Malachi 3:13-18: How we Speak About God
OUTLINE Words of faithlessness Words of fear INTRODUCTION What is the difference between a mercenary and a soldier? A soldier fights for his country; a mercenary fights for himself; the soldier for honor, love of country, to protect loved ones; the mercenary for money. This has given rise to the phrase mercenary spirituality, when your spiritual pursuits are all about you and your interests. The new self-help spirituality of West that is a fusion of New Age concepts and psychology would be a classic example of this. A biblical example of this spirituality is found in the older brother...
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Luke 19:1-10: The Salvation of Zacchaeus
INTRODUCTION Jericho will always be famous for 3 unlikely converts. Firstly, there is the conversion of the prostitute Rahab. At the time of the Exodus she had heard about God rescuing His people from Egypt and giving them victory wherever they went. When the two spies came into Jericho she hid them, saving their lives. Her faith was demonstrated in her brave actions to save the spies. The second we looked at last week, the salvation of an apparently sinful blind man Bartimaeus. We saw someone who would be suspected of great sin seeing Jesus true identity when others...
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Luke 18:35-43: The Healing of Blind Bartimaeus
OUTLINE The knowledge of faith The desperation of faith The asking of faith The consequences of faith INTRODUCTION It has been said that Christ’s miracles of healing various disabilities is a deliberate illustration of how Christ heals our spiritual ailments. Christ raising the dead illustrates how Christ is able to give new life; Christ casting out demons illustrates how the devil’s domination of us is overcome; the healing of leprosy shows how Christ can cure the unclean incurables; the healing of lame shows us the liberty we experience in Christ to live for God; the healing of deafness shows...
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Luke 18:15-17: Receiving the Kingdom like a Child
INTRODUCTION We come to a new section in Luke, 18:15-17, which is of great interest to us because Jesus talks about children. Children play a large part in our lives and are very important to us. The world has many wrong understandings about children that need correcting. Children are viewed as discardable tissue or part of a woman’s body and so can be aborted at their convenience. Others see children as possessions that belong to them to shape and mold as they desire. Many have child idolatry where their sense of identity and purpose is wrapped up in children....
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Ephesians 6:21-24: Final Encouragement
Overview We come now to the end of the book of Ephesians. This is one of Paul’s denser letters as it focused us on God’s work of building the church. Where Romans is a tour de force of the Gospel, Ephesians is considered Paul’s tour de force of the church. In concluding our sermon series let me attempt to give a view from 30 000 feet. The basic thrust of the letter is God’s work in Christ to make a new humanity for a new creation. Firstly, let me give the large sections that we covered. After the introduction...
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Ephesians 6:15-16: The Armour of God: Part Three
What do we need to be effective for the spiritual war we are in? So far Paul has told us that we need God’s truth, this makes us ready, and helps us against the father of lies. We need to guard our hearts with righteousness, firstly with the truth of our justification; and secondly with a love for holiness as we pursue sanctification. Today we want to look at the next two pieces of armour Paul places before us, the shoes and the shield, v15-16, ‘and, as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the...
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Understanding Baptism
Today we have the joy of having a baptismal service, we are baptising four believers into the membership of the church. Everyone knows what baptism is, but not everyone is clear on what baptism means. Some of this is due to ignorance; some of this is due to confusion due to disagreement between Christians. Today I am going to do a topical sermon on the issue of baptism. I want to put forward a definition that I am borrowing from Bobby Jamieson, an American Reformed Baptist who is deeply involved with 9marks. And I would like to unpack his...
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Mark 8:22-30: Jesus Heals Two Blind Men
Thanks to Ian Goodman from Wilson Street Baptist for preaching for us this morning. Mark 8:22-30: Jesus Heals a Blind Man at Bethsaida 22 And they came to Bethsaida. And some people brought to him a blind man and begged him to touch him. 23 And he took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village, and when he had spit on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, “Do you see anything?” 24 And he looked up and said, “I see people, but they look like trees, walking.” 25...
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The Doctrines of Grace: Irresistible Grace
Imagine with me a set of twins, they have both grown up in a good home where parents have loved them, they have both grown up with Christian parents who have instructed them in God’s word and taken them to church every Sunday. They are of equal sporting ability and both of average intelligence. However, when the Gospel is preached to them, one of them believes and the other does not, why? What has caused these two brothers to differ? The typical answers to this question would be, ‘it was their upbringing’, but they have both come from good...
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Luke 9:37-45: A Lack of Faith and Understanding
There is a saying in Christianity: the devil does not attack you on the mountaintops, he is waiting for you at the foot of the mountain. This is literally what happens in this section where Jesus has been on the mountaintop with His inner ring of disciples, and now that it is time to descend, what is waiting at the bottom? A severe case of demonic possession. But not only that the disciples have had an amazing time. They have been sent on their first outreach which resulted in miracles and exorcisms at their hands; they have been stretching...
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Luke 8:41-56: Weak Faith Meets a Strong Saviour
‘My cup runneth over;’ ‘Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think;’ these biblical phrases remind us that when we bring the thimble of our faith to God, He fills it with the flood of Himself and His gifts. Luke 8:41-56 records the narrative of two people who have faith in Christ, but it is a thimble sized faith and Christ exceeds their expectations. The woman with the issue of blood comes to Jesus believing that He has the power to heal, but she will leave knowing His kindness...
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Luke 8:22-25: A Lesson in Faith
There is often a big difference between that first faith by which we are saved and the ongoing faith of the Christian life. Because unbelief is more natural to us than faith; because we are prone to feel first and not to think first; because we often walk by sight and not by faith we stumble at those trials that test our faith. We can be grateful then that we serve a Savior who is both the author and the finisher; the founder and the perfecter of our faith. As we come to this famous portion in Luke 8:22-25,...
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Ephesians 2:1-10: ‘But for the Grace of God….’
‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ This is a well-known statement which recognises that apart from God’s gracious intervention left to ourselves we would be lost. This statement is credited to the martyr John Bradford, once while walking past a gallows and as criminal were being led to be hanged, he looked over at them as said, ‘there but for the grace of God go I.’ It is this grateful recognition that Paul is trying to prompt in the Ephesians in 2:1-10. The body of chapter 1 is only two sentences in the Greek, the first...
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Luke 7:36-50: A Forgiven Sinner’s Love for Christ
When do you know if someone is truly a Christian? This can be a difficult question to answer for on the one hand you and I cannot read the heart of another and so will always have an imperfect ability to make a judgement. However, there is also a call in scripture for us to evaluate a person’s credible confession of faith. The true test of someone’s faith is not the amount of religiosity they indulge in, a person can go to church a lot and not be saved; the amount of theologically correct doctrine we have, for some...
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Luke 7:1-10: The Faith of the Centurion
There is a lot of confusion around the idea of faith today. In our post-religious age faith is now a form of ungrounded optimism towards the future, a keep-your-chin-up sort of attitude that helps motivate you. Some see it as a self-development tool in a materialistic age. Since we have impoverished ourselves in an age of consumerism we need to have some spirituality, and any sort will do. Biblical faith is something different, Biblical faith is informed by the Bible, and it has an exclusive object—Christ. In the Scriptures we come across those who have no faith, those who...
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Ephesians 1:15-23: Prayer for the Saints: Part One
What do you pray for other Christians? You might have found yourself in your quiet time and you pick up the church phonebook to pray through a page as part of your daily devotions. This is the third time you have gone through the book and the prayers are beginning to feel heartless and robotic. You aren’t really sure what to ask for. Should you ask for happiness, prosperity, good health, emotional wellbeing, peace? These are broad categories of well-wishing which are not informed by the gospel, what you want are prayer requests that are not what any uninformed...
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