Sermon Notes & Videos
2024-12-20 | II Peter 1-9 | The 1 Thing
For this very reason be diligent to add these things to your faith, these many things and for so many reasons—promises really. If these things, these many things, are yours and abound, the fruit in your earthly life and your spiritual life will be abundant. If you do these many things you will never stumble. Could there be a more encouraging promise?
And the man who fails to do these things, these many things, he is like a man who can’t see anything past what is right in front of him. It’s almost like he is nearly blind, but in this case it is not the function of his eyes that is in question. In other words, it’s not his physical sight that is distorted, but the absence of his prophetic vision that has blinded him, his inability to grasp the magnitude of what God has promised.
And yet, with all these many things in focus, there remains just one thing that will ruin a man’s opportunity to attain to God’s upward call in Christ. And if there is just one thing that will ruin the whole thing, I will not be negligent to remind you of these many things, but more importantly that one thing.
2024-12-13 | II Peter 1:5-8 | Just Add Practice
It should be so simple. It’s all but finished right out of the box —just one final ingredient, an item amply available, and the recipe is complete. Sure, it’s an integral component and is required to bring the entire formula to life, but it’s readily accessible and safe to handle. Plus, the instructions are about as easy to implement as it is to solve one plus one. Unpack everything in your box and “just add water.” Oh that your Christian walk would be so simple.
Your Christian lifestyle does share one commonality with this useful analogy. When you read the instructions on the side of the box, there is only one ingredient missing, one integral component. Nevertheless, that is where the similarities end. It is not amply available, nor readily accessible; and it is not safe to handle, nor is it easy to implement—far from it. And the instructions are complicated and it always gets messy once the box is opened. That must be why most Christians never break the seal. However, if you are willing, this is the ingredient and these are the instructions. Just add P.R.A.C.T.I.C.E. Persistent Repetition Accelerates Character Transformation Impacting Christian Ethos. Your ethos is the characteristic spirit of your lifestyle and culture, how you operate in your community as a manifestation of your core beliefs and aspirations.
Instructions: open the box, just add practice, a complex ingredient and very risky to handle. Practice is a complicated element: to your faith add virtue, to virtue add knowledge, to knowledge add self-control, to self-control add perseverance, to perseverance add godliness, to godliness add brotherly affection, and to brotherly affection add love. Combine and mix these subcomponents of practice very carefully and in the perfect sequence, or the entire recipe will be ruined. Or, maybe it’s just safer to leave the box unopened and not mess with the one missing ingredient.
How bad can that be? Do you really want to know? Well, it’s ugly; the contents inside the box will eventually rot if you don’t use them correctly—if you don’t bring the entire formula to life; and there is simply no way to know how long it will take before it festers. So, each day you leave the box closed and don’t add the missing ingredient, you are one day closer to your Christian walk becoming infested with maggots.
2024-12-06 | II-Peter-1:2-11 | The Infinite Imperishable Jackpot
What’s are your highest aspirations? For what are you working so hard to achieve? What are your ultimate goals? What final destination will bring you the greatest satisfaction? What are you running toward with such fervency? On what are you most passionately focused? If you were asked to describe your heart’s desires, what would be your most cherished prize? Seven excellent questions, but for most people unfortunately, as the train pulls into their dream station, they discover something utterly disturbing about their destination. It was all a mirage, a total illusion. Tragically, everything they believed would bring them a feeling of completion and a sense of meaningful accomplishment was an utter delusion— a thorough deception!
God’s word has much to say on this topic. If you understood His perspective and applied His knowledge beforehand, that kind of wisdom would help you avoid the guaranteed regret, misfotrune, and frustration that is assured anyone who chases rotting carcasses and evaporating vapors. But, God’s precious and exceedingly great promises will never disappoint you; they are infinite and imperishable, while all other treasures that you might chase, even if attained, will be dreadfully temporary.
It’s an epidemic of human achievement, but not because there is anything inherently wrong with human advancements and accomplishments. It’s just that the intense desires for such success transform from God honoring stewardship to a disease of human achievement in a particular environment. At this moment, you should be begging to recognize that type of environment. It’s a pathological setting that can be easily diagnosed with one test question, as long as you are willing to be honest with yourself: “What satisfies your soul?” When your self-talk sounds like this… “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years; you are a true success,” the disease process has set in. The Great Physician has life-saving advice for this patient… “You foolish one, tonight is your last and your soul is being recalled. The things which you worked so hard to accumulate—whose will they be when you are gone? Since you can’t keep what you’ve accumulated after death—your wealth, achievements, and accomplishments, don’t bother laying up those perishable treasures for yourselves on earth. Instead, lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven that are permanent.”
Here is the true measure of your success—godly stewardship of your advancements and accomplishments. “Delight yourself in Yahweh, and He will give you the desires of your heart.” If you accumulate treasures for yourself here on earth, but you are not rich towards God, those treasures actually expose the disease of your heart. For you, there will only ever be a temporary and corruptible crown. But, if your heart is one that chases the riches of God, His precious and exceedingly great promises, your rewards will be infinite and incorruptible.
2024-11-22 | II Peter 1:1-2 | Faith Like Mine
In the Good News of Christ God’s righteousness is revealed from faith to faith. Why two faiths and not one? Surely faith should be unified into a single concept; God’s righteousness is revealed in faith. But, that would be like saying a man who receives a great inheritance from his father would be considered a good steward of that inheritance regardless of what he does with it. The man who guards it and does nothing; and the man who squanders it with wasteful spending; and the man who makes wise investments or uses it to grow into new successful enterprises, should all be considered equally as faithful. But that isn’t reality; to be truly faithful a man must go from faith to faith—from the free gift of faith to the practice of faith!
Jesus sat at the Last Supper table and delivered to His disciples His most prophetic mandate—this is what is coming and this is who you will be. And He made it clear that He was extending that mandate to a world beyond that table. His petition just hours before His execution: “Father, I pray that My disciples grasp this profound revelation and calling, and to embrace that it doesn’t end with them. It is for every disciple who will ever come to faith in Me, because I now commission them to preach this message—as You sent Me into the world, I now send them into the world. My ultimate desire is that this truth would perfectly unify God’s people, as if they are one person, as We are indeed One Person.”
Peter sat at that table and heard His Savior’s heart. Many years later he knew, just prior to his own execution, that he too must leave a legacy. He would write to his disciples and by extension his words were meant to touch us all; “This letter is to those who have obtained a like precious faith. It is first addressed to all those who have received the gift of faith. But ultimately it’s for those who wish to obtain a second type of faith like mine—to walk the narrow road from faith to faith. It’s a faith I obtained for free that is on a journey of faith that I was obedient to practice. The instructions in this letter will explain how.” Yes, two faiths—and dead is the former without
the latter.
2024-11-08 | II Peter | A Last Will & Testament
When you look around at the state of the Church, what impression do you get? How is the Body of Christ developing? These are difficult questions, so a bit more detail might help clarify. Add maturity as one of the search filters and remove size. Now contemplate your answers again. The Church has certainly become larger and with the advent of the seeker-friendly mega-church, the numbers are impressive. What is the state of the mega-church brand of Christianity, if we are not counting numbers? Don’t count attendance; don’t count weekly services; don’t count tithes; don’t count conversions; and don’t count staff members, etc. Do, instead, identify disciples.
An invitation into the family of God is waiting for everyone; all it takes is a heart touched by God’s grace and then a gentle explanation of how to become a Christian. The entrance cost is free; Jesus Christ paid it all. Yet, if you add maturity as a filter and becoming a disciple as the goal, you won’t find too many takers. Maybe even worse, you won’t find too many offers. That is because becoming a disciple is anything but free; it could cost you everything—even your life! Plus, it takes church leadership less concerned about size and more concerned about depth.
The modern congregation is a mile wide and an inch deep. The raw numbers are impressive, and yet the percentage of biblically literate disciples is anemic. That is because discipleship takes a training regimen that cannot be approached casually. What we discover in Peter’s letter is a step-by-step program for growth—from salvation to the ultimate maturity. Peter organizes his plan just as you’d expect from a man who fished for a living. It’s simple, systematic, predictable, measurable, effective, consistent, and duplicatable. It won’t take a genius to learn, nor teach. The Apostle Paul, a true scholar, must have learned a lesson or two about simplicity from this blue-collar worker before he wrote, “Commit the things you’ve heard from me, from many witnesses, to faithful men who are able to teach others also.” He must have heard what Peter thought of his usual approach, “In all of his letters Paul speaks of the same things of which I write. But, his way of communication makes it more difficult to understand. Ignorant and unstable men then twist and distort his words, as they do the Scriptures. That is always very damaging to themselves and to those who trust them.”
2024-11-01 | Romans 1:18-32 | In His Image We Vote
How exactly did God reveal Himself to mankind? He manifested inside of us! At creation, He did something so all of mankind would recognize Him as the only God; He created man in His own image. And He did so in such a way that no person, at any time in history, no matter their culture, creed, religion, place of origin, heritage, or nationality, could be excused of their ignorance.
What is the cost to a man who refuses to recognize Him? Eventually, God turns him over to depraved thoughts. The price of his foolishness is that the natural light in his heart grows dim, until it is completely dark. From there he will be apt to worship just about anything: man, animals, insects, and even inanimate objects! After that he will become obsessed with lust, especially sexual lust. This will then cascade into every type of sexual perversion; gender confusion often becoming first among them. Then, gender confusion and sexual sin open the gateway to every type of iniquity.
“In His Image We Vote” addresses what every Christian should know before they cast their vote. The existential crisis of our day is rooted in lies about: gender and sexual orientation; the sanctity of marriage; and the right to life. Again, at creation God made His invisible attributes visible for all mankind, so that no man would have an excuse to deny His existence. It should be obvious by simply observing the natural world, and yet there was something even more profound than the testimony of nature.
This is the secret to the deeper meaning of God’s invisible attributes; God is three in one and He created man in His image as three in one. What was originally hidden in Adam at creation was the woman and child. All you could recognize with your eyes in the Garden was the man, and yet God identified him as ‘them’ and told him to multiply. To see what was hidden within, first God extracted Eve from Adam and showed the woman to him. Now, she was no longer invisible. Then, God created marriage between the man and the woman to assure them that they were never meant to be apart; they were one as God was one. What began as what appeared to be a man standing alone in the Garden, instructed to be fruitful and multiply, culminated as the couple, reunited as one in marriage, made the final piece visible; “With the Lord’s help, I have given birth to a son,” the living manifestation of two becoming one! God’s invisible attributes were manifest in us and revealed to us: First the hidden woman was brought to the man, and now the hidden son is no longer concealed.
As you can see, within Adam at creation was the human family, the image of the invisible God. That is what it means that God “manifest in them and showed it to them.” Men would eventually suppress this truth and come against God by attacking the family—thus denying God’s revealed identity. They would contradict that there are only two genders; reject the sanctity of marriage; or define abortion as, ‘reproductive rights that need protection’, and even deny that using abortion as birth-control is murder. Isn’t this precisely what we are witnessing today? It all stems from the denial of God’s image, which opens the gateway of sexual immorality and then leads to all the atrocious sins that follow.
When it comes to political choices, how could any Christian vote for a candidate who denies anything that God used to reveal His image? I pray this teaching would become a staple to help inform all Christians how to vote without compromising their faith—to vote in Bible, or “In His Image We Vote.”