Episodi

  • Robby Plemmons: Jesus Took Your Place

    Robby Plemmons: Jesus Took Your Place
    Sep 20 2026
    We all wrestle with "I don't belong here." Paul's answer in 2 Corinthians 5:11–6:2 isn't a pep talk. It's the gospel: Jesus took your place at the cross so you could take your place at God's table. Not as a hired hand trying to prove yourself. As a son or daughter who's already been accepted. That changes everything.
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  • Robby Plemmons: You Belong to Christ, Body and Soul

    Robby Plemmons: You Belong to Christ, Body and Soul
    Sep 13 2026
    The Heidelberg Catechism opens by asking, "What is your only comfort in life and in death?" Paul answers in 2 Corinthians 5 with a tent and a building — a body that is fragile and temporary, and a home from God that is eternal in the heavens. Rev. Robby Plemmons preaches on the three things that hold us: God's grace secures us, faith in Christ sustains us, and Christ himself will commend us on the last day. Most of us live as though we have to keep everything in the air. Paul says the future is already settled, and that frees us to walk by faith, not by sight.
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  • Robby Plemmons: Cracked but Not Crushed

    Robby Plemmons: Cracked but Not Crushed
    Sep 6 2026
    Corinth was a status-conscious city, and the church there had taken on its values: eloquence, credentials, visible power. Then the “super-apostles” arrived with all of it in spades — and beside them stood Paul, unimpressive in speech, beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked. If God were really behind this man, wouldn’t his ministry look like more? Paul does not defend his strength. He argues that the weakness they would use to disqualify him is the very proof that the power is God’s and not his own. “We have this treasure in jars of clay” — not fine pottery, but ordinary earthenware, and the fragility is deliberate. Afflicted, but not crushed. Perplexed, but not driven to despair. Persecuted, but not forsaken. Struck down, but not destroyed. So the place where you feel weakest may not be a liability at all. It may be exactly where God has chosen to put His glory on display. 2 Corinthians 4:1-18 — Rev. Robby Plemmons — September 6, 2026 — CrossPoint Presbyterian Church, Park City, Utah.
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  • Brad Carpenter: Philemon

    Brad Carpenter: Philemon
    Aug 23 2026
    Brad Carpenter opens by explaining why he is standing there: an old-fashioned preaching exchange. Robby is in Sacramento, where his son Hudson has just taken a job, preaching at the church Brad normally serves. Brad's eldest daughter has just moved into the dorms at the University of Utah. So they swapped pulpits. Philemon is the shortest of Paul's letters and among the most uncomfortable. Onesimus is a runaway slave. Paul is sending him back - to a man with every legal right to punish him - carrying a letter asking that he be received not as property but as a beloved brother. Paul does not command it, though he says plainly that he could. He asks. And then, in his own handwriting: if he owes you anything, charge it to my account. Formerly useless to you, Paul writes. Now useful to both of us. He could have ordered it. He wrote a letter instead, and put his own name against the debt.
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  • Robby Plemmons: It's The Spirit That Makes Us Sufficient

    Robby Plemmons: It's The Spirit That Makes Us Sufficient
    Aug 17 2026
    In 2008, Robby applied to be head football coach at Mississippi State. Not as a joke. He wrote a full proposal: a fraction of the $32 million Alabama had just committed to Nick Saban, with the remaining thirty million placed in an endowment so that players who graduated could apply for grants to start businesses and nonprofits in their hometowns, each paired with an alumni mentor. Use the absurd economics of college football to rebuild small-town Mississippi. His qualifications: he had once coached his six-year-old son's flag football team, because the actual coach failed to turn up to the first practice. The athletic director wrote back, graciously, to say they were going in a different direction. Then his father-in-law suggested asking for it on official letterhead. It arrived. He framed it and hung it on the wall. Why frame a rejection? Because underneath the joke sits the thing everyone wants - for somebody to sign off on us. To put our name on letterhead and certify that we are the real thing. Which is precisely what 2 Corinthians 3 is about. Paul's rivals arrive carrying letters of recommendation. Paul has none. He has a church instead. You are our letter, he tells them. Written not with ink.
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    34 min
  • Jim McAndrew: The True Marks of Christian Ministry

    Jim McAndrew: The True Marks of Christian Ministry
    Aug 9 2026
    In 1986 his mother asked whether he wanted to be a preacher when he grew up. He said yes. She asked whether he knew what a preacher was. He said yes - a Top Gun pilot. Forty years on he is preaching, and his mother is in the pews. The passage is 2 Corinthians 2:12-17 and the claim is blunt: true Christian ministry is marked by weakness and suffering. Not by results, not by platform. Paul reaches Troas to find a door standing open for the gospel, and leaves anyway, because Titus is not there and he cannot rest. There is a second story here, and it is a Utah one. A former LDS bishop across the street, working to convert him, gets a version of Pascal's wager in return. If I become a Mormon and Christianity is true, I lose everything. If I stay a Christian and Mormonism is true, I am told I still get in. So what exactly do I gain? The neighbor's answer: you are missing out on all the blessings in this life. That is the crux of it, and it is not only a Mormon answer. Plenty of Christians preach the same thing in different words. We are the aroma of Christ. To some the smell of life, to others of death.
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  • Tim Fox: 2 Cor 1:12-2:11

    Tim Fox: 2 Cor 1:12-2:11
    Aug 3 2026
    Chapter and verse numbers were added centuries after these letters were written, and sometimes they were added badly. This is one of those places. The passage runs straight across the break between chapters 1 and 2, because the argument does. And the argument is awkward. Paul planted this church, promised to return, then did not. Instead he sent a letter severe enough that the Corinthians are still smarting from it. Now he writes again, defending a change of plan, defending the tone of what he wrote, and defending himself against people using both against him. It is among the most situation-specific passages in the New Testament: a first-century conflict between a founder and a congregation, with details we only half know. Which is what makes the turn in it remarkable. Mid-defense, Paul stops and says that all the promises of God find their Yes in him. The man accused of saying yes and no in the same breath answers by pointing at the one who never has. Tim Fox wrote his doctoral thesis on repentance and restoration in this letter, and it shows in how carefully he handles it. Paul's plans changed. That was never the thing under threat.
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    36 min
  • Robby Plemmons: Comfort Received, Experienced, and Shared

    Robby Plemmons: Comfort Received, Experienced, and Shared
    Jul 27 2026
    Every song has a melody that makes it that song and not another. Simeon Trust teaches that every book of the Bible has one too - a single sustained sentence the whole book hangs on, which every passage connects back to. For 2 Corinthians it is this: God's power is perfected in weakness. That line, brought back from a preaching workshop in the valley earlier this year, is what opens this series. Hold onto it. It is the thread through everything that follows. But first, Corinth. In 146 BC a Roman general leveled the city and killed or enslaved everyone in it. Cicero had called it the light of all Greece. It lay in ruins for roughly a century before Rome rebuilt it - and what got rebuilt was a boom town of freedmen and traders, a place obsessed with status precisely because almost nobody there had inherited any. Paul plants a church in that city. Then he writes to it about comfort - the word lands again and again in the opening paragraphs - and about affliction, and about why the two are not opposites at all. A church built on rubble, in a city that worshipped strength. God's power is perfected in weakness. In Corinth, of all places.
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