Sermons on God's Sovereignty

Jesus and Nicodemus

In John 3:1-15, we meet Nicodemus: a Pharisee who stands out from his peers in that he seems to be genuinely seeking answers and not looking to entrap Jesus, and yet fails to understand because he has not yet been born again.
low angle view of cross against sky at night

Our Wandering Hearts and Our Wonderful God

In Psalm 73, the Psalmist is troubled by the world outside and confounded by looking within until he looks upward and discerns the eternal destiny of the wicked and finds comfort in our wonderful God.

A Merciful and Faithful High Priest

Before knowing God, Jonathan Edwards had a fear of thunderstorms. “I used to be a person uncommonly terrified with thunder: and it used to strike me with terror, when I saw a thunderstorm rising.” But after his conversion, Edwards writes: “Now, on the contrary, [thunderstorms] rejoiced me. I felt God at the first appearance of a thunderstorm. And used to take the opportunity at such times, to fix myself to view the clouds, and see the lightnings play, and hear…

But You Remain

We can all get a bit nostalgic about returning to time when we didn’t have a care in the world. For many of us, that’s a time in childhood where we felt a sense of security. For some of us that time was a very brief window before the hardships of reality crept into our lives.  An essential aspect of our reality is that we are in constant flux, alongside other creatures and creation that is constantly changing. We have…

The Scepter Of Uprightness

Perseverance is the final description applied to those who maintain their faith in Christ to the end of their lives. That faith will not remain in hearts that do not treasure Christ. That is why this sermon-letter opens (and continues) with numerous examples of the superiority of the Son. The author of Hebrews establishes Christ deity, and thus, his ultimate supremacy over all things like few other sections of Scripture (cf. Jn 1; Col 1). Last week we considered how the Son is superior…

Superior To Angels

“In Defense of Being Average”, Mark Manson encourages his readers to accept that they won’t be extraordinary at most things they do, if anything. He writes: “There are over 7.2 billion people on this planet, and really only about 1,000 of those have major worldwide influence at any given time. That leaves the other 7,199,999,000 +/- of us to come to terms with the limited scope of our lives and the fact that the vast majority of what we do…

He Upholds The Universe

What is the area of your life that you feel you MUST control? How devastated are you when things don’t go according to your plan? Parents feel this pressure to protect every aspect of the life of their children to the point that their lives literally revolve around them. Fathers feel the the need to provide for their families to the point that their lives revolve around work. Single men and women get so preoccupied with finding a spouse that…

“Behold Our God” (Revelation 4:1-6a)

Behold Our God (Rev. 4:1-6a) Apocalyptic literature is oftentimes used like a kind of treasure map. If we can unlock the mysterious riddles we will discover when and how the world will end. That approach can certainly make for an exciting reading of the text, but it rarely finds the author’s central meaning. Revelation was not written to satisfy our curiosity about the future. Revelation is about God! It describes the glory of God, the power of God, and the…