Content: Planning without God is arrogant boasting, and James calls it evil. Ecclesiastes reminds us that God appoints the times, and James warns that life is a vapor. The faithful alternative is humble submission: “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.” This lesson calls us to repent of self-rule and bring every plan under the Lord’s authority.
Christ is the Prince of Peace, who alone gives peace with God, peace with others, and peace within; sin is the disturber of all three, and that peace is enjoyed only by being reconciled to God in Christ and submitting to His terms. Everyone is hunting…
Because the church is a body of members held to a standard of Christian conduct, it has both the right and the duty to discipline disorderly members — teaching and admonishing them toward repentance, withdrawing from the impenitent, and restoring the penitent — and the neglect…
Christianity — specifically, the obedient response to the gospel — is the only absolutely sure position for eternal life. Every other position carries a risk that Christianity does not. The call is to make it as sure as ye can. Pilate’s command was addressed to the…
Preaching is not one method of Christian communication among others — it is the method that God ordained for the propagation of the gospel, that every generation of the church has required, and without which no generation can hear. Its weakness in any era is not…
Separation is the governing experience of fallen human existence. It begins with the separation of man from God in the garden and ends at the judgment with the ultimate, eternal separation of the righteous and the wicked. Between those two poles, every form of separation —…
Sin did not begin in the field—it began at the altar. Cain’s fall was a progression: unbelief in worship, pride under correction, and hatred of righteousness. God warned him that sin was crouching at the door, ready to rule him, but Cain refused to master it. The result was not just a broken relationship with his brother, but bloodshed and separation from the presence of the Lord. This sermon exposes the “way of Cain” and calls every listener to examine worship, respond rightly to Scripture’s correction, and submit to God before sin grows into death.
Everyone forms some estimate of Christ, and most estimates fall short of the truth; only the confession “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” is the correct one — and which estimate a person holds settles his destiny. At Caesarea Philippi Jesus asked…
A Christian is not merely a good person, a religious person, an Old Testament saint, or a church member, but one who has become a new creature in Christ — dead to sin and risen to new life through faith and baptism, a citizen of the…
The outline grounds the sermon in I Tim. 5:21 — a text addressed to Timothy about judicial impartiality in church proceedings. He uses it to identify prejudice as the parallel sin to preaching a false gospel (Gal. 1:8-9). Both involve rejecting God’s power — the false…