Sermon Archive
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June 2020
What Are You Seeking
This Sunday we’ll be continuing our study through the Gospel of John by unpacking John 1:35-51 together. In these verses John recounts how Jesus first began to gain a following of disciples. One of the things that often strikes me when I read the Bible is how different the recruitment strategy of Jesus and the early church was from what we see in Christian practice today. Listen in and be part of the conversation as we study these verses together.
Who Are You
For the most part the Bible depicts people in a warts-and-all kind of way, which is to say that both their good and bad points are highlighted. However, whereas the stories of personalities like David or Peter reveal a complicated and nuanced portrait of a fellow struggler, other figures seem to be depicted in a more one-dimensional kind of way. For example you’d be hard pressed to find anything admirable in the Bible’s depiction of Jezebel or Herod. Inversely, the Bible doesn’t offer…
Light and Sight
I’m a bit embarrassed to admit this, but I have a fairly serious sleep walking problem. Over the years I have had many nocturnal adventures like the time I wandered around a horse ranch, destroyed a drop ceiling, went outside and yelled at my neighbor’s house, went into work at a police department, climbed out of a bedroom window, and another time when I injured myself so badly that I was unable to talk for a few days… all while sleeping. Once, in college, I horrified my roommate who wo…
May 2020
In The Beginning
Of the four Gospel accounts contained in the New Testament John begins his in a very unique way. Whereas Matthew and Luke, who both begin their Gospels with a genealogy, seem intent on demonstrating the humanity of Jesus, and Mark opens his Gospel by describing the ministry of John the Baptist who preceded Jesus, but John in his Gospel goes all the way back to the beginning. Not just the beginning of Jesus’ earthly ministry, but that mysterious time before the foundations of the earth wer…
Filled
In this message we finish our series through the prison prayers of Paul by studying Colossians 1:9-14. I invite you to join me in praying this beautiful prayer over your brothers and sisters in Christ this week as the Spirit brings them to your mind. If you like a challenge try committing this prayer to memory. Then you would have it in your arsenal when you find yourself tongue tied and searching for words to pray over a friend from church.
I pray that (__________) would be filled w…
Excellence
Pastor and author, John MacArthur posed the following exercise:
Imagine that you are granted the amazing opportunity to build a new church from the ground up in a community that needs a good church. From the following list you can pick three things to start with, which three things would you choose? Rank them by putting a “1” next to the one you think would be most important, a “2” by the next most important, and “3” by the third. Think big!
_____ a brand new, state-of…
Weak Man
Jesse Ventura, former governor of Minnesota, once said, “Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people.” Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.” Thomas Jefferson said, “Religions are all alike…founded upon fables and mythologies.” You can find similar quotes from others like Larry Flynt, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ted Turner, Christopher Hitchens, Karl Marx and others. The view being ex…
April 2020
Don’t Beg A Dime
This Sunday we will continue our study through the prison prayers of Paul by doing a deep dive into Ephesians 3:14-21. Much like the previous prayer that we studied in Ephesians 1, a major emphasis of this prayer is focused on the idea of “power.” It contains the famous line, “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us.” I pray that the Holy Spirit will use this study to expand our horizons to catch a glimpse of what is possible if we, God’s people, turn to Him in prayer.
Faith and Love
In James 5:17-18 we find a short but very instructive passage about prayer. It says, “Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit.” It seems to me that James is communicating two important truths in these verses. One, Elijah wasn’t anything special. James says he was a man with a nature like ours. IN oth…
Palm Sunday
Matthew 26 begins with Jesus telling His disciples, including Judas presumably, “The Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified,” and just a dozen verses later we read, “Then one of the twelve, whose name was Judas Iscariot, went to the Chief Priests and said, ‘What will you give me if I deliver him over to you?”
I think that Judas may have been the only one of the twelve who understood that Jesus intended to literally die on a cross. Perhaps the others thought that Je…
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