On a Memorial Day weekend Sunday, King’s Fire Church gathered for worship and a communion service centered on one of Christianity’s most countercultural claims: that true life is found not through self-reliance, but through surrender.

The morning’s message wove together themes of faith, humility, the nature of the gospel, and the meaning of Christ’s death and resurrection — anchored by a reading from John 17, Jesus’ prayer in the hours before his arrest.

“Believe in Yourself” — Or Don’t?

The speaker opened with a pointed challenge to one of Western culture’s most celebrated ideas. “Who told you to believe in yourself?” he asked. The gospel of Jesus Christ, he argued, offers a fundamentally different message — one of self-denial rather than self-actualization. “If you loved your life and tried to save it, you would lose it,” he said, paraphrasing Jesus. “But if you lose your life for my sake and the gospel’s sake, you will find it.”

That framing set the tone for the rest of the message: salvation is not something you achieve. It is something you receive.

The Memorial Day Connection

Tying the message to the holiday weekend, the speaker noted that the self-sacrifice honored on Memorial Day — soldiers laying down their lives for their fellow citizens — mirrors, in some ways, the sacrifice at the center of the Christian faith. “It’s not natural to human beings,” he said of sacrifice, noting that evolutionary instinct pushes toward self-preservation, not self-giving. The willingness to give one’s life for others, he suggested, points to something beyond the merely human.

Humility as the Door

A recurring motif throughout the sermon was the idea that humility — not effort, not knowledge, not religious performance — is what opens a person to God’s grace.

“If you think you can do it by yourself, that’s the highest level of pride you can arrive at,” the speaker said. He drew from James 4, noting that “God gives grace to the humble and resists the proud.” The way into faith, he argued, is not a grand act but a quiet acknowledgment: what I have tried and planned and calculated has not produced what I hoped.

He also referenced the story of Nicodemus — the prominent Jewish leader who came to Jesus by night — as an example of someone at the top of their world who still needed to be “born again” in the Spirit.

John 17: A Prayer Before the Storm

The primary Scripture text was John 17, Jesus’ extended prayer on the night of his betrayal. The speaker highlighted several moments from the passage, beginning with a simple but striking detail: Jesus lifted his eyes to heaven while praying — an upward posture, not the bowed-head, eyes-closed posture commonly taught.

“How many prayers do we pray where it’s all just down?” he reflected, suggesting that the heavenward gaze was itself a posture of trust and expectancy.

He then focused on Jesus’ declaration in verse 4 — “I have finished the work which you gave me to do” — made before the crucifixion, and his request: “Now, Father, glorify me.” The speaker dwelt on the paradox: what Jesus called “glorification” looked, from the outside, like torture and death. But Jesus was fixed on what lay just beyond — the moment his perfect, sinless blood would be presented in the heavenly throne room, making a way for all who believe to be counted righteous before God.

“He was working through a process so glorious that the enemy didn’t know,” the speaker said, referencing 1 Corinthians 2. “Or they would have never crucified him.”

Communion as Remembrance

The service concluded with communion. The speaker invited the congregation to receive the bread and cup not as mere ritual, but as a deliberate act of spiritual remembrance — to “remember, not forget” what Christ accomplished.

“Almost so much of what we face in this life is just an attempt by spiritual forces to distract us from what Jesus has done, and to distract us from the fact that it is enough,” he said.

He closed with a pastoral invitation — simple and direct — for anyone in the room who had not yet received Christ to do so, comparing it to a handshake and a spoken word: “When you confess with your mouth and believe in your heart, you are born back to life from the dead.”

My Takeaway

Of all the threads running through this morning’s message, the one that hit me hardest was the challenge to our pride — specifically, how easy it is to believe in ourselves and give ourselves the credit for the outcomes we produce.

The pastor pressed on this in a way that genuinely made me stop and think. It’s so easy to look at a skill developed, a goal achieved, or a problem solved and quietly take ownership of it. But the truth is, God has given me the abilities, the skills, and — honestly — even the motivation to produce the outcomes I’m most proud of. To overlook that and absorb the credit myself isn’t ambition. It’s pride wearing ambition’s clothes.

This sermon was a good reminder to pause, look up — like Jesus did in John 17 — and give the glory where it actually belongs. Not as a religious formality, but as an honest acknowledgment of what is actually true. God is the source. I’m just the vessel.

That’s a posture I want to carry into the week.

About King’s Fire Church

King’s Fire Church is led by Pastors Joshua and Elaine Ortman and meets at 865 Neighborhood Rd., Lake Katrine, NY 12449. Sunday services are streamed live on their Facebook page at 9 AM and 11 AM. The church also operates the Bread of Life Food Pantry, open every Sunday from 12:30–2 PM and on the 1st and 3rd Fridays of each month.

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