Park Road church of Christ Sermons

God sent his son to die on the cross for our sins. And now we each have the blessed responsibility to live for him and in conformity with his will.

Philippians 2.12, 13 says: “…work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”

Even though God is working in us and through us to accomplish his task, it is not apart from our own individual responsibility to be the kind of person who conforms to what God’s teaching is.

Which means we have work to do—in service to God, in service to our brethren, and in service to the lost. And no one can do that work for us. We must get up and get involved.

(May 9, 2021 — Sunday AM Sermon)

Though it may seem like an odd topic, we would suggest to you that every encouraging thing, every positive thing, every uplifting thing, every hope that we might have, is ultimately based on the fact that Jesus shed his blood for our sins!

Unless we are forgiven of our sins and unless we have the hope of deliverance from sin, we really just don’t have any hope at all, in this life or in the one to come.

This lesson considers four reasons why the blood of Jesus is important and why it should be invaluable to us, and how we can come into contact with the precious blood of Jesus.

(April 4, 2021 — Sunday AM Sermon)

It’s become sickeningly common place every few weeks to hear about another mass shooting in some part of our country. Tragically, the cadence of events has become familiar: an active shooter situation is announced, information of the causality numbers starts to trickle out, the shooter is taken into custody either dead or alive, and then the responses begin to pour in, usually in the form of tweets of outrage over the violence and loss of life, and tweets of condolences. 

Those responses themselves usually take a couple of predictable forms as well. In the comments expressing outrage there are usually calls for greater gun control or gun reform in the country, and in the tweets of condolences and sympathy, public and political figures alike will offer their “thoughts and prayers” to the families of the victims. 

Over the years, the phrase “thoughts and prayers” has become something of a firebrand, igniting all sorts of controversy whenever it is mentioned in the wake of the latest violence, often followed by someone’s assertion that “God isn’t fixing this. We have to.”

Involved in such a declaration are some fundamental misunderstandings about who God is, how God works, and what the purpose of prayer is.

This lesson looks at the false choice that says, “When there’s a problem, either we pray and God fixes it, or we do it ourselves.”

(March 21, 2021 — Sunday AM Sermon)