Sermons

“Institutions are the way the teeming abundance of human creativity and culture are handed on to future generations. So posterity, not just prosperity, is the promise of God to Abraham: countless descendants and blessings poured out on entire nations not yet born. Posterity, not just prosperity is God’s promise to David, a succession of sons in his line on the throne. And posterity was what the average Israelite prayed for as well – “may you see your children’s children!” – a wish that before death one would see the evidence that shalom and abundance would continue in one’s own line after death. There is nothing quick about shalom. True shalom endures.”

Andy Crouch, Playing God

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”

G.K. Chesterton

“If our religion be of our own getting or making, it will perish; and the sooner it goes, the better; but if our religion is a matter of God’s giving, we know that He shall never take back what He gives, and that, if He has commenced to work in us by His grace, He will never leave it unfinished.”

C.H. Spurgeon

“And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Christ Jesus.”

Philippians 1:6

“Remember the story in the Imitation, how the Christ on the crucifix suddenly spoke to the monk who was so anxious about his salvation and said, ‘If you knew that all was well, what would you, today, do, or stop doing?’ When you have found the answer, do it or stop doing it. You see, one must always get back to the practical and definite. What the devil loves is that vague cloud of unspecified guilt feeling or unspecified virtue by which he lures us into despair or presumption. ‘Details, please?’ is the answer.”

C.S. Lewis

“Repentance unto life is a saving grace whereby a sinner, out of a true sense of his sin and apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ, doth, with grief and hatred of his sin, turn from it unto God with full purpose of and endeavor after new obedience.”

Westminster Shorter Catechism, Question 87.

“To become that which you are not, you must go a way in which you are not.”

St. John of the Cross

“Bear fruits in keeping with repentance!”

Luke 3: 8

“The awareness of sin used to be our shadow. Christians hated sin, feared it, fled from it, grieved over it. Some of our grandparents agonized over their sins. A man who lost his temper might wonder whether he could go to Holy Communion. A woman who for years envied her more attractive and intelligent sister might worry that this sin threatened her very salvation. But the shadow has dimmed. Nowadays, the accusation you have sinned is often said with a grin, and with a tone that signals an inside joke.  At one time, this accusation still had the power to jolt people. Catholics lined up to confess their sins; Protestant preachers rose up to confess our sins. And they did it regularly . . . The word sin now finds its home mostly on dessert menus. “Peanut Butter Binge” and “Chocolate Challenge” are sinful; lying is not. The new measure for sin is caloric.”

Cornelius Plantinga

“We often forget that the heinousness of sin lies not so much in the nature of the sin committed, as in the greatness of the Person sinned against.”

Diane Langberg

“My sin, not in part, but the whole, is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more. Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!”

Horatio Spafford

“When a minister reads out of the Bible, I am sure that at least nine times out of ten the people who happen to be listening at all hear not what is really being read but only what they expect to be read. And I think that what most people expect to hear read from the Bible is an edifying story, an uplifting thought, a moral lesson—something elevating, obvious, and boring. So that is exactly what very often they do hear. Only that is too bad because if you really listen—and maybe you have to forget that it is the Bible being read and a minister who is reading it—there is no telling what you might hear.”

Frederick  Buechner

“The most precious part of each day for me is the 30-40 minutes I spend each morning before breakfast with the Bible.  All the rest of the day I am bombarded with the stories the world is telling about itself. As I take time to immerse myself in the story the Bible tells, my vision is cleared, and I see things in another way.  I see the day that lies ahead in its place in God’s story.”

Lesslie Newbigin

“God speaks to us: not only to move us to do what he wants, but to enable us to know him so that we may love him.  Therefore God sends his word to us in the character of both information and invitation. It comes to woo us as well as to instruct us; it not merely puts us in the picture of what God has done and is doing but also calls us into personal communion with the loving Lord himself.”

JI Packer, Knowing God, 110.

“‘Fear God!’ is a call that puts us in our place and puts all other fears, hopes, and aspirations in their place.”

Derek Kidner

“Strengthen weak hands,
and make firm the feeble knees.
Say to those who have an anxious heart,
‘Be strong; fear not!
Behold, your God
will come with vengeance,
with the recompense of God.
He will come and save you.’”

Isaiah 35: 3-4

“As we might guess, far from gradually becoming extinct in adulthood, our fears increase throughout our lives. What was once a small family of worries quietly conducts an aggressive breeding program to become a teeming community of palpable fears and private anxieties. The code by which fear and anxiety live is primal: multiply. As we possess more things, care about more people, accumulate more bad experiences, and watch the evening news, it is as if we absorb fear. If they are not obvious in your own life, perhaps it’s because you have been living in a war zone your entire life. At first you noticed every gunshot. After a while the mayhem blends in with the rustle of the trees, the TV, and the children playing in the other room. Fear gradually becomes the background noise of everyday life.”

Ed Welch, Running Scared

“The gospel miracle is that human beings like us from time to time evade the temptations of power and the brittleness of success and actually manage to vulnerably love another person who has all the potential of turning on us and rejecting us. Every time such love is ventured, another piece of the gospel is proclaimed, and the Kingdom of God is made credible.”

Eugene H. Peterson, Leap Over A Wall

“Considering the full sweep of the Christian tradition, one would have to conclude that the most profane word we can utter is that word, mine.”

William  Willimon

“‘Fear God!’ is a call that puts us in our place and puts all other fears, hopes, and aspirations in their place.”

Derek Kidner

“The fear of God is that affectionate reverence, by which the child of God bends himself humbly and carefully to his Father’s law.”

Charles Bridges

“To a truly envious human being, the success or blessing of another – particularly a rival, and most particularly a close rival – is an affront, a kind of assault . . . Envy, like the pride that spawns it, is inevitably comparative. The envier wants to tear down a competitor because “he hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly.” The core of envy is the desire to cut somebody down to size, to change the basis of comparison with oneself, to hamstring rivals so that they have to drop out of the race in whatever competition the envier cares about.”

Cornelius Plantinga

“Do not be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you.”

1 John 3: 13

“For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. For you were straying like sheep, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.”

1 Peter 2: 21-25

“It shouldn’t be an easy walk from the pew to the weight bench, but it is made easy by a Christianity that looks more like a spiritual fitness program than a Gospel balm . . . The church is not like CrossFit; it is more like the hospital, or even the morgue. It is not a place where bad people go to be made good, but a place where bad people are loved in their badness.”

Conor Gwin, “My Church is Not CrossFit”

“The church is not in the world to teach sinners how to straighten up and fly right. That’s the world’s business; and on the whole it does a fairly competent—even gleefully aggressive—job of it. The church is supposed to be in the forgiveness business. Its job in filling pulpits is to find derelict nobodies who are willing to admit that they’re sinners and mean it. It’s supposed to take sheep who can be nothing but lost … and stand them up to proclaim that lostness, deadness, uselessness, and nothingness are God’s cup of tea. The church’s job is not to go around implying that those desperate states are conditions we must get over as quickly as possible once we’ve been found; its true work is to invite us all to go moonstruck over the news that the one operative consideration in our life is the Passion of the Finder to find.”

Robert Farrar Capon

“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.”

Christopher Wright

“Suffering makes people bitter or it makes people beautiful. How was Joseph able to forgive his brothers? He realized that there was an invisible hand that was always controlling his life. He entrusted himself to those two hands. Entrust yourself to those hands. They are good hands.”

Dustin Salter

“In friendship…we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another…the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting–any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who
said to the disciples, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” can truly say to every group of Christian friends, “Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.” The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.”

C.S. Lewis

“The Lord upholds all who are falling
and raises up all who are bowed down.
The eyes of all look to you,
and you give them their food in due season.
You open your hand;
you satisfy the desire of every living thing.
The Lord is righteous in all his ways
and kind in all his works.”

Psalm 145:14-17