Brian's Sermons

Malachi 3:8-10: “Will a mere mortal rob God? Yet you rob me. “But you ask, ‘How are we robbing you?’ “In tithes and offerings. You are under a curse—your whole nation—because you are robbing me.  Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the Lord Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it . Over the past two weeks, we have been looking at the biblical foundation for giving. We acknowledge first that Psalm 24:1: The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it . Remember that God has given us dominion over it all — the command in Genesis was for humanity to work the land and rule over it. Last week we looked at John Wesley’s rules On the Use of Money: gain all you can, save all you can, give all you can. Today ...

Exodus 20:13: You shall not murder. Through the past weeks, we have been looking in depth into the Ten Commandments, God’s rules for living. We started with God’s introduction — the commandments come only in the context of who God is. After God’s people had disobeyed God and experienced the consequences of disobedience, we read God’s response as recorded in Isaiah 48:17-18: Thus says the LORD, your redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: I am the LORD your God, who teaches you for your own good, who leads you in the way you should go. O that you had paid attention to my commandments! Then your prosperity would have been like a river, and your success like the waters of the sea.   There are rewards for following God’s will, and there are consequences for not . God gave us the Ten Commandments, not to beat us into submission, but to teach us how to live in right relationship with Him and in harmony with one another.   Last week we shifted from the first commandme...

John 13:34-35 As young adults, my brother and sister and I invented a new card game that we always liked to play at family gatherings. The notable feature of this game was that whenever you won a hand, you got to create a new rule. Sometimes the new rules made the game more fun, and other times you’d hope to win a hand so you could overrule the old rule with a new one. We would usually have to write down all of the rules so we could keep straight what to do when a particular card was played. Whenever there are new rules, there are bound to be rule breakers. Sometimes it’s just because of plain ignorance of the rules, but other times it’s because people just don’t like the new rules. Someone does not necessarily have to be a rule-breaker to not like new rules – it sometimes just happens. Jesus had just served the Last Supper to his disciples, and Judas had gone to betray Jesus. Jesus was telling the remaining eleven that the time had come for God to glorify Him, and that h...

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.   ...