Sermons from July 2018
The File Test of Christianity
1 John 4:1-6 Start with the person and work of Jesus. The true Spirit of God is going to get the doctrine of the Son of God correct. The Spirit of God always glorifies the Son of God. Always tells the truth about the Son. So the first test of which spirit you’re listening to is: Is the person speaking the truth about Jesus? The second test is to examine what the world thinks of them. Remember, the world has…
Getting What We Want
1 John 3:11-24 Comparison leads to jealousy. Jealousy leads to hatred. If it reaches hatred, according to God, we’ve murdered. We’ve taken life. This is not the stuff of the family of God. This is not what Jesus did. He didn’t take life. He gave life away. “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.” (1 John 3:16) Here is the purest most direct biblical…
Undeniable Family Resemblance
1 John 2:28-3:10 This is where it gets challenging. You cannot be a son or daughter of God and carry a casual attitude toward sin. If you think you’re a Christian but don’t really care about ethical and moral purity, you’re fooling yourself. If you adopt and accept sin as if it’s a part of you, you may not be in God’s family. Becoming a child of God is supposed to change everything about how we act, how we quit sin…
Making the Abstract Concrete
I John 2:18-29 What if God doesn’t want to be abstract, but rather concrete, clearly defined, absolutely knowable? How would He do that? God’s answer to that question is Jesus. “The image of the invisible God.” “Immanuel: God with us.” In this world, we love to talk about spirituality. We love to talk about God. We love to talk about love. We use these abstract words and are comfortable with them because it keeps God out there, undefined, where we…
Going with the Grain
1 John 2:12-17 Each of us has two options when it comes to the thing, or Person, we choose to center our lives around. We can either love the world or we can love God. What is the world? John answers that question by describing the world’s drives or values, “For all that is in the world – the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions – is not from the Father but…