"Featured" Tagged Sermons (Page 6)
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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…
Renew Our Days
Our theme for 2021 is RENEW, and we’re focusing on a different aspect of renewal on the first Sunday of each month (because so many of our folks were at the retreat last weekend, I moved it to the second Sunday for May). I read straight through Lamentations earlier this week, and I was struck by a couple of things: it’s a bit discouraging, especially if you focus on what seems to feelings of hopelessness within Jeremiah. But this is…
God in the Furnace
Where is God when we go into the furnace? Babylon, in some ways, was similar to many pluralistic nations today. Its leaders recognized the wisdom of tolerating all sorts of different deities in the private sphere, as long as everyone’s allegiance in public–at least nominally–was to the Babylonian gods. In other words, “Worship whatever God or gods you want to on your own time and in your own place, but when you’re in public, be willing to give homage to…
Forgive
Jesus said a lot about his expectations that his followers forgive people who sin against us, seemingly going so far as to say that God’s forgiveness of us hinges on our forgiving others. It’s embedded in the Lord’s Prayer (“Forgive us, as we forgive those who sin against us.”), and in the story above, the forgiven servant who withholds forgiveness from his servant finds himself being punished severely. And yet many people–even Christians–still harbor bitterness in their hearts from offenses…
Free Servants: How Christians Relate to Political Powers
We’re in the middle of a sermon series on 1 Peter, a letter the apostle wrote to Christians who were struggling to figure out how they were supposed to relate to an increasingly hostile world. Like them, we sense a change in the cultural tides against the practice of historic, orthodox Christianity, and sometimes we’re confused about who we are and how we’re supposed to live. After laying the theological groundwork and encouraging his readers to remember the importance of…
That I May Know Him
met a friend for lunch yesterday at 11:30, and at around noon it struck me that at that moment almost 2,000 years ago, the sun went dark in Judea, and three hours later Jesus cried out and took his last breath. It’s called Good Friday because of the sacrifice he made for us. But of course, many people died of crucifixion at the hands of the Romans, including many other Jewish men in the years before and after Jesus’ death.…
Living as Christians in an Unbelieving World
We’re in the middle of a sermon series on 1 Peter, a letter the apostle wrote to Christians who were struggling to figure out how they were supposed to relate to an increasingly hostile world. Like them, we sense a change in the cultural tides against the practice of historic, orthodox Christianity, and sometimes we’re confused about who we are and how we’re supposed to live. What does the world think when they think of Christianity? Their opinions might be…
The Exiled Community: Love One Another
Peter wrote this letter to Christians who felt that the world was turning against them, and he wanted to help them think more clearly about how Christians can live in a world whose values are antithetical to theirs. So we’re taking several Sundays to walk through this important letter together. In the first two verses Peter introduces a theme that he’ll return to repeatedly: Christians live as exiles in a strange land. Yet, the apostle suggests, God will help us live…
Exiled but Living With Hope
Peter wrote this letter to Christians who felt that the world was turning against them, and he wanted to help them think more clearly about how Christians can live in a world whose values are antithetical to theirs. So we’re taking several Sundays to walk through this important letter together. In the first two verses Peter introduces a theme that he’ll return to repeatedly: Christians live as exiles in a strange land. Yet, the apostle suggests, God will help us live…
Renew a Right Spirit Within Me
Our theme for 2021 is RENEW, and on the first Sunday of each month, I plan to address a different aspect of renewal. This Sunday we’ll focus our attention on a famous psalm of David. The background of Psalm 51 is his sin with Bathsheba and his being convicted of his sin by Nathan the prophet. [To appreciate the context and to get a feel for David’s remorse, you might read the whole psalm.] David is devastated by what he’s…