Sermons by Chuck Webster (Page 16)
Christ Over All
When we suffer, we’re tempted to question God’s presence and sovereignty, even more so when the suffering is directly tied to our following Christ. Where is God? Does he know? Does he care? Why isn’t he doing anything? Peter’s response–as it so often is for him and other biblical writers–is to go to Jesus, specifically to his death, resurrection, and exaltation. There’s a significant interpretive difficulty in this passage, and we’ll spend a little time with it Sunday, but even…
When They Ask About Your Hope
When the world gets darker, light is more easily seen. In our text for tomorrow, Peter seems to assume this: people who don’t follow Christ will become curious about the source of our hope, and they will occasionally ask where it comes from. “I’ve noticed something different about you . . . you don’t seem to be affected by life’s difficulties as the rest of us are. How do you do that?” “How do you avoid getting caught up in…
The Renewal of the Holy Spirit
The theme for 2021 is “RENEW,” and we’ve been exploring some aspect of that theme on the first Sunday morning of each month. Tomorrow we’ll focus on Paul’s words to the young church planter, Titus, who was in a difficult environment on the island of Crete. Paul uses a quite powerful word in verse 5 when he writes that salvation comes about by the “washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit.” The Greek word behind “regeneration” quite literally…
Loving Life and Seeing Good Days
We’ve been working our way through 1 Peter lately, focusing on how the church should think about our relationships with those outside of Christ. In the text for tomorrow, Peter sums up his emphasis of the last section. You may remember how he’s just encouraged Christians to submit to “every human institution,” servants to submit to their masters, wives to submit to their husbands, and husbands to honor their wives. In 3:8-12, though, he’s careful to emphasize that he’s talking to…
