Brian's Sermons

2 Peter 1:5-11 Last week we looked at 2 Peter 1:3-4, in which we were reminded that God is sufficient to supply all of our needs, that his divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. God makes it clear that he gives us everything we need. As we yield ourselves to his spirit, we find ourselves participating in God’s nature, having our sinful nature replaced by God’s sinless nature. And so in that context, Peter writes: For this very reason, (by which he refers to our participation in God’s nature) make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge, and to knowledge, self-control, and to self-control; perseverance, and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our...

2 Peter 1:3-4 His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.     This past week we experienced some amazing things in this church. Last year some of us gathered on New Year’s Eve to pray for the church, and one of the scriptures we focused on was from Isaiah 42:10: Sing to the Lord a new song, his praise from the ends of the earth. God has anointed us to sing to him a new song. This has nothing to do with worship wars between contemporary and traditional worship; it’s about God doing a new thing. While our God never changes, God is always doing new things. In Genesis 12, God did something he’d never done before when he called Abraham and told him he would bless him to be a blessi...

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 My kids love this time of year – it seems that everywhere we drive, we are surrounded by fields, and most of them are being harvested right about now. The boys love seeing combines working the fields. Anyone who works on a farm will tell you that many aspects of farming are solid metaphors for life. Jesus recognized that as well, and saw that he could explain aspects of the Kingdom of Heaven through farming metaphor. Because Matthew wrote his Gospel primarily for a Jewish audience, he uses the language “Kingdom of Heaven” largely because Jews would avoid using God’s name. This is, in fact, where we get the name “Jehovah” for God – Jews were so careful when they wrote God’s Name, Yahweh, that they would write the consonants for Yahweh, but they would write the vowels for Adonai , meaning Lord. So when we see him referring to the Kingdom of Heaven, we are not talking simply about Heaven. We are talking about the same thing that Jesus talks about when he teac...

Luke 15:11-32 In last week’s message, the religious leaders of Jesus’ time were grumbling because Jesus “ Welcomes sinners and eats with them ” (Luke 15:2). To them, Jesus told three lost and found stories: the lost sheep, in which a wealthy land owner lost one of his one hundred sheep and dutifully sought it out, bringing it home to great celebration; the lost coin, in which a poor woman lost one of her ten coins and turned her home upside-down to find it, at which point she celebrated with her friends and neighbors. Today, the stakes are elevated even higher. It is not merely a sheep that is lost, nor a coin. Now it is a son. Jesus puts a face on “the lost.” There was a man with two sons, and things go all wrong. The scene that Jesus presents is as horrible as it gets for a parent. An inheritance is meant to be something given to the children after their parents’ death, but by demanding it now, the younger son is in essence telling his father, “I wish you were dead.” The yo...