Countryside Fellowship is a gathering of believers who follow Jesus as King, Lord and Savior. Our mission is to be a people growing into the likeness of Jesus, loving others into Kingdom living and eternal life.
Reading the feed…
They showed up with a compliment and a question, hoping to finally pin down whose side Jesus was on. Jesus didn't take the bait then, and it turns out he's still not taking it now. Not from anyone hoping Jesus will sign off on their read of...
Everyone in that crowd meant every word of the compliment. That was never the problem. When a loaded question corners Jesus in the temple courts, he doesn't out-argue it. He asks for a coin instead — and lets the person holding it do all the...
They get every word right about Jesus, no partiality, straight teaching, exactly what’s true. And it’s still a trap. Accuracy was never the problem. But where’s their allegiance? What’s the difference between saying the right things about Jesus and...
Luke 20:19-26 is part of an ongoing verse-by-verse study through the book of Luke.
Three times in two chapters, the people best positioned to move against Jesus don't, and Luke doesn't let them dress up why. They're afraid of the crowd. They just never call it that. Patience. Caution. Discretion. Anything but the...
What does the Bible actually say about asking Jesus into your heart? About tithing ten percent? About Sunday being the Sabbath? Less than you've been told. What does it say about the wise men, the donkey, the fruit in the garden? Even less. And...
We’ve turned baptism into a spectacle, a debate, and occasionally a logistics problem — water temperature, technique, the right way to do it. What we don’t talk about as often is the sentence underneath all of it: the one said right before someone...
They didn't misread the parable. The chief priests understood it instantly, completely, faster than almost anyone standing in the temple courts that day. And their response wasn't confusion. It was a plan. We tend to assume that once a truth...
Judgment stories are supposed to end one way — everything burns, nothing left standing. So when the crowd hears how this parable actually ends, they say the only thing that makes sense: “Surely not.” They’re half right. Something does end. But it’s...
A courtyard full of religious leaders. A question built to trap him no matter how he answered. And Jesus says nothing — refuses to hand truth to men who've already shown him exactly what they do with it. We tend to assume every question deserves...
The experts looked at the stone and called it unusable. Wrong shape, wrong grain, doesn't fit anything worth building. They were the best in the business. They were also completely wrong. Every builder eventually rejects something, an idea, a...
There’s a number most of us keep without saying it out loud, the point where somebody’s used up their last chance. Two strikes, maybe three, and we call the rest wisdom. In Luke 20, a landowner keeps sending servants into a field that keeps turning on...
Luke 20:9-19 is part of an ongoing verse-by-verse study through the book of Luke.
A delegation walks up to Jesus in the temple courts with a simple demand: prove you're allowed to be doing this. It's a fair question, on the surface — until you notice who's asking, and why the answer they get back isn't the one...
Luke 20:1-8 is part of an ongoing verse-by-verse study through the book of Luke.
Nobody organized the crowd that kept forming around Jesus in the temple that week. No clipboard. No schedule. No incentive to show up. Just people who couldn’t seem to leave once he started talking. Terry looks at what actually pulled a crowd toward...
After the weeping over Jerusalem and the overturned tables, Jesus walks back into the temple. Every day. The people who run the building are actively working on the problem of how to kill him — and Luke's description of Jesus in the middle of all...
We notice the indictment before we notice the vision. "Den of robbers" is the line everybody remembers — but it's not the line Jesus says first. Before the critique, there's a sentence almost nobody quotes: "my house will be a...
Jesus clears a market out of the temple, and most of us read it as a story about corruption, dishonest dealing, an institution gone wrong. Read on, and a four-word phrase Mark includes and Luke leaves out tells a different story entirely. It runs from...
Father’s Day usually comes with a tie nobody asked for and a card that says all the right things. But Terry’s asking a harder question this year: has following Jesus actually made you wiser, or just better at waiting for someone to tell you what to do...
There were two lists. One was carved in stone at the entrance to the temple, with a death penalty for crossing the line. The other was spoken on a hillside, naming, one category at a time, who the kingdom of God belongs to. Terry explores what happens...
Most of us would never describe our faith as a cover story. We show up. We serve. We have the record. But Jeremiah stood at the gate of the temple — not to confront the irreligious, but the devout — and asked a question that hasn't aged out: are...
Most of us would never describe our faith as a cover story. We show up. We serve. We know the text. We have the record. But Jeremiah stood at the gate of the temple, not to confront the irreligious, but the devout, and asked a question that...
Nobody decided to exclude anyone. That's the uncomfortable part. When Jesus walked into the temple and cleared it out, he wasn't dealing with villains. He was dealing with a system that had drifted, gradually, reasonably, with good...
With all the preaching and books and thoughts on Scripture and opinions and...and...and...it's easy to overlook the fact that the best sermons of the Bible are the Bible itself. Join Terry as he reads through the Scriptures, selecting those...
