Founded in Truth Fellowship - Bible Teachings and Sermons

He Stayed — full teaching, notes and transcript on our site.
Dorian Gray's face never aged because a portrait in a locked room took the damage, and Leviticus 16 says sin marks God's house the same way. Yom Kippur is God cleaning it so he can stay, and Yeshua stayed on the cross.
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Founded in Truth Fellowship meets every Sabbath in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

Yom Teruah and Hannah's Prayer — full teaching, notes and transcript on our site.
The loudest day on God's calendar is paired with a woman praying so quietly the priest thought she was drunk. Vander Els traces teruah and zikaron from Leviticus 23 through Egypt, Hannah, Romans 8 and the golden bowls of Revelation, and lands on a God who moves when he remembers.
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Founded in Truth Fellowship meets every Sabbath in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

The Other Genesis — full teaching, notes and transcript on our site.
A child in Babylonian exile asks her father whether Marduk beat Yahweh, and he answers with the first line of Genesis. Vander Els reads Genesis 1 and 2 against Babylon's own creation story, where people are blood and clay made to carry the gods' work.
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Founded in Truth Fellowship meets every Sabbath in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

The Mark of the Beast — full teaching, notes and transcript on our site.
The dragon never invents anything, he only counterfeits, and Revelation 13 is where he forges the image bearer's job description. Vander Els follows the lamb with the dragon's voice from Solomon's golden age to Bethel to Berlin, and asks whose name is on your forehead.
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Founded in Truth Fellowship meets every Sabbath in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

The Garden Grows — full teaching, notes and transcript on our site.
Gardens never stay where you plant them, and Eden was not supposed to either. Vander Els follows the command to fill the earth from Genesis through Ezekiel's rising river, Daniel's growing stone, Yeshua's mustard seed and Zechariah's city too crowded for walls.
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Founded in Truth Fellowship meets every Sabbath in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

You Become What You Worship — full teaching, notes and transcript on our site.
Nebuchadnezzar built a ninety foot gold image and an entire government bowed to it. Vander Els asks the question the story usually skips, why everyone else bowed, and follows Psalm 115's autopsy of an idol through the calf, Isaiah, 2 Kings and Romans to the one man whose eyes never moved.
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Founded in Truth Fellowship meets every Sabbath in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

The Image in Ruins — full teaching, notes and transcript on our site.
A wrecked painting sold at a London auction for 45 pounds as a worthless copy, then sold in 2017 for 450 million dollars once the world learned whose hand made it. Vander Els uses that reversal to ask what the fall actually did to the image of God in us.
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Founded in Truth Fellowship meets every Sabbath in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

The Skull Crusher in the Bible — full teaching, notes and transcript on our site.
One promise is made to a serpent in Genesis 3:15, and the rest of the Bible spends itself asking where the son is who will crush his head. Vander Els traces the candidates from Cain to David, and finds the answer on a hill whose name means skull.
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Founded in Truth Fellowship meets every Sabbath in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

Saw and Took — full teaching, notes and transcript on our site.
Genesis 1 through 3 isn't just where the Bible's story starts — it's the template every author afterward keeps circling back to. Matthew Vander Els opened this second installment on the image of God by reminding the room what that image was made for: not just to exist, but to rule. Fish, birds, livestock, wild animals — all placed under mankind's dominion. But before getting to what happens when that rule collapses, he paused on how to read the collapse at all. The Bible, he argued, isn't a rulebook or a phone book of disconnected verses — it's sophisticated literature, and one of its favorite techniques is what scholars call intertextuality. He calls it "biblical hyperlinks": a word planted on one page that a later author, sometimes centuries removed, deliberately reuses to link two stories together. Miss the hyperlink and you miss the argument. Citing his mentor Brad Scott — "If you learn to read the garden, you can read the whole Bible" — Vander Els set up the lens for everything that followed: watch for repeated words and phrases, because the biblical authors are in conversation with each other across the whole canon.
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Founded in Truth Fellowship meets every Sabbath in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

The Image of God Isn't What You Think — full teaching, notes and transcript on our site.
In 1816, a former circus strongman named Giovanni Belzoni set out across the Egyptian desert to become a treasure hunter. What he found, half-buried for roughly 3,000 years, was a carved head and shoulders broken off one of the largest human statues ever made — a monument to Pharaoh Ramses II that once stood some 55 feet tall. The poet Percy Shelley couldn't resist the irony and wrote an inscription for it: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair." A statue built to declare the most powerful thing in existence had become, in Vander Els's words, something tourists take selfies with now. That image set up the entire message. In the ancient world, a king planted statues of himself throughout his territory so that his presence and authority would remain even when he himself was absent. Every empire did this. And every empire's statues eventually fell. With that picture in place, Vander Els opened a new series — four or five messages long — built entirely around the oldest claim the Bible makes about human beings: that they are made in God's image.
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Founded in Truth Fellowship meets every Sabbath in Rock Hill, South Carolina.