“The requirement of believers in Jesus Christ to submit to the oversight of elders requires them to be members of a specific congregation. The biblical teaching about salvation includes church membership and not submitting to church membership is direct disobedience to the clear teaching of the word of God.”
Sermon Series: The Ten Commandments
“We live in a secular world that teaches that all that matters is our lives in the here and now. The Bible teaches us that the most important thing for human beings is how they relate to the God of the Bible. And what we will see the more that we study the Bible and ourselves and the world around us is that the world of which we are a part reflects perfectly the word of its Creator.”
Sermon Series: Biblical Responses to Secular Beliefs
“We are to honor other people appropriately because we are all made in the image of God. That gives value to every human being and we are to acknowledge that value in the way that we think of one another and in the attitudes that we have towards one another and in the way that we treat one another. We are to show them respect as people who are valuable and significant because they are made in the image of God.”
Sermon Series: The Ten Commandments
“One of the secular beliefs that we will have to address is the belief that the secular world-view is based on reason alone while the biblical world-view is based on a faith that is not reasonable. Part of demolishing arguments raised against God is to show that no-one believes what they believe on the basis of reason alone. There are many factors that go into why we believe what we believe and one of the factors that is very powerful is the company that we keep, the society in which we live and the desire to be accepted and admired by people that we admire.”
Sermon Series: Biblical Responses to Secular Beliefs
Read: Ephesians 5:1-21
Text: verse 21
“In biblical thought the freedom of individualism is really bondage and the submission to God and to the obligations of belonging to the body of Christ is really freedom. True freedom in biblical terms is not freedom to express ourselves and to do whatever we want to do, it is living as God has designed us to live and that involves a significant dose of self-denial and submitting to the demands and constraints of our relationships with other people.”
Sermon Series: The Ten Commandments
Read: Matthew 24:1-14
“The application for us as we face a new year is, “Do not be complacent. Do not take it for granted that you are not being pulled into the current of worldly thinking and worldly living. Think very seriously about your life and values and priorities in the light of biblical teaching.” One of the common themes of the best Christian literature on this subject is that the only Christians who will survive in the current environment are those who go deep – that is those who are serious about their relationship with the Lord...”
Read: Isaiah 44:1-8
Acts 6:1-15
Read: Matthew 1:18-25
“Jesus is more than the reason for the season. Jesus is the reason for everything. As the risen and ascended Jesus himself says to John in Revelation 1:17, “I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.””
Read: Matthew 1:1-17
“There is no celebration of the birth of Christ that is in line with biblical priorities that does not have the overturning of sin by Jesus at its heart. The problem of all problems, both in each of our lives and in the world in general, is sin and the blessing of all blessings is the fact that God send Jesus and Jesus came to deliver us from the curse and the power of sin.”
