City Church of Richmond Sermons

“It is surely a fact of inexhaustible significance that what our Lord left behind Him was not a book of thought, nor a rule of life, but a visible community… He committed the entire work of salvation to that community. It was not that a community gathered round an idea, so that the idea was primary and the community secondary. It was that a community called together by the deliberate choice of the Lord Himself, and re-created in Him, gradually sought–and is seeking–to make explicit who He is and what He has done.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

Household Management

“Jesus is a Bridegroom who loved His wife enough to leave His glory, descend to the earth, and fulfill His Father’s plan of Redemption. And this is what we celebrate when we celebrate the subordination of the Son. We do not celebrate authority. We celebrate sacrifice. We do not celebrate control. We celebrate the submission of our wills. It is this beautiful dynamic between the Father and Son, and eventually between the Bridegroom and Bride, that will set the world right.”

— Hannah Anderson and Wendy Aslup

“She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black n—–s in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like her and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned in to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”

— Flannery O’Connor

“Jesus comes not for the super-spiritual but for the wobbly and the weak-kneed who know they don’t have it all together, and who are not too proud to accept the handout of amazing grace.”

— Brennan Manning

“The church is the pilgrim people of God. It is on the move—hastening to the ends of the earth to beseech all men to be reconciled to God, and hastening to the end of time to meet its Lord who will gather all into one. Therefore, the nature of the Church is never to be finally defined in static terms, but only terms of that to which it is going.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

“We hope because of what we have already experienced. Christian hope is both possession and yearning, repose and activity, arrival and being on the way. Since God’s victory is certain, believers can work both patiently and enthusiastically, blending careful planning with urgent obedience, motivated by the patient impatience of the Christian hope.”

— David Bosch

“More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame.”

— Romans 5:3-5

“You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.”

— Henri Frederic Ariel

“God has once more given the PCA a gracious opportunity to show the beauty, grace, and power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ through confession and through the fruits of repentance: such as… establishing interracial friendships and partnerships inside and outside our denomination; renewing our commitment to develop minority leadership.”

— James River Presbytery Proposed Overture on Confessing Covenantal and Generational Sins During the Civil Rights Period