This is the first in a series of posts adapted from a sermon preached on December 14th, 2014 entitled The Wise Men and the Christ Child. Be sure to also read part 2 and part 3.
The History of the Story
Bethlehem
The story begins in the little town of Bethlehem. That’s where Jesus, the one born King of the Jews, launched his campaign. Bethlehem really was a little town. It’s located 5 miles …
“Seek the Lord while he may be found;
call upon him while he is near;
7 let the wicked forsake his way,
and the unrighteous man his thoughts;
let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him,
and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
9 For as the heavens are
“Come, everyone who thirsts,
come to the waters;
and he who has no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price.”
“Incline your ear, and come to me;
hear, that your soul may live;
and I will make with you an everlasting covenant,
my steadfast, sure love for David.”
We typically think of heaven in terms of a transaction with God. Have you ever realized that? We think …
In Isaiah 55 God proclaims that one day he will restore and fix the world that we have wrecked with our sin. Isaiah 55 is restoration of God’s creation.
Read verses 12-13.
12 “For you shall go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall break forth into singing,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
13 Instead of the thorn shall …
As you dig into Isaiah 55 there are a few things you have to keep in mind. Remember Isaiah’s audience. He is writing to the people of God around 700BC . God had given his people land, peace from their enemies. He had given them his law. And yet, God’s people turned their hearts away from him and gave their hearts to the false god’s of other nations. Because the nation had abandoned God, God …
Yesterday I had the opportunity to preach to our church from Colossians 2. As I introduced the topic of the sermon I also gave our church some context for Paul’s letter. Specifically, I wanted them to understand Paul’s mission strategy of reaching the cities like Rome and Colossae. The following is an excerpt from my sermon:
…Paul’s fellow minister, a man named Epaphras, had taken a mission trip to the city of Colossae. The city
My post, Aquinas and Culture, drew not a few readers. If you haven’t read it, I basically argued that the epistemology of Immanuel Kant created a division between the sacred and the secular that the evangelical church is still reeling from. I was asked by a fellow student if I would ever give a rather philosophical explanation of this topic to a church. The following was my response. Keep in mind that this was …
NERD ALERT: As posts on this site go, this one is in the uber-nerd category. My apologies.
Earlier this week I had to answer the following question in a discussion board for school: Why does the church in NA often struggle with finding a good tension between being in the world but not of it? Other ways to state the question are, “What is the relationship between God and this world” or, “What is the …
Here is my sermon from August, 31 2014. It’s entitled The Kingdom of Fullness and the text is John 6.
…
…Using the hermeneutical spiral, evangelicals have been seeking to avoid either extreme on a spectrum described by Richard Lints in his book The Fabric of Theology. At one end of his spectrum is a cultural fundamentalism that believes we can read the Bible and express its theology in culture-free, universal terms; at the other end is a cultural relativism that holds “that the Scripture can have no other meaning than that which is permitted by