Luke 17:1-10: How the Gospel Shapes our Service of Others
The differences between true religion and false religion are striking. False religion is judgemental, true religion is accepting; false religion is strident and forceful, true religion is gentle and yielding; false religion is critical and harsh; true religion is gracious and encouraging; loveless vs loving; external holiness vs internal holiness; hypocritical vs genuine; we all know the difference between true and false religion. False religion is repulsive but true religion is attractive. Our hearts are by nature religious; that means we are vulnerable to the deceptions and promises of false religion and hungry for true religion. Jesus throughout the...
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Luke 11:3-4: The Lord’s Prayer: What we Really Need in Prayer
We are all bad at prayer and Jesus is the master teacher when it comes to prayer. No human being has ever prayed more perfectly than Christ. He is sinless; He is divine and He has been in eternal fellowship with the Father. He as God has both received prayer, but also as man prayed. He has both answered prayer and had His prayers answered. So when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, they could ask no better person. We have looked at the first half of the Lord’s Prayer, a prayer outlined for us to...
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Luke 4:1-13: The Temptation of Christ
You and I sin every day. There is no one here who is perfectly honest, perfectly loving, perfectly self-controlled, perfectly centred on God’s glory in everything they do. We are under constant assault from sin, we find ourselves in a spiritual war whether we choose it or not. And yet we must not sin, we must obey God, we must resist sin and satan and become saints that put on display the power of God over sin. How do we do this? The temptation of Christ is a window into how a true human being is tempted and stands...
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Proverbs 4:23: Keeping the heart
Introduction: Every one of us is two people, there is the person that we project and there is the person we are within. Peter calls this inner person, ‘the hidden person of the heart’ 1 Pet. 3:4. Today in this message I want do an under the hood check. Think of a yacht sitting at anchor, we all see what is above the water line but don’t think much about what is below the water line. The top of the yacht can be beautiful woods and colourful sails with well-polished finishings. The yacht can have a pool and a...
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Proverbs 27:20: The Eyes of Mankind
Introduction: We are living in the information age, and the tools of the information age are primarily our computers, our tablets and our phones. But it is felt across the board that things are getting out of hand. One statistic says the people spend about 90 minutes a day on their phones, this is about 23 days a year and about 3.9 years of your life spent on your phone. One study reckons that cell phone users average touching their phones 2617 times a day, and the worst would be about 5400 times. We are becoming slaves to our...
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Good Friday Sermon: Matthew 26:36-46: The Prayers Of Gethsemane
INTRODUCTION: Today in our Good Friday meditation we will be considering Jesus under the shadow of the cross in the Garden of Gethsemane. The name Gethsemane means ‘oil press’ and seems a very appropriate name for the place where Jesus would pray the hardest prayer any human has ever prayed. As we proceed to the Garden to look not only into another’s grief, but the grief of the Holy One who is submitting Himself to His Fathers punishment for our sins, we must beg the aid of the Spirit, we are not only treading on mysteries but holy ground. ...
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