Sermons

“World evangelization requires the whole church to take the whole Gospel to the whole world.”

The Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization

 “Mission means inviting all the peoples of the earth to hear the music of God’s future and dance to it today.”

Christopher J.H. Wright

“C.T. Studd, born to privilege, gifted athletically, and trained at Eton and Cambridge, turned his back on wealth and served Christ for decades against unimaginable odds, first in China and then in Africa. He penned these words:

Some want to live within the sound
of church or chapel bell;
I want to build a rescue shop
within a yard of hell.”

D.A. Carson

“And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.”

1 Corinthians 2: 1-5

“If God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not make a final end to violence, that God would not be worthy of worship. . . If I don’t believe that there is a God who will eventually put all things right, I will take up the sword and will be sucked into the endless vortex of retaliation.  Only if I am sure that there’s a God who will right all wrongs and settle all accounts perfectly do I have the power to refrain.”

Miroslav Volf

“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

“Probably more trouble is caused in the Christian life by an inadequate or mistaken view of [the doctrine of justification by grace through faith] than any other.  When the child of God loses his sense of peace with God, finds his concern for others dried up, or generally finds his sense of the sheer goodness and grace of God diminished, it is from this fountain that he has ceased to drink. Conversely, if we can gain a solid grounding here, we have the foundation for a life of peace and joy.”

Sinclair Ferguson, The Christian Life, p. 80

“It is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world, as that God has a church for his mission in the world.  Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission – God’s mission . . . The idea of a missional church is far from a new idea . . . If we understand the church from our biblical theology as that community of people chosen and called since Abraham to be the vehicle of God’s blessing to the nations, what else can the church be but missional? This is who we are and what we are here for. Indeed, as a friend of mine said recently, ‘All this talk of “missional church” sounds to me like talking about a “female woman”. If it’s not missional, it’s not church.’”

Christopher Wright

“The church’s great news to a dying world is that there is a living God, whose love for his creation is inexhaustible . . . The church has no other and no better message. This is her great declaration.”

Lewis Allen

“There’s a direct correlation between the accuracy of our memory and the effectiveness of our mission.  If we’re not teaching people how to be saved, it’s perhaps because we’ve forgotten the tragedy of being lost. If we’re not teaching the message of forgiveness, it may be because we don’t remember what it was like to be guilty. And if we’re not preaching the cross, it could be that we’ve subconsciously decided that—God forbid—somehow we don’t need it.”

Max Lucado

“Beautiful people do not just happen.”

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

“There has been a long tradition which sees the mission of the Church primarily as obedience to a command.  It has been customary to speak of ‘the missionary mandate.’ This way of putting the matter is certainly not without justification, and yet it seems to me that it misses the point.  It tends to make mission a burden rather than a joy, to make it part of the law rather than part of the gospel. If one looks at the New Testament evidence one gets another impression.  Mission begins with a kind of explosion of joy. The news that the rejected and crucified Jesus is alive is something that cannot possibly be suppressed. It must be told. Who could be silent about such a fact?  The mission of the Church in the pages of the New Testament is more like the fallout from a vast explosion, a radioactive fallout which is not lethal but life-giving.”

Lesslie Newbigin

“A religion that costs nothing is worth nothing! A cheap Christianity, without a cross, will prove in the end a useless Christianity, without a crown.”

J.C. Ryle

“You can survive on your own.  You can grow strong on your own. You can even prevail on your own.  But you cannot become human on your own.  Surely that is why, in Jesus’ sad joke, the rich man has as hard a time getting into Paradise as that camel through the needle’s eye.  Because with his credit card in his pocket, the rich man is so effective at getting for himself everything that he needs that he does not see that what he needs more than anything else in the world can be had only as a gift.  He does not see that the one thing a clenched fist cannot do is accept, even from God himself, a helping hand.”

Frederick Buechner

“Thou who wast rich beyond all splendor,
All for love’s sake becamest poor;
Thrones for a manger didst surrender,
Sapphire-paved courts for stable floor.
Thou who wast rich beyond all splendor,
All for love’s sake becamest poor.”

Frank Houghton

“We have been so soaked in the individualism of modern Western culture that we feel threatened by the idea of our primary identity being that of the family we belong to – especially when the family in question is so large, stretching across space and time. The church isn’t simply a collection of isolated individuals, all following their own pathways of spiritual growth without much reference to one another. It may sometimes look like that, and even feel like that. And it’s gloriously true that each of us is called upon to respond to God’s call at a personal level. You can hide in the shadows at the back of the church for a while, but sooner or later you have to decide whether this is for you or not.”

T. Wright

“Membership in a local church means joining your imperfect self to many other imperfect selves to form an imperfect community that, through Jesus, embarks on a journey toward a better future . . . together.”

Scott Sauls

“The Christian community is both a sign and a promise of God’s coming liberation. We are the presence of God’s liberating kingdom in a broken world. We are the place where liberation can be found, offering a home for exiled people. We are to welcome the broken people to a community of broken people. We are the community among whom liberation is a present reality – the jubilee people who live with new economic and social relationships. We are the light of the world, a city on a hill. The challenge for us is to articulate Jesus’ message of liberation in a way that connects with people’s experiences and offers a place of liberation in the Christian community.”

Tim Chester