Menlo Church

#JesusIsLord

“Jesus died on a Roman cross and walked out of a grave three days later and that resurrection is how God declared Jesus, Lord of everything. That's the announcement and what makes it good news for you and not just great news for the world is the king who now rules is the same king who went to the cross in your place. He carried your sin so you could be forgiven fully and for good, not because you did it, but because he did it. You can't earn your way into his kingdom.”

#CoveredByGrace

“The only person who never wore a mask in his entire life basically had to be treated as though he wore all of our masks. Remember the Garden Of Eden? God took away the fig leaves and he covered Adam and Eve with clothing he made himself. At the cross, Jesus does that work for you and me for good. Jesus is cast out so that you and I never have to be again.”

#StayFaithful

“And don't let the size of that dream or the way you are experiencing it right now keep you from seeing what God is already doing right in front of you. So whichever group you're in, the call is the same. Stay faithful when the fruit doesn't fit your forecast. Whether that's a couple years in or five years in, all throughout our life, God is responsible for the fruit. We are responsible for just staying faithful.”

#ConfessionBringsFreedom

“But remember this, remember, confession, is not a burden, it's a doorway. It's not meant to shame you. It's the key that unlocks your prison cell. Confession is the path to freedom and healing and wholeness and greater purpose and belonging. It means no longer cowering in the shadows or hiding behind a mask, even to ourselves, but boldly stepping into the light one step at a time as a forgiven child of the living God for whom Jesus died.”

#GraceForAll

“When Jesus died on the cross, he died for all of your sin, past, present, future. That's such good news. And the great news of that is that you get to extend it to other people too because that same grace is available to them. Jesus is not standing on the sand waiting for you and me to get better at swimming. He's got breakfast ready, and he's just asking if you're hungry.”

#JesusPaidItAll

“Don't repent because you can't atone for your sins. Right? That is the whole point of the gospel. A while back, I was doing a a self reflection exercise with a group of business executives on the theme of repentance. And at one point, one of them said, I really need to make up for some stuff in my past. You know, and everyone immediately started to affirm him because that sounds really humble and it's also really relatable. I mean, who of us has not thought that at some point? But as soon as he said it, I just had this deep sense of Jesus saying, but that's my job. That's my job. The wages of of your past sin is death. Can can you make that payment? I can't make that payment. I can't be my own savior. I can't make up for my past. Only one person can. And praise God he already did. Repentance is not self harm.”

#FollowTheWayJesus

“So what does it mean to reclaim the way of Jesus in your life? What does it mean to be a follower of the way? It's someone who is an undivided follower where God has access to every part of their life. Someone who is an unhurried friend, who moves at the pace of love toward people they have nothing to gain from. Someone who is a thoughtful witness, whose life is a testimony about a god they love who loved them first. And it means that we are a sacrificial developer. People in a world that tells us to get as much as we can for as little as we can give. We follow a savior who said that we will find our life when we give it away.”

#WisdomThatWitnesses

“This author grew up alongside Jesus and for years did not recognize him for who he really was. He lived alongside the perfect representation of wisdom and missed it. But our failure to recognize or represent wisdom well doesn't have to be the end of our story. It wasn't for James, and that gives someone like me hope. And when I think about the words used in this description, peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy, I see the way of Jesus. Not weak, not evasive. Jesus could confront hypocrisy, tell difficult truths, and refuse to bend conviction, but he he never needed to make another person feel smaller in order to prove himself right. And that's what I want wisdom to form in me, not simply better words, but a better witness.”

#SlowMercy

“I think the way of Jesus in living a more unhurried life with him and with others is simply a better way to live. Because judgment is really fast. It's really easy. It is the Silicon Valley curriculum, and it fits your calendar. But mercy is slow. Somebody was slow with you once. You didn't earn it. You probably never told them. And some of us, we haven't yet realized that we are a closed door in the life of someone else that God has providentially brought to us on purpose and for a purpose. And if we would just slow down and be present, who knows what God might do?”

#ReclaimPace

“``But interruptions, they can't be assignments when we are moving at a sprinter's pace. You can't love people in a hurry. Love takes a minimum amount of time, and there isn't a version of it that gets faster. As a matter of fact, the best expressions of love in your life, the people that you feel like love you the deepest, are the people that love you the slowest, which brings us back to the calendar. See, a full calendar is not a scheduling problem in your and my life. It's a formation problem. It teaches you and me that people who are not on our calendar are in the way of it. So the first thing that we have to reclaim if we wanna reclaim the way of Jesus in our life is pace. Not because being slow is the goal. I'm a pretty fast paced person. Being late is not a virtue. But hear me, slow, it's the only speed at which you can stop and notice somebody that God may put in your way, in which an interruption could be understood as an assignment. And I know it means changes. Jesus would call us to make them.”

#GospelIsHome

“``Now, at the beginning of this series, we asked this question, what does it take to get right with God? And every single one of these religious systems that we've looked at has had a different answer to this question. Right? We talked about this idea of, for some, it's like, all right, just keep up with the law or tip the scales or empty the glass or climb up that ladder or stay in a state of grace or show me your resume. Ultimately, it's this idea that you pay, you hope, and on this side of eternity, you never quite know. The gospel is the only thing in this series that we've looked at that does not sell you a way in. It hands you a way home. It doesn't get you a seat that you have to keep paying for like some sort of religious season ticket. It makes you a son. It makes you a daughter, Permanent and perfect access to a father who is ready to adopt you. That is a very different offer.”

#KnownByGod

“``The question of your life was never going to be, did you rack up enough good to impress a distant God? The question was always and will always be, will you let God, who already knows you more than you know yourself, know you as a friend instead of a stranger? That's the invitation of the good news of Jesus, the gospel. The gospel is not that bad people can finally become good enough. The gospel is that dead people can come all the way back to life because of Jesus. Jesus is not shopping for resumes on LinkedIn for the kingdom of heaven. I promise. He is not scared off by your gaps. He knows them. He wants relationship with you, gaps and all.”

#PaidInFull

“``I still think about father Michael, the man who unlocked a chapel for a kid who'd grow up to preach this, and he never needed to win. And the honest ache that I carry for father Michael and people like him is that I don't know how he'd answer the question that I asked you today, But I'd wanna tell him that the debt was paid, not like mostly paid. Jesus didn't just give us, like, an option to think about an installment plan. Like, he actually paid all of it. The bond of my brokenness and my sin and the bondage that it represented, it was retired two thousand years ago on a hill outside Jerusalem. That a dying man said one word, and that word meant paid in full. And then he sat down because the work is done. All the tollbooths can come down.”

#ListenToJesus

“``When the voices compete, listen to him. When religious structures offer promises, listen to him. When others claim special knowledge or authority to redefine faith, listen to him. All the laws point to Jesus. All of the prophets point to Jesus. And when the clouds clear, Jesus remains because Jesus is enough. This is where Christian confidence finally rests. Not in our ability to climb high enough and understand everything or complete every spiritual requirement, but in the son who came down to meet us where we are.”

#GodsFullLife

“You see, this this is the message of the gospel. God emptied himself for us so that we can have life to the fullest. Buddhism and Christianity, they look at those two same questions of why and how, but they come to very different solutions. One says, you have to empty yourself in order to experience peace. And the other says, I have emptied myself for you. Come to me and I will make you full. The choice is yours. So in light of this, how can we respond? What can we do about this this week? Well, I hope is that as you interact with people in your life this week who maybe practice Buddhism, you're able to approach those relationships with a new maybe level of respect or understanding. Like remember, they're approaching life from a completely different worldview. And so whenever you're talking with them, I wanna encourage you to think about asking this question. In a world full of suffering or when you experience suffering, how do you find peace?”

#gospelconfidence

“``If you're a follower of Jesus and you understand the gospel the way that we just communicated it, this isn't arrogance. It's humble awareness. It's Psalm one thirty saying, god, if you kept a record of wrongs, who could stand? No one. And so by grace, through faith, in Christ, if you're a follower of Jesus and you were to stand before god today, scale of one to 10, how confident are you that you get to eternity? If you understand the gospel, the answer is 10. It could never be below 10 because it isn't based on you. It's based on him.”

#GraceThroughFaith

“``See, Jesus, he didn't just offer a solution to the problem of her moral performance. He he brought an internal transformation to her life that she had never experienced before through the law. She experienced salvation as a free gift in grace alone through faith alone in Christ. Period. And for her, after a lifetime in the line of countless lifetimes, generation after generation after generation, in the system she lived in that made her feel as though her access to God was somehow connected to her ability to obey, she was finally free. Her worth was no longer achieved, but it was something that she felt like she had just received. But it came with a cost.”

#StrengthToCarry

“``What rises up naturally within us is the need to control the narrative. But what if moments of public disgrace or perceived weakness were made to develop something deeper within us? Maybe the true test of strength is not what you can lift but rather what you can carry without making someone else pay for it.”

#CounterfeitVsCross

“The scroll feels like awe, but it isn't. The offload feels like agency, but it isn't. The profile feels like identity, but it isn't. The chatbot feels like intimacy, but none of them stretch you. None of them grow you. The shape collapses when nothing is resisting you on the other side. But on the cross, Jesus pulled in all four directions at once so you could.”

#MisplacedIdentity

“It's rarely the stuff that's, like, so terrible that we're going, I'm gonna put my entire life on that. Maybe it happens, but it's a slide and we see it as one. But when we have really good things, it's so easy for us to let those good things become ultimate, and when we do, they go from good to bad. And so here's the question I want us to think about. What do you do when the identity that you've built collapses? Because if you built it, it will collapse. Every misplaced identity eventually meets an expiration date. And the question is not whether your identity will crash. It's what's underneath your false identity when it does.”

#MoreThanProductivity

“Because you are not the sum of your productivity or the average scrolls or time you spend on a screen per day. You are more than the optimized version of your latest performance review. You are more than what your kids think of you or what your parents think of you or what your teachers think of you. You are someone made in the image of God with infinite dignity, value, and worth. He loves you out of the overflow of his character. And he does not need anything from you. And nothing will change any of that. Anything that's telling you anything different than that isn't telling you the truth.”

#RestNotHustle

“You will not outperform the algorithm this week. It's already won, and your week hasn't started. You will not outoptimize your calendar. The world may want you to work your way to a better version of yourself by pretending to be god, but rest and awe are the radical steps we take to remind ourselves and those people who are closest to us that that we make terrible gods, and we don't have to fake that anymore. In a world that says, fake it till you make it, in God, can I just tell you, you've already made it?”

#SayYesToday

“That's not your imagination. It's the God of the universe who has been chasing you not just your whole life but before the history of the world is finally catching up. Don't talk yourself out of it. Think about this story. The priests, they didn't wait till they felt ready. They stepped in, and you can step in too. Here's what I wanna invite you to do. If you've never given your life to Jesus, if you've never committed to follow him, you can do that right now, right here, wherever you're sitting. You don't have to have it all figured out. You don't have to have your life all cleaned up. As a matter of fact, you can't do that. You just have to say yes.”

#WeDontDeserveEachOther

“I was brought back to this conversation we had before we were married when think Joe was, like, a little blinded by love at one point, and she turned to me and she said One point? Yeah. Only one. She turned to me and she said, Vince, I don't deserve you. And I said, no. You don't, which was Incredible we're still married. Not the recommended response. Wait. You actually said that? Yes. But I, yeah, I I did continue, thankfully. I said, and I don't deserve you either. Isn't it wonderful?”

#LookUpLiveDifferent

“The the way we use our phones in public around others, this is an outward representation of what we value most or what we value least. So as Jesus followers, it is so critical that we look different. You may have heard that phrase, preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words. You may have heard that phrase. I'll say something that that sounds a little bit shocking. In 2026, the greatest way to preach the gospel without words in public is simply to be off your phone looking up. It doesn't stop there, but it does start there. See, Jesus, he walked, talked, lived, and looked different. This is our way to look different.”

#PrayBeyondControl

“When was the last time you prayed for something you couldn't produce? You know, we're in a moment right now, like, you could produce a lot, but when was the last time you prayed for something you couldn't produce? Not a reasonable, not a responsible request, not wisdom to a decision that you've almost already made, not a prayer that was really just a plan you made and you wanted God's stamp of approval on it, something that you genuinely couldn't manufacture or engineer your way into or out of.”

#DoubtAsCatalyst

“``Doubt is what drives both of them. We get a choice of what we'll do with our doubt, whether you're a person of faith or not. And as we've already said over these last couple weeks, doubt is not the enemy. Doubt honestly expressed is actually a catalyst. It can be the most spiritually productive posture that someone can have because it forces us past the easy answers of simple faith to a discovery process that draws us closer to God himself. That as we get older, as we grow wiser, as we lean in more with God, we can find him more beautiful because he can handle the complexities of a life that feels overwhelming to us. The problem isn't doubt. The problem is what we do with it.”

#BringYourDoubts

“When we have doubts, when we start asking hard questions, when we hear something that that challenges our our belief system, do we just believe our doubts and assume that they they must be true? Or do we bury our doubts and try to pretend that they don't exist because either option gives our doubts a power over us that they were not intended to have? Or is there something else God is inviting us to do with our doubts and questions? What if Jesus longs for you not to believe your doubts or to bury them, but to bring your doubts to him, honestly?”

#GraceNotWork

“I want you to know that Jesus didn't come back from the dead to give you more to do. As a matter of fact, he came back from the dead to tell you that all the work has already been done, that your story isn't over, that what he accomplished is still available to you. It's life now and life forever with God. That what looks like the end is not the end. That the tomb being empty then means the weight you're carrying now is not the final word on who you are forever.”

#BurdenBearerJesus

“For though he had no burden of his own, in love, he took our burden, the burden of the whole world, and he hoisted it up on his shoulders, and he carried it to the top of the hill. And there, he stretched out his arms. They thought they were nailing his hands into a beam, but he was nailing our burdens into his hands. He was reversing the first disobedience of taking fruit from a tree with the ultimate obedience of giving his blood on a tree. And there on that wooden cross, Jesus became the fulfillment of all of our myths.”

#TableOfTheWounded

“See, the enemy of this table isn't the person that doesn't feel like they're worthy to sit at it. It's the person who's been sitting at it long enough that they've started deciding who else gets to be here because they have been tricked into thinking it's theirs to decide it in the first place. You know what I keep coming back to in this story? Nobody around this table actually deserved to be at it. Not in the way that we would think about it. Judas has already gone on the inside. Peter is about to blow up on the outside. The rest of them are mid argument about their own ratings while Jesus is hours away from the cross. This table, it wasn't a table of the worthy. It was a table of the wounded, the wanted, and the waiting.”

#BurnoutIsFaithfulness

“There can be a crash that we feel even after milestone moments with God, even if we're convinced that God's taking us in the right direction. So I wanna be direct about something because I think the church has not always been honest about this. Burnout is not just a sign of faithlessness. Oftentimes, it's evidence of faithfulness. Elijah did not burn out because he didn't trust God enough.”

#HopeForgedInFire

“I'll share one last thought with you. Have you stopped to wonder why there was a furnace there in the first place? That furnace was actually not designed for punishment. It was a hearth used for metalworking. The furnace can be a metaphor for our suffering, but it can be the place where hope is forged, where the impurities of our illusions burn away and something stronger begins to take shape. Fire is a way of deciding what will be consumed and what will be strengthened. And so the question I pose to you today is this, is your theology just theoretical? Or do you actually believe that there's hope on the other side of surrender? Because trust in God transcends the furnace. It doesn't remove the heat, but it changes what it will produce.”

“This is the beauty of the gospel, the good news of Jesus, that when you finally stop running, when your ram crashes, when your system is on overload, when you finally confess who you really are, God doesn't remove you from his plan. He renames you. He gives you a new identity right in the middle of it. Jacob wrestled with God in the dark and walked away with a limp. And I'd love to tell you that after this interaction, Jacob's a changed man, and he's, just night and day better the rest of his life, but he still fails. He still falls short. He's still being shaped by God day by day. Jacob was like us, imperfectly pursuing God and needing him just as much today as yesterday.”

“I want you to imagine not waiting for the finish line, not assuming that God is somewhere out there, but that God is right here right now. He's standing with you in it. He's calling your name because that's what he did here. Remember he said, Moses, Moses, he didn't say leader, he didn't say murderer, he didn't say disappointment, he didn't say washout. He said, Moses, for you he's saying, son, daughter. If God can call Moses by his name in Midian, he can call you by your name today.”

#JesusCameDown

“He's showing us that real love isn't about you and me reaching God. That's what every other religion outside of biblical Christianity does. Here's the ladder. You climb to get to God. No. No. No. What John is saying is Jesus is the only time that God climbed down to get to us. That's the good news of the gospel.”

#LovedNotEarned

“Because the Venmo kid works for the wallet. The report card kid works for the status. But the fridge art kid the fridge art kid can walk in security, can walk in safety. They aren't trying to earn the father's love. They know they already have it. They create, they serve, they live their lives as a response to the love that they are increasingly aware of and that will never change.”

#LovedNotEarned

“``Now that's a great statement, but do you know when God the father said this to Jesus? It was before his ministry began, before the miracle started, before the teaching started, before the cross, before the resurrection. God the father validated God the son based on relationship, not performance. He loved him because of who he was. Many of us, we wait until the report card comes back to say, I'm proud of you. My dad would wait until I graduated from college to tell me that he was proud of me for the first time. God leads with it. It's the first thing, and it should be for us too.”

#RedeemedNotCompleted

“``Jesus is the true groom who saw his bride, the church, you and me, in all of our mess, in all of our sin, and he didn't say you complete me. He didn't even ask us to complete him. He said, I will redeem you. He didn't fight for control. He submitted to the cross. He laid down his life to make us holy.”

#IdentityInChrist

“``You need a source of love that doesn't come from your family tree or at least your earthly one. See, Jesus is the only truly differentiated person who's ever lived. He stepped right into the messy mobile of humanity. He ate with sinners. He touched lepers. He dealt with the betrayal, but he never let that pull him into the dysfunction that was around him. When people praised him, he didn't get a big head. When people spit on him, he didn't lose his identity. Why? Because he was anchored to his heavenly father. He knew who he was, so the world couldn't tell him or try to trick him into thinking he was someone else.”

#restNotHustle

“Rest isn't a prize for people who finish their to-do list. It's a presence for people who are willing to come. The yoke is his way of life. It's the pace, his posture. And to take his yoke means that you stop hitching yourself to comparison or control or constant productivity, and you stop letting your calendar and your notifications lead your life. You let Jesus lead your life, and you keep company with someone who has nothing to prove and offers you a way that actually fits a human soul.”

#ShepherdsWereFirst

“Good news of great joy for all the people.And this good news of great joy came to whom?Who is invited of all of the people out there to be the first witnesses to the birth of Christ?It's the shepherds.It's the nobodies.The shepherds probably had never been invited to anything in their lives.Yet they were the first to be invited to see the King of Kings and Lord of Lords because that is what the kingdom of God is like.”

#TimeSplitByChrist

“If this story is not true, then all we have is empty nostalgia and hollow traditions. But if it is true, then this night is not a nostalgic reminder. And our traditions have profound depth. It's the announcement that God stepped into the world in real history. And nothing has been the same ever since. As a matter of fact, it's split time in two.”

#JoyIsGift

“Happiness drains you, but joy was bought for you. It fills you up. Happiness is earned. Joy is given. Happiness is purchased on credit. Joy is purchased at the cross. At some point, you have to realize that the reason joy feels so different from happiness is because joy does not depend on your and my effort. It does not depend on you and me manufacturing an outcome or my life circumstances being okay or my effort or my performance or my personality.”

#TangibleHope

“``But when Mary gave birth to Jesus Christ, she gave birth to the hope of every mother who has buried a child because she bore the son who empties out tombs, starting with his own and who raises life right back out of the grave. That is how tangible the hope that Jesus Christ offers us really is.”

#HopeInTheWaiting

“Jesus, he gives us a picture of that actually, a picture of a father who refuses to waste the waiting, a father who keeps the house ready, a father who refuses to give up, a father who watches the road every day with hope in his eyes because someone that he loves is worth it, still worth it. This is the heart behind hope for everyone.”

#GoodThingsVsGod

“It's not that they were lazy. It's not that they were evil. They were simply trying to fill the ache in their life with something that only God's presence can fill. That's the way he made us. See, when good things become ultimate things, they stop being good for us.”

#GraceForAll

“Jonah finds himself in a spot where he wanted a world where God is good to him and hard on Nineveh. Really hard on anybody he felt like didn't deserve it. And the good news for all of us is that God doesn't work that way. God actually makes his grace and mercy and love available to everyone. And chapter 4 is where God finally turns the mirror. Not just on Jonah, but on you and me as well.”

#GraceIsUnlimited

“``After all of his running, after his rebelling, after almost drowning, God isn't offering him a second chance. Sometimes we say grace is a second chance. No, no. Grace is as many chances as you need. And that's such good news. He just gives Jonah the next chance that he needs.”

#NoPlaceBeyondGodsReach

“You see, this boat to Tarshish was already on a collision course with judgment because of who was on board. So when the storm hits, Jonah discovers you can't outrun a God who is everywhere. Now there is no place where God's authority or his presence is absent.”

#NumbnessCostsHealing

“Numbing often feels better than hurting, and that feels like the choice that we're making. But what we don't realize is that it often costs our healing when we choose not to feel what's really happening around us. And the problem is that when we numb pain, we also numb joy.”

#StormResilientFaith

“What Jesus offers you and me is not storm prevention technology. That's what we're looking for. Jesus is offering us a storm resilient faith. Not a life free from pain, but a life built to stand through the pain.”

#DoubtInvitesPower

“Sometimes we don't run from God. We just drift into habits and behaviors that simply numb the pain that, that we feel. It won't heal it for good, but it'll conceal it for now. And some of you, that's just what you've decided. That's as good as it gets. And if you're tired of that, then Jesus has a vision of faith for all of us that we can come to him directly and exactly as we are. That no matter the categories the world has placed on you, Jesus just simply wants to be with you.”

#DoubtAsDoorToDeeperFaith

“And not only that, I believe that when we bring our real doubts to Jesus and our honest questions to God, we...it can become for us a path of deeper faith. Now, what if our doubt isn't a detour from discipleship, but if it's a door to a deeper relationship with Jesus?”

#peacewinshearts

“See, we have been convinced that the war being waged in the headlines is something we must fight on the same terms, but the true war is a spiritual war and it isn't in the headlines. It's in our hearts. It's in our homes. It's in our habits. The true war that we are fighting is won by waging peace. And that's what we're going to talk about today.”

#FaithUnityDependenceFirst

“``See, God knew that if they arrived without faith, without unity, and without dependence on him, that he was building in them along the way over the course of decades after centuries in captivity, that the promised land would just become another version of Egypt. Some of us, we need the exact same lesson today as we head into this fall with expectations that can feel so heavy, with accomplishments that we're hoping to achieve that will let us down over and over again if we're not careful. Ultimately, Israel learned the same lesson that we need to. And that is that the long road with God beats any shortcut without him.”