What a privilege it is all these many years to come around to the celebration of the Lord's resurrection and be able to preach messages that relate to it. Having been here now over forty years, many, many Easters have come and gone and every one is a new and fresh challenge to take a look at the resurrection, perhaps, in a very special way...

Open your Bible, if you will, to the sixth chapter of Mark’s gospel. In the wonderful providence of God, we’re working our way through Mark and we just happened to arrive at this particular portion of Scripture in Mark chapter 6, verses 7 and following, which our Lord sends out the Twelve on their first short-term mission trip. It fit so well, the intent of the conference, so much is here seminal for the area of understanding how we do ministry that I decided to split it into two parts, do half at the front end and the last half at the back end. For some of you, you will only receive the back half cause you weren’t here last Sunday. We did have a contingent of folks from the Philippines who were disappointed that I only gave them half last week, so they changed their flight and they’re here this morning. We’re glad you stuck around. I hope you find it worth your while...

Now this morning I want you to open the Word of God to Mark chapter 6...Mark chapter 6. For you that are visiting with us, we’re working our way through the gospel of Mark and having such a wonderful time doing it. Every Sunday morning when we come together we spend time with our Lord Jesus as He is the theme of every paragraph. How enriching and wonderful it is...

Let's go to the gospel of Mark, our familiar location. When I have been kind of discussing what we might do after the gospel of Mark, thinking about after a little bit of a break this summer for me and Patricia, a little time away, we'll come back and it has been suggested to me by several people that we ought to do the gospel of John, and go back through and start again on the story of Christ from a completely different viewpoint, from the person of John, because it's been essentially 40 years since we had the opportunity to do that. So that's just how much people love the story of Christ. You cannot get enough. So I'm weighing that wonderful consideration...

We are tonight going to look together at a very, very significant issue in our time in connection in a series that we're doing on the end of the universe. When I first started to prepare this, I thought I would do one message, and then I thought it might extend to another. And in thinking about this and wanting to be as helpful to you as I can possibly be, I realized that there may be more to this than we can cover even tonight. But I want to begin where we should begin and that is to begin with the Scripture...

It was a couple of weeks ago that I gave a message on the theology of creation and I told you that I was intending to give you two messages, one on the beginning and another one on the end. The theology, if you will, of creation and the theology of uncreation, a message on the beginning of the universe and then a message on the end of the universe, how it all began and how it will all end...

For this morning, we're going to turn to the twelfth chapter of Mark and we're going to be looking at verses 28 through 34...28 through 34. You'll notice that I've titled this, "Loving God," and that's really obvious. And as I was thinking this week about love and loving God, obviously a huge subject, something came across my desk that I thought was interesting, from Ripley's Believe It Or Not. And according to Ripley, the longest expression of love ever written was the work of a Parisian painter named Marcel De LaKurre, who wrote it in 1875. It was addressed to Magdalena DeVilla Lora, his artistic light of love, he said...

Let’s turn to the Word of God together, Mark chapter 11...Mark chapter 11. As you can see, this is the end of the eleventh chapter but it is the beginning of a confrontation between Jesus and the religious leaders of Israel, a confrontation that starts here on Wednesday and ends on Friday with His crucifixion...

Well, tonight we return to the subject, the sufficiency of Scripture. It is Job who said, “I have esteemed the words of God's mouth more than my necessary food.” That is to say what Jesus said in the New Testament. “We don't live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.” Taking in the Word of God, said Job, is more important than eating food...

In the early years of Grace Church there were many things that were foundational, obviously. They are still foundational. Those things don't change. And as I have said through the years, there are some pastors who pastor different churches in different places. My Dad was like that. He pastored here and there and hither and yon, pastoring quite a number of churches in different places. I've had the privilege of pastoring different churches in the same place. But there are vastly different churches that have occupied the 35 years that I've been here. The congregation shifts and moves. I'm the fixed point which is a little bit different than the normal pastoral experience moving from place to place. And if I were to move from place to place, through the years I would feel like I needed to go back and lay the foundations that were basic and important and God blessed in other places. And because I've stayed in the same place, I've tended not to do that but being reminded again that the congregation has changed so frequently through these years, particularly in the rapidly changing population of Southern California, that it's good thing to go back and re-grasp some of the great sections of Scripture that laid the foundation for all the work that God has done here...