How We are to Relate to One Another (5) Love Binds Everything Together
The Call to Put Sin to Death
“Seek the Things that Are Above”
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
The Futility of Trusting Idols
Read: 1 Kings 18:1-2, 17-29
Text: Verses 23-29
“And so it is easy for us to place our trust in the things we can see rather than in the God whom we can’t see. The only way we know that everything that we need comes from God is from the Bible. God tells us in his word that he is our Shepherd and our provider. But we know that by faith. We do not know that empirically. God’s involvement in our lives and in the weather and in the economy is not something that we can discern on the basis of experience. We must believe it on the basis of God’s word.”
Sermon Series: The Message of Elijah
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
The Law and the Christian
Read: Romans 7
“Our sinful nature is provoked to sin by the law because we are rebellious at heart. If we see a law, we want to trample it. But that is also the way that God brings us to see how sinful we are. Once we understand how the law provokes us to sin we come to see how profoundly sinful we are, and we realize that we are dead in sin and that we need to be made alive to God which of course is exactly what God does to us through our union with Christ when we believe.”
A Natural Question Profoundly Answered
Read: Romans 6
“The good news is not only that we are forgiven and accepted as righteous by God through faith in Jesus Christ. The good news is just as much that the power of sin over us is broken. A huge part of what is good about the good news is that we are set free from the power of sin in our lives when we believe in Jesus. The problem with sin is not just that it makes us liable to God’s punishment. The problem with sin is also that sin is destructive and dehumanizing and devastating. Sin takes away from our joy and our happiness and our quality of life in the deepest sense. And so, it is a huge part of the good news that believers are released from the slavery to sin and to Satan.”
The Meaning of the Fourth Commandment (3) A Memorial and a Sign
“This is one of God’s great purposes in creation and in the history of salvation – that people might come to know that he is the Lord of all and that they might give him the glory that is his due. And so, for his people, he gave them a day where work was off-limits and common activities were off-limits so that they might remember and contemplate where they had been before God had rescued them, but also that they might remember and adoringly ponder the awesome power and glory of their God revealed in their rescue.”
Sermon Series: The Ten Commandments