God tells Jeremiah he was known before he was formed; Jeremiah says he is only a youth. Harry Wilson pairs that with the harder verse later in the book — if runners wearied you, how will you compete with horses — and asks whether difficulty is obstacle or training.

Harry Wilson preaches Psalm 119 on God as an authoritative Father, which is neither authoritarian nor permissive. The psalm is relentlessly about law, and yet its verbs are all affection, which is the tension the message works.

Harry Wilson preaches the verse everyone can recite and the three that follow, which fewer can. The judgment John names is preference rather than ignorance, and belief, after C.S. Lewis, is less one item among others than the light by which the rest is seen.

Two young readers open Youth Sunday with the hardest sentences in the Gospels. Harry Wilson watches the smiles turn to frowns, preaches it with his own mother and grandparents in the room, and argues Jesus is insisting on an order of loves, not the abolition of the lesser ones.

Greater love has no one than this. Harry Wilson takes John 15 out of abstraction by way of his own mother, a single parent raising three children in small apartments, and draws a line between building a resume of interesting things and bearing fruit that actually abides.

Jonah paying the fare to Tarshish to get away from… read more

John 5:1-7 at the pool of Bethesda. A man has… read more

A Palm Sunday message from the youth pastor, opening with… read more

A Youth Sunday message rewinding to Acts 21:27-30 — the… read more