Sermon Notes & Videos
2024-04-05 | Romans 8:33-39 | No Weapon Shall Prosper
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It won’t always seem true, but feelings can be fickle. It’s not that they are bad, or that you shouldn’t have them, but feelings oftentimes can’t be trusted. And there is no inspiration more effective or deceptive, than trouble, when we consider its effect on emotions. A good o’fashioned trial, complete with attacks from every direction, pressing in on every side, is all the fuel you need to lose confidence in God, to let your feelings run amuck, and to allow your emotions to rule the day.
Weeping and sorrow may last through the night, but joy comes in the morning. That is precisely why God’s heart is for you to hold tight to His promises. It looks bad; don’t worry. You’re in danger; don’t fear. There is no way out; don’t panic. It’s too much to bear; don’t lose hope. The burden is too heavy; don’t cave. The doors keep slamming in your face; don’t give up. The temptation is too great; don’t surrender. The answer is nowhere to be found; don’t stop asking. The solution is too confusing; God is your mathematician. What to do is a complete mystery; God is your spiritual detective. And now, make it really personal!
I’m too sick to be well; God is my healer. The price is too high and I can’t cover the cost; God will reconcile my accounts. I’m too dirty to ever be clean; the Lord of all will exchange my garments for His. My sins are too many, too often, too big, and too ugly; God says to me, “Do over!” The circumstances of my life are beyond complicated; I am at the end of myself, the limit of my understanding. It all feels like an enigma wrapped in a conundrum. Excellent, that is precisely where God wants me!
Nothing that exists in the entirety of creation can be, if the God over all of creation had not allowed it to be. He is sovereign over your suffering and your solution! No weapon formed against you shall prosper; every enemy that rises against you God will defeat. But there is one “not so subtle nuance” that might be your greatest victory in times of trouble. You are more than a conqueror in Christ Jesus. God does not just defeat your enemies—He obliterates them, as if to spray a firehose at a matchstick!
2024-03-22 | Romans 8:28-32 | The Winning Hand
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At times, ideas you’ve never before considered breeze across your mind and suddenly the mundane becomes utterly profound. You fall deep inside the thought and realize you’ve been unwittingly slow playing your cards all along. Do you know what that means? That is when in a card game you are conscious of holding the winning hand and yet you represent yourself in all ways as if your cards are merely pedestrian. You are keenly aware you’ve won, but you want your opponents to believe otherwise so you can draw them in further, tempting them to commit a larger stake, all so you can win more of their chips. This play does not work well in matters of the Spirit. And that is because no one would slow play things of God intentionally; there is no upside in knowing you hold the winning hand and acting as if you’ve lost. If you did, you are guaranteed to lose, and so does everyone around you who needs to witness what winning with the Lord looks like!
One such matter of prominence in which you might have unintentionally slow played your hand is divulged when you unexpectedly realize that your cards hold the secrets of the universe, the words of the living God who created all things. For so long you’ve treated the Bible casually like any other app on your mobile device, or any other book in your collection of stories. Then your eyes suddenly open and you reconsider the nature of the “cards” you hold in your hands, and just how life-altering it would be if you actually played them. You couldn’t lose! No one would slow play these cards deliberately, if they truly comprehended the strength of their hand.
Another such region of darkness is exposed to the light when you live life, plodding along as if you are infected with some type of deficiency or lack—a losing hand. And then you abruptly experience the revelation that God would not leave you with any insufficiency—proven by one undeniable fact. The price He paid to make sure you had everything you need was the life of His only begotten Son. If He was willing to pay that much to ensure you have the winning hand, how on earth can you imagine under any condition that you don’t?
2024-03-15 | Romans 8:23-27 | The Mind of God
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At times there are just no words. Have you ever felt that way: when your experience exceeds explanation; when the circumstance defies any useful description; when the strength required to speak is altogether gone and you cannot even formulate a single word to express your desperation? If words were dollars you’d be living in abject poverty. And yet this is not a bad place to be because it is here where the Holy Spirit takes over.
There is an obvious stipulation that should govern your prayer life at all times, and that is to seek first the will of God. Minimally, if you can’t quite discern God’s will, you should offer to abdicate your will in favor of His, and that sometimes is enough to render you speechless. “I just have no words; I don’t know what to pray.” And suddenly sounds pour forth—unintelligible, inarticulate sounds; deep guttural groans that are not human in origin. We find the Holy Spirit at work and this we know. The Spirit never speaks a word that did not originate from the Father’s heart, His mind—which might be the perfect definition of God’s will. But what is most extraordinary is that these unintelligible, inarticulate sounds; deep guttural groans form through your mouth! And that means what is coming forth from your very lips is the mind of God.
2024-03-08 | Romans 8:18-22 | The Unveiling
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Making a public presentation of something new or renovated is a common practice. We pull the veil from a new statue; drop the sheet from the rendering of a new building project; lift the cover from the model of a new mall; remove the canvas from a prized piece or art; uncover the blindfolded eyes of an unsuspecting beneficiary of a surprise room makeover; and move that truck hiding a complete home renovation. We celebrate when a project is complete, a job well done. We christen a ship, a public dedication before its maiden voyage. We cut ribbons as we celebrate the inauguration of big new projects, as Shakespeare would say, with great pomp and circumstance. And yet, this is all about stuff, stuff which is here today and gone tomorrow.
What is of much greater value are the ceremonies that commemorate people and their milestones and accomplishments. Especially important are the rare occasions in life when we get to recognize a right of passage—the few in a lifetime moments when there is a change in status. One such milestone that ought to be immortalized is the transition from childhood to adulthood. It has great significance in the natural and far greater significance in personal matters concerning God. And beyond that, maybe that which is of greatest importance, are matters concerning all of Christendom—the Body of Christ as a whole.
Two significant events in the life of an individual believer best mirror these collective milestones in the Christian faith—one reflects what has already occurred, and the other the prophetic future of Christianity. The first is when one becomes a newborn child of God. That extreme moment is when one passes from death to life and is born-again as a child of God. All who believe and call on His name become adopted children into the family of God—instantly. They become newborn infants in the faith and their journey begins—the journey to adulthood. On a collective level, that was the birth of the Church. And the arrival at adulthood is the second milestone that requires attention. It’s that extreme moment in the faith when one passes from needing childlike accommodations to becoming personally responsible, accountable as a spiritually mature adult Christian. This is a shadow of God’s prophetic plan for mankind. All of Christendom will one day leave childhood behind, with its many accommodations, and arrive at adulthood, and that moment is worthy of the greatest of unveilings.
Individually, the right to become a son of God is instant, but the work of preparing to be presented as a spiritually mature adult takes time. Corporately, the unveiling of God’s sons is the next big thing on God’s calendar—the next hour on His prophetic clock. It will be a moment worth demarcating, a right of passage, a coming of age of God’s children, for which all of creation is eagerly waiting. Since the fall of man in the Garden, all of creation has been in steady decay—tainted as an innocent victim. But, when the sons of God are finally revealed, when God’s children have finally matured into spiritual adults, the glory of God that will emanate from them will restore everything about creation that was broken and lost in the Garden. For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. It’s the next big thing on God’s prophetic calendar—the next hour on His prophetic clock. Tick—tick—tick—tick…
2024-03-01 | Romans 8:1-17 | Hand Picked Orphans
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Everyone wants to be part of a family. In fact, God created the human family as the perfect representation of the Divine family. Quite literally, the human family is the image of God in the earth. Yet, in practice, in this fallen world, family dynamics don’t always play out as planned. As humanity careens towards the end-of-days, the assault on the family has intensified. It makes sense when you think about it; God’s plan is for the family to represent His image in the earth. And the enemy’s chief strategy is to ruin that image—hence the wholesale destruction of the family unit and family values.
There is an epidemic of un-parented and under-parented children in the world, but none of it surprises God. Satan’s assault on the family runs deep, destroying marriage and even the desire for marriage; gender and even the idea of gender; and children and even the birth of children. Again, no surprise to God. From the beginning God had a plan; He is the Father to the fatherless! And He institutes His plan by way of adoption. The magnificence of adoption is that it negates the need to be born of a certain bloodline to be considered a child of God. Your born-again encounter served as the legal paperwork for your adoption; human orphans are handpicked and invited into the family of God. It is the perfect demonstration of God’s furious and astonishing love. And, our capacity to love God comes only because He first loved us.
And finally something else emerges which staggers the mind. You were not just adopted by God as His child, which makes you an heir to His kingdom; you became a joint heir with Christ. Your inheritance in God is an equal inheritance as promised to His only begotten Son! And that means God has placed you in the firstborn position along with Y’shua. That is who you really are! So, the next time you feel like an orphan, alone and unwanted, meditate on this utterly beautiful thought. Adoption is a choice which requires a selection process, and God searched the pool of orphans in which you were swimming and He chose you!
2024-02-23 | Romans 7:15-25 | Shards of History
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This is the diary of a man in the process of discovering what it means to be born-again and empowered by the Holy Spirit. To twenty-first century Christians, these struggles appear almost commonplace. We saw the Reformation over five-hundred years ago; we can recall countless Holy Spirit revivals throughout history; we’ve experienced many types of movements in Christianity: Prayer, Charismatic, Prophetic, Pentecostal, Messianic, and Hebrew Roots, to name a few; and we have study bibles, bible programs and apps; a myriad of Christian books, curriculums, and study guides; Christian television, radio, magazines, music, and the internet; and we have churches on every corner, over three-hundred thousand of them in the United States alone. You get the picture?
However, Paul is the first man alive to sort through and commit to words what took place in us when the great transaction occurred, ideas and words that have become part of the common vernacular for those whose lives Christ exchanged for His own. Let’s examine Paul’s struggle to discover just what happened to each of us when we got knocked off our feet in the great exchange. The last part of Romans seven is like taking a peek into the diary of a man on a long journey. Think carefully about your own life and history, contemplate any important event, and then consider if you were called to write about it. The words could hardly compare to the details of the actual story. Words can’t do justice to the seconds, minutes, and hours of reality. Sure we can overview life in snapshots, key moments and highlights, shards of history, but the minute details of reality can never be chronicled sufficiently, for any historical event, even one in your own life. Consider a soldier at war, for instance. There are key battles, strategic moments, memorial dates, and history-deciding losses and victories. And in that one soldier’s life, in his mind, he endured the expanded nano-seconds of time—an ongoing personal reality, but hidden from recorded history: the fears, the suffering, the cold, the pain, the doubt, the hope, the confusion, and the terrible longing for his loved ones. He experienced every continuous moment, reality that history never recorded. And this is but one soldier. Can you feel it?
Now, take a look back at Paul’s struggle, his dilemma. You are reading an encapsulation. He is opening his diary and allowing us to see, and possibly feel, the highlights of his journey of discovery; “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” Yes, it all comes down to this journal entry; “Thank you Father, your Son has already delivered me from this struggle. I get it now, my old flesh serves the law of sin; but, the new man, born-again in Christ, serves the laws of my God.”
And then the great question for all of us. Do we join Paul in his struggle, or do we join him in his discovery, his victory? You have his diary entries to draw from; why repeat his mistakes? Choose now to agree with the law of sin that has you doing things you know you shouldn’t and neglecting things you know you should, or live as the new creature and serve the laws of God who sent His Son to die for you that you might be born-again and filled with His grace.