Rivercrest Presbyterian Church - Sermons

The resurrection is God's declaration that our hope rests not in what we can accomplish for Him, but in what Christ has accomplished for us. And biblical courage is not confidence that everything will happen the way we want. It's confidence that nothing can prevent the Lord from accomplishing what He has promised. So, our courage in the fire doesn't rest in the strength of our faith, but in the faithfulness of our Savior.

The Christian's confidence is not that our purposes will prevail, but that the purposes of Christ cannot fail. And we see that in how Paul was rejected by the people he had once sought to please, but he had been received by the Savior he had once sought to destroy. That great reversal points us to the wonderful, disruptive grace of God. As John 1:23 says, "But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God."

The Christian life is not something we step into when ordinary life stops, but it's how we life when ordinary life happens. And ordinary life is the field of our spiritual formation. Similarly, Christian community is not an accessory to the Christian life, but it's one of the ordinary means why which Christ sustains His people. And as we walk together, by faith, we learn that the presence of suffering doesn't mean that we've wandered outside of God's will. Sometimes it means we're walking straight into it.

The blessings we enjoy invite us to give thanks. The suffering we endure teaches us to cling to His unfading promises. And in both, it’s the Word of the Lord that guides us as we walk by faith. Because faithfulness is not about simply arriving at the right destination. It’s about how we live along the way. We don't know what the road ahead holds. We don't know what burdens we'll be called upon to carry in the coming week. But we know the One who has promised to bring us home.

There's a deep question underneath this passage that requires a level of honesty that can be uncomfortable, as it challenges us to come to terms with whether we're asking Jesus to bless something that He is asking us to put away. And it brings us to a place where we need to wrestle with what it means to truly surrender.

In the age of content creation, it's easy to think we're merely distracted from spiritual formation, and forget that anything and everything we give our attention to is actually forming us. So, what Paul does in Athens, a place that is full of idols and very religious, is he recognizes how sin has distorted and deformed their worship, and points out how people made to image God have become people who make gods in their image. 

The Church is not a community built on our sameness. It's not a community held together because we're just so naturally compatible. But we're a new creation community in Christ, created by a grace powerful enough to cross the boundaries that would otherwise define us. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility. Grace reaches beyond the world's ordinary divisions and gathers us into a new creation community together in Christ.

Following Paul and Timothy in this passage, we see in real time how the gospel frees us to surrender our preferences and our plans. And it helps us to remember that sometimes following Jesus means surrendering something good because Jesus is leading somewhere else, and that faith doesn't require knowing why every door closes. Faith requires knowing Who is leading.

Acts 15 shows us a poignant picture of the brokenness and wreckage that still exists in the Church. But what this passage reminds us is that the wreckage never gets the final word. Because the brokenness of Christ's people cannot stop the faithfulness of Christ to His people. Jesus is more faithful than His servants are broken. 

Legalism says that Jesus isn't enough - you need Jesus and something else. And then License says that Jesus doesn't really change anything - so you can just remain as you were. But the gospel doesn't say either of those things. What the gospel says is that God in grace receives us as we are - and then begins the work of making us what we're created to be. And the mess in church around us doesn't mean that grace has failed, but that grace is still at work.