Join us this Sunday as we wrap up our Ready to Run series. Let's explore the discipleship strategy here at North Highlands and discover what it means to Learn, Love, and Live Like Jesus.

We often seek temporary prizes or pleasures, but Jesus asks us to seek His kingdom and His righteousness which are imperishable. This week we hear about several lessons from the Sermon on the Mount -  lessons that Christ calls us to put into practice now for an eternal reward.

Our third and final value is an outward facing one: You are Wanted. Every church wants to be a welcoming church. But oftentimes the way churches think of “welcoming” is superficial at best or misguided at worst, opting for an approach that (even if unconscious) avoids all moral judgments and encourages a “values-free” environment in the name of being welcoming.

Well, here at North Highlands, we believe those two approaches to being a “welcoming” church fall woefully short of the biblical standard; we seek to practice a “welcome” that is both deeper than superficial smiles and higher than politically correctness.

So, I grew up going to a beautiful old (in every way) Methodist church in downtown Waco. 

My mom sang in the choir, which meant my siblings and I needed someone to watch us every Sunday. That someone was Ms. Sandra Test, a sweet elderly woman, who, to curb our boredom, would do little scribbles on the bulletin for me and my siblings and then we would have to turn them into something - a dog, a cat, etc. She did her best, but we were bored out of our minds. In fact, I associated church with two words: boredom and buildings.

I don’t associate the church with those two words anymore. Praise God! The church has come to mean so much more to me. Now, the words that come to mind are more inline with what God has in mind for His Church. And I am excited to celebrate that with you this weekend as we look at the second shared value we have at North Highlands: We are Family.

This weekend we pivot from Mission and Vision and begin to focus on a few values that we have here as a church. These values are the shared convictions that we have as a church body that create the culture we enjoy as a church. They are the things that people pick up on or feel when they are with us and this morning we hit on the first of three values we have at North Highlands: 

God is God (and we are not). I have heard time and time again from folks how much NHBC values the authority of God and His word in our lives as a church family and I cannot wait to talk about it through Isaiah 40, which is one of the great “God is God” texts in all of scripture.