Trinity Church of the Nazarene

10/26/2026

Pastor Adam preaching from Philippians

10/19/2026

Pastor Adam teaching from Philippians

10/12/2026

Pastor Adam teaching from John

10/10/2026

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It was not a dying man's last words. It was a creditor cancelling a debt.

John 19:30 records the final word Jesus spoke before his death on the cross. In Greek it is a single word — tetelestai. English translations render it as it is finished or it is accomplished or it is completed.

Those translations are accurate as far as they go. The Greek verb telos means end, completion or fulfilment — and tetelestai is its perfect passive form, indicating something that has been completed with lasting effect.

What the English translations do not convey — because English has no single equivalent — is the commercial and legal resonance the word carried for anyone in the first-century Greek-speaking world.

Archaeologists excavating ancient Egyptian sites have found multiple papyrus documents — bills, tax records, commercial receipts — from the Greco-Roman period with the word tetelestai written or stamped across them. In these documents the word functions as what modern accountants would call a paid in full stamp. It was the word a creditor or tax collector wrote across a debt record when the account had been settled — when nothing remained owing, when the transaction was complete, when the debt was cancelled and the record closed.

The word did not just mean finished in the sense of over. It meant finished in the sense of discharged — the obligation met, the account cleared, nothing remaining.

When Jesus spoke tetelestai from the cross, anyone in his audience who dealt in the commercial world of the first century heard something specific. They heard the word that appeared on cancelled debts. The word that meant the account was settled. The word that meant nothing more was owed.

He was not announcing defeat. He was issuing a receipt.

The debt was paid. The record was stamped. Nothing remained.

Share this with someone who needs to understand what Jesus meant by those three syllables.

"When he had received the drink, Jesus said 'it is finished.' With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit." — John 19:30

10/05/2026

Pastor Adam Thompson continue the serioes in the book of Jhon

10/03/2026

Trinity Nazarene Church is having an event tomorrow Saturday “ free clothing giveaway, and free furniture and miscellaneous from 1-3pm, 2805 Englewood Ave Yakima Wa

09/25/2026

09/10/2026

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Ezekiel 18 starts with a proverb that apparently had become very popular in Israel: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” Basically, our parents made bad choices and somehow we are the ones walking around with the weird taste in our mouths. It was a convenient explanation for why everything was going terribly. Their ancestors had sinned. Previous generations had rebelled against God. Their leaders had made disastrous choices. Therefore, here they were suffering the consequences of a mess they did not personally create. And to be fair, there was some truth buried in there. Choices absolutely can affect generations. If somebody sets the house on fire, the children living upstairs do not get magically fireproof bedrooms simply because they were not holding the match. Ezekiel has spent plenty of time explaining how Israel arrived at this point. But there is a very large difference between saying, “Someone else’s choices affected my life,” and saying, “Therefore I am not responsible for what I do with my life now.” God is about to dismantle that second idea.

God says, “Behold, all souls are mine.” Then He walks Ezekiel through several generations of one imaginary family. First there is a righteous man who follows God. Then that man has a violent, sinful son who does basically the opposite of everything his father did. Then that man has a son who looks at what his father has done and decides he is not continuing it. Same family. Different choices. And God’s point is unmistakable: righteousness is not inherited like your nose, your height, your inability to function pleasantly before sunrise, or whatever other family trait everyone agrees came from Grandpa. Neither is guilt simply passed down as though God has some enormous heavenly spreadsheet where your great grandfather did something terrible in 1947 and now apparently your account has an outstanding balance. Each person stands before God.

“The soul who sins shall die.” That sounds harsh until you realize what God is actually correcting. Israel wanted to believe they were trapped inside somebody else’s story. God says no. Your father’s righteousness cannot save you while you rebel against Me, but your father’s wickedness cannot condemn you when you turn toward Me either. You are not spiritually doomed because you came from a mess. You also do not get to coast because you came from faithful people. You cannot stand before God holding Grandma’s Bible and say, “We were very religious,” as though salvation works like a family Costco membership. God knows you.

And then Ezekiel 18 gets even more interesting because God talks about someone wicked who turns away from his sin. You would almost expect God to say that the damage has already been done, the record is too long, and there are simply too many things written in permanent ink. Instead: “None of the transgressions that he has committed shall be remembered against him.” Read that again. This is the same book where we have spent chapter after chapter watching judgment approach Jerusalem because sin actually matters. God has not suddenly decided rebellion is adorable. He is saying something far better. Repentance matters too.

Then God asks one of those questions that tells us something enormous about His heart: “Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked… and not rather that he should turn from his way and live?” God is warning them because He wants them to turn around. Judgment is coming, yes, but God is practically standing in the road waving both arms saying, turn around. You do not have to keep going this direction. The warnings themselves are mercy. Ezekiel is not standing there gleefully announcing destruction. God is calling people back while there is still time to come back.

That also means Ezekiel 18 leaves us without some of our favorite excuses. I am this way because of my family. Because of what happened to me. Because somebody else started it. Because I have already messed up too badly. Because this is simply who I am now. Some of those things may explain how we got somewhere, and some wounds left by other people are very real. But explanation is not the same thing as a life sentence. God does not look at the road behind you and tell you there is therefore no point changing direction. He says turn.

And near the end of the chapter comes this incredible plea: “Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed, and make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit!” If you have read ahead in Ezekiel, that language should start ringing bells because eventually God is going to explain who ultimately provides that new heart and new spirit. Ezekiel 18 tells Israel they desperately need one. Later, God promises He will give one. And eventually the entire story points us toward Jesus, because our problem was never going to be solved by becoming slightly nicer people who occasionally remember not to eat the metaphorical sour grapes.

The chapter ends almost painfully simply. God says He has no pleasure in anyone’s death. “So turn, and live.”

Turn and live.

Not fix your family history and live. Not somehow undo every stupid thing you have ever done and live. Not prove that you deserved another chance and live. Turn.

Maybe you inherited consequences you never asked for. Maybe people before you made choices that shaped your life in ways you are still dealing with. Maybe you are the person who made the choices and you are looking backward thinking there is absolutely no way God wants anything to do with you now. Ezekiel 18 speaks to both people.

You are not trapped by the faithfulness of the people before you, and you are not trapped by their failures either. You are not trapped by yesterday.

God is still calling.

Turn and live.

08/09/2026

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Hebrews 6:19 says, “We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain.” I have read that verse plenty of times, but the more you actually look at what an anchor does, the better the comparison gets. Because an anchor is not something you use to make the weather behave itself. You do not toss an anchor overboard and suddenly the wind stops, the waves flatten out, the clouds disappear, and everyone gets to continue their pleasant little boat ride like nothing happened. That would be a significantly different piece of equipment and I suspect sailors would be extremely interested in purchasing one. An anchor has a much less glamorous job. The wind can keep blowing. The waves can keep coming. The current can keep pushing. The anchor's job is to keep all of those forces from taking the boat wherever they feel like taking it.

There is quite a bit of physics happening here. A boat on the water is being acted on by forces constantly. Wind pushes against the portion above the water. Currents push against the hull below it. Waves transfer energy into the boat and make it rise, fall, roll, pitch, and generally remind anyone with a questionable stomach that land was actually a perfectly lovely invention. If nothing counteracts those forces, the boat drifts. It may not drift very quickly, which is actually part of the problem. Move a tiny amount every minute for enough minutes and eventually you can be a very long way from where you started. You do not have to be violently thrown somewhere to become lost. Sometimes all it takes is a little pressure in the same direction for a long enough time.

An anchor provides resistance to that movement, and this is where it gets even more interesting because anchors do not primarily work by being really heavy objects that somebody throws onto the bottom. Weight certainly matters, but a good anchor is designed to dig into the seabed. As tension develops in the anchor line, the anchor bites into sand, mud, or another suitable bottom and transfers the forces acting on the boat into something capable of resisting them. There is an entire system involved, including the anchor, the chain or line, the angle of pull, the seabed, and the amount of line that has been let out. Apparently “throw heavy metal thing in water and hope for the best” is not the complete science of anchoring. Who knew.

And that makes Hebrews 6:19 such an incredibly good description of Christian hope, because God never promised us that becoming a Christian meant the forces acting on our lives would disappear. There are still storms. There is still grief. There is still disappointment. There are still prayers that seem to go unanswered longer than we wanted. There are still relationships that hurt, plans that collapse, people we lose, things we do not understand, and days when approximately seventeen problems apparently coordinated their schedules and decided today looked convenient. Christianity does not mean nothing will ever push against you again. An anchor would be rather unnecessary if nothing ever did.

What Hebrews promises is not the absence of forces. It gives us something capable of holding against them. And the thing Hebrews calls our anchor is hope. Not hope in the modern sense of crossing our fingers and saying, “Well, hopefully this works out,” while having absolutely no idea whether it will. The verses immediately before this talk about God's promise, God's unchanging purpose, and the fact that it is impossible for God to lie. Then comes the statement that “we have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul.” Biblical hope is not confidence that everything happening around me will turn out exactly the way I requested. It is confidence that God remains exactly who He says He is regardless of what is happening around me.

There is also something important about an anchored boat that I think we sometimes miss. An anchored boat still moves. Quite a bit, actually. It can rise and fall with waves. It can swing around its anchor as the wind changes direction. It can rock enough that the people aboard are wondering whether breakfast really needed to be eaten that morning. Being anchored does not mean being motionless. It means that all of that movement is happening while the boat remains secured to something that keeps it from being carried away.

I think sometimes Christians confuse those two things. We feel ourselves moving and assume our anchor must have failed. We have a difficult season and wonder why our faith isn't making us feel perfectly calm. We grieve and wonder whether we should be handling it better. We get scared and think maybe stronger Christians don't get scared. We ask God questions and worry that questions somehow mean we have stopped trusting Him. But an anchor was never designed to make the boat incapable of feeling the storm. It was designed to keep the storm from deciding where the boat ultimately ends up.

You can be grieving and still be anchored. You can be confused and still be anchored. You can be afraid and still be anchored. You can have questions you cannot answer and still be anchored. You can have moments when you feel like you are doing a fairly accurate impression of a small boat in a washing machine and still be anchored. The presence of movement does not prove the absence of an anchor. Sometimes the reason you feel the pull so strongly is precisely because something is holding you while everything else is trying to move you.

But Hebrews gives us an even stranger and more beautiful picture than an ordinary anchor. Normally an anchor goes down. Hebrews says our hope “enters into the inner place behind the curtain,” and the next verse says Jesus has gone there “as a forerunner on our behalf.” The language moves from a nautical picture to the imagery of the Most Holy Place, the presence of God. Our anchor is not ultimately buried somewhere beneath us where we cannot see it. Our hope reaches ahead of us to where Christ has already gone. In a sense, the anchor in Hebrews is thrown upward. We are down here getting tossed around by everything life can produce, while what holds us is secured somewhere beyond what we can currently see.

And maybe that is exactly why hope matters so much. An anchor disappears beneath the water. From the boat, you cannot stand there watching it grip the bottom. What you can see is the line. You can feel the tension. You can see that despite the wind pushing and the current pulling, you have not been carried away. There are times when faith feels a little like that. We cannot see everything God is doing. We cannot see the entire plan. We cannot see tomorrow, much less ten years from now. Sometimes all we can see is the storm, and storms tend to be rather obnoxious about taking up the entire view.

Yet the anchor is still there.

The goal of faith is not to become a person who never gets rocked by anything. Scripture is full of faithful people who cried, questioned, grieved, became afraid, and occasionally had absolutely no idea what God was doing. The difference was not that the storms somehow missed them. The difference was what ultimately held them.

So if life feels like it is moving underneath you, that does not necessarily mean you are drifting away from God. If you are being tossed around a little, that does not mean the anchor has failed. And if you can feel the tension between what you see happening around you and what you still believe about God, maybe that tension itself is worth noticing.

Because you only feel tension on an anchor line when something is pulling one direction and something stronger is refusing to let it go.

The waves can move you. The wind can shake you. The storm can make the ride considerably less pleasant than you would have personally selected.

But it does not get to decide where you end up.

“We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul.”

The storm can keep making noise.

The Anchor is still holding.