The Ranch Church Podcast

You're listening to the Ranch Church Podcast. For more information and service times, go to ranchchurch.com.

John and Debby Wright, who are stepping into the role of global leaders of the Vineyard movement, join us at the Ranch while on sabbatical in the Santa Ynez Valley with their family. Debby opens with a greeting from the worldwide Vineyard family and a picture of churches gathering in every kind of place, open-air settings like ours, centuries-old buildings, shanty towns, and countries where worship is not permitted, so that around the clock the Lord is receiving worship somewhere. John then preaches from three consecutive stories in the book of Judges, built around a question most of us have asked at one time or another. Could God really use me?

He starts with his own story: a quiet, bullied, introverted boy who tested out as a perfectionist and a specialist, wired to be a jeweler, who has now spent almost 40 years in pastoral ministry. Then he walks through Judges 3, 4, and 6. Ehud was a left-handed man in a right-handed world, marked by a stigma that made him look expendable, and that same left hand is what God used to free Israel from 18 years under Moab. Jael was a woman in a man's world, not a leader and not a judge, a tent wife who knew how to drive a peg because she had done it a thousand times, and God used that ordinary skill to break 20 years of Canaanite oppression. Gideon was a timid man in a dangerous world, threshing wheat down in a winepress out of fear, calling himself the least in the weakest clan, and the Lord told him to go in the strength he had.

The thread running through all three is Paul's word in 2 Corinthians 12, that God's power is made perfect in weakness. God's pattern is to choose people who cannot do what he is calling them to do in their own strength. The message closes with John and Debby leading a time of ministry, welcoming the Holy Spirit, praying for those held back by fear, setbacks, or the sense that they do not quite fit, and calling the church forward for prayer.

Scriptures: Judges 3:12-30; Judges 4:1-24; Judges 5:24; Judges 6:1-16; Judges 7:7; 2 Corinthians 12:9-10

You're listening to the Ranch Church Podcast. For more information and service times, go to ranchchurch.com.

Guest speaker Pastor Lars Linton opens John 5 at the pools of Bethesda, where a great crowd of sick people waited for the water to stir and one man had been lying there thirty-eight years. Out of that entire crowd, Jesus walks straight to the one person nobody noticed. Around that single moment, Lars builds three truths: Jesus sees you, Jesus saves you, and Jesus is superior.

He traces the God who sees back to Genesis 16, where Hagar meets God in the wilderness and calls him El Roi. He shows that Bethesda means house of mercy, and that Jesus skipped the palaces during the feast and went to the hospital instead. He follows the healed man into the temple, where Jesus finds him a second time, because the word translated made well means whole, and Jesus came for the soul as well as the body. From there Lars teaches a practical pattern for biblical confession, a practice he believes the church has largely lost: regard the great love of Jesus, recognize your own responsibility, realize the seriousness of the offense, and receive forgiveness. The message closes in the Sabbath controversy of John 5:16-22, where Jesus answers his accusers by claiming equality with the Father in nature, power, and authority, and calls every knee to bow and every tongue to confess that he is Lord.

If you have been waiting a long time, or if you have wondered whether anyone notices, this message is for you.

Scriptures: John 5:1-22; John 5:39; John 9:1-3; Genesis 16:13; James 5:14-16; 1 John 1:8-9; Philippians 2:10-11

For more information and service times, visit ranchchurch.com.

You're listening to the Ranch Church Podcast. For more information and service times, go to ranchchurch.com.

Continuing through the hall of faith in Hebrews 11, Pastor Rick Soto turns to verses 13 through 16, where the saints of old are called strangers and exiles who died in faith while seeking a better country. His message begins with a simple charge: don't waste your life. Using the picture of packing luggage for a trip, he asks the question every traveler settles before zipping the bag. Where are you going? If heaven is the destination, pack accordingly. Rick gives five packing instructions for the journey. Pack God's story, letting God write and interpret the narrative of your life instead of the stories we tell ourselves, with the Beatitudes of Matthew 5 as the guide. Pack contentment, a harder discipline than it looks, commanded in Hebrews 13:5 and commended in 1 Timothy 6:6. Pack significance, giving your life away to what matters in Jesus, as Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and Sarah did. Pack Sabbath, the stop that God built into creation before there was ever a tabernacle, temple, or church. And pack heaven, a real place of no pain and no decay, a great reunion, and a kingdom that cannot be shaken. The message closes with an invitation to let God become the author and interpreter of a brand-new story, and to take a step of faith toward prayer.

Scriptures: Hebrews 11:13-16; Matthew 5:1-9; Hebrews 13:5; 1 Timothy 6:6; Hebrews 12:1

Pastoral invitation: Come forward for prayer during the closing ministry time. The changing of a story needs a new beginning, a pivot, a new interpreter, and a new storyteller. Getting out of the seat, even when socially awkward, is itself framed as the step of faith.

Continuing in the book of Hebrews, Pastor Rick Soto opens what he calls the hall of faith in Hebrews 11 and walks through three lives: Noah, Abraham, and Sarah. He teaches that all of life revolves around faith, and that our faith is never in faith itself but in the person of Jesus Christ. Tracing David's confrontation with Goliath and his prayers in Psalm 18 and Psalm 62, he shows how God builds faith across our past, present, and future. From Noah comes the urgency of obeying God's warning and the promise of Genesis 7:16, that God himself shut the door. From Abraham, obedience without knowing where the road leads. From Sarah, trusting God's timing when the promise seems impossible. The message closes with what faith needs in order to grow, love, contentment, and simplicity, and an invitation to come out of hiding and let the Lord minister to the secret places of the heart.

Scriptures: Hebrews 11:7-12; 1 Samuel 17:36-37, 45; Psalm 18:1-3; Psalm 62:8; Genesis 7:16; John 10:10

Pastoral invitation: Stop hiding. Closing ministry time asked people to come forward for prayer, framing the step out of the seat as itself the act of faith, the same step Noah, Abraham, and Sarah took.

Show notes

You're listening to the Ranch Church Podcast. For more information and service times, go to ranchchurch.com.

In this interactive teaching, Pastor Rick Soto opens Psalm 23 as a school of prayer. He teaches two simple practices, praying scripture by agreement and praying scripture by application, and leads the church in praying the shepherd psalm together, line by line. Along the way he traces the shepherd heart of God from Psalm 28 and Isaiah 40 through John 10 and Revelation 7, names seven marks of a good sheep, and speaks honestly about rest, soul restoration, and fearing no evil because "you are with me." He also brings a direct challenge: to recover the bold, praying spirit that marked Ranch Church's earliest days, and to become a church genuinely devoted to prayer.

Scriptures: Psalm 23; Psalm 28:9; Isaiah 40:11; Matthew 9:36; John 10:2, 11-14; Revelation 7:17; Galatians 5:1

Pastoral invitation

Two layers. Personally: learn to pray scripture, agreeing with it and applying it to the specific places you carry fear, pain, and want. Corporately: step into a renewed culture of prayer, concretely a 24-hour prayer chain and ongoing prayer chapel, and receive prayer from the team for soul restoration.