Sermons from Pastor Steven Canfield

The Surprising Stories of Jesus: The SowerA farmer flings seed everywhere: on the road, among rocks, into thorns. No careful farmer works this way, and that's the point. In Matthew 13, Jesus tells the parable at the heart of all his parables, picturing God's word scattered with abundant generosity into all the wrong places.For Jesus' first listeners, seed carried deep roots in the Hebrew scriptures, from God's promise to Abraham of countless descendants to Isaiah's faithful remnant. Jesus is announcing that everything Israel had been waiting for, justice, peace, healing, and renewal, is arriving in him. The seed is being sown now, and hearts respond in different ways. Some never let it in, some receive it with excitement but no roots, and some are choked by worry and wealth. But those who hear, see, and understand become good soil that yields a harvest a hundred times over.The invitation is to come to these parables with open eyes and receptive hearts, asking God to show us what his kingdom is like.

The Surprising Stories of Jesus: Week 1Jesus could have explained his kingdom with a lecture. Instead, he told stories. This opening message sets the framework for the series: Jesus the one-of-a-kind king, the kingdom he brings, and the parables he told to describe it.In Luke 4, Jesus announces good news to the poor, echoing Israel's hope of Jubilee and declaring it has arrived because he is here. We see the same king at Zacchaeus' table and with the Samaritan woman, lives transformed after one encounter. His kingdom broke every expectation: the last become first, power shows up in sacrifice, and all are welcomed to the table. To stir people toward that reality, Jesus drew on the stuff of everyday life, much as Judges 9 used a parable of trees choosing a king to expose a ruler hungry for power.Over the coming weeks we'll explore parables of kingdom, grace, and judgment. They were never pep talks or children's stories. They were meant to provoke us and flip our assumptions about God. Come ready to be surprised.

Job: Trusting God's Wisdom in SufferingThe book of Job isn't really about Job, Steven argues, it's about whether God can be trusted to run the world well, even when the innocent suffer. Job loses everything without cause, and his friends, operating on the ancient assumption that suffering always signals hidden sin, spend chapter after chapter accusing him of wrongs he never committed. Job insists on his innocence and demands an explanation from God. When God finally speaks from the whirlwind, he never explains why Job suffered. Instead he reveals the staggering complexity and wisdom behind how he governs creation, wisdom far beyond what Job, or any of us, could grasp. The book's point isn't to answer why we suffer, but to show that what we need most in suffering isn't an explanation, it's comfort, and a trust in God's wisdom and goodness even when we can't see the full picture. Steven closes by pointing to Jesus as the true innocent sufferer, who endured suffering he didn't deserve, voluntarily, out of love, so that suffering itself would one day be undone.

The Big Song You Might Have MissedEvery "greatest songs of all time" list misses one, Steven argues: the Song of Songs, a book of Hebrew love poetry so esteemed that ancient rabbis called it the holiest book in the Bible, even as its meaning has puzzled readers for centuries. Steven walks through the different ways scholars have tried to interpret it, as literal romance, allegory, drama, or collected wedding songs, before settling on a simple image: think of the book like an onion, with layers worth peeling back one at a time. The first layer is the plainest, God takes human love, desire, and intimacy seriously, and gives us poetic language for it. The second layer is analogy: that same passionate longing echoes the way Scripture describes God pursuing his people, as a bridegroom, a faithful partner, a lover who woos. The third and deepest layer is where the sermon lands, that the Song of Songs isn't just about human romance but an invitation into the staggering reality that God doesn't just love us out of obligation, he delights in us, wants us, and longs for us the way lovers long for each other.

Proverbs closes not with a summary statement but with a poem, an acrostic hymn to a woman who works with her hands, cares for her household, invests wisely, and reaches out to the poor. Steven makes the case that this isn't meant as a literal blueprint for wives to imitate, but a portrait of Lady Wisdom herself, the same figure who has called out to readers since the book's opening chapters, now embodied in full. Reading the poem closely, Steven points out something striking for its ancient context: the husband and children barely appear, because the woman herself, wisdom herself, is the point. The sermon's invitation is to take up wisdom as a lifelong partner, however messy or overdue that beginning might feel, trusting that wisdom moves us toward the good of others and becomes a stabilizing force in every area of life. Steven closes by pointing to Jesus as the fullest embodiment of that wisdom, the one in whom the fear of the Lord and the way of God are made complete.

How to Live the Final Chapters of Your One Wild and Precious LifeSteven turns to a question Proverbs, surprisingly, doesn't spend much time on: what does wisdom look like as we grow old? Proverbs, he explains, was written mainly to instruct the young, so the wisdom literature's real material on aging shows up elsewhere, in Genesis's picture of humanity formed from dust, in Ecclesiastes' unflinching honesty about the body's decline, and ultimately in the hope of the resurrection. Steven walks through what he calls the ABCs of Christian hope: our physical bodies will be raised as Jesus' was, heaven and earth will one day be joined together, and we will finally be fully home with God. From there, he offers practical wisdom for every stage of life, the young are called to honor and listen to those who've lived long, while those growing older are called to invest more, not less, in loving God and others, cultivating joy, gratitude, and curiosity along the way. Even as our bodies wear down, Steven points to Paul's promise that we are being renewed inwardly day by day.

A Cheerful Heart Has a Continual FeastProverbs keeps returning to the heart, that inner space Scripture treats as the wellspring of everything we think, feel, and become. Steven sits with a handful of proverbs on this theme, landing especially on Proverbs 15:15, a cheerful heart has a continual feast, and unpacks what that image meant in the ancient world: not an everyday meal, but the lavish, overflowing abundance of a wedding or celebration. He's careful to distinguish this from shallow positivity that ignores real pain, pointing instead to a deep, cultivated joy that can coexist with sorrow and hardship. Drawing on Proverbs 4:23's call to guard the heart above all else, Steven offers practical ways to cultivate that kind of joy: surrounding yourself with people doing the same heart work, filling your mind with beauty and goodness, naming what steals your joy, praying for help, and reaching out for support when you're stuck. He points to Jesus himself as the fullest picture of this, a man who had little by way of comfort or possessions yet embodied a continual feast of the heart.

Proverbs 12:18 sets up two ways of speaking: words spoken rashly that cut like a sword, and the tongue of the wise that brings healing. Steven unpacks what that healing speech actually looks like in practice, timely, comforting, controlled, purposeful, and generous, drawing on Proverbs' repeated warnings about babbling fools and the damage careless words can do. But the sermon pushes past technique to the root of it: Jesus taught that our words flow from the abundance of the heart, so the real work isn't just managing what we say but letting God change the heart behind it. Steven offers a simple, practical rhythm for growing in this: pay attention to your words, reflect on them, invite honest feedback from people close to you, and confess when your words have wounded someone. The invitation is to let Jesus, the ultimate model of healing speech, shape how we talk to one another.

Wisdom, Folly, and the State of Our Hearts
Proverbs sets two voices calling out in the same streets: Lady Wisdom, inviting people to her table to eat, drink, and grow in understanding, and Lady Folly, offering an easier, emptier way that promises pleasure without the work. Steven walks through how Proverbs categorizes those who follow folly's voice, the naive who simply haven't learned to read the room, the stubborn who refuse to hear correction, and the mocker who scorns wisdom outright, each requiring a different kind of response. But the sermon turns the lens inward too: these aren't just categories for other people, they're patterns every heart can fall into. The good news is that Jesus is described in Scripture as the wisdom of God fully expressed, meeting us in our foolishness and drawing us back to walk wisely with him.

Lady Wisdom's Great InvitationProverbs picks up where Genesis 1-3 leaves off, wrestling with how to navigate a world that God made good but humanity broke by choosing its own way over his. Into that mess steps Lady Wisdom, a figure who appears throughout Proverbs 1-9 not whispering in private but calling out in the streets, inviting anyone who will listen into a quest for a life well lived. Steven walks through what that quest requires: a certain posture of the heart, the willingness to face life's real complexity, and trust that wisdom's path leads somewhere good. Proverbs calls the ones who find it "happy," blessed, flourishing, the same word Jesus uses on the mountainside in the Beatitudes. The invitation is open to everyone: join the quest for wisdom, and discover the life it leads to.