Sermons From Grace Baptist Church of Richmond Hill

Miriam challenges Moses because of his marriage to a Cushite woman. She seems to be motivated at least in part by prejudice because he has married a woman of a different skin colour. God responds by giving her a skin disease. God strongly affirms the marriage between one of the Old Testament’s most famous Jews and his African wife.

People misunderstand the distinction between the commands to foreigners and sojourners in the Old Testament and wrongly assume that God was against non-Jewish ethnicities. This message shows God’s heart to reach the nations in the Old Testament.

Church-going slave owners used the curse of Ham to justify their enslavement of Africans, reading their prejudices into the text and ignoring humanity’s creation in the image of God. The church missed its opportunity then. What will it take to get it right this time?

Moral and spiritual failure often leaves us feeling like we’re in the doghouse. We can feel stuck and struggle to find a way forward. This message looks at how God meets us in those times and clears a path to our restoration.

When confronted with the evil and injustice in our world, we’re often caught off guard. We wonder why God doesn’t do something about it. Meanwhile, we gravitate toward passive indifference or vengeful aggression, and we can find our own character is corrupted in the process. This message looks at how to deal with the world’s injustice.

We all face the pressure of powerful people in our lives; governments, bosses, and popular classmates, but how should we respond to the pressure? Jacob, in Genesis 33, provides us a helpful example, showing us that God’s people walk the path of humility, generosity, and obedience.

When we feel desperate, the temptation is to fight with the wrong people for the wrong things or just give up and settle. In this message, we learn from Jacob’s wrestling with God how to pursue Him for what our hearts most yearn for.

There are many terms we can use to describe the various fears which we have in our lives. But all the way from the time of today’s passage to the present day, one of the most powerful kinds of fears we have is the fear of other people. This message looks at the only true way we can conquer this fear in our lives - through a different kind of fear.

We often find ourselves wanting to change. But when we start with the behaviour without addressing our thinking, frustration often results. This message looks at how God uses our circumstances and His Word to confront the patterns in our mind that bind us to our past.