Sermons

What You Asked De. 18:15-16 “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen—just as you desired of the LORD your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of the LORD my God or see this great fire any more, lest I die.’” For context, today’s words from Moses are spoken about 40…

Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.” In today’s OT reading we find a reminder that our God is the God of second chances. Jonah is a well-established and evidently well-to-do prophet of Israel in the mid-700’s BC. He was called to leave his comfortable ministry to the royal court of Jeroboam II and go to…

For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. Many here have heard of, read, or seen the Left Behind and Thief in the Night series of books and movies. There are several editions. The movie was recently updated with Nicolas Cage as its big-name actor. I remember seeing the earlier series in the later 1970’s. The concept of the rapture being the fulfilment of Jesus’ return being like…

Therefore encourage one another with these words. The good news of forgiveness, new life, and the resurrection to eternal life changes everything in the life, mind, goals, and activities of God’s faithful people in Christ. The Apostle Paul wrote two surviving letters to the Christians in Thessalonica. In them he commends their firm faith lived amid suffering and persecution. He encourages then to learn and embrace sound biblical doctrine as it will help them find hope and endurance in their…

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. The blessings pronounced by Jesus in today’s gospel reading are commonly called the “Beatitudes”, from the Latin word for blessed, fortunate, or happy. The English words “happy” and “fortunate” are probably not the best way to translate either the Greek word makairioV or to properly capture the full nature of the divine blessing in these verses. “Blessed” seems  best as it being blessed by God in the ways described in…

If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. The central and most important claim of the Christian Scriptures is that they are true. Not man’s ever-changing, continually nuanced versions of truth. God’s truth. Revealed truth. Eternal as the God who is the ultimate standard of truth. Truth anchored in the person and nature of the one who made the heavens and the earth, who…

Philippians 3:14 I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. By the time the Apostle Paul wrote this letter to the Christians in Philippi he’d been serving Jesus for about 30 years. He had suffered much for the gospel: imprisonments, hunger, illness, persecution, stoning, and as he mentions in today’s reading the loss of all he once held dear to his former Jewish faith and heritage. The words spoken by Jesus…