Tonight, we come to a most critical part of the creed. This is critical for a number of reasons, not the least of which because this is the gospel. The good news is that sins can be forgiven. This is our message that we preach to the world, and we are the only ones able to proclaim it. Political organizations can preach help, but they can't preach forgiveness. 

Getting the gospel wrong has led to just about every problem that the church has. We can so easily misunderstand it because we are sinners. We are born with a bias against understanding it. So we need to take the time to walk through this carefully. Some of these things are going to (hopefully) not be news to you, but this is a great opportunity to see where you heart might have missed the comfort and encouragement you are entitled to or where it has gained undue complacency that you are not entitled to.

You have heard it said that there are only two certainties in life: death and taxes. I’m here to add a third certainty to life: temptation. Temptation exists everywhere because we still have sin within us. Its power has been broken by our putting our faith in Christ and having the Spirit living inside us. This means that we don’t have to sin every time temptation comes along like we did before Christ. But we aren’t away from sin’s presence yet. And if there is anything we learn about temptation is that it is persistent, usually more so than we are.

Joseph’s case turned out to be different than a lot of ours. Despite the constant temptation, Joseph, quite impressively, resisted it. One theologian thought that Joesph’s ability to rule himself was more impressive than running the country of Egypt (Matthews). How do temptations actually work? How did Joseph resist them so well? How can we learn how to resist temptations better? Do things always go better when you resist temptation? We will try to answer those questions as we look at our two points today: Temptations want your loyalty, yet only God will be loyal to you.

In this episode, we cover the doctrine of the Church. Once again, special thanks to Third Mil Ministries for the outline I am teaching from. 

The recording starts abruptly, but I was in the middle of explaining that all of these lectures have been adapted from some other curriculum from Third Mill ministries. This one is about the Holy Spirit!  

Our series continues this time looking at the Son! Note: I got the Day of Atonement sacrifices mixed up with the Sin offering in this lecture. Sending out the goat into the wilderness is the Day of Atonement offering procedure, not the sin offering! 

Our continuing study on the Apostles' Creed, this evening focused on the section on God the Father. 

We've added a Sunday time of study together going through the Apostles' Creed. In this introductory episode, we explore the Creed as a whole and define why we should study it.  

What comes to your mind when you hear the phrase, “God will be with you”? For many, I think, this is a phrase that has been heard so many times, it has lost its meaning. It has become part of the Christian language that we actually stopped thinking about a long time ago. What does it really mean for God to be with you? How does that make a difference to your life, particularly when things are going well? What difference might it make in other people’s lives that God is with you? We will explore these questions as we take a look at this chapter over the next two weeks. Today I hope that you will be convinced of our main point, that God’s presence in you impacts your world right where you are.

Genesis 38 doesn’t get nearly the respect and love it should. Many look at this chapter as an unnecessary and disturbing interruption to the story of Joesph, a generally positive story of redemption. Looking at the content of the story, it is easy to see why people think that. We all have some section of our lives we regret, and it would seem that we are looking at Judah’s season of regret here. Why dwell on the gross sins of one of the brothers when we could be focusing on the more positive portrait of Joseph? After all, this doesn’t describe most of our lives as good Presbyterians, so what is there even to learn from here?

But this is actually a critical chapter for the story of Genesis, our Christian lives generally, and even contributes to the overall story of Jesus.

Genesis 38 is critical to the book as a whole because Joseph is not the only character in this section of Genesis. Judah’s roles is arguably equally important. Rather than just focus on God’s redemption of Joseph’s circumstances, we are seeing in this chapter, the beginnings of God’s redemption of Judah’s character (Matthews). We can’t see how far God brings him if we don’t know where he started from, and this chapter shows us that sinful starting line. Hopefully, this will give you hope for what God can do in your life.

This chapter is critical because of what it has to say for your Christian life today. Because of the sexual misadventures aplenty we see here, we tend to focus on those and not look at all the foundational sins that actually lead to those moments. There are many “smaller” sins that are actually quite common to us all shot through this passage that we can learn a great deal from. Hopefully, this will make us more grateful for Jesus’ sacrifice for those sins after seeing them in their proper light.

Finally, this chapter is critical because of what it tells us about Jesus’ family.

We are going to tie all of this together under our two points, Little sins are big obstacles to family commitments, yet Jesus has died for the little sins, too.

We have come to the final turn in our story of Genesis. We’ve been on quite a journey. We have seen how God has been faithful to three generations of Abraham’s family, and now we turn the corner to see how the story of Genesis concludes. 

At first glance, it would seem that now we are going to look at the life of Joseph as the main character going forward, but that would be a mistake. For sure, Joseph is going to be featured prominently in the chapters to follow, but the story really is about three men, not one. By keeping that fact in mind, we are going to have a much better idea why God includes the details that He does in the upcoming chapters. 

Today, we are going to take an overview of the section ahead of us, and because it is Father’s Day, we are going to look at it through the lens of three fathers, Jacob, Judah, and Joseph. They are going to compare and contrast in general, and we will see deeper details as we much through in the coming weeks. We are going to look at two points today that while addressing fathers in particular are nonetheless applicable to everyone. Fathers have a deep impact on their children yet Our impact is not beyond God’s mercy and control.