New Hope Tampa Bay Sunday Sermon Podcast

Vicki Harrison opens What's My Next Step, God? with prayer — the early church, released from custody and warned to stop preaching, asking God not for safety but for boldness. Three questions to locate where your own prayer life actually is, and a next step from wherever that turns out to be.

Vicki Harrison closes Learning from Jesus with the end of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:15-29) — false prophets known by their fruit rather than their presentation, the warning that words alone are not enough, and two houses built by the same builder on different ground. Recorded September 20, 2026 at New Hope Church, Brandon, FL.

Vicki Harrison opens Matthew 6:19-24 and makes the case that this passage is not really about money — it is about treasure, the thing we have the hardest time letting go of, and the direction our hearts travel once we have chosen one. Recorded at New Hope Church, Brandon, Florida.

The disciples watched Jesus pray. The New Testament records him praying thirty-four times, and they were often in the room for it. Prayer is still the one subject in the Gospels where they came to him and asked directly to be taught: "Lord, teach us to pray." In week four of the Sermon on the Mount, Pastor Julie Hamilton opens Matthew 6:5-13 and starts with a quilt. It was made for her as a child, it is worn and frayed now and lives in a closet, and it has part of a prayer stitched onto it that she recited every night while climbing underneath. "Before I even knew my soul and body could be parted, my mouth prayed words with eternal implication." Before Jesus hands over the model, he clears two things out of the way. There is prayer as performance - the street-corner prayers timed and positioned for maximum visibility, which Jesus says have already been paid in full by the applause they were aimed at. And there is prayer as magic formula - heaping up words as though God has to be worn down or brought up to speed. Then comes the hinge of the passage: "Your Father knows what you need before you ask him." If God already knows, the reason to pray has to be something other than getting him the information. Relationship. Trust. Alignment. In Methodist language, prevenient grace - God already at work ahead of us, before we know to ask. What Jesus gives next is a pattern for a heart pointed the right way, which is a very different thing from a formula to recite. It moves through four movements: the address, the priorities, the provision, and the praise. Four words of it - "Our Father in heaven" - carry intimacy, community and transcendence at the same time. And the prayer closes where it opened, pointing back at God. Series: Learning from Jesus: The Sermon on the Mount Speaker: Pastor Julie Hamilton Scripture: Matthew 6:5-13 Recorded: September 6, 2026 New Hope Church | Brandon, Florida - findnewhope.com Watch and listen to past messages: findnewhope.com/message-archive

Most of us are happy to bring God our requests. We are much less happy to have anyone tell us how to live. In week three of the Sermon on the Mount, Pastor Roberto Chaple opens Matthew 5:38-48 - turn the other cheek, hand over your coat, go the second mile, love your enemies - and puts each one back in the world it was spoken into. "Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth" reads as savagery now, but it began as a ceiling. The principle runs through Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and shows up in the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi around 1750 BC, and its whole purpose was to stop a slap becoming a feud. Damage control, which is roughly what human justice still is. Jesus takes his hearers past that ceiling into something considerably less reasonable. A slap to the right cheek had to be a backhand, and Jewish law treated the backhand as the especially degrading version - the message being "you are beneath me." Turning the other cheek hands that message back. And the verb behind "forces you to go one mile" is Roman conscription language, the same word used when soldiers pulled Simon of Cyrene out of the crowd to carry a cross. It ends on the word we all stumble over. "Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." The Greek is teleios: complete, whole, mature. Something is teleios when it has become what it was made to be. New Hope Church | Brandon, Florida - findnewhope.com Watch and listen to past messages: findnewhope.com/message-archive