Brian's Sermons

Luke 15:1-10 It was “senior skip day” during my senior year of high school, and I was in Physics class, talking to my friend David. If you looked around the classroom, you would have seen six students present; two were sleeping, and the other four were engaged in various conversations. In front of the classroom, our teacher lectured. He had material he wanted to get through, and whether or not the few students who had not chosen to skip school wanted to listen was none of his worry. We simply weren’t listening. Today’s scripture follows immediately after Jesus’ words: “ He who has ears to hear, let him hear. ” (Luke 14:35b). The issue is that there are some who just are not listening to Jesus. The tax collectors and sinners are all gathering around to hear Jesus, but the Pharisees and the teachers of the law are complaining. In Jesus’ time a tax collector wasn’t just a despised IRS agent. Not only did a tax collector take your hard-earned money, but he did it for Rome. R...

Luke 16:19-31 “What happens after you die?” has been a popular topic of discussion for quite a while, recently it has hit the forefront with a popular book from a Minor Christian celebrity, a book that denies the existence of Hell. The point of the book is that a loving God wouldn’t send people to Hell. It would be great if that was true, because Hell is a terrible place of punishment and separation from God, and nobody wants to go there or for their friends to end up there, and a modern interpretation of who God is might suggest that a God who loves us so much wouldn’t want anyone to end up there, and if he doesn’t want anyone there, and since he is God, after all, he could make it so that nobody ends up in Hell. The problem with this view, however, is that it doesn’t hold up under biblical scrutiny. Jesus Himself talks about Hell, and when he does, he is clear in its existence. The context for today’s parable is that Jesus was teaching his disciples and the Pharisees we...

Luke 11:5-13 I don’t specifically remember being taught to pray; it is something that my mom taught me when I was too little to remember. I do remember thinking that my cousin Chad was really spiritual because he used really grown-up language like “beseech” in his prayers. Even in modern times, there is confusion on how to pray, so Jesus’ disciples ask him to teach them to pray. The most well-known aspect of this teaching is the Lord’s Prayer. We pray this prayer all the time, but then we stop. When we look at the Lord’s Prayer in Luke’s gospel, there is no break between the words of the prayer and the discussion that follows. In fact, the language suggests continuity rather than a break. “Then Jesus said to them” connects the former to the latter.  So we have the Lord’s Prayer followed by the parable of the friend in need and the question to fathers, all strung together in one teaching. Then Jesus said to them,“Suppose you have a friend, and you go to him at midnight a...