Parkside Church Westside Sermons

The last sentence in chapter seven on Matthew’s gospel doesn’t have any of Jesus’s teaching in it. Instead, it’s the voice of the narrator stepping back in and telling us about the reaction to Jesus’s sermon. People were amazed, astonished, and really...

This story that Jesus tells at the end of his sermon isn’t really about contractors and cement. It’s a metaphor of life. We each set our hope in life on an ideal and place our trust in something. The difficult events of life reveal if our choices have...

History is marked by those who have influenced people away from God, damaging, and even destroying their lives. This is why there are repeated warnings in the Bible, to be wary about those who will seek to deceive us spiritually. It’s hard enough to...

When Jesus refers to himself as “the bread of life,” he’s not talking about a pleasant meal; he’s talking about life and death, like manna meant life to the Israelites in the wilderness. To have Jesus as the bread of life means more than just being...

We’ve now come upon the words of Jesus where he describes two different gates, that lead down two different roads, with two different sets of companions, that lead to two different destinations. He says that we must choose which way we will go. The...

One of the surprising effects of The Golden Rule is that it actual condemns us. It’s a standard of life that’s impossible for normal humans to keep. That’s one of the purposes of “the Law and the Prophets” of which The Golden Rule itself is only a...

Jesus once again returns to the subject of prayer, in order to encourage us to pray, by giving us some very gracious promises. He’s wanting to remove our understandable doubts and timidity. He wants us to feel that we may come with the expectation...

As we make the turn toward the end of Jesus’s famous sermon we now come upon one of his most famous sayings of all time, “Judge not, that you not be judged”. The point of Jesus’s pithy line isn’t that we should tell others not to judge us. But that we...

In the first chapter of Ruth, we learn that God chooses and saves individuals, as well as nations or peoples, according to his Providential plan, not for their own sakes alone, but so that they would make the good news of Jesus Christ known to the...