“The kingdoms of this world have their place, but they are always flawed, always imperfect, always provisional. The kings and rulers of this world are necessary, but they also cause as many problems as they fix. Human governments can never solve all the problems that need solving. They are part of the problem. And their imperfections should cause us to look for something above and beyond the imperfection and brokenness of everything in this world.”
Sermon Series: Ecclesiastes
“You see, God has made us reflectors. We do not have independent existence. We are images. We are not originals. We are images of some original. That is our essence. And that is all that we can be. We are God/god reflectors. We are images of some God/god. It is not possible for us not to be an image of some God/god. Either we reflect the true God, or we reflect some false god. Just like a mirror is always going to reflect something so we are always going to reflect some God/god. When God said that he made us in his image he said that he made us as mirrors to reflect him.”
Sermon Series: The Ten Commandments
“But within this overall perspective, an important part of the answer to the problem of meaningless is our relationships with other people. The meaning of life has to do with relationships, first of all our relationship with God, but within that context, our relationships with other people. And what these verses in Ecclesiastes that we are looking give us is a spectrum ranging from vanity towards meaning – a spectrum from emptiness to fulfillment.”
Sermon Series: Ecclesiastes
“If the true God is our God, then serving and pleasing him is our greatest desire and we enjoy God’s gifts in moderation while being grateful to God. But if we make a god of our appetites and desires then satisfying them is more of a focus and priority than serving God is and so our life is dominated by serving our appetites.”
Sermon Series: The Ten Commandments
“The gospel strikes at the heart of envy and rivalry and wanting to outshine others, because the gospel gives us the mind of Christ who came not to be served but to serve and to give his life for others. By the example of Christ and by the power of his resurrection, believers are enabled to put to death the lust for wanting to outshine others and to begin to love others and serve others and rejoice when they rejoice rather than resenting their successes and blessings.”
Sermon Series: Ecclesiastes
“God is to fill the horizon of our lives. God demands literally everything from us. Having God as our God means that our lives are not our own. It means that no part of our lives are our own. It means that we exist for God. It means that every second of our lives and every thought that we think and every thing that we do is to be directed by love for God and directed to pleasing God. Any time that is not happening we are breaking the first commandment.”
Sermon Series: The Ten Commandments
“Jesus is God’s answer to the dilemma posed by the author of Ecclesiastes as he agonizes over the horror of oppression in the world. God sent Jesus to proclaim liberty to the captives and to set at liberty those who are oppressed. But Jesus went about fulfilling that mission in a very unexpected way. He did it by entering into suffering himself. He did it by being on the receiving end of oppression himself.”
“The fact of the matter is that we are all inclined to be atheists by nature. We all suppress the truth of God that comes to us from the creation, from Moses and the Prophets and from Jesus and the apostles. In 1 Corinthians 2:14 Paul writes, “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.” That is all of us by nature. The reason that there is atheism is not that the evidence for the existence of God is weak. The reason that there is atheism is that human beings have sinful hearts that suppress the truth about God in the creation and in the word of God.”
Sermon Series: The Ten Commandments
Read: Ecclesiastes 3:16-22
“We need to remind ourselves that the only reason we are not on the receiving end of God’s wrath, for all the times that we have treated others badly, is Jesus Christ if we are indeed trusting in him. When we are horrified by injustice in the world, we must remind ourselves that we have committed some of the same sins and that we share the same sinful nature as the worst perpetrators. If we are different, we are different because we have been rescued from our sins and forgiven and have received the Holy Spirit.”
Sermon Series: Ecclesiastes
Read: Matthew 5:17-20
“So, we saw in the first sermon that God gave the Ten Commandments to the people of Israel after he had saved them from slavery in Egypt. He introduces the Ten Commandments by saying, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” First God saved them. Then he gave them his law. The order is very important. It means that the law is not intended to function as the way to a relationship with God. The relationship came first. Then came the law.”
Sermon Series: The Ten Commandments
