Sermons on Matthew
Surprised on Judgment Day
This is a familiar story to most Christians, and it’s been preached many times over the years to help people realize how much Jesus cares about our attitude toward those who are disadvantaged. And that’s certainly a needed emphasis. Tomorrow I plan to focus on an interesting nuance in the text, something that I’ve never thought that much about. For the most part, I’m going to ignore the last part of the story–about the ones who ignored the needs of…
Our Daily Bread
We come to the part of this beautiful prayer where Jesus leads us to express our needs. There are three requests–Give us our bread, forgive us our debts, and lead us not into temptation–and we’ll consider the first one tomorrow. The one about the bread is the only one that has to do with physical needs, and it’s very brief. You’ll notice there’s nothing extraordinary there–no requests for luxuries, obviously, and not even a request for something more than simply…
A Simple Life
Three weeks ago we started a short series on what it looks like to follow Jesus in the midst of busy lives, lives where we feel pressured by so many expectations and distractions. What does following Jesus look like day-to-day? How do we do what life demands while also finding time to cultivate a real-life relationship with Jesus? The answer is in actually following Jesus, not just in the abstract I’m-a-Christian-because-I’ve-been-baptized sense, but actually walking in his footsteps, doing what he…
Out of Egypt
Christmas is a time of year when many people reflect on the birth of Jesus. It has arguably become quite commercialized, of course, and sometimes it reflects attitudes that are considerably dissimilar to those that characterized Jesus. But any occasion that gives us an opportunity to talk about Jesus in meaningful ways is good. Sunday we’ll study Matthew 2–about the wise men, about Herod’s decree, but particularly about Jesus’ trip to Egypt as a child and how that reflected a…