Mercy Hill Church Sermons

In the midst of difficulties and persecution, remember who you are in Christ and persevere accordingly in faith, together in community and as witnesses of God’s glory!  

In the closing chapters of Acts, Luke goes out of his way to show how the story of Paul follows after the pattern of Jesus. The point is clear: those who look to Christ will look like him—but, even more specifically, they will look like the cross!

God often uses silence to sanctify us and pain to prepare us as he gets ready to reveal our redemption. We are to respond to seasons of silence by remembering God’s promises and waiting on God with eager expectation.

Jesus is revealed as Immanuel, God-with-us. The nearness of His presence is an attribute of who He is, independent of our circumstance or worthiness.

God enables us as His people to persevere by rooting us in His grace, surrounding us with His family, and sustaining us with His peace. 

Paul reasons with Felix and Drusilla about righteousness, self-control, and the coming judgment all with the aim of leading them to faith in Christ Jesus. God would reason similarly with us. Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts . . . but believe!

The biblical worldview as it is presented to us in this text won’t let us be naively optimistic on the one hand nor naively pessimistic on the other hand. Instead, we are invited to embrace a “gospel realism” where we see that, while the Christian life will be inevitably hard, it will also be invariably good!

When catastrophe strikes, all our comforts are stripped away. This wake-up call points us to our deepest need—not merely for relief from our circumstances, but for renewed dependence on the Lord. The devastation in Joel points beyond earthly disasters to the coming Day of the Lord and ultimately to Jesus, who offers us grace because He already endured the full, devastating force of God's judgment on our behalf.

The Christian life is not easy and requires faith [Heb 11:1], and this faith is not a one-and-done faith, but a faith that will continue to ask you to trust God more and to trust Him in new areas as we walk with Jesus. We need to not only trust Him with eternity, but we also need to trust Him with today, if we are going to live into His promises and have our lives be an illustration of His good and perfect plans. In this letter we can see Paul and Onesimus taking steps of faith as they seek and obey God’s calling on their lives. And we also see Philemon being asked to continue to step out in faith and to trust God in his response to Paul’s letter.