Psalm 46 is a psalm that has to do not with personal crisis but when the world around seems to be in a state of utter collapse, when the oceans are surging, mountains falling into the sea, the earth caves, and when nations are at war. What does faith look like then? This has always…
Category: Expository Sermons
Acts 5:1-11 Ananias and Sapphira
As a church, we exist not only to know Jesus but also to make him known. We have the threefold message: ‘Jesus is wonderful: you’ll love him. Jesus is Savior: you need him. Jesus is Lord: obey him.’ In making Jesus known, we want to remove all unnecessary barriers. We want people to leave a…
Psalm 19
To be human is to have the ability to choose our responses. In your grade school science classes you probably learned what distinguished living things, or organisms, from non-living things. Why is it that we say a dandelion is alive but a cloud is not, or that coral is alive but a rock is not….
Acts 4 A generous community
Today in our study of Acts we come to the end of chapter 4, and the description of the life of the early church, a description that echoes the description we find at the end of chapter 2. But to see what an incredible description this is, it is necessary to go back in the…
Psalm 29
One of the great things unique to the human experience is our ability to feel awe, to be overcome with wonder at the size or beauty or power of a thing. We feel a certain awe at some of the things that mankind can produce: a ten-second, 100-meter sprint, or a Tchaikovsky piano concerto, or…
Mark 14:66-72 Peter’s Denials
Say you have a neighbor. Every day you see him leave for work. You see him come out to the driveway, enter his car, and put it in neutral. Then he gets out of his car and begins to push it onto the road, and then down the road till he’s out of sight. His…
Mark 2:13 – 3:6 The Irreligious Jesus
How is it that someone can grow up in a Christian church and, as soon as they are able, can leave it entirely and live without it? That question hits home for many of us today: · Some of you have watched your children abandon God and church, and you still pray for them…
Mark 2:1-12 The paralytic
In the summer of 1967, a teenaged girl named Joni had her whole life ahead of her. She was attractive, athletic, part of a secure, affluent, and strongly Christian family. She was headed for the Olympics as part of the US show-jumping team. But on a July afternoon that summer, her life changed. Out with…
Mark 1:21-39 Three-fold discipleship
In the last passage we looked at, Jesus had just called his first disciples. Remember, Simon and Andrew, James and John were at the Sea of Galilee, plying their trade as fishermen, and Jesus issues a compelling call: ‘Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.’ At once, they drop what they…