Nonbelievers spend all their time in a life of death (Eph. 2: 1-2). They are dead in their trespasses and sins in which they live. Believers are privileged to be given a dying life, while the unbeliever has nothing but a living death. We are privileged to die that we might live, while they live …
Who Desperately Needs It
We are going to hear a message this morning on the nature and reality of personal holiness. This is a perilous kind of message, because we constantly want to give the edification found in such messages to somebody else, who desperately needs it. Ambrose Bierce once defined a Christian as one who believes the New …
Our True Condition
Father, our national condition of sin is desperate. We want to be known as virtuous, but still want to keep our sin. We want the accolades that come from righteousness, but do not want the trouble of actually being that way. And so we posture and pretend. We pray, therefore, on behalf of a corrupt …
Inclusion Excludes Exclusion
Scripture contains two fundamental principles when it comes to the eating of sacred meals. The first principle concerns what we eat, and the second principle concerns with whom we eat. The answers to these questions for Christians are, respectively, bread and wine, and with all who call upon the name of the true God. Excluded …
You Didn’t Have To . . .
C.S. Lewis once commented on our tendency to guard against the error we are least likely to fall into. Faced with a flood, he says, we break out the fire extinguishers. And so we guard against what we think are the pressing temptations of our day, and over time we come to think that the …
National Sellf-Deception
Father, Your Word calls us to speak without deceitful lips. And yet our sinful nation, which has so much sin to confess, does not even bother to confess sin falsely. We think that we have no sin, not as sin is defined in Your Word. And it is at just this point that Your Word …
Give It Up or Give It Away
God has been kind enough to give us yet another Advent season, and so we should be resolved to live in it as true Christians. This means standing against the spirit of this age. This means learning what Scripture intends when it says that there is a way that seems right unto a man, and …
Two Pieces of Fudge
This is our first celebration of the Lord’s Supper in the Advent season for the year of our Lord, 2010. And note that word celebration. When we celebrate God’s grace to us here, we are learning how to celebrate His goodness in every aspect of our lives, and that includes our orientation to festivals like …
Cut to the Heart
Father, You have established Jesus Christ as both Lord and Christ, and Your Word tells us that the first generation of those who heard the gospel were cut the heart by this message, by this declaration. Father, our nation is not cut to the heart, and so we pray that You would grant a spirit …
Thanksgiving 2010
We begin by thanking God for who He is, and what He has done for us through His gospel of glory. He is the triune God, which means that He is love. Love is not an afterthought, not an add-on. From all eternity, the Father has loved the Son, and the Son the Father. The …