City Church of Richmond Sermons

“If God is God, and man is made in His image: then each man is significant.”

— Os Guinness

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

“The Man Jesus Christ, to whom no affliction, no ill, no suffering is alien and who yet was the wholly innocent and righteous one, is praying in the Psalter through the mouth of his Church. The Psalter is the prayer book of Jesus Christ… He prayed the Psalter and now it has become his prayer book for all time… Those who pray the psalms are joining in with the prayer of Jesus Christ, their prayer reaches the ears of God. Christ has become their intercessor.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

“If we cannot control it, it is because it is too great, not because it is too small for us. The great things of God are beyond our control. Therein lies a vast hope.”

— Roland Allen

“In giving [the Holy Spirit] to us, God is not just promising us our final inheritance but actually giving us a foretaste of it.”

— John Stott

“A conceptual argument for the gospel is good but easy to dismiss. A relational demonstration of the gospel is harder to write off.”

— Ray Ortlund

“We are Peter, and Peter is us. The second chance comes not through some penitential act of Peter’s, but through the sheer grace and love of Jesus himself.”

— Lee Koontz, First Look

“Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.”

— John Wooden

“I’m a doubting Thomas
I’ll take your promise
Though I know nothin’s safe
Oh me of little faith”

— Nickel Creek

“The heavens frighten us; they are too calm;
In all the universe we have no place.
Our wound are hurting us, where is the balm?
Lord Jesus, by Thy Scars, we claim thy grace

If, when the doors are shut, Thou drawest near,
Only reveal those hands, that side of Thine;
We know today what wounds are, have no fear,
Show us Thy Scars, we know the countersign”

— Edward Shillito, Jesus of the Scars

“If you believe in God, what may you hope for? Everything, or at least everything that really matters: the ultimate triumph of life over death, justice over injustice, peace over war, love over hate and happiness over unhappiness. ‘An infinity of happiness in an infinity of life,’ as Pascal put it…

‘What can people hope for who have never believed in God or who have ceased believing in him? Nothing—that is, nothing absolute or eternal, nothing beyond the “darkest reaches of death”—which means that all our hopes for this life, no matter how legitimate (less war, less suffering, less injustice) run up against that ultimate nothingness… This by no means prevents us from struggling for justice, but it does prevent us from believing in it completely or believing that its triumph can be permanent. In a word, Pascal, Kant and Kierkegaard were right: There is no way for a lucid atheist to avoid despair.’”

— André Comte-Sponville, The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality