Sermons

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

—C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Spread for thee the festal board
See with richest dainties stored
To thy Father’s bosom pressed
Yet again a child confessed
Never from His house to roam
Come and welcome, sinner, come!”

—Thomas Haweis

“Seismic shifts in thinking have occurred between Augustine’s day and ours, not least of which is the emphasis on the individual rather than the collective. Today, we’re tempted to privatize our choices. Church membership is presented as one of many appealing choices in the spiritual growth cafeteria line, participation in a local church as optional as pie. Spiritually, there’s no real sense of need for church, only preference. But according to the language of Scripture, we cannot divorce ourselves from the church any more easily than we could cut off one hand or renounce our blood lines. The church is the believer’s new family. It is home.”

—Jen Pollock Michel, Keeping Place

“In his letter to the Philippians Paul writes about his own identity culturally. He calls it “the flesh,” that is, all that we have as human persons that comes from our history and heritage. He says in Phil. 3:4, “If anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless. But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them dung, that I may gain Christ and be found in him.” Each one of us needs to substitute whatever our own cultural history, cultural identity, cultural heritage, racial identity—whatever we like to put in there—in place of Paul’s words right there. We need to be prepared to say with the apostle Paul, “I am white, I am English, I am Reformed, I am Presbyterian”—or whatever it may be for you—and say, “I consider this manure.” Those are Paul’s words. It is not just rubbish, I consider this dung in comparison to knowing Jesus Christ.”

—Jerram Barrs

“It is important to see that this “peacemaking” work of the cross – reconciling Jews and Gentiles and creating one new humanity – is not just a by-product of the gospel, but it is at the heart of the gospel itself (Eph. 3:6). Paul includes it in the work of the cross. In other words, Paul is not merely saying that now that lots of individual sinners of different nations have been saved and are on their way to heaven they really ought to try to get along with each other in the meantime. He is saying that the creation of a new humanity is the good news that Christ came to accomplish.”

—Christopher Wright

“If we are going to live fully in the grace of God in Christ and participate in his cosmic work, then we must live out the story of reconciliation both as reconciled people and agents of reconciliation. Even as Christ, our peace, made peace through the cross, so we are to be peacemakers in every dimension of life: in our relationships and families, in our neighborhoods and workplaces, in our churches and denominations, and in our cities and nations.”

—Mark Roberts

“How does one remember God, reach for God, realize God in the midst of one’s life, if one is constantly being overwhelmed by that life?”

—Christopher Wiman

“One way or another, we are always remembering, of course. There is no escaping it even if we want to, or at least no escaping it for long, though God knows there are times when we try to, don’t want to remember. In one sense the past is dead and gone, never to be repeated, over and done with, but in another sense, it is of course not done with at all or at least not done with us. Every person we have ever known, every place we have ever seen, everything that has ever happened to us – it all lives and breathes deep in us somewhere whether we like it or not, and sometime it doesn’t take much to bring it back to the surface.”

—Frederick Buechner

“Forgetfulness leads to exile, while redemption is the secret to redemption.”

—Baal Shem Tov

“Sin is a breach of trust, the illicit reach of unbelief, an assertion of autonomy.”

—Bruce Waltke

“Grace doesn’t sell well; you can hardly even give it away, because it works only for losers and no one wants to stand in their line.”

—Robert Farrar Capon

“Come with thy heart hard, dead, cold, full of wickedness; come as a blood-red sinner; this is the way to come to Christ!”

—John Bunyan

“When God pardons, he does not say he understands our weakness or makes allowances for our errors; rather he disposes of, he finishes with, the whole of our dead life and raises us up with a new one. He does not so much deal with our derelictions as he does drop them down the black hole of Jesus’ death. He forgets our sins in the darkness of the tomb. He remembers our iniquities no more in the oblivion of Jesus’ expiration. He finds us, in short, in the desert of death, not in the garden of improvement; and in the power of Jesus’ resurrection, he puts us on his shoulders rejoicing and brings us home . . . The work of redemption is done entirely by the redeemer, and not at all by the redeemed.”

—Robert Farrar Capon

“What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it – the fact that he knows me.  I am graven on the palms of his hands.  I am never out of his mind.  All knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in knowing me.  I know him because he first knew me, and continues to know me.  He knows me as friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment when his eye is off me, or his attention distracted from me, and no moment therefore when his care falters.  This is momentous knowledge.  There is unspeakable comfort – the sort of comfort that energizes, be it said, not enervates – in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good.  There is tremendous relief in knowing that his love for me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench his determination to bless me.”

—J. I. Packer, Knowing God

“Thus says the Lord: ‘Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth.”

—Jeremiah 9:23-24

“Knowing God is a relationship calculated to thrill a person’s heart.”

—J. I. Packer

“Why is power a gift? Because power is for flourishing.  When power is used well, people and the whole cosmos come more alive to what they were meant to be.  And flourishing is the test of power . . . I pray that when you put [this book] down, you will be one step closer to the flourishing for which you were created, and that as we, together, make something of the world, the cosmos itself would groan a bit less and sing a bit more, as the whole creation awaits the revealing of the children of God.”

—Andy Crouch, Playing God

“Great Father of mercies, Thy goodness I own,
And the covenant love of Thy crucified Son;
All praise to the Spirit, Whose whisper divine
Seals mercy and pardon and righteousness mine.”

—John Stocker

“The movement of God’s Spirit is very gentle, very soft – and hidden. It does not seek attention. But that movement is also very persistent, strong and deep.”

—Henri Nouwen

“He who dwells in a house, keeps the house in repair; so the Spirit dwelling in a believer, keeps grace in repair.  Grace is compared to a river of the water of life (John 7:38).  This river can never be dried up because God’s Spirit is the spring that continually feeds it.”

—Thomas Watson

“All these civilizing goods — from television to supermarkets — are merely means which smooth our path through the world and make it easier to travel. But what will it profit us, if we make smooth social and technical progress on this level road and no longer know where we are going, in whose name we are living, and what the goal of our destiny is? For then perfectionism in the way in which we master life leads precisely to a life which has not been mastered. Then we shall be wandering aimlessly over a smooth and level plain.

May it not be that our neuroses and our predilection for psychiatrists derive from the fact that we have become a heap of misery in this great empty plain? What good are our refrigerators, what good is the well-oiled apparatus of our style of living, if we no longer know what we are living for?

Albert Einstein once said that we live in an age of perfect means and confused ends. The question which is inherent in that statement I consider to be the most important question of our times. It has to do with the boredom which is deadly, with the emptiness which frightens us, but also with the fulfillments which make life worth living. It has to do with the crucial task which has been set for us, namely, to distinguish between the “means,” which make our life easier, and the “meaning” of our life, which is the only thing that makes life possible. Even the person who has perfectly solved the problem of the means can still perish in suicide because a life without meaning is dreadful. And this dreadfulness actually increases as the outward course of this life grows smoother.

I can express what I mean by this as a Christian in the words of our Lord: “What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?” All the means of mastering the world can turn a man into a fool if he overlooks the crucial question. That this should not happen, I consider the most important question of our time.”

—Helmut Thielicke

“There’s one more voice you may need to adjust. It’s the voice in your head whispering, There’s not enough. Not enough resources, spots in the best schools, teacher’s attention, opportunities, friends who will provide the right type of influence. Not enough hours in the day, funds in the account, time to protect the planet, chances to do things over. Fear of scarcity is alive and blooming inside the minds of most parents. That’s what sends their voices into the pinched and panicky zone. Fear is behind the rushing, hovering, chiding, and pleading that sours our conversations with our children . . .   For as long as I have practiced therapy with families, parents have been worried about scarcity . . . Relinquish the fear and you open a door to enchantment.”

—Wendy Mogel, Voice Lessons, 4.

“Salvation is  . . . membership in the family of God . . .The creation of a family with children is the reason for all of God’s activity.  This is how he intends to show his glory . . . Our sonship to God is the apex of creation and the goal of redemption . . . The story of Paradise lost becoming Paradise regained is the story of God’s grace bringing us from alienation from him to membership in his family . . . Our self-image, if it is to be biblical, will begin just here. God is my Father (the Christian’s self-image always begins with the knowledge of God and who he is!); I am one of his children (I know my real identity); his people are my brothers and sisters (I recognize the family to which I belong and have discovered my deepest ‘roots’).”

—Sinclair Ferguson

“The LORD God is a sun and a shield; the LORD bestows favor and honor. No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly.”

—Psalm 84: 11

“Everything You Wanted to Know About Predestination, But Were Afraid to Ask.”