Total Sermons: 201
Total Amens: 1
Revolutionary Warning
Usually when people teach and preach they aim for their words to be as clear and understandable as possible. When Jesus taught the Parable of the Sower, though, His words were intentionally difficult to understand. He spoke like this to fulfill the warnings that were given several hundred years before to the Israelites through the prophet Isaiah. Because the people had rejected God over and over again for so many years their opportunity to learn and repent was being taken away from them. Those who did trust Jesus were able to listen and understand His message, and they could be encouraged that God would work a great harvest through them. We should all soberly listen to this warning and know that God does not strive with the unrepentant forever but eventually His offer of mercy and reconciliation will be withdrawn and there will be nothing left but to stand before the almighty God Himself and face judgment.
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Revolutionary Power
After the Sermon on the Mount Luke goes on to details some stories about Jesus demonstrating His power as the Son of God by healing a sick servant, raising a widow’s son from the dead, giving sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf. These demonstrate God’s restoring power at work in healing some of the broken effects that sin has caused in a fallen world, and God chooses to use that same power today to restore broken relationships, heal sickness, and help people to overcome the sins that ensnare them. Jesus’ restoring power is also demonstrated in His ability to restore a prostitute’s relationship with God by forgiving her sins, and He extends that same opportunity to us as well.
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Founded on Obeying Jesus
We often think that we have accomplished something when we have learned something new in the Bible. Far too often we stop at this point and do not move on to applying what we have learned and obeying the commands of Scripture. Jesus says that this is a disaster waiting to happen, like building a house without a firm foundation, and that when difficult times wash over us we will not be able to endure them. If the foundation of our lives is in walking according to God’s ways we will have deep foundations dug that will help us to stand firm in the day of testing.
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Blind to Mercy
The religious leaders in Jesus’ day loved to enforce their own extensive lists of rules and regulations and hammer anyone who didn’t live up to their standards. Jesus said that these people were blind and were leading other blind people into a ditch. They were blind to that fact that God is God of mercy and compassion and they were blind to their own failing and need for grace. We often take up the same judgmental attitude as the Pharisees, vilifying our opponents and painting ourselves as the good guys. Jesus commands us to stop judging and condemning people and instead by merciful and forgiving like our Father in heaven because we are all sinners and in desperate need of His mercy, grace, and forgiveness.
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Abiding Along the Way
Like our spiritual father Abraham we are called to follow God by faith as sojourners in this day and age and look forward to heaven and the jaw-dropping inheritance that He has promised to us. If our true home is in heaven and not here, how do we create community in a place where we don’t belong? Jesus taught us that while we are in the place that He has called us to now we should not try to hop from place to place in search of something better but instead to remain there and invest in the people around us by sacrificially loving them and sharing the truth of the Gospel with them so that they could receive new spiritual life in Christ.
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Returning Grace for Evil
We find it relatively easy to be kind and gracious to people who are kind and gracious to us. Jesus is unimpressed by that and said that anyone can do that. He calls us to a tremendously more difficult task: to love our enemies, the very people who have harmed us in the past or threaten to do so in the future. This is so difficult to do because we want justice for those that have hurt us and we want to strike out and weaken those who threaten us to prevent them from hurting us. The reason that Jesus calls us to love our enemies is because He loves His enemies, including you and me and our enemies, and He shows grace and mercy to us who oppose Him. The mission of God’s people in this age is to spread the Gospel of God’s Grace by word and deed throughout the whole earth, and since we have received such amazing undeserved love from God, we should show it towards our enemies as well, because Jesus cares about them like He cares about us.
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Everything You Know is Wrong
Wealth. Possessions. Food. Laughter. Popularity. We strive for these things because we see them as being fundamentally necessary for a happy life. Almost every man, woman, and child who has ever walked the earth has believed this, and everything that we experience in our lives seems to reinforce this. Roughly two thousand years ago Jesus Christ stood up in front of His followers and turned this worldview completely upside-down. He said that those who lacked these things were the ones who had it good, and the ones who had these things in abundance were headed for disaster. At first, second, and third glance this makes absolutely no sense but it is rock-solid truth. While money, food, and the approval of others can make us temporarily happy, they are temporary and can be taken from us in a heartbeat. Not only that, we also turn them into idols and they distract us from the most important thing in the universe, God. Those who lack such basic things are the ones that are blessed because it helps them to see just how much they need God, and just how much more valuable He is than the things they lack.
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Whosoever Means Me
When we look for people to team up with we look for those who have the greatest skill and talents and show the greatest potential to help us out. When Jesus chose His followers, though, He did not just pick from the religious all-stars of His day but instead chose regular people like fishermen and tax collectors who had real issues, shortcomings, and sinful habits. The call from Jesus to accept His offer of salvation through faith and follow Him is not merely offered to the best and brightest of us but to everyone regardless of race, economic background, personal accomplishments, or moral track record, and He is less concerned with the talents and gifts of His followers and more concerned with their willingness to follow and obey Him.
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Revolution: A Changed Heart
People came from miles around to hear John the Baptist speak, and when they arrived John confronted them directly and called them out for their rebellion and self-righteousness. When people would ask them what they must do and he asked them to do the very things that they did not want to do and found very difficult. John knew that we often approach following God’s commands like a big buffet where we can pick and choose the commands we like and think we can accomplish and leave the ones that are difficult or costly. God calls us to follow Him with our whole hearts, not just piecemeal, and that means that we need to be willing to yield every aspect of our lives to His good commands and priorities. As we submit our hearts to God our behavior will follow suit and our lives will undergo a revolution as we become more loving like the God we follow.
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Biblical Principals for Success
Everyone wants to be successful at the things that they try to do in this life and the books written on how to be more successful are too numerous to count. The Bible calls us to strive for success as God defines it, not as the world defines it, and the story of David defeating Goliath is an excellent example of success achieved God’s way. David knew that the specific purpose of his life, as it is for the rest of us, was to proclaim and demonstrate the greatness of God to those around him. David also knew that God had been preparing him for success in this battle through the previous fights that God had brought him through. David acknowledged that it was God who gave him the means to be successful and not his own strength and ability. David had also thought through the obstacles he might face and had a plan for overcoming them.
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