Hoover Church of Christ Sermons

“Kingdom” is the emphasis for our One Word devotional book reading for the upcoming week, so I plan to focus on that theme Sunday.

Kingdom is a hugely significant theme in the Bible–it’s used more than 200 times in the Old Testament alone–but sometimes we’re a bit vague on exactly what it means. Sometimes people think of kingdom as synonymous with the church, but that doesn’t come close to explaining the nuances and implications of kingdom thought in the Bible.

Sometimes people talk about social justice issues as “kingdom work,” and there’s nothing wrong with that, but that, too, is inadequate.

We’ll explore the idea Sunday morning, but kingdom essentially refers to God’s rule over a people in a specific place and time with significant implications for how those subjects live.

We live in the kingdom now in a sense, though there’s another very real sense in which we anticipate the day when God’s reign will be fully and completely realized.

It’s an understatement to suggest that these are strange, chaotic, and difficult times. The pandemic alone interrupted “normal” lives in ways that we couldn’t have foreseen, and then racial tension boiled over in the last two weeks, of course. Tensions are high, and people are hurting and angry.

Your Twitter feed has probably been filled with bad news for quite awhile, and other social media outlets are no better.

Which leads us to this question: Where is the good news? What is the appropriate Christian response? How does following Jesus affect our attitudes and actions right now?

I plan to deviate from the One Word devotional books that we’ve been reading to begin a short series called, “Some (Really) Good News.” I think we need to think more reflectively about how the gospel affects the way Christians process difficult times.

The title, as you may have guessed, is taken from a pretty neat project that John Krasinski created several weeks ago. He started producing short videos called “Some Good News” where he highlighted good stuff that’s going on in the middle of all the chaos. I plan to take the idea and adapt it by talking about the Gospel (=Good News) of Jesus. I like John, but Jesus’s good news is better than his.