Nurture and Admonition in the 21st Century Introduction Last week we distinguished discipline from punishment. That initial distinction was that discipline is corrective and punishment is concerned with retribution. But once we have accepted the duty of administering parental discipline, we discover that discipline falls naturally into two categories—corrective and formative. The Text: “And, ye …
Why Children Matter (II)
Nurture and Admonition in the 21st Century Introduction This is a message on “discipline basics.” Remember that we not only want to learn how to discipline our children in a biblical fashion, but that we also want to do so in a biblical context. This means that we are not using the Scriptures as a …
Why Children Matter
Nurture and Admonition in the 21st Century I Introduction A family is a divinely-ordained community. It is a set of defined relationships, with obligations and privileges assigned by God accordingly. It is not an arbitrary collection of individuals, and it is not something that we get to define. God created the family—it was not invented …
Remembering the Lord Your God
Introduction We are looking at a passage this morning which is familiar for many reasons. The Lord Jesus quotes it when He tells us what the greatest commandment in all Scripture is (Luke 10:27). This passage contains the great Shema, recited by the Jews constantly—“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.” This …
Gospel, Church, World: Gospel Presence VI
Introduction Our goal in this life, and our goal as a congregation, ought to be three-fold—we should want to get the gospel straight, we should want to get the church right, and we should want to get the world restored. Let’s walk through it in that order. The Text: “But ye are come unto mount …
Taste and See: Gospel Presence V
Introduction We worship God the Father through Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. But in order for this to work, He cannot be a distant Christ. Remember that in Christ God came near, God became our neighbor. We worship God through a close Christ, a near Christ, an indwelling Christ. The point of …
Who Is My Neighbor? Gospel Presence IV
Introduction We live in a relativistic and postmodern age, one that loves to muddy distinctions and blur the lines. This is all done with high-sounding language, which the first thing that happens is that we find we have lost the Creator/creature distinction, which puts us in the idolatrous violation of the greatest commandment. The next …
Gospel Presence II: Gospel Center, Gospel Edges
Introduction The gospel message provides a hard center for our lives, but we must make sure that we do not understand this as an isolated hard center. We want the gospel to be a taproot to the entire tree, and not an isolated boulder in a field of scattered boulders. The litmus test is whether …
Gospel Presence I: The Resurrection of the World
INTRODUCTION:The resurrection of Jesus was not an odd circumstance in an otherwise unchanged world. This world is not what it used to be because this world is the place where a man once came back from the dead. And when He came back, it was not as a resuscitation, as happened with Lazarus, but as …
Spiritual Disciplines: Work
INTRODUCTION:God breathed the breath of life in Adam, and he became a living soul (Gen. 2:7). Having created him as a living soul, He gave him an abundance of food to eat (Gen. 1:29). The third thing that happened was that God gave him a task (Gen. 2:15). His immediate task was to tend the …