Pastor Joe Sugrue - Grace and Truth Podcast

Sunday December 29, 2019

God so loved the world that He became a part of it.

Christianity is the presence of God in the world in the person of Jesus Christ.

What had never before entered the imagination of man, assumed flesh and blood, who solved the deepest problems of our existence through His life and work.

Life, as Christ showed us, was active, joyous, and everlasting in fellowship with God as Father.

When we look at Christ's entrance into the world, He wasn't occupied with pleasing people. He was occupied with the truth.

To be a totalitarian, he [Orwell] knew from his contemporary totalitarians, you had to seize control of truth itself. You had to redefine truth as "whatever we say it is." You had to falsify memories and photos and rewrite...

for full notes: http://www.cgtruth.org/index.php?proc=msg&sf=vw&tid=2160

Thursday December 26, 2019

God so loved the world that He became a part of it.

Christianity is not an ethereal, eternal doctrine about God's nature, but rather it is the presence of God in the world in the person of Jesus Christ.

What had never before entered the imagination of man, assumed flesh and blood, who solved the deepest problems of our existence through His life and work.

Life, as Christ showed us, was active, joyous, and everlasting in fellowship with God as Father.

This generation, millennials and beyond, are a generation of popularity, and that mindset, making everyone like you by not doing or saying anything that would offend them, especially if it is the truth, has infiltrated the church.

The...

for full notes: http://www.cgtruth.org/index.php?proc=msg&sf=vw&tid=2159

Sunday December 22, 2019

Christmas 2019

God so loved the world that He became a part of it.

Christianity is not an ethereal, eternal doctrine about God's nature, but rather it is the presence of God in the world in the person of Jesus Christ.

What had never before entered the imagination of man, assumed flesh and blood, who solved the deepest problems of our existence through His life and work.

Some years ago, the dean of St. Paul's in London was invited to write a Life of Christ for a series of handbooks by a well-known firm, and sent his answer on a post card to this effect: "As there are no materials for a life of Christ, I regret that I cannot comply with your...

for full notes: http://www.cgtruth.org/index.php?proc=msg&sf=vw&tid=2158

Thursday December 19, 2019

Pride is the worst of all vices. It can remove other vices from a soul while it takes the seat of control. The clear footprint of pride is seen as the thought that you are really quite good, and in fact better than most.

The absence of pride is an actual forgetting about yourself.

Pride can beat down the other vices and cause us to feel that we are quite good.

Pride becomes its deepest when you are so delighted in yourself that you don't care at all what other people think of you. Of course, we are not to worry about what other people think of us, but that is only right when we are incomparably more concerned with what God thinks of us.

This is why...

for full notes: http://www.cgtruth.org/index.php?proc=msg&sf=vw&tid=2157

Wednesday December 18, 2019

Christ didn't strip us of our material. He stripped us of our natures. He tore from us our delusion of worth.

Remove our worth and still we can carry pride. We would be empty shells; afraid, alone, either becoming vicious or crawling under a rock. Christ did remove our worth, but then He gave us His own worth. He gave us His life.

The unworthy serve God by the grace they have been given. Knowing that truth, pride is removed and grace fills the void it leaves, changing the man from ugly to beautiful.

2Co 3:4 And such confidence we have through Christ toward God.

2Co 3:5 Not that we are adequate [sufficient in ability] in ourselves to...

for full notes: http://www.cgtruth.org/index.php?proc=msg&sf=vw&tid=2156

Tuesday December 17, 2019

Pride is essentially competitive, only finding pleasure in having more than the next guy.

Pride is competitive by its very nature. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.

We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, cleverer, or better-looking than others.

Pride has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.

Other vices, wrong as they are, can sometimes bring people together: you may find a certain fellowship of jokes and friendship among drunken people or unchaste people. But pride always means enmity - it is enmity;...

for full notes: http://www.cgtruth.org/index.php?proc=msg&sf=vw&tid=2155

Sunday December 15, 2019

Eph 3:8 To me, the very least of all saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unfathomable riches of Christ,

Eph 3:9 and to bring to light what is the administration of the mystery which for ages has been hidden in God, who created all things;

Eph 3:10 in order that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places.

The least of all saints was given the most vital mission. If we are honest and forthwith with the reality of our calling (to be Christlike in each of our everyday lives) we must conclude that we also have been given, blessed with, the most vital mission. And none of could say that we are any better than Paul, the least of all saints. If...

for full notes: http://www.cgtruth.org/index.php?proc=msg&sf=vw&tid=2154

Thursday December 12, 2019

All believers are unworthy and bring nothing to offer God, and yet they have been called by God to go forth in all His will in the image of Christ in all holiness and blamelessness.

The last few classes we have been looking into the last supper. It is the Passover meal where Christ and Satan would sit next to each other and the disciples would ignorantly compare themselves to each other wondering who was the greatest. Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God would wash the feet of the betrayer indwelt by Satan and give to him the bread and the wine, openly proclaiming their meaning in His cross.

There is a betrayer in their midst, but the biggest problem among the eleven is the betrayer within them: ignorance and pride.

Men and women...

for full notes: http://www.cgtruth.org/index.php?proc=msg&sf=vw&tid=2153

Wednesday December 11, 2019

All believers are unworthy and bring nothing to offer God, and yet they have been called by God to go forth in all His will in the image of Christ in all holiness and blamelessness.

The simple meal that came to be known as the Last Supper became one of the most popular events in human history. Peter and John were chosen by Jesus to prepare it. When the other ten arrived and their lacked a servant boy or girl to wash their feet as they entered, either it never entered anyone's mind to take the position of a servant and wash the feet of the others, or it did and they deemed it beneath them. Jesus was sure to celebrate this last Passover with the twelve alone for several reasons, and this was one of them. If they went on after His death and...

for full notes: http://www.cgtruth.org/index.php?proc=msg&sf=vw&tid=2152

Tuesday December 10, 2019

In his booklet The Mark of the Christian, Francis Schaeffer writes of Christian love and unity. In one section he writes about how love can be costly at times, meaning sacrificial. In that section he writes about our love for those who of us, our brethren, who have made mistakes. "A [fourth] way we can show and exhibit love without sharing in our brother's mistake is to approach the problem with a desire to solve it, rather than with a desire to win. We all love to win. In fact, there is nobody who loves to win more than the theologian. The history of theology is all too often a long exhibition of a desire to win." He makes a very good point that holiness and love must always accompany one another. Holiness without love is harshness, and love without holiness is compromise.

God created the universe for the...

for full notes: http://www.cgtruth.org/index.php?proc=msg&sf=vw&tid=2151