Jesus Institutes the Lord’s Supper
YHWH is: A Covenantal God
The LORD’s Question and Elijah’s Complaint
Read: 1 Kings 19:1-10
Text: 1 Kings 19:9-10
“So we have Moses asking for mercy and minimizing justice. And we have Elijah speaking of justice and saying nothing of mercy. This points to a tension in the Old Testament between the mercy and the justice of God. There is an awful lot in the Old Testament of the wrath of God against the sins of his people. But there is also the theme of God’s mercy that runs through the story. And these two aspects of God’s character are in tension with one another at least from a human perspective.”
Sermon Series: The Message of Elijah
Profession of Faith and Church Membership
“Church membership is not intended to be a peripheral part of our lives. It is not intended to take up a few hours of our lives each week. That is very clear from the biblical teaching and that is what is reflected in the vowed for profession of faith and the explanation of them in our Form of Government. One verse that sums this all up is all up is 2 Corinthians 5:15 which says that Jesus “died for all that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.” The rest of the New Testament spells this out in considerable detail when it describes the life that is to flow from the saving grace of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.”
Thanksgiving
Read: Psalm 65
“Thanksgiving in the Bible is part of the response of God’s covenant people to God’s salvation and it is part of praise and part of a relationship of prayer and forgiveness and dwelling in God’s courts and being satisfied with the goodness of God’s house and the holiness of his temple. And it is in the context of that relationship that we are to think of the bounty of the harvest and celebrate the fruitfulness that is rooted in God and his favor.”
Hebrews 8
Read: Hebrews 8
“That is what is promised to us in the new covenant and sealed to us in our baptism. Our baptism reminds us and confirms to us that through faith our sins are actually dealt with once and for all time. The forgiveness that is signified and sealed to us in our baptism is based on the reality of Jesus fully and finally paying the penalty for our sins. Because God’s justice has been served by Jesus’s death, that same justice requires that our sins can never be counted against us. And that registers in our own consciences so that the peace that we experience is much deeper and more profound than what was possible under the old covenant relationship between God and his people.”
Sermon Series: Important Covenant Passages
Genesis 17
Read: Genesis 17
“Remembering and forgetting are spiritually significant in Scripture – at least when it comes to remembering or forgetting that we are in a relationship with God – that God is our God and that we are his people. We are to live consciously in the light of God’s promises and of his requirements for us. We are not to forget that we belong to God with all that that means for our lives. One of the purposes for the sign of the covenant is to keep our covenant relationship with God top-of-mind.
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Sermon Series: Important Covenant Passages
Genesis 15
Read: Genesis 15
“And one of the promises that is most difficult to believe is that how God could ever forgive us for our sins and accept us as his people. Once the grace of God shows us even a little bit of how incredibly evil our sins really are, the thing that will seem to be most impossible of all is how God could ever do anything else but banish us from his presence forever. That God is willing to forgive us and embrace us as his beloved people is perhaps the most impossible thing of all once we understand even a little bit of what our sin must look like to God.
And then the covenant oath becomes very precious. And then our baptism becomes very precious because our baptism is the sign and seal of the covenant for those who have fled to Jesus for refuge.”
Sermon Series: Important Covenant Passages
