Hoover Church of Christ Sermons

In the month of May, we’re having a “Train up a Child” campaign—we’re hoping to be able to fill all of our children’s Bible class rotations with teachers through May 2019.

In conjunction with this emphasis, we studied the text above. We discussed how children weren’t highly valued in the world of antiquity for different reasons, which may explain why the disciples discouraged people from bringing them to Jesus. The disciples also probably had an inflated sense of their own importance, and they may have thought Jesus was too busy to take time for kids. There were badly mistaken, of course—Mark’s account demonstrates this more clearly than Matthew’s: “But when Jesus saw it, he was indignant . . .” (Mark 10:14). Jesus wasn’t happy with people who ignored children.

It must’ve been a memorable sight: the hands that fashioned this world into existence reached down and scooped up little kids and blessed them (“And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them,” Mark 10:16).

We applied this story to our church family: (1) Children matter; and (2) Children’s souls matter. Most of us have attended or visited churches with few children, and it doesn’t speak well of those churches’ future. At Hoover we’ve been blessed with a lot of young children, and God expects us to treat them as Jesus did: to love them and bless them. We have an hour or two each week to shape the hearts of these children, so we must take advantage of these opportunities.

Nic took Paul’s use of “ambassadors” in 2 Corinthians 5 and illustrated how Christians are ambassadors of God’s kingdom in the world today. Just as different cultures have different values and different ways of prioritizing their values, so God’s kingdom has a structured value system. Christians go into the kingdom of this world and spread the cultural values of God’s kingdom.

Nic listed three of these values: (1) We value truth. This is a bedrock value—it undergirds the Christian faith. Christianity is based on both historical truths and truths of the mind (virtue, value, compassion, beauty, love, etc.); (2) We value people. God created people, and he loves them. Value is determined by what someone is willing to pay for a thing, and God was willing to give everything for us. As Christians we also value people because God does, and so we honor their autonomy; (3) We value peace. God wants people to live and work together in harmony. As Christians we try our best to live peaceably with all people, while not compromising God’s truth.

One of the most amazing things about the Bible is its beautiful unity and cohesiveness . . . It tells one over-arching story about what God is doing in the world. One remarkable symbol of that is the Tree of Life, which is mentioned first in the creation narrative of Genesis 1-2. Then, after the Fall, God casts humanity out of the Garden of Eden and away from the Tree.

But it’s interesting that we find subtle references to the Tree throughout Scripture. At various places in the Old Testament, echoes of the Tree are found in the Tabernacle and Temple. And then we find the culmination of the story at the very end of the Bible when John sees us reunited with the Tree once again. So in a way, the Tree of Life frames the entire biblical narrative: it’s mentioned at the beginning of Creation, and it’s emphasized in the last two chapters of Scripture.

In this sermon, we’ll study how the Tree symbolizes God’s presence and how the Fall led to our being separated from him. But we’ll also emphasize the beauty of what God has waiting for us: that day when all of God’s people will once again eat of the Tree of Life and will be restored to his presence in a way that we can only imagine.

The problems and issues of life are many. Most of the time, the major problems we face are self-induced. It can be difficult to accurately identify and analyze the root causes when we are not honest with ourselves. Also, identifying root causes is often difficult when we close our eyes to prevailing facts and factors associated with our problems.

In the sermon, Stan compared the confused world of Zephaniah’s day with our own. Judah was confused in so many ways, having bought into the false ideologies of the world. They had turned away from God and had turned to idols, even sacrificing their own children to pagan gods. In a similar way, we are sometimes persuaded by the false messages of the world, buying into philosophical perspectives that are more concerned about political correctness than they are about truth.

As Christians, we must keep our eyes focused on Jesus, and he will open our eyes to see truth, enabling us to clean up the messes in our lives.

Today is Easter and millions of people around the world commemorated the resurrection of Christ. Of all the events in Jesus’ life, none is more significant or more life-changing than the empty tomb. He died on Friday, but that death would have been meaningless had his tomb remained occupied early Sunday morning. When the apostles preached, they emphasized the resurrection more than anything else.

We studied 1 Corinthians 15, probably the earliest account of the resurrection in the New Testament. The Corinthians apparently had been influenced by some early Greek thinking that led them to believe that there would not be a bodily resurrection, and Paul responds to that in this chapter.

He grounds his thoughts about a bodily resurrection in the resurrection of Christ and explores its implications for believers today. The main point here is that the resurrection changes everything. It validates Jesus as the Christ, and for us it confirms that the God who raised Jesus’ body from the tomb will one day raise our bodies to live eternally in the new heavens and earth. This conviction completely changes how we live our lives (our priorities, our values, the way we face difficulties, etc.).