Brian's Sermons

The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory We have spent months studying the Lord’s Prayer. We begin by recognizing and acknowledging who God is. God is the Almighty in Heaven, but he has chosen us as his children, so we can address him as “our Father.” We worship him and lift up his name as holy. This must always be our context for prayer. We do not lift up our prayers to someone who is just one of us. God is love; he cares for us. But he is also all powerful; he can answer our prayers.  We begin our petitions of God by asking for his kingdom to come and for his will to be done; in asking this, we also humble ourselves and bend our will to his. We call upon Jehovah Jireh - God our Provider - to give us this day our daily bread. We entrust ourselves fully to his provision.  We continue our prayer by asking for forgiveness and for the power and grace to forgive others, and we ask for the power to resist temptation and deliverance from Satan and his tricks. As we com...

We’ve been spending a lot of time on the Holy Spirit. We started out looking at who the Holy Spirit is, concluding that the Spirit is personal and the Spirit is God.   We turned to look at what the Holy Spirit does, and we discussed that it is the Holy Spirit who calls us, turning us to God, giving us the freedom to serve God, and even helps us to pray. The Holy Spirit is the One who seals our adoption as God’s beloved children and heirs, transforming us and equipping us to do God’s will, giving us spiritual gifts and growing within us the Fruit of the Spirit. Last week was a powerful service in which we were given the “good news” that the only way to defeat death is to die… and to be resurrected, and to daily die to self, emptying ourselves to be filled with the Holy Spirit. I concluded by reading from Robert Boyd Munger’s pamphlet My Heart – Christ’s Home , where he concluded that it’s not enough for the Holy Spirit to be a “guest” in our heart, but that our job is to sign over...

Over the past few weeks, we have been asking the question “Why?” We first tackled the little question of the meaning of life: we were made to bring God glory.   Everything about us is meant for that purpose, to extend to God the central position in everything.   We revolve around God, not the other way around.   So last week, when we asked the question, “Why the church?” we have to remember that the church’s purpose is to bring God glory.   Everything we do should bring God glory.   Anything else is missing the mark. This comes in handy when we consider this week’s question: Why did Jesus have to die?   This is a very good question, and it gets to the heart of our entire belief system.   One way of putting this question is this: If God is so good, why doesn’t he just forgive?   To ask God to simply look the other way, like a kindly grandfather tsking “boys will be boys” would be to ask God to be someone who he is not.   God is just.   ...