/2025

The Thin String of Hope | Genesis 7:11-8:19 05/21/2025

God’s Grief | Genesis 6-7:5 05/12/2025

Cain and Abel | Genesis 4:1-16 05/05/2025

Lifted Up to Heaven | Acts 1:1-11 04/28/2025

When I Am Lifted Up | John 12:20-33 04/15/2025

The Ruin and the Restoration | Genesis 3:7-24 04/07/2025

The Fall | Genesis 3:1-7 04/01/2025

The Gift of Marriage | Genesis 2:18-25 03/23/2025

The Gift of Work | Genesis 2:4-17 03/16/2025

The Gift of Rest | Genesis 2:1-3 03/11/2025

The Gift of Gender | Genesis 1:26-31 03/04/2025

The Gift of Gender | Genesis 1:26-31 Scripture: Genesis 1:26-31 Key Takeaways: + God made us male and female to bear his image - Matthew 19:3-6 + Our bodies are a good gift from God and tell us who we are “This is hugely important. If the body is merely a vehicle or a costume for the real you, then it is the equivalent of property. But we know this can’t really be the case. However much we might privilege the mind or soul over the body as the ‘real’ us, we know deep down that the body is an essential part of who we truly are. When people hurt your body, you know that they have not just damaged some of your property; they have violated you. What you do to someone’s body, you do to a person… We cannot escape our embodied-ness. Alastair Roberts sums it up neatly: ‘The body isn’t just something that clothes the self but is itself the self.” – Sam Allberry. What God has to say about our Bodies. + Some people feel an incongruence between their biological sex and their internal sense of self “In many Western countries, we’ve seen a massive spike in teenagers questioning their gender. For instance, the Tavistock Centre in London, the main gender clinic in the United Kingdom, treated 51 (34 males, 17 females) children and teenagers in 2009 who had gender dysphoria or were identifying as trans*. In 2016, the same clinic saw 1,766 (557 males, 1,209 females) children and teenagers, and in 2019 it saw 2,364 (624 males, 1,740 females). That’s more than 5000% increase among females in 10 years. Researchers have documented similar upsurges, among biological females in particular, in many Western countries: Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States.” – Preston Sprinkle. Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church, and What the Bible Has to Say. + Our hope is in transformation not transition “Christian discipleship is oriented toward living out the divine image that God created us to be. Sexed bodies are part of that image. Ontologically then, transitioning would be moving us further away from who we are, not bringing us closer to it.” – Preston Sprinkle. Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church, and What the Bible Has to Say. - Romans 12:1-2 - 2 Corinthians 5:17 + See people as image bearers that are to be loved, protected, and cared for + Develop convictions not just gut reactions + Parents, own and exercise your authority compassionately + Seek to be a welcoming community that listens, learns, loves, and shares the truths with compassion and patience /episode/index/show/churchatthecross/id/35535820

The Gift of Being Human (Part 2) | Genesis 1:26-31 02/17/2025

The Gift of Being Human (Part 1) | Genesis 1:26-31 02/10/2025

The Gift of Creation | Genesis 1:1-2:3 02/03/2025

In the Beginning God... | Genesis 1:1 01/27/2025

In the Beginning God... | Genesis 1:1 Scripture: Genesis 1:1 Key Takeaways: Psalm 33:6 Nehemiah 9:6 Revelation 4:11 + God Exists as the Eternal and Transcendent God Aseity Hebrews 11:6 + God Exists as the Good and Personal God “There is a philosophical fissure between fundamental impersonalism or fundamental personalism. First of all, there is the difficulty of deriving ethical values from a nonpersonal source. If the universe is most fundamentally matter, time, and chance, then it becomes very hard to argue that one combination of those three is necessarily and of itself better than another combination - for example, that life is better than death or kindness better than selfishness - in any way that gets deeper than a feeling or an unjustifiable decision… the impersonal cannot create obligation. From looking at the natural world, we can tell what is but not what should be. We can tell that hot is different from cold, drought from moisture, lightness from heaviness, and good from ill, but we cannot tell in any of those cases that one is better than the other in any way more profound than we happen to prefer it. Philosophers try very hard, sometimes very hard indeed, to derive something resembling commonly accepted human ethical principles from a radically impersonal universe, but such valiant and well-meaning attempts tend to be unconvincing or rely on the goodwill of the reader in granting contestable assumptions.” – Christopher Watkin, Thinking Through Creation. + God Exists as the Triune God John 1:1 John 1:18 John 17:5 John 17:24 1 Peter 1:18-20 “For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.” – Aristotle, 384–322 BC “Plato thought that in order to be worth rearing, children must be “malleable, disposed to virtue and physically fit”. If they did not prove themselves worthy, parents would “properly dispose of [them] in secret, so that no one will know what has become of them.” Aristotle thought defective children should be exposed—that is, discarded at rubbish tips, abandoned on hillsides, thrown down wells or drowned in rivers. “As to exposing or rearing the children born, let there be a law that no deformed child shall be reared.… Around the world and down through history the vast majority of cultures have considered that we are all better off without the weak.” – Glenn Scrivener, The Air We Breathe /episode/index/show/churchatthecross/id/35034950