Below you’ll find links both to the sermon audio and manuscript I wrote for this sermon. I pray they will encourage you in your walk with Christ and spur you on to godliness.
Month: August 2021
Sermon Manuscript: “The End of Mark” Mark 16:9-20
Below you’ll find links both to the sermon audio and manuscript I wrote for this sermon. I pray they will encourage you in your walk with Christ and spur you on to godliness.
Sermon Notes: “The Death of Death” Mark 15:40-16:8
Below you’ll find links both to the sermon audio and manuscript I wrote for this sermon. I pray they will encourage you in your walk with Christ and spur you on to godliness.
Communion Meditation: A Real Salvation
COMMUNION MEDITATION
As we take hold of a piece of bread and a cup of juice, we must never forget that they symbolize a real body that was broken and red blood that was truly spilled.
Christianity is not a religion of religious symbols in hope of a real salvation. It is a real salvation with symbols which embody our hope.
As John Updike said in his Seven Stanzas for Easter:
Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.
This table is a history lesson. The stone is rolled back. The angels had vivid hair and wore real linen spun on a loom. Christ lived, died, was buried and rose again as a fact of history; an eternal peg on which to hang our hope.
So, if you belong to Christ through faith, then this table is set for you as a reminder of the living hope of the risen Christ. So come, and welcome to Jesus Christ.
Confession of Sin: Don’t Go Easy on Sin
EXHORTATION
God doesn’t give us his grace so that we can go easy on ourselves. He gives us his grace so that we can be truthful with ourselves. If we know that after we’ve been completely truthful to God his grace remains, then we have every encouragement not to go easy on our sin. Good news church: where sin did abound, grace did much more abound, so let’s go to our Father and confess our sins together.
CONFESSION
Father of Mercies,
Thank you that your grace is sufficient to cover all of our sins. Forgive our frivolous attitude toward life, our callousness toward suffering, our envy of those who have more than we have, our obsession with creating a life of constant pleasure, our indifference to the treasures of heaven, our neglect of your wise and gracious law.
In this next moment, make your grace weigh heavily on us so that we might not go easy on our sin. So, hear us as we silently confess our individual sins to you now in silence.
Father, thank you that while we were your enemies, you reconciled us through the death of Christ. Help us now to live a life dependent upon your grace. A life that of repentance and faith. Do this all for Christ’s sake, and in his name, Amen.
(Exhortation & Prayer based on a portion of a Redeemer Downtown NYC service)
ASSURANCE OF PARDON – Isaiah 54:8; 43:25; 54:22
8 In overflowing anger for a moment
I hid my face from you,
but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you,”
says the Lord, your Redeemer.
25 “I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.
22 I have blotted out your transgressions like a cloud
and your sins like mist; return to me, for I have redeemed you.
Sermon Manuscript: “The Death of the Son of God” Mark 15:16-39
Below you’ll find links both to the sermon audio and manuscript I wrote for this sermon. I pray they will encourage you in your walk with Christ and spur you on to godliness.
Getting at the Text
“This writer can testify that, if one thus saturates the mind with a passage, and gives it time and opportunity to dissolve under one’s meditation, the mind will hold it, so to speak, in solution.”
– Alan Stibbs, Expounding the Word, p. 104