Yasmin Pierce speaks at World Mandate Midwest 2023.

This week, Pastor Alex spoke out of Exodus on the topic of: follow, commune, and persevere.

Throughout the book of Exodus we see God continually with His people. The Israelites were being led by the presence of God, and received His continual blessing and favor. God endlessly provided for them, and with their radical deliverance came a radical provision. Even when the Israelites were not choosing Him, God was choosing them. He was always faithful.

Pastor Alex made three primary points:

1. We must choose to follow Him

If we follow Jesus we get to commune with Him and be in His presence every day. We get to eat and drink with Him, walk with Him, and spend every moment of our lives with Him. Following God is not just one decision, it is a series of daily decisions.

2. We choose to commune with Him

Following Jesus is an every-aspect-of-our-life thing. Therefore, we need to establish discipline and rhythms that allow us to spend time with God.

3. We choose to persevere

Perseverance is a choice, and we need to recognize that God is a God of covenant and promises – He is faithful when we are faithless. He will carry us through.

Practical ways to enact these steps:

As we choose to follow Him, start each day acknowledging Him and being grateful.
As we commune with Him, get into the regular habit of praying the Lords prayer, pray at or before lunch, and do communion regularly. Set alarms on your phone, and acknowledge God throughout the day.
Choose Him daily.

What is God leading us into in 2022? Life with God is not one decision, it’s a series of many decisions.

This week Pastor Matthew launched our new sermon series titled “Wait on God.”

He encouraged us to wait on God in this season; being ready for Him to do whatever He wants to do however He wants to do it.

His three main points were to:

Know Our Calling
Let Him Sustain You, and
Get Ready!

Waiting on God is active, not passive. We need to know our calling, which is to follow Him. It is as if Jesus is personally saying to us “you, me, let’s go.” It is a call that requires leaving everything and living our lives according to His will, in His way. We need to die to our pride, our rights, our nationalism and our previous mindset, attitudes and expectations.

To cope through this time we need to avoid simply running back to the old or familiar things like TV, movies, alcohol, porn, social media or work. Instead we need to allow Jesus to deal with our unresolved issues and move forward into healing and renewal.

Finally, we need to get ready. To deal head on with the unresolved issues in our “house”. We need to seek the Lord, turn to Him and let go of anything that keeps us from Him. We need to get ready as He is doing something new.

This week Pastor Matthew and Amanda led us through the history of Waypoint Church and shared the vision for the future, focusing on four areas:

1. A slowed down spirituality. Slowing down to be with God and one another.
2. Beneath the surface discipleship. We have to live lives that confront our hurts and wounds, stepping in willingly to be unraveled so that Jesus can put us back together.
3. Church planting, because Church is God’s plan A for the world and there is no plan B.
4. Reaching cities and nations, including Omaha.

This week, Pastor Matthew continued on with our Take Me To Church series with part two of becoming a multi-ethnic community.

We want to be a multi-ethnic people. We are better when we learn from and do life with people who are not the same as we are. It’s a beautiful thing when we are joined together in unity (which is not the same as uniformity).

Becoming a multi-ethnic community is Biblical. We see it all the way from Genesis to Revelation; God created different cultures and there’s beauty in their diversity and their differences. This type of multi-ethnicity will not simply happen, it takes intentionally, patience, courage, and passion.

As Christians we are tasked with the ministry of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:14-21), and Pastor Matthew suggested four practical steps as a starting place:


Practice remembering. This includes remembering America’s history of racial oppression and slavery experiences. Our nation is founded on centuries of racial oppression, and the residue of racial inequality still runs deep within our communities. We can’t understand our present reality without an honest recognition of our past. Our refusal to look at the dark history of the United States often reveals the idolatry in our hearts, and as Americans we need to remember where we come from so that we do not repeat the sins of our past.
Practice listening. We need to be deeply committed to listening to others for the purpose of truly hearing and understanding them. Our levels of offendability when it comes to race conversations often reveals our levels of immaturity, as we have a tendency to reduce people to their worst belief. To truly listen to people requires us to take up our cross and walk the way of Jesus daily – leaving what is familiar territory, and making space in our hearts for a different narrative. To listen like Jesus requires three movements; leaving our world, entering into somebody else’s world, and allowing ourselves to be formed by others. Reconciliation requires being vulnerable to another culture, which is impossible if we believe that other cultures are better or worse than our own.
Practice of lament. We don’t need to be sorry for people, we need to feel sorry with people.
Practice of reconciling prayer. We are not going to get anywhere with reconciliation unless we give ourselves to prayer. We need to be people who pray, and we will be changed if we give ourselves to prayer and fasting.

These practices are all aids not to help us do more, but to help us become more like Jesus.

This week, Pastor Jermaine continued on with our Take Me To Church series on the topic of Waypoint’s call to be a multicultural and multi-ethnic church.

Pastor Jermaine had three primary points about why seeking racial reconciliation is important:

1. It’s Biblical.

Too often we want to focus on righteousness in lieu of justice, when the two of them are Biblically inseparable. Too often we apply the Bible to our eternal destiny, but not to our modern, current circumstances.

Too many people in the historical church have disconnected the message of the Gospel from the reality of living racially reconciled lives. This is problematic, and should not be.

It’s not good enough to have perfect orthodoxy (doctrine) and broken orthopraxy (action). The call of God on our lives is to have both our doctrine and our action in line with one another and the Gospel.

2. It’s relational.

The family of God is one marked by reconciliation on all fronts; including age, gender, and race. We are the Kingdom of God, and we should hurt when our brothers and sisters hurt. As the body of Christ we have a mandate to continue this journey of multiethnic reconciliation.

3. It’s continual.

This is a call that is going to cost all of us something, and it will be a continual journey. We need to all keep loving one another as we struggle.

At some point we must rise above our earthly allegiances (to our denominations, our political parties, our nationalities..) and ascend with allegiance to the Kingdom of God. We must answer the call of God, whatever the cost.

Waypoint has a call to intentional multi-ethnicity, which includes running to areas of pain, linking arms with our brothers and sisters who are different from us, asking the Lord to restore our compassion, and stepping out to care for one another practically. We are to take up the cause of Christ, even when it brings up tension and becomes uncomfortable. This is not a call that can be undertaken by one person, it requires the entire body of Christ. We need to make room in our lives and our hearts for those who are different from us.

This week, Pastor Matthew shared about what the Lord did during his time on Sabbatical.

The Lord wants to release healing over the wounds accumulated over the past two years.
Jesus was joyous, and God wants to pour out His oil of joy on us.
When we say yes to Jesus there are certain things we are saying yes to. This includes the way of the cross, which is suffering and a laying down of our lives. Jesus taught us how to do this. If we allow Jesus to work in us through suffering, He will make us more like Him.
The church is still God’s plan A to see Him and know Him, and so long as that is true there is still hope.
The church must be an alternative community that purposefully resists the things of the world. We must be built on love for one another. If we look exactly the same as the world, then the church has nothing to offer the lost.
Nations come and go but His Kingdom endures forever.
We live in a post-Christian culture, and because of that we need to shift.
We must continue our journey towards slowed down spirituality. We must continue to plant churches. We must continue our journey towards multi-ethnicity.

God is calling Waypoint in this season to come out and go.

Midweek Reflections is back after the summer break! Join Pastors Alex, Jermaine, and Luke dig into the new sermon series, Witness.

Pastor Luke concludes our series in the Lord's Prayer with a powerful message about overcoming temptation.