Sermons

The virgin birth is crucial to the early church confessional statements. It is a centerpiece of the Gospel story. It was foretold by a prophet some 700 years before the incarnation. It's vital to who Jesus is. It was necessary, it is central to the Christian faith, it was expected, and it means God came to earth.

God did not leave mankind in sin and misery even after they directly disobeyed him in the Garden of Eden. He immediately stepped into history and promised us a Redeemer who would crush Satan's head. In order for this to happen, a man, a second Adam, would have to do what the first Adam was unable to do. No man could keep God's law once sin entered the world. So God became man. Jesus did not cease to be God. He wasn't a man who became god-like. He wasn't an apparition. He was a real man, born of a real woman with a real genealogy. Jesus had two natures, God and man, in one person without any confusion, composition, or conversion. He laid aside some of his divine attributes only to be used at the direction of the Holy Spirit. He took on flesh, experienced all that we experience, and became one of us—only perfect. By becoming man, the Son of God became the perfect atoning sacrifice for our sins. As the God-man, he satisfied divine justice on the cross. Jesus was God dwelling among humans as a human.

There is no other person like Jesus Christ. A man who was God. A man who claimed to be God. A God-man who backed up his claims by defeating death and rising from the grave on his own authority and power. No other man has changed the world like Jesus. He really is the God who became man.This is the extraordinary claim of Christianity. This is the beginning of our journey as we examine the claims of Jesus. The crux of Christianity is the claims and actions of Jesus Christ. The entire church ought to shut its doors if any one of Jesus' claims can be proved false. We worship Jesus as God. We call him God. We trust in him as God. He is the crux of Christianity.

The argument goes something like this: if God is all powerful and good and loving, how come he allows people to suffer, evil dictators to rule, tragic deaths, disease, orphans, and other horrible catastrophes? Couldn't he just stop the evil? How can there be an all powerful God and evil existing in the same universe. It is easy to theologize. Indeed, good theology will be like a healing balm in the midst of intense grief. But we cannot assume to have all of the answers. The bottom line is that God is sovereign and we are not sovereign. Because only one of us is sovereign only one of us will have all of the answers. Since no man is sovereign, no man can answer some of these divine mysteries. We have to look to the Scriptures to see what answers God has given us and then decide whether or not we want to believe and trust those answers.

So why do we need to understand what election and predestination is? Does it really matter? The simple answer is that the Bible refers to predestination and so it matters. In the English Standard Version of the Bible, the word predestined appears in Romans chapter 8. In both verses 28 and 29, the Apostle Paul talks about how God has predestined us to be conformed to His Son. Paul also talks about predestination in Ephesians chapter 1. In both verses 5 and 11, Paul uses the word predestined to talk about God's choosing of his people to be adopted sons. Since it is discussed by the words of the Bible, we should likewise discuss the topic. This then puts the responsibility on us to understand what it is and how it applies to our lives and theology (our understanding of God).

One of the greatest prayers offered to us in the gospels is Jesus' high priestly prayer in John 17. Here, we read that Christ asks that his disciples, and all those who would come to believe in him, would be one! The appeal for Christian unity is a large theme of this great prayer offered to the Father from His Son. Christ goes on to ask that we might be one, even as He and the Father are one—that is, that the church might display the same type of unity that the Son and Father display in the Trinity. We know that the prayers of Jesus Christ are efficacious (producing the desired effect) and that they are powerful! Yet as we look across the landscape of Christianity, we see, at least in its visible form, more division, fragmentation and more separation than at any other time in its history. Some recent statistics claim that the number of distinct Protestant denominations in America alone well over 2,000. This immediately raises a host of questions, including: "If Christ is the only way, why so many denominations?" or "What exactly is the church anyway"?

How is it possible to know that the Bible is true and that it has any authority in our lives? What makes the Bible so different or more important than the Quran, ancient Hindi writings, the Jewish Scriptures alone, or the latest book in the Twilight series? In essence, the question that many asked in our Religious Questions survey was why any of us should trust the Bible? I want to set out to demonstrate several things about the Bible. We will take a look at how the Bible came together throughout history. We will look at the claims of the Bible about itself. And finally we will seek to understand what we are called to believe concerning the Scriptures.

During the 2008 presidential election, Rick Warren hosted an interview with Barack Obama and John McCain in which he asked, "Does evil exist, and if it does, do we ignore it, do we negotiate with it, do we contain it, or do we defeat it?" This question is more complicated in our current generation where evil is not a common term and its existence is often questioned. The aim of Christians should be to come to a biblical understanding of evil and its origins, in order to decipher the proper ways to respond to it.

What is going on in churches and in the Christian faith today? What exactly do we believe and why? Can Christians articulate their beliefs and does it really matter? So what if a person prays a prescribed prayer? Anyone can do that! What are the fundamentals of the faith? To be a right-wing Republican? To be a theological conservative? To be a "Reformed Christian"? Does it really matter what we specifically believe if we already have the "basics"? Why bother with the minutia of theology if all we really need is simple faith? Is it true that a person who simply "prays the prayer" and "lives the life" is saved? Saved from what? Saved from hell? A conscious hell? Really? Do Christians truly believe that all people who don't "believe the way we do" are going to suffer eternal and conscious punishment? If we believe that, why are we not out pleading with our friends and relatives to "come to know the Lord"? What are the fundamentals of the Christian faith?

God has given us parameters for sex. We shouldn't be afraid to talk about them. We should embrace them and celebrate them. Our culture, family, teachers and friends all attempt to dictate what we think and act concerning sex. Rather than allowing these people to dictate our view on sex we should turn to the Bible—God is the author of sex and therefore He knows best. We will all have a choice when we discuss biblical sexuality: We can either obey God or we can ignore Him. In this case, I'm going to go with God, and I hope you will too.